How To Increase 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.

There are some key ways that people make mistakes with bench pressing. They can actually be alleviated very very quickly and I can show you here and now. These tricks, they're not going to do as popular right now, could put 10 to 20% on your bench press weight within a month.

I mean, they could put 10% on the bench press weight like that. It's all about technique, it's all about maintaining the right technique throughout the lift and these are good little tricks that people don't know. So, I'm going to show you.

We've got the bench press here with a little bit of weight loaded up and I'm going to show you the right setup because the right setup is crucially important. As with all weight training movements, you need to set your body in the right position, you keep your body in that set position, and you don't deviate from that set position. If you could learn just that for weight training, you're more than halfway next to success and you're probably better than 80% of weight trainers who wouldn't have that at any gym that you got at the moment.

So, I'm just going to climb on to here and I'm going to set myself up properly. A lot of the people, when they set themselves on properly, get on the bench press, they lie down, they pick the weight up, over and over like this. That's not going to work.

You have to get the right posture. So, power comes from the whole body. You don't, for instance, do this.

This is another very very common mistake that people make when they're trying to do the bench press, they lift their legs up like that. Well, you're going to be unstable. If you're going to be unstable, you're not going to be able to generate the rest of manpower.

So, all strength comes from the legs. So if you want to really improve your bench press, what you do, you tuck your feet behind the knees as you get in. You then lie back, you take the correct grip on the barrel, we'll get to the grip in a second, and with your feet, so if you noticed my feet are pushed, tucked underneath my knees and you tuck your feet down and then you squeeze the glutes.

Now, what that does, that's created a lot of tension in my legs and I can then use my legs, the tension and the strength in my legs to keep a rigid force in my body that will help me to push the weight up. I squeeze the glutes and as I squeeze the glutes, this stack gives me an automatic arch in my lower back. This automatic arch in my lower back will then raise up my sternum so that I'm going to half pull to press, to press the bar with.

The final point in terms of the posture is as you lower the bar, you contract the shoulder blades, so you squeeze the back and you squeeze the shoulder blades back and down as you go down. If you're round, you've got no power. The best analogy that I can give you here is when you try to punch somebody, if you try to punch somebody like this, you've got no power.

But if you punch somebody like this, this is where the power comes from. So, you want to mimic this. You basically want have your upper arm, your humerus, in a stable position as possible and that is created by squeezing back and down here. .