He has them rest for a moment and they move over to the balance beam. He has them pretend they are in a jungle, but it forced to trigger it a bit as the children do not seem to understand him at first. At the beam, he explains they will be walking across the river, and while Danny thinks this will be easy, he tells them to imagine that it is late at night and very windy. The children question this, and he mentions that it had been this way for him, so they have to pretend. A long-winded diatribe on the intricacies of the bench press is beyond this article. I can, however, hammer home the necessities. Make sure you have these points down before diving any deeper into assistance training: His power-grip bench is 75 percent of 300, or 225 pounds. He should do one working set (after warm-ups) for around 8 reps. This episode has not aired in Ireland because Suzy's gym outfit appears to camouflage with her skin tone, making her naked. His dumbbell weights for his alternate chest workout are a quarter of 300 pounds, or 75 for each dumbbell. He'll use that weight for two sets.

The bench-press program requires you to do benches with three different grips: close, power (medium), and wide. The ProgramThe classic old-school powerlifting strength strategy is to sync up a 10- to 12-week pre-competition periodized training cycle with a purposeful increase in body weight. Powerlifters discovered long ago that by continually and conscientiously pushing their body weight upward during a periodized power cycle, they maximized results. The additional calories they took in over this time established anabolism, ignited muscle growth, and accelerated recovery. Each successive week, the powerlifter grows slightly larger and slightly stronger. Identify your power-grip 1RM (max bench press, paused) at Week 1; you'll rely on that figure for all computations for all bench-press variations. The first three exercises—power grip, wide grip, and narrow grip—are done on Day 1. The fourth exercise, the dumbbell bench, is part of the Day 4 workout. His narrow-grip bench load is based off of what he did for the wide-grip bench – 205 pounds – but then he subtracts another 10. So he'll do one set of as many reps as possible with 195 pounds.

Make the speed bench your main bench-pressing movement one day per week, or your first-level assistance exercise after your heavy bench presses. If you choose to use the speed bench as a main exercise, bench heavy on one other upper-body training day per week, keeping the loads between 80-85 percent. Paused Bench Presses Resist the negative,regardless of whether you're using dumbbells or barbells. By resisting the negative, you build muscle; don't throw away all the incredible muscle-building attributes of a controlled negative. Bad benchers lower the bar fast and push up slowly; elite benchers lower slowly and push up explosively.

Identifying The Problem

Over the next 10 weeks, you'll strip away all the exercise clutter and shift from a classic volume-biased bodybuilding training template into an intensity-biased powerlifting template. To improve the bench press, reduce the number of other chest (and arm) exercises performed to nothing more than press variations, dips, and a little extra triceps work specified in the program. Upon arrival they walk past a bunch of grownups and come into another room. They hear someone and look to find Grampy Rabbit swinging from a rope while yelling as he lands. He explains that they will be playing pretend while working out, once Madame Gazelle leaves. To warm up he has the children run on the spot, flap their arms, stretch, then wiggle like jelly. Still they do not exactly understand but they play along anyway. They come across it and they head over to a bunch of ropes. He tells them to pretend that they are crossing the vines to get across the water, where a bunch of crocodiles await. He also has them call as they pass by, then move onto the pole vault and tells them how big athletes jump over it, but because they're all so small and young, he just has them pretend it's a dinosaur and run under it's legs instead. Before they start Candy asks him if he has ever had to do this as well, and when he says he has, they proceed to get down and crawl. If you're unsure which describes you, have someone film you doing a heavy bench-press set. Warm-up to about 90 percent of your 1-rep max, and press it for as many reps as you can. When you've finished, watch the video and note where you begin to struggle. Then note where you begin to fail on your last rep. You'll get an instant visual of which group you belong in. Group 1: Trouble Off The Chest

If it's been a while since you took note of your breathing habits, start paying attention. Most people are taught to inhale on the eccentric part of an exercise and to exhale during the concentric. While you should definitely breathe, this isn't the method that works best when you need to produce a large amount of force. In the everyday world, when you need to move something heavy, you take a big breath, push/pull while holding your breath, only exhaling after or during the completion of the movement.

His wide-grip bench press is also 75 percent of 300, or 225 pounds, but then he subtracts 20 pounds. He'll do one set of as many reps as possible with 205 pounds.

An isometric pause in the bottom bench-press position does wonders for building strength and power out of the hole. That's because under normal conditions, when you reverse direction out of the hole, built-up elastic energy helps propel you over the bottom portion of the lift. But when you stop at the bottom momentarily, that built-up energy is lost, so you now have to work harder getting the bar out of the hole.The caveat is that the gains are judged in relation to your best strict bench effort, not your best struggling-for-your-life rep. You'll establish a single-rep maximum at the beginning of the process to serves as a benchmark. Then you'll start building on it. You'll Get Bigger, but It Won't Feel Like Bodybuilding With that, he decides they are all finished. He tells them that they have made it out of the jungle and are rejoined by Madame Gazelle , who asks how their time was. They explain everything they did and Peppa voices how much she loves being in gym class with Grampy Rabbit.