Starting Strength

a potentially dangerous situation. The unracking and racking procedures must be done correctly from the beginning, because most of the danger involved in this most dangerous exercise in the weight room is associated with getting the bar in and out of the rack. So, in the interest of furthering safety in the weight room, here are The Rules:
Do not use a thumbless grip on the bench press. If the bar is not secure in your grip, it is not secure at all. A thumb around the bar by no means guarantees that you will never drop the bar, but a thumbless grip increases, by an order of magnitude, the likelihood that you will drop the bar.
Any time the bar is coming out of the rack or moving back into the rack, it will be over your throat and face. Therefore, when the bar is moving into or out of the rack, your elbows must be locked. This rule applies whether you are being spotted or not. The triceps should lock the elbows over the rack hooks so that the bones of the arm are in a straight line and the weight is being supported by the skeletal components instead of by the muscles when the bar moves over the head and neck. The first thing you do when unracking the bar is to lock your elbows before you move the bar into position. The last thing you do when racking the bar is to unlock your elbows after the bar touches the uprights.
Start and finish every rep from the start position over your shoulder joints. It is common to see novices stop the bar as it comes out of the rack short of the starting position, at a point over the throat, lower the first rep to the chest at an angle, and come straight up to the correct position to start the second rep. Some people get in the habit of taking the bar down to the chest right out of the rack. But the bar should never start down before it is in place – if it does, there will be bar path problems due to the lack of an initial ceiling reference for position and the fact that the bar is going back to a different place than it started from. Both of these problems create the potential for killing yourself, so don’t make either mistake. Only after the bar gets all the way to the start position and your eyes have found their place against the ceiling should the bar start down.
Never shove the bar toward the rack before the rep is finished. Many people do this on the last rep of a set, in a hurry to rack the bar. Always wait until the rep is locked out in the balanced start position before you move the bar back to the rack. If you’re going to miss a rep and your spotter fails, it is preferable to have the bar come back down on your chest rather than on your face. If you don’t make it to the rack with the bar, your bent elbows cannot support a heavy load over your face. This sloppy habit indicates a lack of patience, an unwillingness to take a few extra seconds to do things correctly and safely, and a lack of respect for heavy weights that can hurt you very badly in this position.
If you are benching heavy by yourself, always bench inside a power rack. You can set the pins at a level just barely below your chest so that if you miss a rep, you can lower the bar to the pins and escape safely. If you do not have a power rack, do not bench heavy by yourself. This is what kills more people with barbells every year than any other stupid thing people do with barbells. If you get trapped under a heavy bar, it can kill you. Really. It happens.
If you insist on not following rule #5, at least have enough sense to NOT COLLAR THE BAR. If you secure the plates with collars, “for safety” like the poster in the weight room explains, and you get stuck under the bar by yourself, you cannot tilt the bar, slide the plates off, and get out from underneath it. Even the cost of wrecking the room by dumping the load on one side of the bar will be cheaper than your ass, which you’ll admit is a higher price to pay.
If your spotter has to take the bar, don’t release your grip; help the spotter get the bar back in the rack. Leaving the spotter with a heavy bar unsupported from below will get you both hurt – his back and your face. If your spotter is attentive enough to do his job correctly, be good enough to help get the bar back in the rack. Unless the spotter is very strong or the weight is very light, a loaded barbell any distance at all from his center of mass cannot be handled with arm strength. If you bail out of the rep and leave the spotter with what is most assuredly your problem, you will likely not