Part 1 - This episode introduces the series and talks about the importance of technique and specifically bench press technique:
Hi there guys this is Neil Deighton, I’m back with a new video. This is gonna be a series of videos about powerlifting programming, about setting up powerlifting routines, that kind of thing.
Now if you’ve stumbled across this video and you’re wondering why the hell I’m making such a video on powerlifting, maybe never come across my name before. Well I’m not on the level as the guys like Dan Green, Bridges those kind of guys but I’ve been lucky enough to train with some great lifters – Andy Bolton, Brian Reynolds, Dave Carter and many more so I’ve picked up quite a bit over the years. Been competing a while now for about 12 years, I’ve had a little break lately but in the past I totalled 912kg in the 90’s as a junior which was a world record for juniors. I bench press 305kg at 90kg body weight which was a world junior and a European senior record. Then I did a bit of raw training and squatted 300kg in a belt, benched 5 plates, deadlifted over 700lbs and I’ve helped other guys get stronger as well so even though I don’t consider myself a particularly great powerlifter, I think what I’m just trying to do is just throw a few ideas out there and if it helps anyone then great. So that’s who I am. Now, it’s such a broad spectrum all the powerlifting, how to set up a routine that kind of thing. It’s such a broad spectrum it’s gonna take a few videos so I don’t want to make them overly long.
So, the first thing I’m gonna talk about is to me one of the most important things, and that’s technique. Now it’s kind of a bit of a boring subject really and you’ll hear it often talked about “you’ve got to get your technique right”, well yeah obviously you’ve gotta get your technique right, and you might think that your technique is bang on. But when I’m talking about technique I’m looking at guys like Andrey Belyaev, if you watch him lift, his lift is perfect. His technique, his proficiency is unbelievable. If you watch him lift at 50% of his max it’s gonna look exactly the same as his 95-100% of his max. The only way that comes is from practicing the lifts. He does a lot of lifts, he performs squat, bench press, deadlift, he does lots of them he practices a lot. That’s the only way you’re gonna really get your technique up to scratch, you aren’t gonna get your technique up to scratch by bench pressing once a week and doing 4 sets. You’re gonna get to a good level but to get that to what could equate to an extra 10-15kg onto your bench press you aren’t gonna get there unless you’re practicing the lift more often. When you practice the lift more often, when I’m talking about is practicing in the say 80-85% kind of intensity range. I don’t think there’s much benefit to practicing a lower intensity range than that, if you’re using too little weight you aren’t really gonna get the technique proficient at heavy weight you’ll break down as the weight gets heavier but if you get your technique right at 80-85%, that kind of range where you’re at your limit for good technique, where your technique is still as you’d like it but it’s still hard work, that’s the kind of range you want to be working.
So if we talk about bench press, what we’re talking about when we’re looking at technique. Well if we start with the setup, so you get ready to bench how do you set up. So if we look at your feet, are your feet flat or are you on your toes and a lot of that’s gonna depend on what federation you lift in. How far underneath the bench do you have them, why do you have them that far underneath the bench, would it help if you put them a little bit further back? Would it help if you had them a little bit more infront, how about if they were wider? Would you be better off pointing your toes in slightly, would that help if you have issues raising your bum off the bench? That’s just talking about your feet, now you bring your upper back into it where what part of your upper back is setting up on the bench? Is it more towards your upper traps and your neck? Or are you quite low down? Could you get a bit higher and your sternum up a bit higher?
So that’s just your back and then you’ve got to talk about your head positioning, how’s your head, are you bringing it up when you’re bringing the bar down? Or are you keeping it on the bench? When you get the hand-off are you keeping everything tight? Do you squeeze your rear delts together if you are? Do you find this helps? I know it’s kind of a commonplace thing, you must squeeze your rear delts together. I know guys like Stan Efferding say that he prefers not to, and I think that’s gonna depend a lot on your benching style but I think this is the kind of thing you’ve got to play around with and find out what works best for you. So how fast do you bring the bar down, can you bring that bar down faster? If you can bring the bar down faster under the same control you’re gonna have a bigger stretch reflex. How about when you pause the bar, are you pausing it by sinking it in a little bit? Or are you hovering on your chest, which do you prefer? What’s your elbow angle? How much are you tucking your elbows in? And that’s gonna determine where abouts you’re touching really. Now when you're looking at elbow angle you've also got to look at wrist angle is your wrist behind the bar or are they in line? If your wrist is behind the bar you're not going to be able to generate the power to press up and you're gonna lose the lift. Are you flaring your elbows on the way up? Now why is it important in my opinion to flare your elbows, if you were gonna do a rack lockout you're not gonna do it with your elbows tucked in, you're gonna have your elbows flared naturally because that's your strongest position it's where your strongest leverage is so are you flaring them correctly when you bring the bar up?
