Base_Strength

I've been grounding lately in between my sets. Since my rack is bolted into cement, I'm able to ground by touching my squat rack. When the weather is nice, I just go outside my garage and touch a leaf on a tree for about one minute. The amount of stress after a heavy set of 5 reps is pretty intense. I definitely feel like I recover better in between heavy sets.

Lifting heavy is hard and builds incredible physical strength but more importantly it builds mental toughness. Humans were meant to do hard things. #liftheavy #getstrong

My focus is to get my clients stronger in natural human movement patterns. Patterns that we use daily like squatting down and standing back up. Bending over and picking something up. Lifting something over our head. The picture is my wife getting ready to pick up a 50lb fertilizer bag. She's very strong in this movement pattern. If you are not strong in this movement pattern, then you have a higher chance of injuring your back or just being really sore after a day of yard chores. I want your body to be strengthened as a system not in isolation. Because that's how the human body moves. It moves together as a system. Your body parts don't move in isolation. It has natural moving patterns. When you are stronger in these human movement patterers it carries over to all aspects of your life, hobbies, and sports.

Are you stuck on your bench press? This is usually the 2nd lift when a client hits the wall the first being the overhead press. Most of my male clients get stuck around 180lbs and my female clients around 80lbs. Before I do any program changes from 3 sets of 5 reps, I want to make sure my clients are taking enough rest time between sets. Often the reason they are getting stuck is they are not allowing enough rest time. Initially you only need lesst than 3 minutes of rest in between sets but as the weight gets heavier you will need 4 minutes, 5 minutes or even 6 minutes. If the client is getting plenty of rest time then I will make a program change and instead of going up 5lbs each session on the bench, we only go up 2.5lbs each session and we see how long we can ride this out. When my client can't go up 2.5lbs any more at 3 sets of 5 reps, I usually switch them to 5 sets of 3 reps. They are still getting 15 reps in and we are still going up 2.5lbs in weight each session. We can usually ride this out for a few weeks before the next programming change is needed. I hope these tips help you get unstuck in your bench press.