Road to a 405 Raw Bench

Got to start somewhere

Indeed, you must start somewhere! Thanks for the luck, losthog! It worked. I got 405 today! On schedule, as plannedā€¦

Woot!

Milo234 Bench Press 405

Here are the two training templates I used for the last 21 weeks to go from 360 to 405. I did two cycles of the hypertrophy template followed by 3 of the strength template. Currently I only wrote down my Bench Press templates. Iā€™ve been meaning to add my lats and biceps, squats, and deadlifting templates too, but havenā€™t got around to it yet. Hopefully I will in the near future because I was writing these down for a friend. I hope someone finds this info helpful.

Training Templates

Todayā€™s lift was part of a fun powerlifting meet we had at my office. I attempted 415 after doing 405, and the bar came two inches off my chest before my left arm decided to fall down and my right arm followed shortly thereafter. 405 looked like I could probably do at least 5 lbs more if I were fresh, so Iā€™ll attempt 410 next week before resuming overload training.

I made my first post to this thread on February 26 when I bench pressed 315 for the first time and had an estimated 1RM of around 340. Itā€™s been 205 days since then, and I added 60 lbs to my bench press, 45 of which were added in the last 21 weeks. This feels like pretty damn good progress. Maybe 450 by April or May 2019 is possible.

4 Likes

Yeah, thatā€™s some crazy progress. I benched 315 a long time ago and I still canā€™t get 405. Did you gain a lot of weight or take some special supplements or what? Whatā€™s the secret?

I didnā€™t take any special supplements. My supplement stack is casein protein shake in the morning and before bed (Muscle Milk Peanut Butter Flavor), and high glycemic sugar drink (blueberry juice) with whey protein (Six Star Whey Protein) during and after workouts. I tried creatine for 2-3 months, and itā€™s unclear whether it made much difference. Iā€™ve never used steroids or anything like that.

I did gain quite a bit of weight, 40 lbs total. 15 lbs (of almost all non-muscle) were gained during two vacations that I took during deload weeks. Each vacation I added 5-10 lbs of weight pigging out and then when I got back from vacation rather than doing the normal thing and dropping the weight, I decided to maintain the higher body weight to avoid slowing progress. If I had watched my diet more carefully I probably could have done this while only gaining 15-20 lbs as my body fat percentage has gone up 3-4%. Iā€™m planning to lose weight sometime in the not too distant future now that I hit this goal.

I now think I probably have some good genetic factors going for me in the bench press. My ape index is average right at 1.0, but I think my arms are slightly shorter than average because I lock out my deadlifts at my dick while most average guys seem to lock out just below their balls. So each of my arms is probably 1 inch shorter than an average guy of my height, and since my ape index is 1.0, having slightly shorter than average arms means that my chest is slightly broader than an average guy of my height. So I assume this made some difference.

But, I think by far the most important thing was just training more intelligently. 2 years ago I decided to start lifting again somewhat seriously, and I didnā€™t really know what I was doing. I made some good initial progress, then my bench press estimated 1RM was stuck right around 290 for 5 months or so despite training regularly and generally doing what I assumed was a reasonable routine. One day while I was really annoyed with the fact that I didnā€™t seem to be making any progress, the thought crossed my mind that Arnold Schwarzenegger bench pressed 500 lbs and people out there have bench pressed 700+ There was no way 290 lbs could be my genetic limit (probably the vast majority of guys can hit the elite strength standards here if they are willing to put in the time and train properly), and those guys who bench press 500+ didnā€™t get there by adding 1 lb every month.

The problem was obviously that my training wasnā€™t good. So I decided to read as much as I could about training to get strong and tried to pick the best information sources I could find. I read Arnold Schwarzeneggerā€™s Encyclopedia of Body Building (turned out not to be that helpful), Louie Simmonsā€™ Westside Barbell Book of Methods (sorta helpful but also had some dubious info), watched their Bench Press Secrets and other videos, got Starting Strength and Practical Programming for Strength Training by Rippetoe, Rennaisance Periodizationā€™s Scientific Principles of Strength Training with Applications for Powerlifting, and Reactive Training Systems Reactive Training Manual. The last four sources were extremely helpful.

