Bench Programming

[eLm0]

I bench 3x per week and recover fine. Do your prehab, eat and sleep enough and you'll be fine. Slack on any of these things and you will not recover well imo and from my experience.

 

Yea I agree.

I'm natty and bench 3x a week. When I was doing Sheiko CMS this was 4x a week.

I wouldn't say I recovered fine (tendons took a pounding) but I survived lol

 

Personally I think one needs volume and frequency on bench

[Alphens88]

I ran smolov jnr for incline bench earlier this year but changed it up a bit from 4x to 3x a week. Just meant it went from 3 week program to 4 week program.

Ran it 3 times with deload week in between each cycle and added 20kg to total. Recovery seemed to be all good for most part. Took me a while to get used to no accessory work though.

For me anyway increasing frequency helped can accumulate more volume easier too

[bang_bang]

The operative part of that is that Gibbs is a freak lol but yeah sure multiple days fine just have to be aware of volume and overloading your shoulders and elbows. Hell guys who are geared up to the eyeballs have issues with those areas. It only stands to reason most natty guys would have to be even more aware.

I'd say its less of an issue for nattys. It was a lot harder on my joints benching 150kg 4x a week juiced up than 100kg 4x a week natty.

 

For a natty its bloody hard to increase your bench doing it 1-2x a week unless your steadly increasing bodyweight or your a newbie. Now i'm on gear its the opposite, my joints can't handle lots of frequency with heavier weight so 2x seems to be optimal. one heavy day, one volume day.

[BeastBuilder]

No one benches 100kg natty.. Don't try and impress us with your lies bruh.

[HarryB]

I'd say its less of an issue for nattys. It was a lot harder on my joints benching 150kg 4x a week juiced up than 100kg 4x a week natty.

For a natty its bloody hard to increase your bench doing it 1-2x a week unless your steadly increasing bodyweight or your a newbie. Now i'm on gear its the opposite, my joints can't handle lots of frequency with heavier weight so 2x seems to be optimal. one heavy day, one volume day.

Well I suppose it's an individual thing and very dependent on whatever other ancillary work you do.

[Wookie]

You can bench 6 days a week while natural and make gains.

The question is how do you recover and avoid inury?

The usual trade off for increased frequency is by lowering intensity (percentage of 1RM) and volume per session.

I made my best bench gains training it 3x pw, but it was a fairly elaborate program where the 3rd day relied heavily upon tricep work in the form of reverse band bench (think slingshot) and lockouts. The actual benching rotated through close, medium and wide grips with usual intensity rarely going over 80%.

It worked reasonably well. But takes alot of thought and experience to do well, I modified a Sheiko bench cycle with the aid of a national champ. Do it wrong and you get injured or simply make no gains.

My general way of programming for bench is to shoot for 2x per week, aim assistance at weaknesses and frequently deload. I usually program at quite high intensities in at least 1 session each week and then make sure the lifter recovers well.

That is one approach.

And I'll go right out and say that I simply don't know enough to program 3-4 bench sessions a week for the average lifter and have them progress well. It's not a simple thing at all to do in a continuous fashion.

Lastly, Smolov is garbage. If you made gains off it it's probably because you weren't training hard before. It will break someone who actually has developed a solid max from years of hard work.