Starting Strength

a spotter, this movement back to the rack should be covered. For the next sets of five reps, add weight a little at a time – 10 pounds at a time for smaller kids and women, 20 or even 30 pounds for bigger trainees – until the bar speed begins to slow down and your form starts to change. Stay there for two more sets of five, and that is the first workout.

    Figure 5-9. The bench press.

    Common Problems Everyone Should Know How to Solve
     
    Since the bench press is the most popular exercise in the weight room, lots of people do it. Since lots of people do it, lots of people teach it, and lots of extremely wrong ways to teach it have been developed over the years – things that make absolutely no mechanical sense, some of which are quite dangerous. The bench press is already the most dangerous exercise in the world due to the position of the body between the bar and bench, with no way to get the bar off of you by yourself in the event of an accident. Normally we let safety follow as the logical by-product of efficiency, but for the bench press, we’ll pay extra attention to ways to avoid getting killed under the bar.
    Hands and grip
     
    The bar, being over the head, face, and neck during the bench press, presents some significant safety problems if certain common-sense precautions are not observed. The subject of spotters and spotting will be dealt with in detail later, so these comments will involve things that you must do.
    Maybe the biggest, dumbest, most common problem involving the hands is the use of the thumbless grip. Except for the squat, there is no thumbless grip in barbell training. Using a thumbless grip is absolutely the worst decision you can make with regard to safety, and it is detrimental to performance as well. Many lifters start with a thumbless grip in an attempt to get the bar over the very end of the arms, with the leverage off of the wrists, which is understandable. But doing this with a thumbless grip is unnecessary since the same position can be obtained with the thumbs hooked around the bar . The risk of having an unsecured bar over the face and throat is just too high. The grip is thumbless in the squat because the bar is not moving – you are. For the bench press, the thumbs secure the bar in your grip, and without your thumbs around the bar, it is merely balanced over the end of your arms.

    Figure 5-10. (A) The thumbless grip vs. (B) the thumbs-around grip. There are only a few ways to get badly hurt in the weight room, and using the thumbless grip is one of them. You can get the same position over the end of the arm with the thumbs-around grip, without the potential risk of dropping the bar on your face, throat, or chest.

    The best spotter in the world cannot react quickly enough to save you from a dropped bar. The danger of this cannot truly be appreciated until one sees the effects of a dropped bar firsthand. In the United States every year, an average of eleven people are killed while training with weights, essentially all of them under the bench press . While this means that millions of lifters are doing perfectly safe bench presses, you still don’t want to be one of the eleven who weren’t. If you insist on using a thumbless grip on the bench, you need to do it at home so that when the ambulance comes (if anyone is there to call 911), it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s training.
    Another problem with the thumbless grip is that it diminishes lifting efficiency: what the hands cannot squeeze, the shoulders cannot drive as efficiently. This phenomenon can be observed when you’re using large-diameter bars and fat-handled dumbbells: a 2-inch bar is about twice as hard to press as a standard 28.5mm (1 1/8 inch) bar. This difference is due to the inability of a person with a normal-size hand to effectively squeeze a fat bar with a good tight grip. Squeezing involves closing the thumb and fingers around the bar until effective pressure can be applied with the forearm muscles in isometric contraction, increasing the tightness of the muscles on the distal side of the elbow, making rebound out of the bottom more efficient, and increasing motor unit recruitment throughout the arms and upper body. (Distal is the end furthest from the center of the body, and proximal is the closest to it.) Some lifters like to think about leaving their fingerprints in the knurl of the bar to increase their squeeze. The thumbless grip is an excellent way to voluntarily reduce the lifter’s