And then you've also got to look at grip width, if you actually think about why you use a certain grip is because it's your most natural grip, would you be better off trying to make it a bit wider to cut the range of motion down? And you've also got to think the positioning on the bench, do you do it because it's the most comfortable at the moment or do you think it's the most optimal? What I mean by that is, personally I used to bench with my feet not so quite tucked underneath me and that was because it comfortable because my hips were tight, but now my hips are looser I find I'm in a better position to bench with them further underneath the bench so it wasn't a case of I'm better with my feet as they were it was a case of I needed to make adjustments to flexibility, mobility to get in a correct position to bench. Same with your lower back, if you've got a very tight lower back when you're trying to put your feet well underneath you and get a bit of an arch going, even though we're not particularly arch our lower back it is going to arch pretty hard and that can cause problems if you've got tightness in the area it might be uncomfortable, even too uncomfortable to hold. How about holding the upper back, if you're set up high on the upper back you've got to make sure your traps and rear delts are strong enough in that position. Are you doing enough external rotation work. So there's all these things that come into it and I don't think that you can learn everything, get everything spot on by doing minimal amount of work per week. 4 sets of benching to me is not enough to get that technique going, and I know some people say that there's the thought process that I'd rather get stronger than make adjustments to my technique because if I make adjustments to my technique because if I make adjustments to my technique I might not necessarily be stronger even though I’m lifting more. That's fine for a general person but if you're a powerlifter you should be trying to get out as much weight as you can so you should be working on the technical issues as well as the strength issues.
I think I'll wrap that up for today so anymore questions or anything just put them up on TMuscle otherwise I'm gonna crack on with this series and do a little bit about something different each time. So what have we got to look at, we've got exercise selection for assistance exercises. Rep schemes, volume, frequency. How about when you're dieting vs when you're in a calorie surplus and a whole other load of things so stay tuned for the next one, thanks very much for watching.
Part 2 - Neil talks about increasing volume and frequency:
Hi guys welcome to part 2 of the powerlifting programming, today I'm just gonna go over the amount of work you do, increasing the amount of work you do so this is kinda gonna encompass volume and frequency and just got a quick question about breathing at the end during the lifting.
If I was to say to you imagine if you could fit all the work you've done, all the training you've done in the last 8 weeks into 5 weeks you're gonna progress so much faster. Now what's gonna limit that is gonna be recovery you aren't gonna be able to recover from your training sessions so it's pointless even saying it at the moment. But what we're looking at is can we adapt to being able to train more often to do more volume. So I'm gonna use the sink analogy, I can't remember who wrote it but it made sense to me so I'll go with that. Now if you imagine a sink and you've got your tap, as soon as you start running your tap that's your training stress, and your drainage hole that's your recovery. ability Now if you've got a very small drainage hole, say you're the kind of guy who does minimal work per week because you just can seem to recover properly or you don't think you can recover properly, you can't turn the tap on very fast or think sink is gonna overflow pretty quickly. And that will be akin to maybe overreaching, I won't say over training because overtraining would have to occur over a much longer time period. So unlike a sink the human body is adaptable so we can increase the size of our drainage hole as it were. Now how do we got about increasing the size of our drainage hole, and obviously if we do that we can turn the tap on faster which would be akin to doing more training.
