Personal Tactics in overcoming bench press plateau (part 1)

Disclaimer: The calculations are estimates based on my lifts and also on a single website: https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards.

Other website used: https://21plusrepmax.com/

Spoiler: My bench press didn’t improve in a 1-2 month span, but it will.

In this blog, I will be discussing my active journey in overcoming my bench press plateau at 225lb 1RM. Before I did my first assessment in the bench press, I was doing a dedicated block in weighted dips for 5 reps; incrementally increasing by 1.25 or 2.5lbs each session with 4 day gap. My first bench press improve after doing dips, but not as much as I’d expected. As a response, I began implementing exclusively isolation exercises targeting the weak links of the bench. In recent testing, it helped for shoulder press, but not for the bench press. Despite getting stronger in isolations, I still had the same problem which was getting stuck in the middle portion. For this month, I will do partial bench pressing using the squat rack; starting from elbows slightly below the mid points which targets my weak points. I will continue doing pec decs to help maintiain it strength (currently able to do 225lbs for reps or 1RM 300bs) or slightly progress so that the pecs will continue to not be a weak point. I will now provied information regarding strength standards for the bench press along with the dips and the isolation exercises used from the website: https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards along with personal pictures of my lifts to help express and analyse the possbile reasoning of my plateau.

Let’s start with the primary muscles associated with the lift: pectoriali major, front deltoids, and the triceps. The exercises besides the bench press that have been used so far are: dips, tricep pressdowns, rope tricep pushdowns, barbell front raises, dumbbell front raises, (cable) front raises, and pec decs. Here are the strength standards for each exercise to provide reference:

The reason I set up a table of three levels with each exercise (compound and isolation) is to create a quick reference to help figure out the strong and weak points of the bench press. Now I’m going to provide a set of pictures of my lifts around the first assessment (April 1st 2024) and recent assessment (May 25, 2024 and then provide a table underneath.

More Isolated Exercise Analysis

The bench press for the most part hasn’t changed. Even though the data says it’s lower, fasting makes a difference in low rep/heavy compound lifts, but not so much in isolation exercises or high rep from experience. The changes for the following body parts are: Front Delts(barbell front raises) : neglible improvements at (-2lbs) , Chest (Pec Dec): massive improvements at (84.3 lbs), Triceps (tricep pushdown at 2 variations): decent improvement at 10-15% increase from Intermediate Mark. Overall, the bench press and front delts haven’t changed while the triceps and chest have improved. This confirms my experience on both times where I get stuck in the middle portion of the press. *

Random Notes about Table #2

Just as a side note, I also implemented front raises in a lying position since that is a front delt movement that close resembles the bench press. However, the three reasons on why that it didn’t help was 1) neurological adaptations to the exercise, 2) human error in bending the elbows slightly further in the movement, and 3) only doing them in higher reps instead of exposing that movement to low rep/high weight once in a while. The second exercise to discuss is the (cable) front raise. I have been doing them since 5/1/24 and will stick to this exercise due to mainly an injured right middle finger; details are on post 2. Literally after inputing the conversion of front raises, from cable version to barbell, I noticed the barbell front raises strength didn’t change that much. The last thing to mention is the subtle difference between the dips and the bench press. Dips are noticiable stronger than the bench press due to different distributions of muscles actiavted for each compound movement. Based on this table, since the chest is the strongest muscle, the dips use more chest than the front delts and triceps. *

Coming across the idea of doing bench partials after lackluster bench

After having a disappointing performance on benching 205lbs, I didn’t want to end it there and had to figure something on the spot. I noticed an empty squat rack, and remembered seeing someone doing incline press the other day, and figured let’s see if I can do partial bench press (from elbow at midpoint). Looking at the last image (and then follow the arrow from the bench press) there 2 things to notice: 1) my 1RM for the partials was only 5 pounds above my bench press when doing 175lbs by 7 reps and this time there was no fear since I had the “side rails” of the squat rack and 2) my 1RM was 17 lbs higher in the second set when lifting at 20 lbs lower at 155lbs x 14 reps. I’m more conditioned to perform better with higher reps at the moment. The point is that the partial bench press has a very similar 1 rep max then the regular bench press due to not needing the chest to be a strong point and therefore exposing the weak points in the same way.

Two valid options from this position (besides just benching or dips)

Before doing this blog, I was going to exclude cable tricep pushdowns since I didn’t feel like it made a difference. In reality, it was masked by the lagging front delts. But after doing this blog, I’m going to add it back, but this time do 50%-100% of the tricep pushdown programing in low rep sets. Here are two options to improve the bench press and perhaps do a hybrid of them:

Option #1

Do partial bench press with pec decs

Option #2

Stick to (cable) front raises for front delts, tricep pusdowns for triceps, and pec decs for chest.

Thoughts about partials

The timing was perfect for me to implement partials and an excited to try it. I love the idea of partial benching without having to rely on a spotter and help remove some fear associated with bencing. This works perfect for my situation since the bottom portion / chest can be maintained or strengthened with pec flys. The strength difference between the chest versus the triceps and front delts are massively different for it to make sense to implement partials. For the sake of programming, if there’s one excessively dominant body part in comparison to other body parts when doing a compound exercise then a minimalist program could contain a partial working on the weaker body part along with an isolation exercise focusing on the strongest body part to prevent atrophy and not make it the weakest body part in the future.

Closing and my plan

This experience was the perfect way to prove that you’re only as strong as your weakest muscle. Refering back to the options or either sticking to exculsively isolation exercises or pairing up partials that focuses on the weaker body part with an isolation exercise that focuses the strongest muscle, the weakest body part has to get stronger which seems to be front delts until I can get over the mid point. Even though I got stronger in the cable front raises, I barely got it to “match” the barbell front raises due to having to get stronger in the weaker portion of the lift which is less of a case for free weight front raises. In an odd way, it’s investing for the sake of higher muscle building potential due to more mechanical stress in a more lengthened part of the lift. Any further improvements in cable front raises should yield improvements in the bench press at this point. I do push exercises twice a week. I’m inclined to do 1 day of all isolation while the second day be partial benching with all isolation except for tricep pushdowns. As much as I would have loved to continue to do isolation, there’s a skill component to benching and other minor factors that could make a difference and I would much rather play it safe plus I get a chance to try partials.