Bench Press Tips

December 18, 2020 Joey Dussel

👋 Hello and welcome! Thanks for taking the time for today’s post. I write and create everything myself so you’ll find things very straightforward and to-the-point here. Hope you enjoy it!

Here are some tips for bench press performance & safety. I know this is a popular exercise so I made this blog with a new video and some anatomy pictures + links.

Brand new video —> Bench Press Tips

Anatomy pictures

Ok starting simple with the bones of the arm to get oriented. Your chest connects to blue, yellow, and pink. Pink is your collarbone and it's pretty much stationary already, so when pressing, we want to contract the other muscles that connect to yellow so that it also becomes immobile. That way, arm movement (blue) is the only movement that occurs (aka the arms move the weights up).

Then, in the next pictures, the pectoral muscles (yellow) are the primary contributor to press, but pink also helps lift. Also, the back of your body (left side of the image), should have tension in the green Lat and the muscles of the upper back (in the next picture)

This next picture is an overlapping layer of more muscles. So these are the outer layer over the deeper inner layer. The colors change with each image, but you can see the names if you want to do more research.

The left side of the coloring is the outer layer. The right side is the inner layer. In this image, the blue and pink muscles are the deepest and most responsible for the stability of the shoulder. So these are smaller and less visible, but MORE important than the big showy pects.

Muscles in action

Check out these pictures to see the active muscle during exercises.

Anatomy pictures

Muscles in action

Other videos that will help