Starting Strength

motion in a way that strengthens the whole range. Any joint about which movement can occur will benefit from having its entire function improved. So, all the muscles that move a joint should be exercised, using a movement that calls into play as many of the muscles as is efficiently and safely possible.
    The bench press, like the squat, benefits from a certain amount of rebound out of the bottom, using the stretch reflex phenomenon that is a feature of skeletal muscle ( Figure 5-19 ). It takes practice and good timing to tighten up the bottom of the movement enough that you can get a correct rebound every rep, without actually bouncing the bar off your sternum and rib cage like an object on a trampoline.

    Figure 5-19. Several physiological and mechanical phenomena produce a rebound that makes for a stronger contraction. First, the viscoelastic nature of muscle makes it act like a spring – the longer you stretch it (up to a certain point), the more forceful the return. Second, there is an optimal sarcomeric length that results in the most force being generated by a contraction, and this optimal length is associated with a mild stretch. Last, the stretch reflex mediated by muscle spindles (intrafusal fibers) is activated by stretching and results in a more forceful contraction.

A competition bench press (theoretically at least) has no rebound due to the technical rules, which specify that the bar must cease its motion at the bottom before being driven up off the chest. A touch-and-go bench press allows you to lift more weight than a paused bench press. It must be said that a cheated bench, with a heave of the chest, a hard bounce off the pecs, and a bridge with the hips, allows more weight to be lifted than does a strict touch-and-go. Then why is a touch-and-go okay, but a bounce and a bridge are not? It is not always our objective, as noted earlier, to lift more weight, but the touch-and-go is easier to learn than a paused bench because the stretch reflex is such a natural movement; staying tight at the bottom during the pause is a skill that is difficult to master even for competitive powerlifters. The bounced, heaved, bridged, butt-in-the-air version of the bench press uses rib cage resilience and hip extension to aid in driving the bar up, taking work away from the targeted muscles. So a strict touch-and-go is a good compromise, letting you lift more weight but still providing lots of training for the pressing muscles.
    You should be able to recognize excessive bounce and know when a correction needs to be made. For both the bench press and the squat, optimum bar speed occurs when the bar moves fast enough to efficiently elicit a stretch reflex and thus permit an efficient drive up. Bar speed is too slow when the descent produces fatigue, as it will if you deliberately lift submaximal loads very slowly. Bar speed is too fast when it actually adds momentum to the load on the bar on the way down, so that you must decelerate against both the weight on the bar and the effect of its excessive velocity on that load – where the effective load on the bar is actually heavier than the weight.
    You bounce too much when the bar slams your chest hard enough to change your position with the impact and then slows down markedly a couple of inches up from your chest. This excessive bounce occurs because you allowed the downward velocity of the bar to increase in an attempt to increase mechanical rebound, so the initial upward velocity of the bar was due more to the physical rebound than to your active drive off the chest. This means you had to loosen your position to let the bar speed up as it dropped. If it’s bad enough, the bar path will change after the rebound as your elbows shift position from the lack of tightness in your lats and delts. The whole messy thing is a result of a lack of tightness on the way down, and it can be remedied in a couple of ways.
    One way to stay tight off the chest is to just barely touch it. You can’t cheat the rep if you can’t bounce the bar off your rib cage, and you can’t bounce it if you just barely touch your chest. Think about touching just your shirt, not your chest, with the bar. Or you might imagine a piece of glass on your chest that you have to touch but cannot break.
    Visualizing a light touch usually works, but it deals with symptoms. The best way to fix a bouncing problem is to address it at its root: by learning to be tight during the movement, and in a way that can be