Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [94]
With this in mind, look at the ceiling, unlock your elbows, lower the bar to the chest, touch it without stopping, and drive the bar back at the point on the ceiling your eyes have trapped. Try it for a set of five reps. You’ll notice immediately that if your eyes don’t move from their fixed position, the bar will go to the same place every rep.
This little eyeball trick works 90% of the time the first time it is used to produce a correct bench-press bar path. Even if you are “poorly coordinated,” you should be able to do a fairly good bench press within a couple of sets by using this technique. “The groove,” as the bar path is often referred to by bench pressers, is the first and most frustrating problem that novice trainees will experience because the tendency is to follow the bar with your eyes. By focusing your eyes on the ceiling, you can eliminate this problem the vast majority of the time. If the bar finds the groove automatically, as it does with this method, you can direct your attention to other aspects of the exercise that might be a problem.
The key to the whole method is staring at the fixed position and not at the moving bar. If you use a fixed reference point for the bar position, you can make the bar go to the same place – and therefore through the same path – each rep. If you follow the bar with your eyes, you have no way to direct the bar to the same place every time because you are looking at the thing you are moving and not at the place you want it to go. This is the same principle used to hit a golf ball or a tennis ball: the implement moves to the target (the ball), and the target is the object of the fixed eye gaze. Granted, tennis balls move and golf balls don’t (until they’re hit), but the principle is the same. The brain coordinates the hands to take the implement – the club, racquet, pool cue, or bat, or the sword, sledgehammer, axe, or barbell – to the target, because the target is the reference for the eyes. When a tennis ball moves, the head and eyes move with it, rendering it a stationary point. Fortunately, most ceilings don’t move in most weight rooms, so our task is easier than McEnroe’s, but it is similar in that we are driving an object in our hands toward a stationary thing we are actively looking at. There are similarities between seemingly diverse activities, all of which involve movement directed by the eyes. Whether the object of the movement is stationary or in motion, the implement in the hands goes where the eye gaze is focused.
Do another set of five with the bar, reinforcing your eye position, and then rack the bar. This is done with locked elbows, after the last rep is finished, by moving the bar back to the uprights, touching them with the bar, and then setting it down in the hooks. Should you have a spotter, this movement back to the rack should be covered. For the next sets of five reps, add weight a little at a time – 10 pounds at a time for smaller kids and women, 20 or even 30 pounds for bigger trainees – until the bar speed begins to slow down and your form starts to change. Stay there for two more sets of five, and that is the first workout.
Figure 5-9. The bench press.
Common Problems Everyone Should Know How to Solve
Since the bench press is the most popular exercise in the weight room, lots of people do it. Since lots of people do it, lots of people teach it, and lots of extremely wrong ways to teach it have been developed over the years – things that make absolutely no mechanical sense, some of which are quite dangerous. The bench press is already the most dangerous exercise in the world due to the position of the body between the bar and bench, with no way to get the bar off of you by yourself in the event of an accident. Normally we let safety follow as the logical by-product of efficiency, but for the bench press, we’ll pay extra attention to ways to avoid getting killed under the bar.
Hands and grip
The bar, being over the head, face, and neck during the bench press, presents some significant