I would say that 3-4 of the most important things I learned from reading all those books were basic advanced block periodization, exercise selection, and volume manipulation. I would highly recommend all of those books.

Basic advanced block periodization: group training into blocks that start with easier weeks and get increasingly harder each week followed by deloads. Separate training into periods of hypertrophy focus with 60-75% average intensity with increasing rep counts each week followed by strength focus with 75-85% average intensity and increasing weight each week.

Exercise selection: you want a big bench press, you have to train the muscles that are used in the bench press and pick the exercises that have the best carry over to the bench press. The primary movers in the bench press are chest, shoulders, and triceps. The best exercises to overload each of these muscle groups while having high carry over to the bench press are already well-established by elite strength athletes of the past. Chest: Bench Press and Incline Bench Press and Wide Grip Bench Press (several training sources swore this made a huge difference) and Dumbbell Flys, Shoulders: Strict Overhead Pressing, Triceps: Close Grip Bench Press and Close Grip Incline Bench Press.

There are tons of other exercises you can do for any of these muscles, but these are generally gonna be some of the most effective (weighted dips were also mentioned in several sources and dumbbell variations probably are ok but not quite as effective as barbells). Tuscherer illustrated this in the RTS Training Manual by asking a question along the lines of, which triceps exercise will have more carryover to your bench press? close grip bench press, lying dumbbell triceps extensions, skull crushers, or french press? The answer obviously is going to be close grip bench press because it more closely mimics the competition movement and is much more overloading moving greater weights. Similarly, dumbbell laterals and cable laterals to grow the shoulders arenā€™t going to be nearly as effective as overhead pressing.

Volume: The upper body requires crap loads of volume to grow (close to but not quite twice as many reps as lower body today). The hypertrophy routine I worked out for myself built up to 5x8 Bench Press, 5x8 Incline Bench Press, 5x8 Wide Grip Bench Press, 5x10 Dumbbell Fly, 6x8 Overhead Press, 4x8 Close Grip Bench Press, 4x8 Close Grip Incline Bench Press. That is 34 sets of bench press related stuff in a single week, and that doesnā€™t even get into lat and biceps work. That is a hell of a lot of pressing variants, but that is how much volume I need to overload my chest, shoulders, and triceps to the point of requiring more than 1 week to recover. It took me several months of training, and tweaking the volume, and workouts where I was under-recovered to finally arrive at this volume, and this volume might not be appropriate for everyone, but if you are going to bench press 405, you probably are going to need a hell of a lot more volume than the average guy in the gym.

I modeled my strength phases after Rippetoeā€™s Texas Method, only Rippetoeā€™s Texas method was obviously not nearly enough volume. So my strength phases ended up being BP 5x5, IBP 4x6, WGBP 4x6, Flys 4x10, BP 5RM, OP 5x5, CGBP 3x5, CGIBP 3x5. Rippetoeā€™s original version of Texas Method in his book was just BP 5x5, OP 5x5, BP 5RM, OP 5RM, and his ā€œhigher volumeā€ versions in PPST included a few sets of close grip bench press iirc. I ended up adding 10-15 more sets than Rippetoe recommended because that was what my body could tolerate and still recover from.

More is better as long as your are recovering successfully.

Finally Iā€™d say functional overreaching, where you train so hard that it takes your body more than a week to recover and so you deload for an entire week afterwards was extremely helpful I feel.

2 Likes

The fact that you gained a whole bunch of weight most likely is a major factor, even if a lot of it was fat. A lot of people say that adding mass (including fat) is the easiest way to bring your bench up. Bigger belly = shorter ROM, perhaps there are other things affecting leverages as well.

