Purposeful Primitive Online

By Chuck Miller CSCS

I took a long and hard assessment of my lifting future in the fall of 2009. I had just turned 40 – old man class here we come! – and was feeling every bit my age with an arthritic a/c joint in my left shoulder. In the orthopedist’s comforting words, “Don’t worry about it; you won’t need surgery until the pain gets too unbearable.” Well that’s just swell. Walking around with a permanent grimace affixed to my face sounded so damn appealing.

Then again, this news wasn’t nearly as depressing as the reconstructive knee surgery I’d endured 9 months earlier; plus the months of torturous rehab that followed. Due solely to my own stupidity, I had managed to fracture my tibial plateau (the top of the tibia where it meets the femur to form the knee joint) playing tackle football. The fracture required a steel plate and seven screws to stabilize the break. A word of advice to aging weekend warriors: getting seriously injured in a Turkey Bowl football game might not be the safest, sanest choice – but you only live life once.

That would be enough to make most men hang up the their lifting belt and fade away…perhaps morph into a saner, more peaceful existence, like riding around in a golf cart, drinking beer and smoking cigars, content and OK with my ever-expanding 45 inch gut. Just as I was getting over the leg break at age 40, in March 2009 my blood sugar soared out of control. My father was diabetic and I had been diagnosed as having Type II diabetes. I could deal with that. I workout religiously and maintain a reasonably fit bodyweight of 200 pounds on my 5’ 10” frame. I certainly wasn’t surprised. What did surprise me, however, was that after nearly a week of taking the little pills they gave me and diligently checking my blood sugar multiple times a day, it hadn’t budged from around 400 (normal readings range from about 80 to 120).

A trip back to the doctor for some more tests revealed the real shocker. I was diagnosed as being Type I diabetic; the non-insulin producing kind I had always thought was reserved for juveniles. No wonder the little pills designed to help my body use insulin more efficiently weren’t working. My pancreas had crapped out and I wasn’t even producing any of the stuff! So it was straight to injections 4 times a day for me. Imagine that bit of irony; the gym rat who had managed to avoid the substantial temptation to use steroids for nearly three decades was going on the needle anyway.

That’s all water under the bridge now, and believe it or not, the insulin was actually a Godsend. With stable blood sugars, I no longer felt dizzy every time I tried to put a heavy bar on my back. And the knee, well, to my orthopedist’s amazement, the same bone that looked like I’d “pounded the top of with a hammer” felt good as new and was perfectly able to tolerate heavy loads again. The only explanation I have for this turn of events is that a higher power must have decided I wasn’t done with weight training just yet. For my part, I at least diligently followed the rehab schedule and didn’t rush my way back before I was fully healed.

So really, my biggest training obstacle wasn’t diabetes or my shattered knee. It was the one that might have seemed the smallest on the surface – that pesky a/c joint. I knew I had to make some changes to my bench press training if I had any hope of continuing. I just didn’t know exactly what to try until I read Pavel’s book, Power to the People Professional, and his bench press technique description struck a chord with me.

Prior to reading Pavel’s book, I had been stuck for months at a touch and go bench press of 280×5 most workouts. Occasionally, I could grind out 285×5, but more often than not I missed the fifth rep at this weight. Additionally, these workouts left my shoulder achy for days and made me wonder what point persisting on really served. Maybe I was just over the hill and my ego was preventing me from accepting it.

Ah, not so fast doomsayer. If Brett Favre can come back every year for a decade, maybe this old man has a few tricks left also. Pavel describes the Russian bench press technique as “push pressing your bench presses,” and having been capable of a 300-pound push press at one time, the idea of generating that sort of power while lying down had real appeal to me. I just had to figure out how to do it.

From my powerlifting background, I at least had the tight set-up and 3 contact points of feet, butt, and upper back, giving me a solid base from which to press. The first minor change to my technique involved widening my grip a couple inches to shorten my stroke just a bit. When I put the wider grip and slight reduction in elbow tuck into practice, I got the added bonus of feeling less strain on my shoulder. All these years I had heard that a wider grip would irritate the shoulders more, but at least in the case of my a/c joint, a grip of about 28” between my index fingers as opposed to my former 26” grip yielded immediate relief.

The big change came in the take-off and descent. Gone were the days of white-knuckle gripping the bar and trying to squeeze the life out of it while inching it down under agonizing (and perhaps self-defeating) control to a point just barely grazing my chest. I was instead instructed to grip the bar loosely, lower it quickly, and allow its full weight to rest on my chest. Holy cow how would I ever get that thing started from such a dead stop position!

Stored energy and an explosive start comrade; that’s the Russian way. And we accomplish this by forcefully squeezing the bar after it comes to a complete stop, and using this squeeze as a cue to drive with the legs, sending a shock wave of muscular power through the body and allowing the bar to explode off the chest. The key, however, is the squeeze. You must be relaxed before squeezing the bar, or the transition simply will not be sudden enough. If you’re already squeezing the bar hard and then try to squeeze it harder, you just won’t get the shocking effect. Think of a dragster mashing the accelerator in slingshot-style off the start line – rather than going from 4th gear to 5th in an already speeding Porsche turbo.

To be honest, if you get the descent and start right, the press will take care of itself whether you choose to go in a straight line or back in an arc. I prefer letting the bar drift back a few inches through my sticking point, and I believe Pavel does too, but straight line pressers a la Westside will benefit just as much from the fast descent and explosive start as drifters do. Either way, your new speed off the chest will have the effect of masking your old sticking point, allowing you to drive right through it with weights that used to be grinders.

And the result of this experiment for me…? My bench went from the aforementioned 280-285×5 touch and go to 315×5 paused in about 10 weeks with no change in bodyweight. Your mileage will vary, but odds are you’re younger than me (and my buddy Dirt) and likely will fare even better.

Let’s summarize “push pressing your bench presses” so that you have just a few important mental cues to take to the gym…

1. Grip the bar as wide as you feel comfortable in order to shorten your pressing stroke
2. Resist conventional wisdom to squeeze the bar at takeoff, instead, maintain a loosey-goosey, lack-of-tension grip
3. Lower the bar to the chest quickly while maintaining control. I shoot for speed just shy of free fall. With heavy weights, you’ll be tempted to inch the bar down, wearing yourself out in the process. Resist this urge and commit to an authoritative descent. You’re the boss; not the stupid ass-barbell!
4. Let your chest support the full weight of the bar rather than tensed musculature.
5. Initiate your press with a forceful squeeze of the bar accompanied by violent leg drive (Pavel describes a foot stomp)

Good luck with your training and never abandon the quest to improve. Part of the beauty of lifting is that no matter how long you’ve been at this game it always seems like there’s something new to learn.