The Bench Press Is Not A Chest Exercise?

I think we ruffled some feathers with the last post featuring the Ludus Team challenging the most important muscle group for the bench press.

Undoubtedly, the beginner or average lifter will tell you that your chest is the most important muscle group contributing to your bench press. I’m here to tell you, that training your chest is not the secret to growing your bench press!

To begin, and to smother all of your torches, it is true, that a bench press will absolutely involve the muscles in your chest and even grow those muscles; without a doubt.

However,

Your pectoralis major and your pectoralis minor, though making up a large muscle group, actually have a lot less to do with your bench max than you may think.

Isolating any exercise to your chest is difficult, as almost every single contraction of your Pectoralis Major or Minor, also activates many other muscle groups, such as your triceps and deltoids. Just like it is a little bit more difficuld to train your glutes, without your quads or hamstrings developing alongside of them. The only exercise to avoid activation in your triceps and your deltoids that comes to mind are variations of flies. Which leads us to the point here. What is the bench press if it is not a chest exercise?

The truth is, the bench press is actually an ARM exercise, and more primarily, a Tricep exercise.

Your chest is actually used more to stabilize the weight during a bench press than it is to complete a full bench press repetition. In reality, the more you focus on training your tricep muscles, the higher your bench max is going to climb.

Some of the best Bench pressers in the world like JM Blakely, Dave Tate, George Halbert, Kenny Patterson, and Matt Wenning all have dedicated years (and some even have tricep exercises named after them, like JM press and tate press) to developing the short head of their triceps, and there isn’t a single pec-fly done between the five of them. As a matter of fact, a couple of them even have videos directly quoting what I am telling you now.

On your upper body focused days, you should be pumping as much volume as you can recover from into your triceps; this should be the focus to anyone who wants a better bench press. We typically attack triceps immediately after our first core lift, as it ensures the athlete has ample energy to complete the volume required without issue.

So what tricep exercises will build my bench press? 

Here is a quick challenge

Pick Three of these and do the following:

• Dumbbell Rollbacks
• Dumbbell Tate Press
• JM Press
• Close Grip Bench Press
• Overhead Extensions
• Banded Extensions
• Close Grip Pushups
• Board Presses
• High Pin Presses

Work these into every upper body day. It is also recommended to train your triceps during your extra workouts and GPP days as well. Tricep injuries are very rare and recover more quickly than most of the muscles in your body. Use that to your advantage. Chest injuries however, happen a lot more frequently. Utilizing various tricep extensions will ensure that your bench is growing, while remaining injury free. The reason a lot of athlete's bench press's stall, is because they fail to put enough volume into their triceps.

I can guarantee you, that the athlete pumping volume into their triceps will always beat an athlete focusing on pec flies every day of the week.

Try these out and let us know.