On the max effort bench day, westside often recommends board presses and floor presses for the max effort. Now, if you had trouble with the board press, for whatever reason, could you sub in decline and rotate that with floor press? Both decline and board presses are a smaller ROM however, its my understanding that the deltoids are less involved in the decline variation, but i could be wrong.
Basically, would it be ok to do the decline instead of board press? Thanks alot. For whoever answers, no speculations please, i dont wanna get this wrong, and i could speculate all night. Thanks 
Anything anyone tells you would be speculation. If Louie himself came on this board, he’d probably recommend, but the last word of his advice would be the last word of advice that everyone else is about to give you: try it and see for yourself what happens. Is it in the 8 keys 9 week template? Nope. Does that mean it wont work? Hell no. YOU have to look at YOUR weaknesses and experiment to see what helps em.
I dont know where your weaknesses are, but my honest feeling is that most non-elite lifters could use more work practicing the full lift, and close variations therreof (incline, decline, etc)
So if you want somebody telling you what to do, heres my vote
week 1 decline -5 rm
week 2 decline -beat last weeks max by 10 - if you dont beat it, do a 3 rm max for week three. if you do beat it, go for a 5rm again in week three
what im trying to say is that do what it takes to contiunue working hard and handling heavier weights. push yourself to break rms. then push yourself to handle heavier weight wiht lower rep maxes. when youre done take a week off and test your max. if it went up, declines helped. if it didnt you wasted, what? a month? two months at the outside? thats nothing, this is a marathon not a sprint
[quote]Deathroe wrote:
On the max effort bench day, westside often recommends board presses and floor presses for the max effort. Now, if you had trouble with the board press, for whatever reason, could you sub in decline and rotate that with floor press? Both decline and board presses are a smaller ROM however, its my understanding that the deltoids are less involved in the decline variation, but i could be wrong.
Basically, would it be ok to do the decline instead of board press? Thanks alot. For whoever answers, no speculations please, i dont wanna get this wrong, and i could speculate all night. Thanks :)[/quote]
I agree with KBC. Besides…it seems as though you are really overthinking this quite a bit.
just echoing what everyone else says… you never know what works for you till you just try the shit.
Thats true. I was always pondering about what to try and alland then one day I just got so angry i was like F**K it im trying everything and am going to see for myself what works and doesn’t work for me. Works like a charm.
dl-
I think floor press would be the closest sub, as far as I can tell. I’m curious as to what difficulty you are having with the board press. Is it that you lack the boards or a partner? If so, then floor is probably the closest sub. But, if it is that you found it too difficult then definitly do boards. That’s why you do them.
Starkmann