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Bench Press Your Bodyweight
How To Bench Press Your Bodyweight
The bench press is the king of exercises when it comes to increasing your upper body strength. To be able to bench-press your own body weight is crucial for developing muscle mass as well as the definition that you have in your chest and arms.
The bench-press engages several muscles and these are your pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, anterior deltoid, serratus anterior, triceps brachii and coracobrachialis. You can quickly improve your upper body strength to be able to bench your own bodyweight by training bench-press hard a maximum of twice a week.
You first need to discover where you are weakest when trying to complete a bench-press correctly without using any momentum. For example you might find that you first start to fail when trying to reach the top where you lock your elbows and your arms are straight.
If this is the case then you know that it is your triceps that are failing you and you need to do some specific exercises that will increase your triceps strength like doing skull-crushers or close-grip bench-press. However if your weakest point on your bench-press is when you push the bar off your chest then the problem is your chest and anterior deltoids.
You can fix this by doing movements like flies, pec deck or D/B presses. However doing the good old bench-press to the point of failure twice a week will soon have you increasing the weight that you can press to equal and pass your own bodyweight very easily.
You can speed up the growth in strength by switching the bench-press to D/B press for a week or two and then going back to barbell and you will see a dramatic increase in the weight that you can lift. It just takes some concentration and specific training and you will easily be able to press your own bodyweight.
The sets and reps that you do when doing these bench-press movements should go down as low as 3 reps to ensure that you are always getting to the point of failure when bench-pressing. Obviously this is done after you have warmed up with a few sets and you should never start with just 3 reps.
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