How to Bench Press Properly
Guidelines for the perfect bench pressing technique
Developing the proper bench press technique is the first step you should take if you want to increase your max bench press. Mike Westerdal's Critical Bench program is one of the best systems for improving your bench press. If you are looking for further details about it, check out this detailed Critical Bench review.
While perfecting your technique can take a lifetime, the pointers below will get you 90% of the way there and you can implement them in a single training session! Improving your form is the easiest way you can increase your bench press totals while simultaneously significantly reducing your risk of injury.
While there are tomes written about bench press technique, most of these are superfluous and unnecessary complications that are of little benefit for 99.9% of gym-goers and athletes.
Instead, there is a much simpler way to teach the bench press that can significantly reduce injury risk while placing the lifter in the best position to develop force (and hence lift the most weight). There are two areas of interest: the five points of contact and then the actual movement itself.
Table of Contents
Setting Up
Foot Position
Hip Position
Shoulder Blade Position
Head Position
Grip Width and Angle
Performing the Bench Press
Lift Off
Descent
The Turn
The Press
When to Use Bench Press Technique
Bench Press Technique - The 5 Points of Contact
The feet, the hips, the shoulder blades, the head, and the hands are the body's 5 points of contact with either the barbell or the bench. There are specifics for each area that you need to know
Feet - Your feet should ideally remain in contact with the ground at all times if you plan on doing a competition. Some federations allow you to have just your toes on the ground whereas others require you to keep your foot flat. In order to increase the amount of tension in your lower body (and hence create stability for a bigger bench press), you should drive your knees out. This will help flatten your feet regardless.
Additionally, you will want to walk your feet backwards on the ground towards your head, developing as much tension as you can in your legs. Just make sure you can keep your hips on the bench (see next section). During the lift, you can then press down on your feet, and the increased tension will help get the bar up off of your chest.
Some lifters will lift up their legs and feet off the ground, either holding them in the air or placing them on the bench. The idea here is that it will help the individual focus on the chest. This is typically a bad idea as it destabilizes the body, lowering the individual's max strength, which results in less tension on the targeted muscles and a decreased training effect.
Lifting the feet up however useful in the case of a back injury as lilting your legs up reduces tension in the lower back. For those with an injury, sometimes benching with the feet on the ground is uncomfortable whereas lifting the feet up is pain-free. In this situation, lifting your feet up is acceptable.
Hips - Your glutes should be tight and remain in contact with the bench, though lightly. If you have a decent arch, when you drive down with your hips should still remain touching the bench. They will want to raise up, but if you are tight enough, they will not completely be removed from the bench.
While using a big arch (i.e. letting hips come off bench entirely) may add a few pounds to your bench press, most powerlifting federations disqualify lifts of these sort. Additionally, for non-competitors, doing this increases the load on the facet joints of the spine and can cause injury and pain.
Shoulder Blades - The position of the shoulder blades (scapulae) is the most important aspect of the bench press. You need to make sure your scapulae are "down and back". The "back" part is easy, and simply refers to retracting the scapulae by pulling them close together. This is easy to feel as it causes the rhomboids (the muscle between the scapulae) to tighten.
The "down" part is much more difficult for lifters to understand and to implement. If you are laying flat on the bench, the down motion involves bringing your scapulae towards your hips. Think of it as the opposite of a shrug.
In order to get into a tight down and back position, the easiest way is to "walk" your scapulae down the bench towards your hips. Bring the first scapulae down and back and press it into the bench while you are lying flat. Put your body weight on that scapula, then lift up the other one and push down and back, using the first scapula you moved as leverage to push your body down more.
Keep going back and forth until you are in a very tight position. Once have walked once or twice, you can push yourself down with your arms against the barbell so that you can get in an even tighter position.
Head - The head may or may not remain in contact with the bench. I prefer to keep it flat as I find that lifting the head makes it hard to maintain good position with the scapulae, but the truth is it makes no difference. Some competitions will disqualify competitors who lift their head off the bench though, so if you plan on competing and do not have a preference, be sure to keep the head against the bench.
Grip - The grip is an area of great controversy. Some people suggest that there is a "best" grip for those learning how to bench press properly, but honestly there are multiple ways to set up your grip for bench press.
As far as grip width is concerned, you want to find a width that allows you to bring the bar down to approximately nipple level (obviously this point varies from person to person - just think about 2/3 of the way down the chest if you are unsure) while keeping the angle between your upper arm and your torso to about 45 degrees. Here is a picture guide (you'd never guess, but I made it myself):
This is a picture of a person (in green) laying down bench pressing. The bench press is in black, the gray is the barbell, the red is the area on the chest where you want the barbell to touch, and line, and the blue represents the angle between the arm and the torso. Your grip width should be whatever width allows this to happen.
The angle that lets the 45 degree angle form between your upper arm and torso when in the bottom position seems ideal for most people. Bringing in your elbows closer than that (at least with raw benching) makes the bench press more difficult and lowers the max you can do. If your elbows are wider than that, you can sometimes bench press more weight, but the risk of injury increases dramatically so it is not recommended.
The grip itself is whatever grip allows you to keep the barbell in a position where the barbell, your wrist, and your elbow make a 3-point straight line with respect to gravity. Here is another high tech example:
The blue line is a straight line that represents the pull of gravity. If you are laying down and benching, you want to position the hands so that the bar sits directly on top of the wrist joint, and then position the elbow directly under the bar.
