My days of strength competition are well behind me, but I wouldn’t trade the memories for the world.

Nothing could extinguish my passion and enthusiasm for strength sports like weightlifting and powerlifting, or for the simple, noble pursuit of increasing physical strength, whatever the goal.

I was thrilled, therefore, last week to receive a very specific inquiry about improving performance on the bench press exercise.

Indeed, the bench press is more than just an exercise. It is more than just lying down on a bench and pressing the heaviest possible load off your chest to arm’s length.

It is the most famous test of upper body strength, a status symbol for fitness enthusiasts, a measure of manliness encapsulated in the simple verbal challenge: “How much do you bench?”

The difficulty afflicting the reader who sent in the inquiry and one that troubles many gym enthusiasts is the training plateau.

A training plateau happens when we get stuck in a certain exercise on a given weight and, whatever we do, week after week, we simply cannot seem to improve.

Plateaux can happen in any exercise or activity, so some of the plateau-busting techniques we will take a look at here can be applied to a variety of exercises. But we will begin with something very specific to the bench press exercise itself: the matter of effective technique for lifting maximal weights.

Technical faults can keep you stuck in a rut and limit performance, no matter what you do. Fixing them might mean a little less weight on the bar while you practise, but the potential you unlock should allow you to punch well beyond your previous best.

Before you even get on the bench, imagine someone placed a coin in the centre of your upper back. Try to hold it in place by pulling your shoulders back and pinching the shoulder blades themselves together around the coin. This position should remain throughout the entire bench press movement.

As you lay down on the surface of the bench, your shoulder blades will be flat against it, and the chest high. This is the strong foundation from which you can push bigger weights, and should remain in place without disturbance throughout the entire movement for maximum support and power.

If you think about raising or lifting the bar with all your strength, however, as we naturally do, we often compromise this powerful and stable foundation. As we push, the shoulders tend to rise up off the bench, the shoulder blades come apart and the force you are producing is essentially lost at the precise moment you need it the most.

The best way to fix this is to vis-ualise not lifting the bar, but instead pushing yourself down through the bench. Imagine the bar is in a fixed position and you are pushing your entire body down into the bench using your shoulder blades. Also, never lift those feet up off the floor.

Technical faults can keep you stuck in a rut and limit performance, no matter what you do

When you feel the urge to lift them, do just the opposite, drive your heels down into the floor to maintain maximum stability.

With your technique in place, if you haven’t already annihilated your plateau, next try varying your repetition patterns.

Try three sets of three with a heavier weight and progressively increase it by 2.5 kilos each week, reverting back to your standard routine when you’ve seen some progress.

A little online research will serve you well, as training protocols such as 5x5, 3x5 or even pyramids can all help add the needed variety.

If all else fails, my personal favourites, which always served me well in competition although unsuitable for beginners, are negatives and dead presses.

You will need a power cage and, preferably, an experienced training partner for assistance and safety. Negatives involve handling an extra heavy weight through the lowering phase of the movement only.

If your maximum single effort is, say, 100kg, then a negative would involve warming up close to that figure and pushing beyond it with negative lifts with up to 110kg or more. You should lower the weight slowly, deliberately and under full control. When you can no longer safely control the weight, you have reached your negative maximum.

This technique familiarises the central nervous system and muscles with heavier weights, but beware, as it is a powerful and stressful technique that should not be repeated any more than once a fortnight to avoid overtraining or injury.

Next, the dead press. The press is dead because it is started from a dead stop. Here, you must set the racks of the power cage at chest height so that, as you bring the bar down all the way, it rests across the racks. In this position, with the weight of the bar fully supported by the racks, exhale, inhale, brace yourself, check you are in the right position to execute perfect technique and push the bar back up from the dead-stop position.

This exercise builds strength in the low position, allowing you to transmit more momentum to the bar. Try working up to a maximal load, which should be between five to 10 kilos lower than your best regular press.

Alternating these two methods over the course of two to four weeks should help you punch through even the most stubborn of bench press plateaux.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.org.edu.org