Hey.
I’ve been following Tate’s “Beginners Westside”-program from the Eight Keys-series, for about 3-4 weeks now, and I’m supposed to change the ME Exercise from 3-board presses to floor presses.
But unfortunately they don’t have a power rack at my gym, and I don’t really have a training partner that could hand me the barbell for every set, so I figured finding a supplement exercise would be better…
Anyone have any suggestions?
The important thing about the floor press is that it takes your leg drive and lats out of the benching movement. You could try and substitute legs-up benching for the floor press, just remember to pause at the chest. It’s not an ideal substitution but it might work.
[quote]aggro-iron wrote:
The important thing about the floor press is that it takes your leg drive and lats out of the benching movement. You could try and substitute legs-up benching for the floor press, just remember to pause at the chest. It’s not an ideal substitution but it might work.[/quote]
I disagree, that is only half of it. It also reduces the range of motion, putting more stress on the triceps. My advice would be that you don’t have to stick to his plan rigidly, just find another ME bench exercise and do that, there are plenty on this site and www.elitefts.com.
You could try floor press with DBs. That’s what have my son do. However, you might need some help getting those into position at some point also.
Have you tried dumbell floor presses?
I would do 1 or 2 board presses and if you haven’t been pausing make sure to pause and relax before exploding the weight up.
You could try combining a couple of the suggestions above to get very close to a floor press. First, using just a bar see how far off your chest the bar would be if you were doing floor presses. Then get enough boards to equal this distance. Then do feet up bench press with this number of boards.
An alternative, if your gym doesn’t mind you bringing in your own bits of equipment, is to use a pair of adjustable car jacks as a mini-rack to hold the bar. You need to be careful racking the bar to make sure you don’t knock over one of the jacks, though.
My gym doesn’t have the rack ur talkin’ about either. So today at the gym, I had my client get under the bar on the floor next to the bench press and placed two mats (blue mats that fold up 3 times making them a little higher-don’t know if you have these mats @ your gym) on each side. Then I just put the plates on top of the mat w/ her in b/w. Worked perfect!
GL,
Danny
Thanks for all the tips. I’ll try to decide weither I’ll change the exercise totally or try something like Danny suggested.
I was thinking of changing it for Flat DB-press for 1-3RM, since I’m sort of weaker from the chest than from halfway as in Floor Press. But would I then also have to change the other exercises for the ME day?
[quote]Dboy wrote:
My gym doesn’t have the rack ur talkin’ about either. So today at the gym, I had my client get under the bar on the floor next to the bench press and placed two mats (blue mats that fold up 3 times making them a little higher-don’t know if you have these mats @ your gym) on each side. Then I just put the plates on top of the mat w/ her in b/w. Worked perfect!
GL,
Danny[/quote]