I agree with most of what you are saying, there are just a couple points I would dispute

While thatā€™s not entirely wrong, there does seem to be some value in doing direct tricep work, Mike T just likes to stick with variations of the comp. lifts but not too long ago I saw a video on his Instagram where he was doing JM presses. If your triceps are lagging then it only makes sense to do some extra tricep work and in some cases close grip bench might not provide sufficient stimulus, if you check what Sheiko and Josh Bryant (who coach some of the top bench pressers in the world) have their clients doing, it does include some direct tricep work. Not in place of close grip bench or other compound lifts but in addition to it.

I know that Mike Israetel is a fan of this but from personal experience I have found no benefit, unless you are doing it just to increase work capacity. Other coaches like Borge Fagerli have been highly critical of the concept of intentional overreaching followed by supercompensation, Borge said that it contradicts the way the body adapts to a training stimulus. The adaptations to training take place in the days and hours after training, not a week, muscle protein synthesis last a couple days at most and the CNS doesnā€™t continually adapt in the absence of a stimulus. It seems like intentional overreaching was mostly based in theory but the theory appears to be flawed and not many people have had success with this method.

You should read Josh Bryantā€™s book ā€œBench Press: The Scienceā€, it has a lot of useful advice in there. He also coaches most of the top benchers at the moment.

I remember that Tuscherer in RTM did say that moves that donā€™t mimic the competition lifts as closely are good in the off season. He recommended JM presses for triceps in off season as you mentioned, but he said he would take those out closer to a meet. Your suggestions make me wonder if maybe I could handle a little additional triceps isolation work. I will try adding more direct triceps isolation work over the next few months and see how it goes. I might be able to fit in some on my chest focus day.

Thanks for the suggestion regarding Bryant. I hadnā€™t heard of him. Will check him out.

Regarding Sheiko, are there any good books or places to go to find the routines he has his clients do? I would be extremely interested in seeing those if they are available. I know he has a website and forums, but I didnā€™t find those super helpful the few times I looked at them, though admittedly I didnā€™t look that hard.

I have little doubt that adding weight helped me quite a bit, but I donā€™t think it was because of reduced ROM. A bigger belly doesnā€™t really help because I touch the bar to my lower rib cage and there is almost no fat there. I thought the main benefits of gaining weight were the superior hormonal environment resulting from a hypercaloric diet and in the case of bench press better joint stability in the shoulders, although I donā€™t really remember where I read that.

I find your criticism of functional overreaching interesting. I of course have no way to know for sure that the overreaching and deloading for a week specifically helped as opposed to just the days immediately following the training, but I do know for sure that if my goal were to not have to deload on a regular basis then I would not be pushing myself nearly as hard. I would have to cut the number of sets I do probably by 5-10 per week if I want to be able to keep pushing through with overload training for 8-10 weeks at a time. Also, I thought that it is very well established that supercompensation and fatigue reduction definitely can take multiple weeks to have their full effects. Peaking for world class super heavy weights takes 3-4 weeks. Iā€™ll see if I can find what Bagerli has to say on the topic. Any recommendations on books from him?

If you do flys for your pecs then why not direct tricep work, right? You can also do stuff like close grip board presses to hit the triceps more.

Sheiko has a book that is supposedly in the process of being translated into English (by Mike Israetel) but it has been a while already so wouldnā€™t get my hopes up. There is some useful info on his forum but the search thing doesnā€™t work properly it seems, other than that he has a lot of articles (mostly on his site) and there are some Q&A videos and interviews on YouTube. Last I checked there is only one free program available on his site, there used to be three, but there is also a smartphone app and you can buy some of his programs, I think itā€™s Omar Isuf and SiIent Mike that he has selling them. However, if you look at what he says himself, the generalized programs that you can find online are only appropriate for novice and intermediate lifters, once you are at a more advanced level (I assume you are based on your bench) then you would need a customized program. Writing your own Sheiko-style program is not totally straightforward if you donā€™t understand his thought processes and logic, I wouldnā€™t try to do it myself. You can modify an existing program, adjust volume, change exercises, whatever seems appropriate, if you want to try this style of training.

