Why Your Bench Press Has Plateaued: Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Aligning Expectations
If you compete in the sport of powerlifting, chances are at some point in your career, you have experienced a plateau. By definition, a plateau is a period of little or no change AFTER a period of success/progress. This is normal and dare I say, to be expected, at SOME point in your lifting career. That doesn’t make it any less annoying. Or frustrating. Or discouraging. For most lifters, if there is a very prolonged plateau, it usually will be experienced in the bench press.
Before we dive in head-first to troubleshooting, let’s analyze why the bench press seems to be the most susceptible to plateau OR, heaven forbid, regression.
In general, it is the least amount of weight a person can handle on a Big 3 powerlift.
Now, you might be saying, why would that make it susceptible to plateau, does that even matter? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that since it is the least amount of weight you can handle it usually means you can, and most likely should, train it more often. No, in the sense that in a vacuum, it does not necessarily matter, really at all. I’ll expand on this point further down.
Bench press tends to be very, “groove" dependent.
This goes hand in hand with the first point. Anecdotally, I have noticed that although a training prescription can be equal in terms of volume, if the rep ranges are just a hair off, or the intensity associated is off, or what seems to be the worst, frequency get’s thrown off, people can feel clunky and not, “in-tune”, with the movement. This sounds like bro-science for sure, but when you bench multiple times a week, let’s say 4 days a week, and then you take all your volume and bring it down to 1 or 2 days, get back to me on how foreign the movement feels overall. Everyone has misgrooved a rep before, but to not feel like you are moving efficiently is very discouraging.
It tends to be the most heavily correlated with bodyweight and muscle mass.
I think for people who do not have a very large bench arch with a wider grip, it is commonly accepted that bench press tends to scale up with bodyweight gain and down with bodyweight loss. From a personal perspective, I think the lighter you are, the more pronounced this is, but I have seen cases with my own athlete’s that if bodyweight loss is too rapid or not handled the right way, even people north of 100kg/220lbs can experience a 10-20lb drop in bench strength. Why is this? Well if we are looking objectively at the bench press, you are supporting the load of the bar across your given bench WITH your own bodyweight. Meaning, your pretty much solely dependent on achieving the most surface area possible with your given frame, while still manipulating other variables such as an arch and grip manipulation. This is why I think people get a lot out of a fat pad, not necessarily because it is magic but it allows you to create more surface area (the bench is literally wider, doubly so if you are used to a narrow commercial gym bench) and maximize the muscle and leverage you already have. There is MUCH more to it than that, however. If none of that made sense or resonated, in periods where you are gaining or weight, measure your pressing power and I would be relatively confident in that if your bench doesn’t go up or down, the subjective “ease” of the lift will scale harder or easier, depending on the amount gained, or amount lost. Another anecdotal perspective that I really took a lot from early on, is look at the people with the best bench presses in a given weight class, what do 95%-99% of them look like? That should be as tangible and practical as it gets!
It it the most technical lift.
Bench is the most technical lift? For most people, yes. Individual experience matters and you might be one of the blessed that bench comes easy to you, but for many, there are a lot of moving parts in the bench that are sometimes hard to dial in, all at once. For instance, in a good, sound, powerlifting-efficient bench press you have the following to consider each rep.
The set-up, how you get set to lift the bar out of the rack and/or setting your arch.
The unrack, try benching a PR with a terrible, non-precise unrack.
Descent speed, some people need more control, others more speed.
Touch point, being an inch or 2 off can throw off a rep completely. A sub-division is whether a heavy sink or soft touch favors your skillset.
Leg drive, this can screw up your heaviest sets and if you cue it wrong, create no-lifts for butt coming up off the bench.
Bar path, there are some people who preach a straight bar path, that is cool if it works for you, for 100% of my clientele, they have shown better success with driving the bar back and up, in a curved manner.
Length of pause, the sport requires a considerable pause AND hold both before and after the lift, if you train with quick pauses, or touch and go, you will be setting yourself up for failure.
Other things are grip width, tucking the elbows vs. flaring them, etc…
So, in short, if any one of these things is manipulated or off, to an extent, you could experience a bottle-neck in terms of your bench progress.
Alright, we made it here, you are reading this because you want your bench to go up again, most likely, or you want to help someone else bust past a plateau.
Troubleshooting the Bench Press
Forewarning here, this is my own perspective on how I would do things, it does not make them the right away, but certainly should give you a jump off point if you are unsure where to go with this, as I have been in periods myself where it seemed like every training decision I made, was the wrong one.
Here are several points to consider before you manipulate program design.
Have you filled out your frame?
This is probably the hardest pill to swallow for a lot of people so I will just rip the band-aid off. If you are skinny and lacking muscle in the upper body, you can pretty much guarantee you will have a severe limiter on your bench progress, bar-none. Filling out your frame is subjective however, and I always like to provide my experience with these concepts. From 2020 to 2022 I put on a considerable amount of upper body mass and although my weigh-ins at meets have been pretty much the same, the amount of muscle I am carrying is higher each time AND I am a strong believer in having periods of training when you are a given amount heavier than your class.
