Whenever the bench press is discussed, one name constantly pops up. Usually out-pressing his competitors by over 100 pounds, he has benched 700 in training. The man - Jim Williams.
The upper body of "Big Jim" is almost incredibly thick and muscular. "Incredible" being defined as being unable to credit your senses with the truth of what you are experiencing. Seeing Jim Williams' upper body gives you this felling. It is difficult to credit your senses with what you are seeing.
Why is one particular powerlifter so advanced in upper body development? Let us take a look at the path Williams traveled.
Basically, Williams's development seems to be the result of three things of which many powerlifters are unaware.
First, isolation exercises build muscle that can be used in your lifts. Nobody is certain why working a muscle in isolation should affect that muscle any differently than working it as one of a group.
The fact remains, however, that doing chins, a muscle-group exercise, just will not build the kind of biceps that isolation work, such as heavy curls, will.
I theorize that a muscle working by itself may contract harder, be capable of a higher degree of response, and since it is able to work harder, it grows better.
For whatever reason, after you do bench presses for some time, or any other muscle-group exercise, for that matter, you will reach a certain point of development and it will seem that you are making no more progress, or a very slight amount. Isolating the muscles involved will make them grow and, of course, when the muscles used in the lift grow, the lift should go up.
There is sometimes an argument about this, because some people report gains in size without accompanying increases in strength, but this is partly a matter of degree. Also, the muscles should be worked in a position that will contribute to the exercise.
For example, lying triceps extensions work the position used in the bench press more than triceps kickback exercises. But, keeping this in mind, if you increase the size of your arms by an inch, the chances of your presses going up are pretty good!
Isolation work is not to be done in place of the basic lift. It should rather be done in addition to it. Personally, I have found it best to do bench presses first, and then do whatever isolation work is to be done that day.
If I mentioned something about a Williams' front raise, I'll bet it wouldn't take you long to guess who it was named after. That's right, Jim Williams used the front raise to build shoulder strength for his big bench presses. He didn't invent the front raise, but he was among the first to realize that it could be used to build shoulder strength which could then be translated into higher bench presses.
Jim does his forward raises standing, but you might also want to try the lying version in which you lie on a bench and let the weight down until it touches your midsection and then raise it up by shoulder power alone. The stress of this version is at the bottom of the movement and this helps the bench press for some people.
Jim simply takes a bar or a heavy plate and brings it straight up in front of him to a parallel position. If you raise it any more, you are beyond the position that helps the bench press. Whip through about 3 sets of 10 reps and then adjust the figures to your own needs.
After Williams popularize this movement, other power men began using it and, in turn, they pushed up their bench press poundages.
Another movement that builds the chest and front shoulder strength for the bench press is the heavy bent-arm "flye." At this point you may argue that many men who do bent-arm flyes and still don't have the chest development that Jim has (ya figure?). How heavy the weights are and how much effort you put into it is important.
When people have criticized the use of this exercise for my bench press, saying it is only a light leverage exercise, I explain that you don't do it like a concentration curl, you do it similar to a heavy breathing squat! This should give you a good idea of how hard you should be working on your flyes. Work up to 5 or 10 reps with a fairly heavy pair of dumbbells and you will work chest muscles you never even knew you had and in some cases attachments that love to come unglued if you get stupid with it.
The lats are involved to some extent in the bench press, but very few lifters know exactly why. Surely the lats are a pulling muscle that moves the arm down and back, so how could it help a pushing movement like the bench press?
Yes, the lats are a pulling muscle, up to a certain point. We have all seen bodybuilders tense their lats with their hands and arms at their sides. That is because when the arms are at the sides of the body, it's easier to contract the lats.
We all know that when you flex the biceps, the muscle is completely flexed only at the end of the movement. This is also true of the triceps and quadriceps of the thigh. From this you might conclude that all muscles are fully contracted at the end of the possible range of movement. Well, this would be a reasonable assumption, but in the case of the lats and the pecs it would be wrong.
As we have seen, the lats are fully contracted when they are only partway through their possible range of motion. When they are brought all the way back, as in a dip or the start of the bench press, the lats are stretched again. The reason we have delved into this so deeply is because it is a subject that is not understood, but it must be, if you are ever to reach your potential in the bench press.
The whole thing boils down to this; in the beginning of the bench press, your lats are stretched. Now, if you tense those lats, your arms will move up even with your sides. This shoots the bar off your chest in the beginning of the lift, and it is this explosive start that will help your bench press improve.
