Bench press shirt technique

“Using the shirt Correctly”

By Ian Smalley

For beginners ,the best set up for the shirt is one where the sleeves are rolled out toward the elbows and the neck is high. The advantage to this two fold…1.the looser the shirt is set the easier it is to get into proper pressing position. A tight chest plate that is pulled down and arms that are spun inwards tend to pull the shoulders up and forward, which is the opposite of proper bench pressing positioning. The lifter has to then rely on the weight once its in his hands to compress his shoulders down into position, all while staying up and tight. Not the easiest thing to do for a beginner. The second advantage is that the bar path will remain closer to your raw stroke, touching around the sternum with a normal tuck. When the shirt is jacked there will come a point near the bottom where the shirt binds up completely and the weight will just hover there for what seams like an eternity. At that point you will either fall flat or dump, or both.

The only way to get that last 2 inches is either to over-tuck or raise your head and roll down. Either way your de-loading the shirt for a period of time and then having to re-load it to press the weight. While many of the best lifters in the world can do these techniques with maximum poundages, it takes lots of time in a shirt and lots of dumps to get it right, and if you are reading this article than that is not you.

As you become more comfortable with the shirt in its “high” position, and you’ve completed many successful attempts, you can start twisting the sleeves in or start slowly lowering the chest plate as the weight that you can press begins to grow. Don’t be the guy that can only touch with a weight that you can’t press, that’s stupid.

Something else to remember when bench pressing is that as you wear your shirt in training and in meets its going to get stretched out. The high position you used 6 weeks before and got some pop out of will be all but gone. Many lifters will start to jack the shirts more and more as they wear out, but the problem with that is that regardless if the shirt is old or not, if you pull the chest plate down you are lowering gthe bar path closer to your belly, not your chest. If you aren’t used to lowering the weight and pressing from that position then you will probably become frustrated. It’s ok to send your shirts back to the manufacturer and get them taken in. An inch off the sleeves  or the chest plate will give you the performance back with out having to buy a new shirt for 100 to 150 bucks. Tailoring usually costs around 20 bucks, and is totally worth it.