I donā€™t think that deloading at the end of every mesocycle is a bad idea, I do it myself, Iā€™m just not convinced that actually overreaching has any benefit over training at approximately your maximum recoverable volume for that block. I asked Josh Bryant about this at a seminar that I attended, he said that itā€™s not unusual for his lifters to be overreaching at the end of a mesocycle but he would never intentionally make them overreach because he sees no benefit to it. Look at some of the recent stuff that Mike Israetel and Brad Schoenfeld have posted on facebook, from some recent studies they have found that you donā€™t need very much volume to get stronger and past a certain point there is no additional benefit in terms of hypertrophy to doing more volume. Of course if you donā€™t want to lose muscle mass then you still need sufficient volume during a strength phase, unless you take certain supplements.

Iā€™m not aware of any books written by Borge Fagerli, he has written a lot of articles and has some stuff on Facebook on this (Borge A. Fagerli), I also had a discussion with him on the RTS forum a while back where he was saying essentially the same thing.

Yes. This is valid reasoning. I think my long previous post on what I thought was important to get to the 405 bench press may not have been optimally worded. I suppose the main point I wanted to make was that I found all those exercises that I listed, particularly the CGBP and CGIBP really helpful compared to the dumbells isolation stuff and french presses I was doing before, but not that they shouldnā€™t be used. Isolation work for triceps makes sense, but it should probably be added with the intention of being additional volume done on top of the barbell work if you can manage it. That is how I view my flys, as just a little additional volume to help the pecs grow, while all the different barbell pressing variants are the main source of the overload. I did feel like my triceps were totally dead from all the volume I listed though. CG work was something I had to tweak a lot and was probably the hardest volume to get right.

Iā€™ll check out those potential sources of Sheiko routines you mentioned, but Iā€™m guessing that as you suggest I probably need an advanced custom routine. I just got 500 DL and 465 Squat this week too which relatively are much less impressive than my bench, but if progress continues Iā€™ll be legitimately advanced in those before too long too.

I looked up Josh Bryantā€™s Bench Press Science book today and remembered that I had found a free preview version of it that I read many months ago on Google Books that had about half the book. Iā€™ll purchase and read the rest in the near future.

I did do two things that he recommended and called out as important although I was doing them anyway before I read his book because they just seem like common sense to me. One was I pause almost every rep I ever do on every bench press variation. I havenā€™t implemented dead benches like he suggests, but I do pause almost all reps close to competition style and his suggestion to do dead benches sounds great to me. I seem to recall that Sheiko recommends always pausing the first rep of every set but the rest donā€™t need to be paused for his programs. The other thing is pressing hard and fast. There is no way to move heavy weight without doing that so it seems kinda trivial to say.

I feel like a lot of the rest of the stuff I remember reading struck me as only mildly useful and mainly guidance on how to address specific problems in the spirit of adding just a few more pounds to your bench press. That type of stuff proably matters a lot when you are already benching 500+ and are near your genetic limit, but I think for people trying to take their bench press to 405 it is far more important to focus on the big picture things like intelligent basic program design and just plain growing your muscles to get stronger. That is what is going to get you 80-90% of your lifetime gains. 405 is a lot of weight to bench press, but it isnā€™t the type of weight where only people who have put on as much muscle mass as their bodies are capable of growing are able to do unless they are very small. If you are 150 lbs and trying to bench 405 without adding any weight then maybe trying every exotic exercise and trick in the book to break past sticking points and add those last 10-15 lbs you need is the only way you will get there, but for most people, just grow an extra 5-10 lbs of muscle over the next year and youā€™ll make huge progress, and that doesnā€™t require any fancy exercises or equipment, just intelligent manipulation of intensity and volume combined with solid, standard exercise selection.

