I jumped back in late. Since you’ve prepping for a meet, I again feel 2 second pause benches (for sets of 3 or less for multiplesets) will do more than speed benches. I favor JM Blakely’s opinion on speed benches really functioning as a “light” day only and not offering much else simply because a “true” spped bench would, ideally, have you NOT decelerating and launching the bar every rep. Otherwise, its more of an illusion of dynamic work. Different folks, different strokes…
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A lot of the techniques you mentioned are used in Conjugate style programming.
Early in a training cycle, Wenning recommends using a 4 second negative before you explode up on each rep of speed work. On the “light” training day.
And the “heavy” training day ramps up to a low rep, heavy set, similar to ladders, every week. Conjugate guys also use slow eccentrics on the heavy day sometimes too.
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In my experience, the simplest way to break through a bench plateau is to simply stop benching for a while and focus on getting strong in other pressing movements. For me, it was the incline barbell press and the dumbbell press. After about 4 months of that, I incorporated flat benching again, and blasted through my old max pretty quickly.
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