I’ll start with the incline. It’s my favorite upper-body exercise because it’s a pure movement. By pure I mean it’s extremely difficult o cheat while doing it. Cheating is another word for sloppy technique. Since incline presses have to be performed correctly, there’s less stress on your shoulders and elbows, which reduces the risk of injury to those joints. What’s more, when you do any exercise perfectly, you get better results than when you use sloppy form.
When I see people in a fitness center doing inclines, it’s usually as an auxiliary movement, after they’ve done their flat benches. As a result, they use token weights. They don’t know that in the late 1950’s and early 60’s the top strength athletes used the incline as their primary upper-body exercise. Greats such as Parry O’Brien, Dallas Long, Randy Matson, Al Oerter and Harold Connolly handled well over 400 pounds on the incline. Ken Patera used it to enhance his overhead press and ended up with an amazing 507, which will forever stand as the American record in the Olympic press.
So id you decide to make the incline one of your core exercises, plan on leaning on it and pushing the numbers up – way up. Before you stack on the plated, however, you must learn the correct technique. Proper form is essential on this lift, and you must spend adequate time mastering it if you ever want to elevate big numbers.
If you try some of the tactics used for the flat bench, they backfire on you. When lifters rebound the bar off their chest on the incline, it darts forward, and there’s no way o them to bring it back into the correct line. Even the old standby, bridging, doesn’t help. What I once wrote about the incline still holds true: “You can squirm, you can jerk about and you can rebound the bar until you cough up blood, but you’re never going to find an effective method of cheating on the incline. That’s what I like about it.”
Your form has to be exact, and that’s good because all the muscles and attachments get worked exactly as they should. As a result, gains come quickly and consistently.
The first time people do inclines, they invariably touch the bar too low on their chest, close to where they place it for a flat bench. That’s incorrect. Touching the bar low will make it run forward, something you don’t want. The bar should touch high on your chest, just under your Adam’s apple, where your collarbone meets your breastbone. The incline differs from the flat bench in that you drive the bar upward in a perfectly straight line. I tell my lifters to imagine they’re moving the bar inside a Smith machine.
Keep your elbows turned out during the incline. Never tuck them in close to your body as you do on the flat-bench press. Before you take the bar out of the rack, plant your feet firmly on the floor and squeeze yourself down into the bench. Become the bench (I know it’s trite, but it might help you remember the point).
I always insist that m athletes use a thumbs-around-the-bar grip rather than the false grip that many use on the flat bench. The false grip is risky. The bar can slip out of your hand n a heartbeat, and since the weight is directly over your face, the consequences can be disastrous. Another reason the secure grip is better is that it enables you to guide the bar back to the correct groove if it starts to run forward. And heavy weights always want to run forward. With the false grip there’s absolutely nothing you can do once the bar moves away from your body.
On the subject of safety: the incline is an exercise that requires a spotter. The spotter, by the way, isn’t there to help you through your sticking point. He or she should only touch the bar once you’ve failed and the help you rack the weight. If the spotter touches the bar before you’ve locked it out, that rep was a failure. The spotter’s job is to assist you in reracking the bar. Often it’s hard to see the uprights because they’re behind you, and you misjudge the distance. It causes the bar to fly over the back of the bench or, worse, come crashing down on your face. So always ask someone to spot you. It doesn’t have to be a particularly strong person, since all he or she is really doing is helping you set the bar back in the uprights.
The spotter can, of course, also assist you in taking the bar out of the rack. Once you have it in your hand, push up against it to assure that you have complete control of it. Lower the bar in a controlled manner to your chest. Don’t allow it to crash downward. Pull it into your chest, hesitate a brief moment, then drive it upward forcefully in a straight line. The bar will almost touch your nose. The movement, both up and down, should be smooth, not herky-jerky. When you finish your final rep, have your spotter assist you in putting the bar back in the rack. Make sure it’s securely in the rack before you release your grip on it.
Where you grip the bar depends to some extent on your shoulder width, but another important point is that you want to keep your forearms vertical throughout the exercise. if they’re not vertical throughout, you’re giving away some power. Many use a very wide grip, saying that they want to work the outside of their chest more, but that’s really stressful to the shoulder joints and doesn’t let you use as much weight. To find the grip width I recommend for most lifters, extend your thumbs on an Olympic bar so that they barely touch the smooth center.
Vary the sets and reps each time you do inclines. At one workout do 5 sets of 5 with a back-off set of 8 or 10. The next time do 3 sets of 5 as warmups followed by 3 sets of heavy triples and then a back-off set. Then do 3 sets of 5 followed by 3 sets of doubles or singles with a back-off set. The slight change will involve the muscles and attachments in a slightly different manner, helping you to make consistent gains.
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