That’s amazing progress. Some of us have been doing this thing for 20 years and are still trying to break a 405lb bench press.
I guess before I start writing this out, I do take the estimates with a grain of salt because I work in the submaximal range alot with 5-10 reps for everything, I know it gets wonky the farther out it goes, so I should preface with that. The last 2 years I have rarely ever gone to a true 1RM, like, maybe 5 times for the bench. Around 3 times for my deadlift and I have never maxed out a squat or gone under 2 since I was like 17, so 4 years almost.
What were you doing in that time frame?
During that late 22-23 period I was still in Colorado with my two Mentors. They coached me through everything for that year, both were competing a lot in the 80s and one was a USPA Judge, they had both been in the sport for a very long time and racked up a lot of injuries, but handed down everything they could possibly teach me. They made me do a lot of accessory work, 3x/wk with one dedicated accessory day, pyramid sets, dropsets, supersets, burnouts, assisted reps, slingshot benching if someone had one that day, basically what I do now but it was a bit more structured since they forced me to do different things or deload some days.
Strength wise, I really think it was just the environment and training crew I had, since moving out I’ve been training solo, and I’ve gotten stronger, still using the same principles they taught me but I really think that’s just the progression of things naturally since I’m still so young age wise. I had great spotters, an entire crew to train with and push me, intense atmosphere and a lot of people supporting me.
Some of it is also probably just coming to terms that bench is slow to progress and it’s just going to lag behind, I think my fault is trying to compare it to my Squat & Deadlift training which has always made huge strides without much change and variation in things technically, program and rep wise. It just pisses me off alot sometimes
your nervous system is essentially the same as it was when you were born (it can’t really improve that much even with training supposedly).
I haven’t put too much thought into that, but it’s an interesting observation, some lifters are just stupid explosive and some are the slow grindy types. As for training, alot of the Eastern Style Programs and Methods rely on pretty high frequency training, sometimes everyday, and I tend to lean and set my beliefs more towards those methods than really low frequency. I dunno, I try not to get too caught up in percentages, cns fatigue, optimization and stuff and take it day by day, all i know is that I try to train as frequently as i can haha. I prefer a much more simple minded approach