The common mistake here is that people let their wrist fully extend, so the bar sits slightly behind the forearm. This is a recipe for wrist injury and pain, particularly as you get more advanced and start using more weight. Instead, you will need to slightly internally rotate your wrists so that the bar sits a little further forward in your hands. This is the optimal position for safety and power.
A thumbless grip is not recommended due to the injury risk. It has some uses, particularly in overhead pressing or when working around injury, but barring unusual circumstances, you should not use it just for general training purposes. Sometimes shoulder or elbow pain present when pressing goes away when using a thumbless grip, making it viable in these circumstances. Do not attempt this without two good spotters however - multiple people have had life-threatening injuries using this grip style in the gym!
Performing the Actual Movement
Most of the work learning how to bench press is the set-up which has already been discussed. Once you understand that, the rest of the bench press falls into place. There are 4 aspects to good bench press technique during the movement: the lift off, the descent, the turn, and the press.
The Liftoff
Once you have the right grip and are set up tight as recommended in the previous section, the first step to executing a good bench press is the lift off. Whenever you are doing your heaviest sets or are maxing out, you must get a lift-off. The person lifting off for you should not be lifting the bar up, but rather out. You want to take the bar like you are doing a straight-armed pulldown rather than lifting up as well.
The reason we do this is because if you are to actually lift the barbell up any higher, you will lose the tight tuck we established earlier by walking our scapulae into the down and back position. There is no point in setting up like that if you are just going to lose the tension on the subsequent lift-off!
The Descent
The entire time you are descending, you should have a lot of tension in your lats. This will help you control the bar speed. The best bench pressers actually use a very slow descent when working with maximal weights - bouncing is not necessary and only can hurt you (I bruised my sternum in high school doing this - cost me 4 weeks of benching and then another 8 before it stopped hurting!).
Before you descend, remember to move the bar towards your feet so that it is directly over your shoulders. Your eye position should start just under the barbell, so you have to move the bar a good foot towards your feet from where it is racked before you start the lift.
The most important aspect of the descent is maintaining the tension in your back. This tension makes the turn very easy and helps power you through the first few inches of your bench press. If you lose this tension, starting from a dead stop will be very difficult.
The Turn
Going from the descent to the press is the most controversial part of the lift. There are three ways you can do this: bouncing, touch and go, or pausing on the chest.
Bouncing is when the person allows the bar to press into the ribcage and sternum, depressing the rib cage by a half an inch, and then using the elasticity of the ribcage and sternum to help lift the bar off the chest. This is always a bad idea and can cause serious injury. As mentioned earlier, in high school I did this and bruised my sternum which then took 12 weeks to heal completely. Such an action with the weights I use today would likely crack a few ribs.
Touch and go is controlling the bar, touching the chest, and then starting the press as soon as the bar touches the chest. This is the ideal approach for those not performing in powerlifting competitions. Many powerlifting competitions require a pause at the bottom of the lift before the press starts, but for the athlete or gym-goer this is not necessary.
A pause involves stopping for about 1 second on the chest before pressing. This is used by powerlifting federations to make results from lift to lift and meet to meet more comparable. It helps prevent unfair lifts from circulating, as theoretically a judge would not count a successful bounce that resulted in an unfairly bench press number.
Note that powerlifting federations that use equipment may use a longer pause on the bench, as the bench shirt stores power at the bottom of the lift. Many raw lifting federations use the touch and go press, since holding at the bottom can significantly decrease pressing strength when done without equipment.
No matter whether you go with the touch and go or the pause, the tension you maintain in your lats is what helps you get through the turn without losing the bar. You must descend slowly when performing a max bench press, otherwise your turn will be a disaster.
The Press
The press is much easier if you set up properly and control the barbell through the turn. As you begin to press the bar up, if you are maxing out, you can drive down with your feet. This extra tension can help push the bar up while the arch angles your chest in such a way that turns the flat bench press into a slight decline. Given that the decline bench is a more advantageous position for generating force, this can help boost your weight.
As you press the bar, remember that the barbell touches about 2/3 of the way down your chest but winds up directly over your shoulders. While you may read that the best bench press is shaped like a backwards "J", such that moving the barbell towards your eyes should be done at the beginning of the press, this does not really apply to lifters not using powerlifting equipment. You should move the bar in a straight line, pressing the bar towards the locked out position without actually thinking about the bar path as this is an unneeded complication.
Bench Press Technique - When to Use It
The technique outlined in this page refers to a max bench press or the "primary exercise" if you are following our bench press training program. For rep work on the bench, I recommend taking a more relaxed approach.
This involves still setting up your grip, head, and shoulder blades in the standard method, but not getting so tight with your hips or feet or worrying about driving your feet into the ground during the lift. While this will slightly decrease your bench press strength, it will also save your lower back from the harmful forces generated by using your hips and back to aid the bench press.
No matter what you are doing on the bench however you will want to tuck your shoulder blades in the down and back position. This will decrease the likelihood of you injuring your shoulder or pectoral muscles by a large magnitude.
Following the techniques in this article will significantly increase your bench press. Learning how to bench press however does take time. Your weights may decrease for a few weeks until you become comfortable with this technique, especially if you change the width of your grip or the place where the barbell touches your chest.