Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [102]
You bounce too much when the bar slams your chest hard enough to change your position with the impact and then slows down markedly a couple of inches up from your chest. This excessive bounce occurs because you allowed the downward velocity of the bar to increase in an attempt to increase mechanical rebound, so the initial upward velocity of the bar was due more to the physical rebound than to your active drive off the chest. This means you had to loosen your position to let the bar speed up as it dropped. If it’s bad enough, the bar path will change after the rebound as your elbows shift position from the lack of tightness in your lats and delts. The whole messy thing is a result of a lack of tightness on the way down, and it can be remedied in a couple of ways.
One way to stay tight off the chest is to just barely touch it. You can’t cheat the rep if you can’t bounce the bar off your rib cage, and you can’t bounce it if you just barely touch your chest. Think about touching just your shirt, not your chest, with the bar. Or you might imagine a piece of glass on your chest that you have to touch but cannot break.
Visualizing a light touch usually works, but it deals with symptoms. The best way to fix a bouncing problem is to address it at its root: by learning to be tight during the movement, and in a way that can be applied to other lifts as well. It is a way to conceptualize the lift so that tightness is built in and elastic energy can be stored in the eccentric (negative) phase for use in the concentric drive up. The bench press, like the squat, consists of two movements: lowering the bar and raising the bar. Don’t think about lowering the bar; just think about driving it up. As you lower the bar down to your chest, you should be thinking about driving up hard, not about the descent. Focus on up only. In an attempt to get ready for the upward drive, you will slow down the descent and be tighter as the bar approaches your chest, thus improving your rebound efficiency and minimizing rib cage bounce. By thinking about driving up while the bar is on the way down, you will have focused on the thing you are actually trying to do, at the best point in the movement to start the process. Lowering the bar is awfully easy, and if you think past that to the drive, you will slow your descent as you prepare to actively drive the bar up. This excellent technique works for any exercise with an initial eccentric component.
Upper back
This important group of muscles has two functions. First, the upper back needs to be planted firmly against the bench and used as a platform to drive against while the arms drive the bar up. When this is done correctly, the shoulder blades will be adducted, or pulled together, to make a flat spot on the upper back to push against the bench itself. This stable platform is the anatomical surface against which the kinetic chain begins. Stated another way, when you bench press, you drive the bench and the bar apart – the bar moves and the bench doesn’t, but you push against both (Figure 5-20). The upper back and shoulders push against the bench, and they need to be tight while doing so, just as the hands are tight against the bar. Second, the shoulders in their adducted position, and the upper back muscles as they contract and rotate or “tilt” the upper back into a chest-up position, push the rib cage up and hold the chest higher above the bench. This approach increases the mechanical efficiency of the pec/delt contraction by steepening the angle of attack on the humerus, as discussed earlier.
Figure 5-20. Just as we do when climbing a chimney (it still happens occasionally, really), when benching, we are in between and pushing against two opposing things. When we are benching, the bar moves and the bench does not.
Keeping your back tight is sometimes a difficult thing to do, since so many other things are going on at the same time. So it needs to be learned in such a way that it requires little active attention.