Are you enjoying bench training?
This is a bit of paradox in that, if you are not good at something, and not progressing, you won’t enjoy it. However, I do believe you can make a conscious commitment to enjoy the bench press and enjoy the moving parts of the movement and the accessory work associated, pretty much instantly and by default, make much more progress than before. I always am weary to use the, “It’s all in your head, bro”, mantra, but I find the people who are self-deprecating about their lack of strength, don’t enjoy the movement, and overall don’t put as much effort into the training of the movement, make the least progress. Make the commitment to loving the process and I promise you, at bare minimum, you won’t loathe heading to the gym for a bench session.
Are you taking care of yourself and hitting your sessions when you are supposed to?
This is a niche one as it applies to everything in the sport and in training as a whole, but permeates in the bench, most often. Any time you under-sleep, under-eat, under-recover, or screw up your frequency, you are almost guaranteeing that your bench will suffer in some capacity. This is more of a chronic pattern than any one session, but reigns true when you are constantly taking sessions at random times, moving workouts around, and not paying attention to trends. If you dial yourself in and commit to doing things the same for even 4 weeks, this is a built-in performance-enhancer.
Erik, I am already doing all of these things, my bench still won’t go up.
First off, cap.
Secondly, if you truly are, the following will be program considerations to alter your current programming, based on where you are stalling out.
Up accessory work. Yes, before I say up bench frequency, try upping your accessory volume. These days I find myself a bit more observant of other’s training, especially younger people who are just getting into it. I notice the bench workout itself is SUPER high intensity and everything that comes after it is rather, for lack of a better term, half-assed. Going back to the point of filling our your frame, there are ancillary muscles in the bench that are neglected when you only rely on the flat barbell bench press for stimulation. So if you are used to doing 3 sets of 10 on everything after your bench workout, I implore you to train the accessory stuff hard and with intent in various rep ranges, not just 10. Go up to 20, down to 8, and everywhere in between. For even the most advanced lifters, this can be a game-changer.
Up bench volume/frequency. This seems self-explanatory, but I feel most people can’t do this off the bat because of how they frame bench training. What I mean by this is, if your bench workout right now consists of working up to an RPE 10 single, and then doing an AMRAP set at 135 and that is it, not only will you make zero progress doing that three times a week, but you won’t be able to sustain that for any period of time longer than a couple weeks. Increases in volume and frequency need to be calculated and over time. If you are used to benching once a week, move to two, not three to start. If you are used to handling a top set, then doing no volume. Start with maybe 2 back off sets, not 5. Generally speaking, the lower your frequency is to begin with, the greater effects adding more frequency will have for you. This has a “level-off” period when frequency surpasses around 4x per week. Meaning, if you are already benching 4x per week, the trade-off from going 4 times to 5 times per week, usually is minimal and there are other stones to turn. In addition to this, using a scheme of moderate, low, high in terms of intensity (weight on the bar), would be of use as if all sessions are too light, or too heavy, you are back to square one.
Fine tune accessory and assistance selection. I think far too often, we under-think (or maybe it is over-think depending on the person) how we chose our assistance movements. To me, I don’t think it is as simple as most lead on. A classic example, if you miss at lockout, I can assure you with somewhat relative confidence, doing a ton of tricep pressdowns and only doing close-grip bench, will not fix the issue. Assistance movements should do exactly that, assist the competition movement, not be used as a primarily builder, although exceptions exist here. The case I am trying to make here is if a certain segment of your bench seems to lag, it might not be in your best interest to attack ONLY that variable. I have ran cycles in year 2 of powerlifting training where I brought my close grip bench press within 5lbs of my comp grip, when I circled back and tested my comp grip, it moved up by 0lbs despite a lot of my tricep driven work going up and getting stronger actively. That said, here are some things to use if you struggle with certain aspects of the bench.
Tend to get stapled at the chest
Speed up descent of the movement
General pec strength (flies, deep ROM dips)
General front deltoid strength (overhead pressing, front raises)
Tend to miss at midrange
Speed up descent of the movement
If using heavy sink style of touch, try soft touch
Check how you are cueing leg drive, if you are using it to impulse the bar off the chest, this could lead you to dying near midrange
Tend to miss at lockout
Check bar-path, a straighter bar path places unnecessary stress on the triceps at lockout.
If using heavy sink style of touch, try soft touch
Check how you are cueing leg drive, if you are using it to impulse the bar off the chest, this could lead you to dying near lockout
The honest truth here, it might just be too heavy for you and you are not strong enough.
Check your rep ranges/sets per session. I have found that certain rep ranges for certain style benchers, just seem to work. This is more than likely because the rep ranges associated represent a greater intensity scheme that works for the lifter, but nonetheless, it is something I have noticed is very prevalent in the people I am fortunate enough to work with. A good rule of thumb here for most people, if sets are over 5-6 total sets, generally, you are better off splitting that across a couple sessions as recovery associated begins to exceed possible benefit, in any one session. As for reps, here is how I tend to think.