Iā€™ll look into the Israetel and Shonenfield stuff you mentioned about functional overreaching. I suppose it does make sense that if the overreaching really were such a huge boost then the optimal way to train would just be to blast yourself every other week, but instead the standard recommendation is to train under MRV for some number of weeks and only overreach in the final week, so whatever benefits there are specifically to FOR probably arenā€™t all that significant compared to the general benefits of regular overload training, and the main benefit is just deloading so youā€™re ready to train hard again next cycle starting from fully recovered. Seeing what sort of a training benefit I get from extending my mesocycles from 4 to 5 or 6 weeks is an experiment that I want to do at some point in the future, but for now I feel like Iā€™ve got a goose laying golden eggs, and I might as well collect as many as I can. If repeating the last 21 weeks results in another +45 or even only +40 or +35 Iā€™ll be really happy.

Thatā€™s actually what he says, he says to train the bench like you would in competition but to also include touch & go work as well to train the stretch reflex.

If you are plateaued then trying new stuff can work, not everyone wants to get bigger. A bigger bench and lower wilks is not better. At some point you need to focus more on neural adaptations rather than just hypertrophy.

Nice bench!

Indeed. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a super heavy weight like me, although if youā€™re really serious about bench pressing 405, adding body weight is probably going to help a lot. If you want to try to bench 405 while maintaining a low body fat percentage maybe one very important strategy to consider is to just go through with it and gain the weight then diet off the fat after hitting the strength goal while training to maintain your new muscle mass. Supposedly this is the most effective way to keep growing lean muscle mass to compete in body building in the long run. I plan to try to go into a weight loss phase while trying to maintain strength at some point in the not too distant future since I have put on more weight than Iā€™d like.

Thanks!

This post is specifically about your choice of reading in regard to Westside BB style training.

The Book of Methods by Louie Simmons makes for a poor choice to initially learn about Westside. The dude is super bright, but itā€™s my opinion and many others that he doesnā€™t always articulate his ideas very well.

Below are some much more readable and digestable books and free articles.

First the Free Stuff
*Benchipedia: Dave Tate's Free Bench Press Manual - Elite FTS | EliteFTS
*Dave Tate's Free Squat Manual - Elite FTS | EliteFTS
*This free deadlift manual by Dave Tate has very little to do with Westside type training. Thatā€™s not at all to say itā€™s a bad read. Iā€™d still recommend at least glossing over it.
elitefts Deadlift Manual - Elite FTS | EliteFTS

Pay for Books
*Iā€™ll be very honest. I havenā€™t read this one and it is written by Louie Simmons. But maybe heā€™s become a better writer in the time between writing the BOM and this one. If you happen to read this one, lemme know if itā€™s any good. :slight_smile:
https://www.elitefts.com/westside-book-squat-deadlift-manual1.html
*The absolute most readable and easy to digest book about anything Westside. Too bad itā€™s pretty specific to the max effort. Itā€™s by Jim Wendler. God I wish he wrote more about the Westside method of training.
https://www.elitefts.com/the-max-effort-method-by-jim-wendler.html
*Okay, and finally one specifically about bench pressing with more relevance to the thread. The free article posted above is much more about benching in general. This one is much more specific to benching within the context of Westside BB style training. https://www.elitefts.com/elitefts-bench-press-manual-ebook-by-dave-tate.html

I hope something from here helps. Good luck in your training and competing!

There is this small asian dude on youtube who benches 405 and 150 bodyweight. In all his videos people can be seen taping him in the backround becuase they think he is messing around.Then he does 315 for reps and people go crazy.

Thanks a lot for the suggested reading!

I fully agree with your assessment. My impression based on reading BOM was that Louie isnā€™t that well educated (no college degree as far as I know), but obviously he has put his entire life into powerlifting and does have some good information, but he isnā€™t so great about presenting it. I do greatly admire his attitude of taking very seriously the idea of trying to research and read about what other very successful lifters have done, and he loves talking about the sources of information he used to develop his training style. I feel like a lot of the info he gives though is strongly tailored to elite lifters on steroids who are just trying to figure out some trick to improve their equipped lifts by a little which makes it not as helpful if you are a drug free, raw lifter who isnā€™t already close to your genetic limits in terms of muscle mass and need totally different volumes and exercise selection.

