Possibly an extreme attempt to retract the scaps and keep the shoulders back during lockout?
S
Archer push-ups on gymnastic rings. Best pec activation you’ll ever get.
im so sorry for late reply but I’ve been doing this for a week now I somehow feel better mind to muscle connection,
im not short, lol Im 5’10"
well as far as shoulder injuries are concerned I’ll probably stop doing this and concentrate more on other lifts
yeah
I try to imitate bench press as a rowing motion with scapular retraction @heretolog
yeah thats one solid point, thanks man @flappinit
I’ve seen a lifting pad being used by charles glass too
This is a great set up if you want to look like Terry Crews, who is a great man, but who’s clavicles are pinched back. Check Lee Haney and see how he kept his clavicles straight across. If you held two pencils eraser to eraser and you want max width, you’d have them in a straight line.
To develop the upper pec decently, you must train it with the clavicles “forward” since it is attached to the medial portion of the clavicle. Not necessarily “Captain America Chris” forward but with the clavicles straight across.
This, combined with getting your elbows (45 degree to torso) ALL the way back, “around” the clavicles at the bottom of the rep will work the upper pecs quite well. People mistakenly conclude that shoulders furthest back is best stretch, but all this does is lead to screwed up shoulder girdle posture. You can test for this vividly by having someone put a yardstick across your scapulae. If there is a space between the two, where the yardstick is out, back, away from your upper back, that unfortunately represents width that will never be achieved in the shoulders unless an adjustment is made in training.
Be sure that your back work includes at least one exercise wherein the shoulders stay forward while the movement is accomplished.
A sad exacerbator is “six pack abs” in that one of the side effects of training the upper six and not the lower four lobes of the rectus abdominis below the naval, is that the thoracic curve of your ribcage will increase, and pull your sternum forward, scapulae together, and clavicles back to a non-optimal pinched shoulder look.
If I’ve offended anyone : )
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Addressing what you’ve just hit on kinesiologically, it’d be revealing to have an olympic size bench press bar with a sliding sleeve with adjustable stops to either side of that sleeve, on each side of the bar. Then you could bench with the inner side of the sleeves up against locked stops so you’d have to squeeze the hands toward each other, or else they’d slide mercilessly outward. Conversely, you could lock down only the sleeves on the outside, so that you’d have to push outward during the motion, or risk sliding in. My guess is that the bodybuilders with aesthetically appearing pecs will tend to slide the sleeves inward, while champion powerlifter benchers may have more of a mix.
The stops could be set to allow maybe a half inch of slide, but it’d be enough to tell you how you are contracting to move the bar. It’s somewhat related to observing whether or not a lifter keeps their forearms vertical during a dumbell press. Ideally it may resemble balancing a broomstick vertically in the palm of your hand. In old issues of muscle magazines, you could readily observe how the guys who tipped their forearms in during the dumbell bench press, paid for the glory of using heavy dumbells by developing their pecs more vertically, than across (see Bertil Fox).
Pardon my Mr. Knowitall attitude.