Your weekly mission: press better
This is a special edition Pointman — Fuck Your Bench!
Heavy pressing is one of the most important exercises you can do as a man. We talked about this in one of the fundamental missions: press & press. But the weightlifting media has tricked you into doing the wrong exercise, the bench press.
The bench press ruins your body and wastes your time. We’re going to talk about how the bench press became the worst lift, and better pressing alternatives.
Why bench press sucks
It’s the first exercise average joe trains, and then overtrains. It’s the first piece of equipment guys buy for their home gym. Ever wonder why bench press is so popular?
Simple: bench press is what the NFL combine uses for their test of strength. This has a generational effect that trickles down to training in colleges and high schools. The cycle repeats itself.
Popular does not equal effective
First off, there are many strength exercises that, by themselves, are clearly superior. Bench press isn’t even top 5.
Better exercises to measure strength: squat, deadlift, overhead press, snatch, farmer’s carry, clean and jerk.
Second, the NFL combine measures both the bench press AND the 20-yard shuttle as well as the 40-yard dash.
Any strength exercise PLUS sprints is a great way to assess athleticism. Pointman trains sprints, of course. But how many average joes are training sprints and hit the track? How many gyms have space for sprints? How many bench presses are in the average gym vs oly lifting platforms and Strongman implements and gymnastics rings? Now you get me.
Ego
Bench press is popular for another reason: it’s the ultimate ego lift. Dudes do bench press because it gives them the easiest path to lifting tons of weight and boosting their ego in the gym. Why is this the case?
Simple: bench press has the shortest and most manipulable range of motion of all the big lifts.
Work = Force x Distance. The shorter the distance, the less hard you have to work to move a given weight. Bench press is quite literally the EASIEST of the big movements.
This is why you see people contorting their body in all sorts of weird ways to lift big in the bench — they are doing that to shorten the distance the weight has to travel. If you are powerlifter, this behavior is totally fine and encouraged. But if your focus is overall strength and athleticism, this is pointless and counterproductive.
Bench press is the least athletic, least useful, and least natural lift of all the big movements. Laying down on a bench with extra support with very limited range of motion is inferior to any big lift where you are on your feet moving big weights around a larger range of motion.
Boobs
It’s odd that so many dudes are trying to make their boobs so big. Why are they trying to develop a feminine body part??
What they are actually trying to do is develop a big chest with incredible pec separation like Arnold or Ronnie. But of course they aren’t Arnold or Ronnie: they don’t have incredible genetics and they don’t have elite training/eating/sleeping regimens of world class bodybuilders. To achieve that level of development you also need to achieve elite development in your other movements and body parts. And btw steroids make this imbalance worse, not better. Ever heard of bitch tits?
What ends up happening is many millions of men spend so much time chasing waterfalls. Which leads me to my next point…
Opportunity Cost
Average joes think bench press is great because it stokes their ego, because they think it’s the superior strength lift, and because they think it will make them sexy. As you now know, those are all bad assumptions.
It is totally okay to train bench press occasionally as part of a balanced program. But that’s not what happens — guys overtrain the hell out of bench. Just google for “international chest day”. Why is there no international deadlift day? Make deadlifts great again!
The real reason this is a problem is because of the tremendous opportunity cost.
You have a fixed number of hours per week to train. Rather than spending it with movements that make you healthy, stronger, and bigger — average joes spend an inordinate amount of time on bench press and the variants. That is a bad choice.
It’s a tragedy to see guys waiting in line for the bench press when they could be spending their time with better lifts.
Posture
It gets worse: bench press will literally ruin your posture. Sitting at desks hunched over all day creates a really bad look. We need to train the posterior chain to strengthen and reverse this look.
Quick basic anatomy lesson…
The muscles on the front of your body are called your anterior chain; the muscles on the back of your body are called the posterior chain.
You can see your anterior muscles in a mirror because your eyes are already pointed in that direction, but not so with your posterior chain. So most people overtrain their anterior and under train their posterior simply because of optics.
You need to your back as least as much as your front, if not more so. Physical therapists, chiropractors, and trainers will tell you exactly that — train your posterior chain more. In fact, my favorite chiropractor advocates for training posterior muscles 2x more than you train anterior muscles.
Bench press is an anterior exercise. Benching too much, without a balanced program that trains your posterior, will make your hunched over posture worse. This is the default shoulders rolled forward pose that is so common with average gym bros. Stop benching so damn much.
Why does this matter?
Bench press isn’t evil, but it is tremendously overprescribed to the point of worship. Fake news! If you are skinny weakling just starting out, the bench can get you strength and size pretty quickly, no doubt. But for those of us who are intermediate and above, and for those of us who want more balanced and healthy training, we need to be smart about our workouts.
Pressing Better
This is your guide to pressing better. There have been many requests for more details on bodyweight training, so I have included six (6!) bodyweight pressing alternatives that are all better than the bench press.
Push ups
Should be self explanatory. If you can’t bang out at least 50 straight push ups with great form, you need to focus on just this basic movement until you can do so. Do not pass go do not collect $$. Focus on this basics before proceeding.
Overhead press
We’ve talked about this before in the press & press. Pick up weight, press it over your head. This is as simple as it gets, and it’s one of the most important movements you need to do.
Incline bench
After you reach a foundational level of strength, you basically don’t need the flat bench press anymore. The decline bench press is an even bigger waste of time btw.
If you do have access to the gym, and you aren’t a skinny beginner weakling, and you insist on benching — do the incline bench. The incline bench press is actually a lovely exercise that builds all the right muscles to make you look like a stud. But you can’t be lazy! If you do this, you need to put even more time into your posterior chain.
Handstand push ups
Once you get strong enough to hold yourself up upside down, do these. Legendary strength move. The bumpy garage door made it particularly hard, good form means keeping your feet together and pointing upwards.
Dips
Gymnastic rings or dip bars are ideal. But the good thing about dips is you can do them lots of places, you just have to get creative.
Decline push ups
These push ups create the physics of an incline bench press. Do them!
Pike push ups
This is a great introduction to handstand push ups and blasts both the posterior and anterior muscles.
Band press
This creates a traditional bench press motion but better and deceptively difficult. You have to use a very heavy band, this is my band. For reference, it can support the 80 pound kettlebell, it provide tons of resistance.
SPEX:
This week your mission is a little bit different and quite simple. Go practice these new exercises. Get comfortable with these movements in the 5+ rep range. These are the new tools in our pressing arsenal.
Fuck your bench
You don’t need it, and there are more effective alternatives. You can train it occasionally. But don’t waste your time prioritizing it or, even worse, over training it. Your body deserves better!
May you live long and press better
Nate