I purchased the Westside Squat and Deadlift Manual and Bench Press Manual and the secrets DVDs for Squats, DLs, and Bench Press. Itā€™s been about a year since I looked at them, but I personally didnā€™t find them super helpful, but I felt they were still a worthwhile read. They are much better organized and edited than BOM. They are basically extensive lists of exercises you can choose for max effort work and assistance exercises as well as recaps of what is in BOM, and a few tables with interesting information like how much can a 500 lb bencher do in several common exercises so you can try to determine weak muscle groups. If you are serious about doing Westside style training then definitely get the manuals. The most valuable information in the manuals for me was the collections of assistance exercises some of which Iā€™d never heard of but which seem good. The manuals are much better organized and edited than the BOM.

I read Dave Tateā€™s free bench press manual. It might have had a few useful tidbits, but Iā€™m not sure Iā€™d strongly recommend it. I also feel like some of the things Dave Tate said in there just donā€™t make sense. One example is that Dave and Louie both like to say that the best way to bench press is in a line straight up and down. This is obviously false as any video of an elite bench presser maxing out will show that there is a significant horizontal component of bar motion as the bar moves from above the shoulders at the beginning forward and down to the chest, then back up and towards the shoulders. If they havenā€™t figured this out after years of coaching and hanging around with other elite lifters it really calls into question their advice. This might work if youā€™re doing something like a rep test with submaximal weight like the NFL 225 test or doing dynamic effort day workouts but not for maxing out.

Thanks, and same to you!

I bought Josh Bryantā€™s book and just finished reading it. It was a pretty short read. It had a lot of interesting, highly promising sounding ideas. I just started a hypertrophy block and plan to follow up with a strength block, and I plan to try the dead bench presses that he recommended in the strength block then max out. So Iā€™ll check back in in about 8 weeks and maybe if this goes well will have a video of 420, or maybe more if the dead benches are really effective.

The other easy to implement suggestion that Josh made that sounds highly promising is to do partial bench presses where you just work the lower range of motion right off the chest and up half way. This seems like a good idea for a future hypertrophy block.

Josh also strongly recommended the Wide Grip BP which Iā€™ve been doing and which is also strongly recommended by Louie Simmons, Mike Israetel, and Mike Tuscherer.

I bet youā€™re referring to this guy, Long Nguyen. He wrote a blog post about his bench pressing throughout his life including his recommended routine:

While obviously his accomplishment is very impressive, taking 5 years to go from 310 to 365 and 10 more years to get to 410 touch n go strikes me as slow progress, so I would guess his recommended program probably leaves some room for improvement. It looks like a peaking program in my opinion, but he explicitly claims it is not and that itā€™s the type of thing he did week after week for years trying to just add 5 lbs to his bench press each year. Given that he obviously well built to bench press itā€™d be interesting to see what he could do if he were willing to bulk up a little, but that doesnā€™t seem likely to be his goal.

He had slow progress because he never went up in weight.

1 Like

Iā€™m not promoting Westside and I donā€™t use their methods, but that doesnā€™t really seem to be the case. If you follow everything Louie says word for word then yes, you would be training for equipped lifting, but it you understand the principles of his system then it can work for raw, drug-free lifters as well. Mike Hedlesky went to IPF raw worlds while using the Westside conjugate method, and he even won a gold medal in the deadlift (and everyone knows that Westside is no good for the deadlift). He had an old thread on this site explaining all the stuff he did, unfortunately it was deleted after he got banned from t-nation.

Anyway, the point is that Westside isnā€™t only for elite multi-ply drug users. Boris Shieko said that his biggest criticism was the lack of practice with the competition lifts, I suppose that could be worked around by doing a lot of close variations of your comp. lifts for ME and DE work. Volume is totally individual, some people do low volume and some do a lot, but again thatā€™s mostly in the form of assistance lifts There is an article on the Westside site by Burley Hawk talking about that, how itā€™s a misconception that Westside is low volume.

So Westside might not be the best choice, and itā€™s likely the most complicated one to get good results with, but itā€™s not nonsense either.