If you have a super high arch and short-ROM, you will get very little out of super low rep sets (3 reps and below) as you need to equate for range of motion and the distance the bar travels rep to rep. 9 times out of 10, these people will benefit from reps in the 6-10 rep range after their top sets.
If you are like me and have a wider grip but still have a longer range of motion, you will most likely benefit from an intermediate rep range, think 3-8 reps per set, after heavy top sets.
Finally, if you have a super long ROM, a closer grip, flatter back, you will most likely get a lot out of the medium to lower rep sets. Usually people who are built like this, I do not exceed reps of 6 and hang around the 2-5 rep range in periods where we want to surge the bench strength for a meet or a test.
Although not a programming variable, check your technique. I have found that for a lot of the people I work with, they have technical breakdowns at certain weights, at certain points, and this alone is the single variable that masks itself as lack of progress. You might respond better to cues from others, but this is how I like to cue technique.
When setting up, I favor a slide back into position.
When unracking, we want to get as high on the traps as we can while keeping our neck as long as we can. I have found this helps with the next piece.
Depress scapula down into the bench and try to avoid excessive retraction of the scapula. Meaning, I am not a big fan of squeezing the shoulder blades together during a bench press as usually, this cue get’s misconstrued and puts the lifter in a spot where they are “rowing” the bar into the chest, which causes excessive tuck of the elbows. I prefer, sink the scaps into the bench and “chest up”, to the bar.
During all of this, we should be pushing the floor away from us to set our leg drive. Leg drive, to me, is not an impulse from the bottom of the lift to help get it off your chest, it is constant and ever-present during unrack to completion of a rep. If you are sending your hips up to the ceiling, you are most-likely not cueing leg drive correct, for you. And for whatever strength it provides, it will make benching in a meet a nightmare with butt lift calls. Instead, if you familiar with a kicking motion, or leg extension, this is how I like to cue leg drive. If the floor was removed, your legs should fly to a straightened position, as opposed to staying bent and your pelvis shoots towards the ceiling if you were cueing that distinct humping motion. You will notice better stability with this style and more consistency and less pronounced sticking points.
Lastly, I like to cue bar path as a straighter descent, and a “back and up simultaneously” ascent. I have seen many a bench be cured with adding this thought process in, mine included. Again, I am big on practical examples and it seems to me, the best benchers seem to mimic this type of bar path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q5IVxhIhMc (Bill Kazmaier with a 633lb raw bench)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2H2bvK98Kw (Dan Green takes this to an extreme)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6B5dJCo9rA (Taylor Atwood, 3:09, does this well)
Well we made it here, but what do I do?
I take pride in my own bench progression as well as others I have been blessed to work with.
My current bench programming looks like the following:
3 times per week frequency, 2 sessions of comp grip work, one session of variation.
I tend to favor a top rep set on my secondary day with higher rep backdowns. At the moment it is a top set of 3, with backdown 8s.
On my variation I like to use tempo almost exclusively and alter whether my feet are up or down, closer to a meet they will be down, otherwise they are up on the bench, usually with a closer grip. I use this to self-limit load and extend ROM.
On my heavy day, I always take singles or doubles as a top set followed by lower rep, heavier backdowns. This is ALWAYS after squats so I can more accurately assess where bench strength is at with the interference I will have in a meet.
My go to assistance lifts for myself are heavy DB pressing in all planes, weighted dips, heavy overhead extensions and pressdowns.
Accessory work usually will feature bicep work twice a week, shoulder work twice a week, direct chest work once a week, tricep work twice a week (one day being short head the other being long head driven) and I generally try to progress these every other week in quality or loading.
I also do a ton of face pulls, rear delt work, etc… and never exceed 4 total backdown sets in a given session as I cannot chronically recover from it.
I used to bench 4x per week with borderline maniacal volume, when I pulled back I made MORE progress.
In closing, I experience a period from 2019-2020 where my bench went up 0lbs. Yes, I went an entire year without PRing my bench. It sucks, I know, but you need to be proactive and not reactive. If something is actively not working, I promise you, trying harder will be like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
If all else fails, the most successful benchers I have coached follow these principles.
Somewhat frequent exposure to heavier loads
Low intensity, moderate volume back off work (usually lower than RPE 7)
Pushing the hell out of accessory work
Pushing when it is time ti push (primary), coasting when it is time to coast (tertiary)
Some people who have made progress using this type of system include:
Me: 214lbs to 303lbs from meet #1 to meet #9
Andrew Graves: 264lbs to 353lbs from meet #1 to meet #7
Dave Cailler: 358lbs to 396lbs from meet #2 to meet #4 (under a year)
Michael Beaupre: Set a meet PR bench press of 292lbs for the first time since 2018.
Try these tips out and let me know if they helped!
To Utopia,
Erik