The lats contribute in one more way. It is well-known that smaller muscles never get developed too far ahead of the larger ones. On the other hand, developing the large muscles makes it much easier to build the smaller muscles. So since the lats are the biggest muscles in the upper body, big lats would enable you to build bigger arms, chest and shoulders, even if the lats were not involved directly in the bench press.
Pullovers, bent rowing, chins and lat machine pulldowns as well as stiff-arm pulldowns are all good lat exercises and will help you build your upper body in order to carry more muscle for bench pressing.
Williams prefers the lat pulldowns, but it can hardly be argued that weighing 350 pounds or so isn't a handicap when doing chins! Which brings up another point.
One of the things that Williams gets tired of hearing is, "Well, you should have got that 675 official bench press. After all, you weight over 300 pounds!"
If this were true, why aren't all super-heavyweights using the same weights that Williams is benching? If that's all it took, they could gain up to 400 pounds and bench press 800. Jim feels that after a certain point it is not possible to increase the smaller muscles in proportion to weight gains.
Can a big man really build three or four times the amount of arm muscle that a small man can? Jim feels that he cannot. Certainly Jim's heavy bodyweight has helped him bench press more, but the fact remains that even though personal problems have kept Williams away from the contests for two years or so, no one has yet come close to matching his incredible upper-body development or his bench press.
The last assistance exercise we will examine is the supine triceps extension. Several big benchers in my area let the bar right down to their nose or eyes and then press it to the overhead position. This is effective, but it can be dangerous if the bar was a little heavier that day than you thought and keep right on going. Usually, though, if the bar is too heavy you can let your elbows go out to the sides and press the bar back up, since most people can handle much more weight that way than with the triceps alone.
As a matter of fact, most trainees let their elbows go out to the sides anyway, thus cheating their triceps of work, and hence growth. A cheat-style triceps extension is not really a bad exercise, but please make sure your triceps are doing most of the work.
Almost all top bench pressers are using some form of the triceps extension, with more getting on the bandwagon every day, so you may as well start now. Mike MacDonald, Larry Pacifico, and longtime king of the bench press, Mel Hennessey, are just a few of the powerlifters reaping the benefits of heavy triceps work for their bench press.
The following is a bench press routine you can try:
Bench press, your choice of sets and reps.
Bent rowing, 3x5 reps with heavy weights.
Front raise, 3x10.
Lying flyes, 3x5.
Straight-arm lat press-downs, 3x10.
Lying triceps extension, 3 x 5-10.
This kind of routine helped Jim get up to a heavy bench, around 550, which is still a long way from 700 pounds. But remember, I said he had three unusual techniques and we have only examined the first one.
The second thing in Jim's favor is that he found out that if he only did a few reps and sets, he could go maximum five days a week. That's right . . . five days in a row.
Williams would quickly work up to a maximum weight, doing sets and reps that would not tax his strength, saving it for the final all-out effort. This does not mean that he lifted the same weight each day, but whatever the maximum weight he worked up to it was all he could lift on that day. Naturally, no "isolation exercises" were used in this type of routine, since the muscles would be overworked.
It has been my experience that working out two or three days in a row seems to coordinate muscle and nerve in such a way as to get a higher lift with the same amount of muscle. However, I do think the five-day-a-week routine is a little much for most of us.
It is not that we couldn't make ourselves do it, it is just that we would not recover between workouts, so we would not build muscle and strength. Even two or three days in a row does not seem to work for long, and should probably only used for a short time.
You must experiment to find out what works for you.
There is still that third technique to be examined. Williams takes a weight that is more than he can bench press, and lets it down to his chest unassisted. Then, with his partner or partners helping, he presses the bar all the way back up. The catch is that the partners do not make the lift easy, they just keep the bar moving and make it possible! This means that Big Jim can push as hard as he can ever inch of the way, instead of only at the sticking point.
Williams did not, however, invent this technique. Apparently, it was used in Zuver's Gym in the late Fifties. This does not make it less effective, but rather makes it a tried-and-true technique. ["new" doesn't mean much, "tried and true" does].
There are many other good exercises that translate into a higher bench press, such as dips, incline presses and rack work, but this article has been intended to describe the way Big Jim arrived at his heaviest bench press.
By now, you should have a few ideas of your own on how to add a few more pounds to your bench press.
Enjoy Your Lifting!
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