Build a Stronger Bench Press With This 10-Week Cycle

This essay from Marty Gallagher lays out a focused 10-week off-season bench press specialization cycle for lifters who want to bring up a lagging bench without losing sight of bodyweight, cardio training, and total progress. For powerlifters, bodybuilders, weightlifters, athletes, first responders, military personnel, and serious trainees, the lesson still holds: a stronger barbell bench press is usually built in the off season, when training contrast, assistance work, disciplined eating, and realistic goals all line up.

Build a Stronger Bench Press With This 10-Week Cycle

The off season is the time for experimenting.

Build a stronger bench press! In my world, “in-season” refers to the preparation phase leading up to a powerlifting competition. The “off-season” refers to any time-period that is not in-season. Competitions are report cards, snapshots in time that offer a cold reality check: where exactly are you, insofar as current strengths and capacities? It is one thing to post big lifts in the comfort of your own training space and it is quite another thing to do it in competition, in front of judges that insist on clean, legal lifts.

When lifters are in the deepest part of the off-season, experimentation is the name of the game. In the off season, the idea is to get as far away as possible from the way in which strength was peaked leading up to the competition. In the competition phase, training volume is minimal, training intensity is maximum. In season, all three lifts are done in the same session, using super-low reps and berserker mental intensity.

In the off-season, new goals need to be conceived of and then set into a timeframe. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once observed, “A goal without a plan is a wish.” The off season is the time to head in the opposite direction and create training contrast. A nutritional element is always incorporated. Food volume and food content are modulated and modified based on individualized goals: eating and training are always integrated and coordinated.

The first order of business is to establish a realistic off-season goal. A typical goal for a serious off-season weightlifter would be to bring up a lagging lift. The smart lifter initiates a specialization program, one designed to focus and concentrate on a lift in need of help. While the other lifts are not ignored, they are done minimally. The lion’s share of time, energy and effort are devoted to the lagging lift. Contrast is created on a multitude of levels…

• Instead of all three lifts, stress one lift
• Increase training volume for the specialized lift
• Use less intensity; volume and intensity are always proportional
• If choosing to increase the bench press, set a realistic goal
• Add assistance work: various grip-width benches, biceps, triceps

The 10-week emphasis will be on one lift, the barbell bench press. Benching is done once a week. To create contrast, multiple sets of competition-grip bench presses are done with a static poundage. Each successive week the static set poundage is increased. Wide-grip paused bench presses and narrow-grip touch-and-go bench presses are done after the competition-grip static sets.

As my strength mentor once noted, “The best assistance exercises are those that most closely resemble the lift itself.” Ergo, flat benches of various grip widths, or using dumbbells, are the closest to regular flat benching. Arm work is done with an emphasis on the triceps. Additional tricep strength aids in locking out limit bench presses. If the mission is to bring up a lagging bench press, the training space should support the plan. A stable flat Olympic bench press, a dependable powerlifting bar, secure barbell collars, and enough weight plates to load progressively make specialization work easier to track.

10-Week Bench Press Specialization Program

Our hypothetical athlete is coming off a successful competition and looking to bring up his lagging bench press. His plan is to add bodyweight, ten pounds in ten weeks, and move up a weight class. Because he will preferentially train his chest, shoulders and arms, most of the new bodyweight will be added to his underdeveloped, relatively speaking, upper front torso.

To dramatically increase his bench press, more muscular horsepower is needed. At his height of 5-5 and weighing 165, he has gone about as far as he’s going to go, insofar as natural, raw bench pressing. He’ll likely break the 300-pound bench barrier staying at a 165-pound bodyweight, but that might take five years.

He wants more, and he wants it quicker. He is desirous of becoming larger and more muscular, particularly in his underdeveloped pecs, shoulders and arms. The challenge will be to maintain his current 11% body fat percentage while adding 10 pounds of new bodyweight in 70 days.

There is no sense adding ten pounds of bodyweight if it is blubber, thanks to poor eating. To maintain leanness while adding size requires the lifter to attain the metabolic sweet spot, a perfect balance between eating and exercise that jacks up a lifter’s metabolism and enables him to stay lean while adding bodyweight.

To stay lean while adding size requires the lifter to engage in high-intensity cardio on a near-daily basis. Optimally the cardio is done first thing in the morning, pre-breakfast. Glycogen stores are at their lowest after sleeping for 5-8 hours. A cardio session done after sleeping burns through residual glycogen. When glycogen is exhausted, the body begins burning through its second favored fuel: stored body fat. Morning cardio should be lung-searing, sweaty and intense. For lifters who want a repeatable conditioning tool during an off-season phase, cardio equipment such as the AssaultRunner Pro treadmill or a hard session on the Jacobs Ladder 2 Home Cardio Trainer can help keep the conditioning side organized.

