I love dinosaurs. When I was little, my favorite toys were my plastic T-Rex and Triceratops. My second favorite movie of all time is Jurassic Park (a close second to Jaws. I have a soft spot for Spielberg films about prehistoric predators). Little did I know that my childhood obsessions would carry over into my adult life in the form of stubby T-Rex arms and an insatiable hunger for dead cows.
And while I curse my short arms every time I can’t reach the coffee beans on the top shelf, I’ve been blessed with good leverage for bench pressing big weights. I managed to put over 50 pounds on my bench press between April 2013 and March 2014, hitting a 365 bench press in competition and a 370 bench in the gym. My goal for my next powerlifting meet is to hit a double bodyweight bench press.
Now, I didn’t magically gain this bench press strength overnight. It was a long, drawn-out process. Not quite 65 million years in the making like Jurassic Park, but I spent several years training to bust the 315 plateau and made plenty of mistakes along the way.
If fact, I made so many mistakes that I put many of them together in my Top 10 Bench Press Mistakes e-book that’s available for free when you sign up for my newsletter on the home page of this site.
I adapted a handful of these mistakes and kicked ’em out in my latest post on Stack.com. If you’re like most dudes and bench press week in and week out with little to show for your efforts, you’ve gotta read this.