Hi,
Just wondering if anyone uses variations on the DE Bench days to work explosive power through one part of the lift. Specifically, I was thinking about running a 3-week phase of 2-board dynamic bench to build power during this portion of the lift. Anyone tried this before? Any success or failures with it?
Personally, I use DE work as technical for the main lift since I don’t get a lot of full range benching without bands/chains or other variations in on max effort work. I let Max effort work be the thing that’ll change in terms of variations and DE work be the technical work.
Also, let’s say you have a sticking point at 2 board range. You want to build speed THROUGH the 2 board, not right at.
The only variaiton I’ve found that works for me on speed day are pin presses right off my chest. Concentric only benching builds a ton of speed for me. Any kind of board work always felt more like stroking my ego than actually helping my bench.
That being said, switching bars as often as you can stand builds strength from many different leverages. I’m lucky, I have 4 different bars I can bench with: a 4inch cambered bar, fat bar, slightly obese bar, and a competition texas power bar. Start adding in different chain and band combinations, hand placements, and different slight inclines, all of a sudden, I have about 1,000 different variaions to pick from.
The trick is figuring out which ones will actually help your speed on bench… usually it’s the one you like the least.
I normally stick with full range bench on my speed (dynamic day), but what I will vary 3-4 weeks at a time is whether or not I am using bands, chains, or bare weight. I progress my load by about 5% each week when I am doing no bands or chains, from 50-60% (est). And on my band weeks, I will guestimate based on my speed of pressing, but I will start with my lightest band on week one, and go up one band strength each week for the 3-4 weeks that I use them. I, like STB, never got much in my raw pressing from doing speed work from boards or blocks. The only thing I may do different, is that all of my reps are paused on speed days.
If my shoulders are really bugging me, I’ll do one board or reverse band. If I do one board, I’ll do one more rep per set.