Bench Press Blues

I had a ridiculous case of hiccups this morning that for whatever reason just wouldn’t go away. Hiccups and yawning are two quirky biological functions that as far as I know are pretty much medical mysteries to this point. With all the technological and medical advancements of the 21st century, I can’t for the life of me understand how we haven’t figured out what causes stuff like this. I mean, there are much more pressing things that medical funding goes to (and rightfully so), but you would think we would have a better guess at this stuff by now than something like your brain is trying to get more air.

Anyway, on to what I wanted to talk about…my workout splits look something like this nowadays: day 1 is chest, day 2 is arms, day 3 is shoulders and back, and day 4 is legs and abs. Looking back at when I first started lifting, I can’t believe I ever did chest every other day, but at the same time I can understand why I did. First, I didn’t know any better. Second, there is simply nothing more fun to lift than chest. Arms is a close second, but even the pump you get from doing arms doesn’t approach the little workout high you get from a killer chest workout. Usually the only thing that gets me through my “day 4” as I’m slaving away with my leg workout is the fact that chest day is only one day away.

The problem is that even though I’ve made some gains with chest, it’s been increasingly harder to go up in weight. This has been especially true with the flat bench press on my gym’s Smith machine. (Our gym doesn’t have a real bench or squat rack.) The main downsides to the Smith machine are that for any given exercise it makes it easier on the lifter than if they were using true free weights because the lifter doesn’t have to worry about balance and could simply concentrate on lifting the weight, and you’re not quite sure exactly how much weight you are actually lifting. The bar on the Smith machine in our gym looks like a standard 45 lb. universal bar, but for whatever exercise you’re doing it’s obviously easier to lift the Smith machine bar then a regular ol’ barbell. There’s a sticker on our Smith machine that says the unweighted bar is the equivalent of a 15 lb. bar, but that seems awfully light to me. Anyway, if I wanted to be overly optimistic about my strength and just assumed the bar weighed 45 lb., I would say I max-out at about 250 lb. on the flat bench right now, but if I go by what the Smith machine says that number is actually 220 lb. (I have had the goal of benching 225 lb. for awhile now). So, I’m not exactly sure where I’m at right now…if I actually tried to bench 250 lb. on a real bench, I would probably end up like that USC running back from a year back, but I would like to think that I could very nearly put up 225 lb. (or very close to it) on a real bench for one rep at least.

Like I mentioned before though, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to go up in weight on that exercise over the past several months. I’ve still been making good progress on the Smith machine with the incline bench press, but I haven’t nearly begun to approach the weight that I’ve doing on the flat bench yet. Interestingly enough, I’ve still been making pretty good progress on both the flat and incline benches with dumbbells though. This has got me thinking about the mechanics of the Smith machine itself. Another drawback of Smith machines aside from the removal of the need of balance from the lifter and the question of how much weight you’re really lifting is that it’s impossible for the Smith machine to exactly replicate what the lifter’s motion would be using real free weights for any given exercise. Some Smith machines are angled, but the motion of the one at our gym is straight up and down. If you were using a real flat bench, this wouldn’t be the case, as the trajectory of the bar actually angles from the lifter’s chest towards the lifter’s eye level. Because of this, and this is just based on my own thinking without doing any actual research, I’m wondering if the Smith machine actually stops being effective at a certain point anyway. I try to keep a blind eye to what other people in the gym are doing, but for some reason I seem to have as much strength or more with the dumbbells than other guys that are lifting more weight on the Smith machine than me. I guess that in reality if you were going to be better at one or the other you would definitely want to be stronger on the dumbbells, but it just doesn’t look quite as sexy to use the 100 lb. dumbbells as it does to keep piling on 45 lb. plates onto a bar.

One of the problems I have with the dumbbells though is the same problem that I run into using the Smith machine: how much are you actually lifting? At first, this seems like a stupid question. If you’re using the 100 lb. dumbbells, you’re technically lifting 200 lb…but just like the introduction of balance makes using a real barbell harder than a Smith machine, dumbbells are more difficult to use when you’re benching than a barbell…but to measure strength, everyone always wants to know how much you bench, meaning bench on the flat bench press using a weighted barbell. I can probably rep the 100 lb. dumbbells 7 or 8 times in one set on the flat bench, but how exactly does that translate? And in my gym, the dumbbells only go up to 100 lb., so it’s not like I can even say I max-out on the 105 lb. or 110 lb. dumbbells (210 or 220 lb. total weight, respectively). I’ve asked my friend Mac, who always crushed me on the bench, how many reps he could do with the 100 lb. weights, and it was difficult to gauge how hard or easy it was for him compared to for me. I wish there was some kind of chart for this. Like, if you knew the maximum number of reps you could do in one set for 100 lb. dumbbells, that would mean you max-out with the barbell at 215 lb. or something. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone is different anyway, and if you can do a certain weight for a certain number of reps, there isn’t really any guarantee as to what your one rep max will be.

The end result of all this is that I should probably concentrate more on the dumbbells than the Smith machine, but in our gym it’s hard to shy away from it too much given the lack of variety. One thing that I think I have working against me no matter what I do though is genetics. Most bodybuilders are short, stocky, barrel-chested guys. As a somewhat tall, lanky guy, I’m the complete opposite of that. With no shoes on, I’m a hair under 6-0, but I have a pretty long wingspan. The average person that stands 5-11 and ½ would be proportioned to have a wingspan of about 73 inches, but my wingspan is a little over 75 inches long. (By the way, I’m tired of basketball announcers going crazy because a 6-10 guy has a wingspan of 7 feet, because that would actually be the average wingspan for a guy that height.) 2 inches doesn’t seem like a big deal, but for an engineering major like me this is just simple math: a longer wingspan creates a larger moment arm, which makes it more difficult for me to lift the same weight as a person of my height with an average or less than average wingspan. So, if you see me in the gym with the bar resting on my throat and choking me to death, just remember that I have a built-in excuse.