Incline Benches in 5x5

[dce2956]

I know everyone and their mother says "dont mess with the 5x5", and for the most part i agree, its great, i love it....


but...


I miss my incline benches! I haven't done them in a month, and i miss hitting that upper part of my pecs. I know there is the option of incline or military press on the light day, and i like the military press a lot, so ive been doin that.

My idea is to either do both the military AND the incline press, or to alternate regular benchpress and incline press every week or every other week. I'm kinda shyin away from doin both the military and incline on the same day cause i need all i can get to keep tryin for PRs on friday.

what does everyone think?

 

[view]

well, one option I say is to fuck with it in this way:

monday don't do 5x5 on bench. do 3x5 and then 2x3 in the deload. then on friday instead of doing 1x5 do 3x5 on the incline and 2x3 in the deload.

 

[cubuff27]

I substitute Inclines on bench day and keep my angle relatively low like 35 degrees.

 

[BiggT]

You can bench on Mon.....ohp on Wed.....and Incline on Fri. Due to the nature of all three lifts, you can train them all at full intensity and have a naturally built-in heavy-light-medium system.

The point in the early stages is progressive overload, I would not recommend alternating exercises weekly or setting up a rotation of exercise and getting overly creative. It isn't even needed for progress early on.

Some people get sore pec/delt tie-ins doing heavy incline and heavy flat on 2 separate days. If this is the case, just grip closer on the flats.

 

[Madcow2]

One thought is that a lot of guys here are used to doing lifts 1x a week at most. I'm sure everyone has heard my thoughts on that one. Frequency can be and is very useful in improving a lift (you are just limited by the workload you can tolerate and still maintain a decent productive effort in each session). Anyway, there is some benefit in people training a core lift 2x per week or more especially for those who have generally never done so before so don't completely discount that.

So some options are replace flat with inclines for a period, maybe flat bench on Wednesday with more moderate volume or closegrip. Like Biggt said, do not rotate exercises week to week - the whole idea is to take a small group of exercises, hammer them and progress systematically, you lose this if you setup some kind of oddball scheme and doing this with a core lift that you are trying to improve just isn't a great idea. The other option is to do variants on each day in a H/L/M setup but you do lose a bit of the frequency element on a specific lift (although all pressing is somewhat similar but it's still something to consider). There are probably some other things that can be done but these are the core options and without building a whole new setup the easiest way to go.

Basically, what I would really suggest is to think of your training in blocks of time. You don't need to do all the lifts all the time. You can rotate exercises in and out with each new block but not screw up individual blocks and the progression by trying to get everything in at once.

 

[BiggT]

Basically, what I would really suggest is to think of your training in blocks of time. You don't need to do all the lifts all the time. You can rotate exercises in and out with each new block but not screw up individual blocks and the progression by trying to get everything in at once.

Exactly! Training cycles. Set goals over a period, say a big power clean, back squat, and incline press.....and train for those goals. If you're itching to front squat something big, focus on them the next block of training you set up. Part of being human means one can only get so good at so much in a given time, althought the temptation can be there, don't try to stuff 10lbs of shit into a 5 lb bag, it just doesn't work.

If your goal is say a big back squat and a big power clean, you can be okay training 3 different presses, but if a big bench is part of your goal, you don't want to lose focus of that, early on in training, too much variety can be a bad thing.

 

[Protobuilder]

I've found that doing a very slight incline seems to recruit my pecs a LOT more than flat bench, where I feel mostly shoulders and tris working. I considered doing slight incline on M & F of the 5x5 (OHP on W) and dropping flat bench but decided not to mess w/the program. That said, do you think it is really necessary to do flat bench if you can better recruit your pecs w/ a slight incline? I would lose probably 15 pounds going from flat to incline but that's about it. Bench numbers aren't that important to me and aesthetics are nice but not a main goal either. LoL

 

[Madcow2]

Slight incline benches are fine for flat bench. It's actually a very good variant - just make sure you aren't doing 45 degrees or something. 'Slight' is closer to flat than it is to incline.

 

[dce2956]

I thought of the flat bench monday/military press wednesday/incline bench friday, but then how would the 3 rep set on friday translate over to the flat bench monday. i know that my incline bench is at least 15% weaker than my flat bench, and i dont know how i would calculate what to lift to keep increasing the resistance and making a new PR.

 

[Protobuilder]

Slight incline benches are fine for flat bench. It's actually a very good variant - just make sure you aren't doing 45 degrees or something. 'Slight' is closer to flat than it is to incline.

Great! Thanks for that. I've been waiting for a way to justify my desire to switch from flat to slight incline. LoL I'll probably keep running flat bench until I really stall and then make the shift. I'm running SF so I think I can justify swapping over to slight inclines once flat really runs its course.

 

[BiggT]

I thought of the flat bench monday/military press wednesday/incline bench friday, but then how would the 3 rep set on friday translate over to the flat bench monday. i know that my incline bench is at least 15% weaker than my flat bench, and i dont know how i would calculate what to lift to keep increasing the resistance and making a new PR.

Honestly, if you want to do this, I would worry about the squat and the pull, and just keep all of your pressing at 5x5 and try to improve them all a little weekly. If you're more of an intermediate-level lifter, this may be harder than you think.

If you want your best bench, and want to train it where you do a 3 on Fri and come in Mon and do that weight for a 5, I would Bench on Mon....OHP on Fri....and Bench again on Fri.....you can do 2 higher rep sets of incline D-Bells on Monday as 'back off' sets if you feel the need to incline....but I can't say enough how much I am in favor of setting goals, keeping them simple, and saving other stuff for new training cycles with new goals.

Just evaluate your goals, if you want to focus on the squat and pull and just be well-rounded on all of your presses, you need to approach differently than if you want to optimize your flat bench. Whatever you choose, give it 100%. I just find it unfair to expect to optimize 3 pressing movements in one training cycle, something has to give, and it will end up being all 3 of them......the approach I said earlier is fine if you really just want to drive the squats and pulls up, but if you really want to hammer away at the flat bench, train the flat bench.

 

[BiggT]

Oh yeah, post up and let me know what you decide on.

 

[perp69]

I did inclines only in my 5x5 for almost a year straight and got some good results. I recently rotated flat bench back in. The weird thing is now my incline bench is stronger than my flat. I hope not for long though.

 

[dce2956]

Well, after much thought I'm thinking of the following plan:

6 weeks of working mainly on flat benches, squats, and power cleans

then

6 weeks of working mainly on incline benches, squats, and snatches

I think the bench/power clean grouping and the incline bench/snatch combo will compliment eachother well.

I'm going to spend the last 2 weeks of the first cycle on getting the snatch form down really well, as that's the last oly lift that i have to get down. I'm hoping that this will work, i'll evaluate it as i go. It begnis Jan. 9!