Starting Strength

the air. As in the squat, where the hands are an important component of the exercise but do not actually move the bar, the lower body is an important part of the bench press without actually being part of the kinetic chain. Even a very proficient bench presser, using the trunk and legs as efficiently as possible, is still pushing against a bench, not balancing the load with his feet and not using his entire body against the ground as he presses. For the press, using the whole body as the kinetic chain is inherent in the movement.
    Basic bench press performance is different from the press in that it is primarily an upper-body exercise. It is an unusual thing in sports to actually place the back against an immovable object and use it to push against something else; it happens after the play is dead in American football if you’re under the pile, but not in many other situations. The press involves the entire body, down to the feet against the floor, using all of the trunk musculature (the abs and back muscles) and the hips, legs, ankles, wrists, and feet to stabilize the body while the shoulders, upper chest, and arms press the bar overhead. This kinetic chain, from overhead at full arms’ length down to the floor, is the longest possible one for the human body. And this makes the press an excellent tool for training your stability under a load.
    Another difference lies in the basic nature of the movement pattern and its use of the muscle contraction. The bench press starts from the top down, with an eccentric contraction, and thus has the advantage of a stretch reflex out of the bottom to assist the concentric contraction, the up phase of the lift. In contrast, the press, like the deadlift, starts the drive up (in this case, from the shoulders) with the bar at rest; the hardest part of the movement is the first part. A multi-rep set can be modified so that the reps after the first one can start at the top – you drop down and rebound up out of the bottom position, utilizing a stretch reflex, and breathe at the top, as you do in a bench press or a squat. But the basic movement, the one done with the heaviest weights, starts at the shoulders from a dead stop.
    For an exercise to be useful as a conditioning tool for a sport, it must utilize the same muscles and the same type of neurological activation pattern as that sport. It need not be an identical copy of the sport movement. In fact, it has been demonstrated that if the motor pathway of a slower conditioning exercise is too similar to that of the faster sport skill – as in throwing a weighted basketball – interference with correct skill execution can result. You would, in effect, be practicing throwing the ball slower than you actually throw it. And since you don’t throw objects of different weights exactly the same way, you’d also get to practice throwing it slightly wrong. Effective strength training for a sport should incorporate all the muscles involved in the sport in a coordinated way, so that strength is produced in the generalized patterns of movement used in barbell training – and specific to nothing else . Then, sports practice incorporates the newly acquired strength as it develops. A sport such as football requires the use of all the muscles in the body because force is generated against the ground by the hips and legs, transmitted up the trunk, and applied to the opponent through the arms and shoulders. Presses, squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and power cleans develop that strength through progressive training , and as the athlete gets stronger, football practice precisely applies the strength in the actual pattern of its use.
    Specifically for the press, it is important to understand that the force is not produced solely and independently by the upper body. The shoulders and arms participate in the production of force, but they are completely dependent on the hips and legs to react against the ground through the feet as they work. In football, the kinetic chain begins at the ground because the feet move first; in pressing, it begins at the bar. Both movements transfer force along this kinetic chain through the trunk, and its isometric function is the same in both. The press provides the pattern of kinetic similarity required of a useful, applicable exercise ( Figure 3-3 ). The bench press does not, but it does allow the use of heavier weights. We will do them both in this program, but we must realize the strengths and limitations of each