Regular cardio done in the morning does not have to negatively affect progressive resistance training done later that same afternoon or evening when recovery, food intake, and workload are handled intelligently. Cardio is combined with clean eating. Pizza, candy, beer, chips, sweets, fast food and industrial food are all jettisoned. Copious eating of healthy, natural, nutrient-dense power foods is used to create the requisite caloric surplus needed to fuel hypertrophy.

Clean eating, cardio training, and a specialization bench press program are combined: the goal is to add 10 pounds of lean muscle mass in ten weeks. If the current 11% body fat percentage is retained, a 40-pound increase in a lifter’s best bench press is realistic. Ten pounds of pure muscle has a profound impact on strength.

Weekly Bench Press Structure

• Bench Press - Power Grip: after warm-up sets, three sets of 5 reps initially
• Bench Press - Wide Grip: reduce poundage, one paused set to failure minus one rep
• Bench Press - Narrow Grip: reduce poundage, one touch-and-go set to failure minus one rep
• Triceps: single-dumbbell overhead triceps press, dips, or lying nose-breakers
• Biceps: curls of various types

Training Details

Every Sunday our hypothetical lifter comes in and begins warming up for the touch-and-go bench press. After 3-4 warm-up sets, he ties into the session’s meat-and-potatoes: three sets of five reps. Our jump-in weight of 220 pounds is a walk in the park for a man that benched 280 in competition.

After three sets of power-grip benches with a static weight, the poundage is dropped, the grip width is widened by roughly two inches per side, and the reps are paused. Drop the poundage roughly 10% and rep out, perform paused reps until you know you cannot perform another rep. No need for a warm-up set. Wide-grip benches with a pause build bench press start power, the explosion off the chest.

After a single rep-out set of wide-grip bench presses, perform one set of narrow-grip touch-and-go style bench press. The grip width for narrow-grip benches is shoulder width. Do not have the hands too close together. These touch-and-go reps require a hard lockout on every rep. Narrow-grip bench presses done without a pause build lockout power. The lockout is emphasized.

Note: in our lexicon, go to failure does not mean fail with a rep. It means rep until you know you cannot do another rep. No need to eat a rep, just know that the next rep would fail. More accurately, this strategy is failure minus one rep.

Assistance choices can stay simple. Some lifters may prefer a plate-loaded leverage bench press, others may use selectorized gym equipment, and some may finish with upper-body isolation work on a pec deck/rear delt machine. The point is not novelty. The point is to support the barbell bench press, not distract from it.

Every Friday morning our hypothetical lifter has his official weigh-in for the week. It is his duty to eat enough and supplement enough to make sure the weekly one-pound weight gain occurs. If the cardio is intense and consistent and the diet is made up of quality natural calories and potent supplements, weight gain will be lean muscle, not body fat. The bodyweight column is logged each Friday. The listed number is the bodyweight goal for that week.

The usual course of action after a successful bench specialization phase is to switch to a leg or back specialization phase. There is great logic to the idea of rotating specialization routines on a regularly recurring basis in the off-season. This is an ultra-basic periodized approach and has been used by strength athletes for decades.

The overarching idea is simple: take performance and physique to the next level. Center your weight training and eating toward improving a specific lift. Done in conjunction with a highly regulated eating strategy and a high-intensity cardio regimen, the lifter can stay lean while adding size. Handled just right, the payoff is huge: increased lean muscle mass and a monster bench press. But that means no bobbles, mulligans, false starts, or falling off the wagon. At the end of ten weeks, 70 days, your body is magnificently reconfigured. A goal without a plan is a wish. Figure out your goal; we’ve just shown you how to plan.

If the bench press is the priority, upper-body tools such as PowerBlock Elite USA 90 adjustable dumbbells or urethane hex dumbbells can support pressing variations and arm work without derailing the specialization phase. When the loads climb, some lifters also like the feel of an all-leather lever powerlifting belt and a training space protected by rubber gym flooring rolls.

FAQ

What is a bench press specialization cycle?

A bench press specialization cycle is an off-season training phase where the bench press becomes the primary lift. Volume, exercise selection, eating, and assistance work are coordinated to bring up a lagging bench while the other lifts are maintained at lower priority.

How often do you bench during this 10-week cycle?

In this plan, benching is done once a week, but the session includes competition-grip bench presses, wide-grip paused bench presses, and narrow-grip touch-and-go bench presses to create training contrast and target different portions of the lift.

Why use power grip, wide grip, and narrow grip bench presses?

The competition or power grip handles the core workload. Wide-grip paused benches build start power off the chest, while narrow-grip touch-and-go benches emphasize lockout power and triceps contribution.

Can you stay lean while adding bodyweight during a bench press cycle?

Gallagher’s point is yes, provided the lifter keeps cardio intense and consistent, eats clean, and creates a smart caloric surplus instead of adding bodyweight through junk food and inactivity.

What should happen after a successful bench specialization phase?

After a successful bench phase, many lifters rotate into a leg or back specialization phase. That off-season rotation creates periodized contrast and keeps progress moving across the whole physique and total lifting package.

About the Author

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of numerous books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book “Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method" and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.