So how do we get that drainage hole bigger, that's the main question. And I think what all of us do, or at least I did do and I’m trying to change that now for this and it seems to be working is you'll do maybe 4, 5 6 weeks training you'll be training hard and then you're gonna feel a bit tired, maybe aching a bit you'll maybe lose a bit of motivation so what do we do? It's time to back off we've got to listen to our body, we're gonna back off, we're gonna have a deload week, then we're gonna come back and we're gonna build it back up again which is great but the problem is you aren't forcing that adaptation, you're not gonna increase the size of the drainage hole by doing that, you aren't forcing your body to work harder for longer so it's kinda gonna stagnate where it is recovery wise. To increase that recovery what we're gonna do is were gonna push on for an extra couple of weeks when we feel like that. Now this where it becomes important to listen to your body each session. If you've got bad lower back pain and it's deadlift session, I'm not saying carry on and do a deadlift make sure you're working hard on something, go on the pullups, make sure you're doing a hard session so you're still forcing your body to adapt but ideally we do want to be pushing the compound lifts, that's the idea. Right, so don't back off too often and what can we do now we can start adding days into your routine or increasing your volume per day. Now this is also gonna have the same kind of effect. I've talked about frequency before and volume it's the same thing, it's a very slow process, it's not a case of going from doing squatting once a week for 3 or 4 sets to starting right I'm gonna squat 4 times a week now and do a high volume. I'm gonna deadlift 5 times a week, I'm gonna bench 8 times as I've seen some of the top guys doing it, the eastern Europeans will. You may be able to get to that level but it's gonna take years and years.
So what we're looking for, it's not kind of a eureka moment where you think right I'm gonna bang in a load of volume here and I'm gonna add a load of days there. It's such a slow process and I'll explain what I mean by a slow process and how I’d go about adding things into your routine. Now what have we got to consider before we start adding the extra work in? There's 2 main things for me, the main one is lower back loading. This is what I kind of base a lot of programs around, if you're putting too much stress on your lower back you're doing too many heavy squats, deadlifts, bent over rows that kind of thing anything that taxes your lower back that's when you're more likely to get burnt out. So we're gonna have to bear that in mind when we're programming in more work. And also if you're getting too amped up every session if you're getting too psyched up and you're headbutting bars and you've got your smelling salts out every session you're gonna struggle to increase your volume because you're just gonna burn out eventually. You're taxing your CNS much more than you need to. Remember it's training, you're not in a competition.
Right, so say we're training 3 days a week at the moment we're doing a squat session, a bench session and a deadlift session. And you've got room to add another day in, well go over someone who doesn't have the time to add a day in, in a minute. But say you've got time to add another day in, how do we play it? Well if we think of the lower back loading issue and the musculature involved in each lift you'll notice that squat and deadlift is more taxing than bench press. So bench press is gonna be the first thing that you split into 2 days. So how do we split a bench press session into 2 days? We'll go through what might be a typical bench press session, you might do 4 sets of flat bench, you might move on to a chest exercise and do 3 sets, you might move on to a shoulder exercise and do 3 sets, you might finish with a tricep exercise for 3 sets. So how do we change that into a 2 day program? Well as we say we're taking small steps here we don't want to go and bang in too much volume at once, we don't want to stress ourselves too much, the body can only adapt to so much stress it isn't gonna adapt to everything. So what we can do is we're gonna add 1 set of bench per week so 1 day we're gonna do 3 sets of flat bench on the other day we're gonna do 2 sets of flat bench. And we're not gonna change the assistance exercises for now we're just gonna split it. So what we might do is, we might do 2 sets of chest on 1 day, 1 set of chest on the other day. We'll split the shoulders, we'll do 1 set on 1 day another set on the other day, and the triceps 2 sets on one day, one on the other day. I'd rather do it that way than split it as a whole, I'd rather do your chest and shoulders and triceps and bench twice a week rather than say right I'm gonna put shoulders on that day and triceps on that day because I think it's not as optimal in my opinion.
