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June 20, 2005
A Power to the People!/ladder hybrid to jumpstart your bench press
Question: My bench press has stalled. Do you have any cool routines to get it going?
Try the following program by Jason Brice of Johnson City, Tennessee. Jason combined one of the power cycles from my book Power to the People! with ‘ladders’, a technique popular in the Russian military for improving pull-ups.
On June 30th, 2001 Brice started out with one set of five reps with 225 pounds, or 67% of his 335-pound max bench (naturally, you will need to plug in your own numbers). Jason did only one set of five reps per workout, adding five pounds each time. What will surprise you is that he benched five days a week, Monday through Friday. The reasoning behind such an unorthodox schedule is outside the scope of this piece; it is explained in Power to the People!
Since you cannot keep on adding five pounds a workout forever, even if you started the cycle with a light weight, eventually you will reach your five-rep max. When Jason reached his he switched from powerlifting style cycling to ladders. ‘A ladder’ means doing one rep, resting briefly, doing two reps, etc., then starting all over when you cannot top the reps of the last set. Brice did sets of 1-2-3-1-2... with his 5RM until his form started to get sloppy. He did this every other day for two weeks.
Then Jason backed off ten pounds from his 5RM established two weeks earlier and resumed a linear cycle: one set of five Monday through Friday adding five pounds a day. When he had a tough time completing his fiver Jason took two days off and tested his one-rep max, something he did every two months. Here is what he accomplished:
| June 30th | August 30th | October 31st | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bench press 1 RM | 335 | 385 | 420 |
| Bench press 5 RM | 285 | 325 | 360 |
Said Jason: “…My lifts were witnessed by my co-workers as well as a few powerlifters who compete with me. If I lied about my results they would call my bluff.”
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at June 20, 2005 5:50 AM