🔥BUTT ON THE BENCH WHEN BENCHING

✅ Asides from not being a valid lift (yeah your PR doesn’t count if your butt lifts off), you’re moooore likely to injure yourself, if you don’t keep your booty on the damn pad.

🚨 When we bench press, we need to create full body tension to express the most amount of force possible: basically “a strong base” to push the bar from, which comes from your entire body, NOT just your chest. Quite in fact you need to think about your feet, glutes, diaphragm & traps. All of these BEFORE you even unrack the bar.

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When I set up for my bench press, as soon as I sit actually, I literally screw my feet on the ground and squeeze my glutes, which stay GLUED to the bench.
As I lay on the bench I adduct my shoulderblades back together, creating an UPPER (read closely, I said *UPPER*) back arch. At this point I breathe through my diaphragm and keep my core tight.
This create full body stability, which allows me to lift heavy weight, in the most efficient way possible.

🚨 Only at this point I unrack the barbell. But why all this?

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🔥 The main points of force expression, which create the base/foundation for my bench press are my traps/upper back, my glutes and my feet, from which I generate force against gravity which pushes down perpendicularly with the barbell.
If we lift our butt off the pad, we’re actually weakening the lift – asides from making it more dangerous.

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✅ If our butt lifts up when we bench, our whole mid section extends and basically gets cut off the set up, neglecting abdominal and glute force. Our set up is now generating force from 2 points instead of 3, which obviously results in less strength output and increased risk of injury, where our back is now taking most of the load.
Next time you’ll try to hit a bench PR, make sure it’s a legit one.