[quote]ConorM wrote:
Brucelee I would totally agree with you about the technique thing on a lot of forums, but on T-Nation and others the people are mostly knowledgable so i would assume good form. I worked real hard on my form and I now have pretty good form on all my lifts despite the crappy numbers.
I do think sometimes you see numbers being talked about on a forum and ppl with under a years experience are like benching 250, squatting 300. I just don’t believe it, unless they are pretty freakish genetically I doubt they could be doing it. The net seems to add so much as to be unrealistic, or maybe everyone here is really weak including two estonians that bodybuild and moved here to work. They are like 250 pounds each of muscle and bench like 250 and squat like 350. Not very impressive for two guys as huge as these.[/quote]
I think its mental. Again, when I started working out, the biggest guy I could find was about 5-11 210 and he would usually just work up to plates on the bench (135). He had gotten 315 sometime in the distant past, and had arms a little over 18 inches, and he even told me that he had used steroids in the past, but we all saw him as about the biggest and stongest you could get. As a result, rarely did anyone ever put more than 135 on the bar.
Then in college with my bench stuck at 170 for a couple years, a friend of mine, a SKINNY 6-5 185 pound small forward on the basketball team who came out of the ghetto in Kansas City (who was very lean and wirey strong) came in not having lifted in a long time and tripled 265 close grip. He did NOT work out. He did not take steroids. HE HAD LONG ASS ARMS!
Well, I benched 210 within 5 weeks. I still wasn’t training right, and stayed stuck around 225 for 7 years. Then one day I just realized, 225 is shit. When I had been in highschool it had been GREAT, but now as a teacher, I saw small kids doing 225. Again, within 6 months I got 285.
I’m not boasting either. I have now done 370 and done 315 for sets and reps, but I know that that is no big deal.
If you weigh a solid 180, and benching in the low 2’s, you should be able to hit 300 within a year. Just believe it.
Take a weight you can get for 5 sets of 3 with a strong effort in about a 10 minute time frame. Do it. Don’t bench for 2-3 days, come back and add 5 pounds and do it again. In five or six weeks you’ll be doing your current max for 5 x 3, and add 20-30 to your max.