Benchpress - Brady Steward

Every time I train for a competition, I ask myself if I'm improving. As in any sport, if you're at or near the top, you have to be willing to do what you've never done... and sometimes even what no one has ever tried.

Of course there are stronger benchers in the USAPL and IPF, but my path is tailor made for me. There are many sports practices that I have considered or that are worth considering. How will my body respond to some specific combination of programming and planning? What hidden and delayed effects will my training plan have on my performance? What about changes to diet, training, cardio, breaks?

I try to stick to a very analytical and progressive approach to training planning, always re-evaluating my results after weeks to keep me confident in where I'm headed in my training efforts.

Frequency 2x per week

Frequency 4x per week

Frequency 3x per week

During this training cycle I tried a few new things. For example, exercise rotation, cycle extension, control by feel, a new form of cardio and mental training. It turned out that the above practices worked very well at the end of the cycle.

I rotated the exercises every 2-3 weeks. In the past 2 years, I have rotated them every 4-6 weeks. This change seems to have brought me out of stagnation. The only thing that remained was the benchpress in the jersey as the main BP I. That will never change. The benchpress in the jersey is so specific that it can't be used except at races without training. Without breaking down exactly what exercises I chose, I will say that I felt the benchpress in the jersey improve as the race approached.

The previous 6-7 competition cycles I had followed a standard cycle of 7 weeks. However, this was not appropriate. Training for Bench press Nationals was the first training cycle of 13 weeks, including the week of competition. I had also never done a deload until then. During the 6 week accumulation, I got close to the point of failure, so once I changed the frequency of training, the workout became easier to complete successfully and my recovery accelerated.

I trained all the lower body exercises including the extra exercises twice a week as listed in the attached tables. This has helped me to get fit for long training sessions. Once I transitioned from accumulation to transformation, I took advantage of this in the frequency of bench press training 4 times a week. It meant training through the pain threshold for me, but I felt energized every time I left the workout. When I got to the strength tuning phase, I felt very good. I reduced my training frequency to 3 times a week and because of this, I was able to recover 100% before every other training unit.

I didn't have to change my rep plan once during this mesocycle, I managed to stick to the plan. I'm confident that this helped me at the competition. I found that I didn't need to deload as often as I thought.

Instinctive training became an important part of this cycle, because of the desire to avoid overtraining. I followed the plan I've outlined here, although I did reduce the volume of supplemental exercises or intensity when I felt the need. I constantly evaluated my progress and continued with the end goal in mind. On the other hand, I had planned weeks in which I wanted to reach very high volume or intensity and get to the point of overtraining.

I added extra exercises depending on what I wanted to achieve. They weren't intense or volume intensive, of course, but they gave me the volume I needed at the end of the workout. The extra exercises included lunges, grip exercises, one-arm push-ups, supine push-ups, biceps raises with one-arm pull-ups, pull-ups, shoulder shrugs, and anything else I felt was necessary. The intention was to get the muscles pumping. If it was necessary to reduce the volume of the exercise, I reduced these exercises in the first place.

I set a new personal best of 287.5kg at the competition.