And now what we've got is we've got 2 days and we aren't doing loads on each day, the recovery is gonna be no different than it was but you've got an extra set in there now so you've got somewhere to build. And all you can do now is every couple of weeks you might add a set here, a set there. You might add a little different exercise in so over time, over months and months you're gonna increase your volume and it should make you stronger. Now how about squat and deadlift? We're gonna train 4 days we've got our extra bench day in, how do we kind of increase that? Well to start with I'm gonna leave deadlift as it is, to me it's the most taxing exercise. Gonna leave that until last to start playing around with, but we can probably squat twice a week. Now we're gonna add the squats in, we're gonna work up to 1 or 2 sets, sub maximal we're not going near failure and we're gonna do it before deadlifting. You're gonna squat before deadlifting in a comp anyway so it makes sense. All we're gonna do is we're gonna build it up slowly, you don't need to jump in doing a max set of 5 reps, just built it up. Maybe 70% for 5 reps and just working that technique and each week maybe upping the intensity a little bit you'll maybe get to 75-80% and instead of doing more intensity you're gonna add another set in so you might do 3 sets before deadlifting. And then if we want to take it a little bit further you might carry on with that kind of routine for a couple of months and then how about if we want to add another day in? What do we do? We'll probably gonna look at your back work we want to do a bit more deadlifting now if we can. So what we might do is we might add 1 or 2 deadlifting sets in. It might be off of the block, it might be off of the floor, it might be a deficit. We're just gonna add 1 or 2 sets in, maybe even 1 set to start with on deadlift day, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take assistance exercises and if you're gonna do your deadlifting you do your pullups your machine work and we're gonna choose 2 exercises out of them and we're gonna do it on a different day. So that makes 5 days and one of the days is gonna be a back assistance day, but it's not gonna be too taxing, you're not gonna do 4 or 5 different exercises. What you're gonna do is you're gonna take the exercises that you were doing already and put them on that day and slowly increase it. What it's doing is by the extra days it's giving you more room to manoeuvre increase in volume wise, simple as that. Not the best idea to do it if you're in a calorie restriction, if you're dieting anything like that you're probably not gonna be able to recover as fast so it's maybe not the right time to add in extra work.
Now how about if you train 3 days a week and you don't have time to train any more than 3 days a week. Well that goes for a lot of people I think and I don't think it's a problem per-se. I don't think it's optimal but I think there's plenty of great lifters out there much better than me who have done well off 2 or even 3 days a week. So what we can do is we can do that same thing as we did on the deadlift day, we can add the squats in before the deadlifts. And we're gonna have to play around more with the volume per session than we are the frequency, obviously if you can't train more days. What we can do though we can add the lifts in more often at a lower intensity. If you need to you can do your bench press on a different day at a lower intensity depending on how many days recovery you've got in between. If you've got a few days in between you can add another bench press session before one of your other sessions. I don't really think the whole “only train for 40 minutes, an hour” as long as you've got your nutrition pretty good around your workout and with powerlifting you're using a fair bit of rest time so I wouldn't worry about training too long.
So just to recap we're just gonna take things slowly. If you can train more days we're gonna train more days, if you can only train 3 days we're just gonna kind of increase the volume, you might do a set at 80% for each lift the first week, you might do a couple of weeks. Then another set in with around 80% so we're just gradually building the volume up. Mainly focusing on the compound lifts rather than the assistance cause that's where you're gonna get the most bang for your buck and that's where we want to improve our proficiency.
So I think that wraps it up on that for today, if anyone has got any further questions on it feel free to ask away and I'll do my best to answer them. Oh breathing, just had a question about breathing when you're doing the lifts and the kind of question was about doing multiple reps, do I hold my breath for the whole set. No personally I don't, if I'm doing a squat I'll take a breath in obviously. Breathe into your belly, push our against your belt as hard as you can, get that intra abdominal pressure and it's gonna support your lower back and help you lift the weight as well. Never breathe out during the concentric or eccentric you want to keep your breath held all the time. If you start to let your breath out you're gonna become a bit looser, not only are you not gonna make the lift you're gonna open yourself up for injury so never breathe out during the concentric. All that bullshit that people spout, do you breathe in on the way down and breathe out on the way up? Not if you're a powerlifter you don't, not if you want to get anywhere. So I think we all know that really. So that actual question was “do I hold my breath through all the sets, for the whole set?” No I don't if I'm doing bench press I'll take a breath, unrack the weight and off that one breath I will do one rep. To be honest it's something that I don't even think about and I've had to really think hard what I actually do. In between reps I'll take a breath but it's not a full breathe out, full breathe in it's kind of a little one, as little as possible. I can't concentrate properly if I do the whole set off one breath, I'm focusing more on trying to breathe and I think it really does hinder me, and I don't see any real benefit to it. If you can do one rep off one breath that's all you're gonna do in a comp I don't see a problem with it. So little breath in between sets isn't a problem. Right so that wraps it up for today, thanks very much for watching and I'll soon be back with a new one.
