Mastering Proper Bench Press Form

Proper bench press form is pretty straightforward, yet so many people in the gym get it wrong.

Once you’ve done one rep with good form, you’ll have it down. From there, it’s just a matter of staying focussed on technique and leaving your ego at the door.

Here’s how to bench for maximum gains while avoiding injury.

Grip Width

In a nutshell, the wider your grip, the more you work the pectorals, and the narrower your grip, the more you work the shoulders and triceps.

Do not go too wide on the bench press. The wider you go, the more you put your shoulders in a weak position.

As a rule, unless you have exceptionally long arms, your little finger should be no further along the barbell than the outer rung. Any wider than that and you could be putting your shoulders at risk.

Full Range of Motion

Proper bench press form requires pressing through a full range of motion. This means touching the barbell to your body at the bottom of every rep, then pressing until your elbows are locked out.

That’s full range – if you’re stopping earlier you’re cheating yourself out of training the lower portion of the lift, which is what hits your pecs the hardest and causes the most growth.

Thumbless Grip? … NO

Who knows how it got started – but the thumbless grip is NOT proper bench press form, and is one of the most dangerous pieces of advice you’ll hear in the gym. It’s an urban myth that it helps you lift more – it’s the pecs, front delts and triceps that do all the lifting in the bench press, the position of your thumb is irrelevant.

When it comes to the safety risk, you just have to google “thumbless grip bench press accident” to find out for yourself. Warning, some of the videos are gut-wrenching.

Keep your legs on the floor!

Another strange phenomenon in weight rooms around the globe is the sight of people benching with their legs resting ON the bench. While not as dangerous as the thumbless grip, it makes no sense whatsoever when you consider the mechanics of the lift.

Keep your legs firmly planted on the floor for a stable base of power from which to press.

The Movement

As you press, the two key points to keep in mind are:

• Tuck your elbows
• Lower the bar to your upper abdomen

These two points work together - let me explain.

The most important thing to focus on when pressing is keeping your elbows “tucked”. When most people do a rep on the bench press, from a birds-eye-view, it looks like their upper arms are at ninety degrees to their torso.

This is actually not proper bench press form - their elbows are in the “flaired” position, which is very unhealthy for your shoulders.

When you hear people in the gym complaining about how they wrecked their shoulders with the bench press, it was probably because they benched with elbows “flaired”. Along with an excessively wide grip, elbows flaired is a surefire recipe for shoulder injury.

So, what should you do? Keep your elbows tucked in. This means keeping your upper arms at around a 45-60 degree angle to your torso, from a birds eye view. It may feel strange at first, especially if you have been benching with elbows flaired for a while.

Some people complain that they don’t feel as much of a stretch in their pectorals benching this way. It’s true that good form does slightly shift the stress off the pecs, onto the shoulders – but only slightly.

Your pecs are still very active when you lift with tucked elbows, and you aren’t going to need rotator cuff surgery after a couple of years in the gym.

You shoulder lower the bar all the way down to your upper abdomen. Just because it is a chest exercise, doesn’t mean you should be lowering it to your chest. Lower the bar down to the top of your abs, where your ribcage begins. In fact, if you have the proper grip width with elbows tucked, you’ll find this is naturally where the bar “wants to go”.

Why is this so important?

When you tuck your elbows and lower the bar to your upper abdomen, you put your shoulder joint in a much safer position to be pressing heavy weight.

To illustrate this, imagine you were lying on the bench press. Put your arms up in front of you and hold the imaginary bar. Flair your elbows out to 90 degrees, like most people do on the bench press.

Now, pull your elbows back and stretch your chest as if you were lowering the bar down. You’ll find that it’s hard to pull your arms back past a certain point, and you feel a stiffness or tension in the back of your shoulders, behind the rear delt.

That feeling is your rotator cuffs being compressed against your shoulder blades, and telling you that the shoulder is not meant to flex in that direction.

You can imagine how much damage you’d be doing by lowering hundreds of pounds to your chest week in week out with this form.

Now, try the proper bench press form; the elbows tucked position – i.e. elbows at 45-60 degrees to your upper body (you can check in the mirror). Pull your elbows back and open your chest up as if you were lowering a barbell.

Your arms can go much further back – because the shoulder joint is designed to rotate that way. Notice, no tensed, compressed feeling at the back of your shoulders this time.

Hopefully that’s convinced you to bench the right way. Proper bench press form could save you years of pain and thousands of dollars worth of surgery.



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