What sort of “activities”?
Do you want to be a powerlifter or not? Simple question.
In my opinion when you have more than one activity you will only ever become good at each. That and I hate all the elite totals out there that aren’t that high. But this is just me rambling on.
Story of my life. Good at lots of stuff, expert at nothing.
I’m just crap at a bunch of stuff and just okay at a few.
My first question is what kind of structure do you have to your lifting, meaning programming, rep scheme, intensity from workout to workout, etc. A lot of guys gripe about their lift stagnating when the reason is as simple as they got as far as they could without having any rhyme or reason to their lifting and stayed at that number. Slingshots are always fun to add in, but if you havent siphoned every pound you can from tried and true programs and just go throw some plates on and bench, you wont see much help from adding in a piece of equipment. And if it does add weight to your bench max, it will be small to moderate and without structure, you will be back to square one, just 20lb. heavier while wearing a slingshot every chest day.
Yes. I run programs with percentages for the main lifts -531 and candito. I tend to do body weight stuff for my supplemental work because I’m pretty good at it. On a good day I can bang out a set of 10 bar Muscle ups.
Last I checked, you need to do stuff that you aren’t good at if you want to improve. And I have never heard anyone claim that muscle ups were beneficial to the bench press in any way.
You goal is to increase you total by 20%, but your training lacks specificity and volume, plus you are not fully committed to your goal. Nobody got anywhere in powerlifting without really trying, it just doesn’t work like that. I suggest that you re-evaluate your goals and either get more serious or just forget about it. Powerlifting doesn’t have to be your sole reason for living, but doing two work sets a week and screwing around with some other stuff is not going to get you where you want to be.
Fair enough. Thanks for the advice.
Just bench. It will go up. Do yourself a favor and try this:
Obviously warm up before starting at 50%
Week 1: start at 50% of your max and do a set of 5. For you, add 10lbs per set doing 5’s all the way up until you reach a weight you know you won’t get for 5 reps and stop there.
Week 2: start with 50% of your max and do a set of 3. Add 15lbs per set doing triples the same as week 1.
Week 3: start with 60% and do singles with 20lb increases per set.
Do this for 2-3 cycles. I’d rather you do no assistance work but very light very high rep band sets are acceptable. If your bench doesn’t increase from this, your technique and/or calories are no good and you need help in person.
I’ve never done anything a program where I work up to weight like that. I’ll give it a shot.
It works.