How To Improve Your Bench Press

My name is Nick Mitchell. I'm a personal trainer in London. I own a gym called Ultimate Performance and here in this gym, we train everybody from pop stars ad soap stars to professional athletes and lots and lots of regular people in the art and science of body composition.

So, legs tight, I'm going to take about a shoulder width grip, a biacromial width grip on the bar. This is the most effective for development, for strength, it does vary, and different power lifting federations will allow different width grips. I'm going to use this one just for, because this is what I'm comfortable with.

Tuck my feet behind my knees, squeeze my glutes; ideally, you get a liftoff and you push your shoulders back and down. You lift off the bar. Ideally, you have a liftoff on the spot if it's heavy, you take the bar, you check it in, and now, what you do is you squeeze the shoulder blades as you go slowly down, you bring the bar to here and then you press it up in a straight line like this.

Now, what you don't do is bring it down and bounce it off the chest like that. Bouncing it off the chest isn't going to get you stronger. So, you bring it down to here, a little pulse, boom, push it up, don't push it over your head, just push it up, the shortest distance is always the easiest, bring it down and then squeeze the shoulder blades as you come down, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

Do not overly rotate the upper arm. Do not bring the shoulder blades back like this. Tuck them in a little bit like that.

Tuck the arm in. Because as you tuck the arms in, you keep the shoulders protected. Again, the punching analogy's the one that holds true.

If you punch somebody like this, you're not going to generate as much power as you could punch somebody like this because you've got stable shoulder joints. And those are really some key things. The one other thing that I would add in terms of improving your bench press, and try this, try this with a spotter.

Don't look up the bar. Don't lie there and look at the bar. Look up, look up, your focus is looking up.

If you look up the bar, you tend to push the bar away from you. I've seen people improve their bench press by 5 to 10% simply by stopping from looking at the bar and just focusing on pushing through. The final point I'll make, learn how to explode the weight.

You bring it down and then as soon as you hit the bottom, you push it up as quickly as you can. So, it's always a controlled negative, the lowering of the weight is controlled, you squeeze the shoulder blades, you keep your chest high and then you ram the weight through. Those little things, those little pointers will make a huge difference to your bench press if you've been doing it wrongly.

The most important thing, just to reiterate just to go over one last time though, is to not round. Don't round the shoulders like this and then push like this, it's like this. Basically, what I say to people, you stand or you sit or you lie proud.

You be proud. By being proud, you pull the shoulder blades back, you stick the chest up. This puts your body into the most stable position to fire and that's probably the quick and easiest ways to improve your bench press. .