Bench Press Help

[FIRESTAR]

Is your chest meant to get fatigued when doing this exercise. The only thing that gets fatigued on me are my triceps and shoulders.
This is my form:
-Lie of bench with feet and **** planted.
-Place hands slightly larger than shoulder width.
-Lower bar until it makes contact with lower portion of chest.
-Continue with eccentric and concentric movements.
-Stop till muscular failure.

Nothing I do seems to piss my chest off, whether its pec deck or chest press or bench press.. there is no fatigue, I think these movements are relying on my shoulders and triceps.

P.S - I stopped training for about 2 weeks and when I got back I come to this ****.

[ClawKnight]

Keep your shoulders back and arch your back, keeping your chest high and ass on the bench. Chest needs to be higher than your shoulders to bring it into the lift properly.

I used to bring my shoulders into it too much, now it hits the chest hard

[Gareth83]

Try the 1 and a 1/2 technique

Where you lower the bar/DB to your chest, then push it back up to halfway, back down to the chest, then finally push it to the top.

That is one rep.

[Bison]

It's all about the mind to muscle connection imho. Getting the chest involved during bench press can be one of the hardest to learn because we hardly ever use the chest muscles in normal day to day life. So we need to learn how to engage them and what it feels like if you get what I'm saying?

There are a few tricks I've used in the past, like pre-exhaust. Try doing a set of DB flyes immediately before a set of bench press. The idea is to tire out the chest muscles so when benching you'll learn how to feel the chest working, as it's tired you should get more 'feel'.

Tense and squeeze the pecs as much as you can, keep doing it during the day, you'll soon find that you can make each pec dance at will. Again once you've built up this mind to muscle connection it's much, much easier to engage the muscle during working sets on exercises like bench press.

As you set up for bench press, push your chest out, squeeze and tense the pecs, grab the bar and try to push each hand towards each other. This will create lots of tension in the pecs, keep it there! Then start reppping really squeezing at the top of each movement.

Little things like that can, over time, make all the difference, my chest always fatigues before the delts and triceps

[FIRESTAR]

Nice one I'm saving that.

[Curt]

you want to hold the bar wider than that....look at some videos mate or maybe you do, but u described it as smaller grip.

really concentrate on the chest pushing the bar and not your triceps.

[tru]

Sorry to bring this back up!
I had the same problem and I went along the route of doing some DB flyes to pre-exhaust my chest as bison suggested which worked enough to be giving me DOMS on my chest the next day but no immediate pump (or very very little). Switched to DB press after the DB flyes instead of bench and my god I've never felt a pump like it! Try it

[Bison]

Good point. Sometimes the smallest of changes can make all the difference. Something as small as changing the grip an inch or two wider/closer, or reverse grip, changing from straight bar to cambered bar, barbell to DB, even something like longer/shorter rest times can do it.

[simon m]

Benching on a very slight incline is good as well.

One question for Firestar - Do you have very long arms? If so, benching may not be as useful as dips when developing the chest.