What To Do When Your Bench Press Stalls

Is your deadlift and squat game just fine and dandy … but your bench press has stalled? 

Happens. A lot.

In fact, this is a super popular question from gym-goers who want to get stronger and fitter. When the roadblocks go up around your bench press game, what do you do next? 

Beast Gear has the answers.

Where Have You Come From? 

This is an important question to ask (and answer) because your story so far can go a long way to explaining why your bench press has stalled.

See, here’s the deal: If like many of us, you only recently got into strength training and didn’t do anything during your formative, adolescent years, you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point. You won’t be as strong as you hoped you’d be.

Why not? 

Because your body hasn’t had the requisite demands placed on it. 

This is in stark contrast to, say, a meathead who’s been lifting since he was eight years old. 

Skeletal muscle takes time to build, especially if you want it to produce force. You might see a significant increase in fluid retention of cells which adds to your physical size, but these will soon vanish if you take a few days off from working out.

While you might be able to tweak your training and see an increase in muscle, even this might not work if you just don’t have the kind of muscle that takes a decade or more to build, and which will support your technique.

So What Can You Do? 

All is not lost yet. If you start putting the focus on the sheer volume of work and generality of work, you can start to build a more solid base that will allow you to push the bench press longer and harder and to stop you from plateauing. 

In other words, it’s time to spend more time doing all that you can to form more muscle.

We’ve pinpointed 3 key phases of training: 

• Hypertrophy, where the focus is on building muscle and, as such, volume is raised 

• Strength, where you encourage each muscle to generate more force 

• Peaking, where you do maximal weights 

For the bench press, you need to be spending more of your time in the first phase. And maybe you’re not doing this at the moment. Maybe you’re spending too much time focusing on positions and techniques. While this helps with the deadlift and squat (at least at first), it doesn’t really work for the bench press. 

Spend less time focusing on your timing, arch and position (coordinations) because there’s simply no need. What you need are:

• Bigger triceps 

• Bigger shoulders 

• Biggest chest

• Bigger back 

The bigger you are, the stronger you are, the more you will be able to progress your bench press. 

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped to give you some hope and direction moving forward. Bench press stalls are a bit of a pain but they’re not the end of the world. As long as you