What's up, guys? Jake Hutton from Fitness Culture. Today we're gonna be talking
about one of our favorite days on the Fitness Culture Athlete and Power Program.
It's gonna be our dynamic effort training day. So we're specifically gonna
be talking about dynamic effort bench press and some of the progressions
that we do to get you up to the most advanced variations of the dynamic
effort bench press. So there's a lot of debate whether dynamic effort training
actually gets you strong or not because you produce more force when you are
lifting heavy, because it takes a certain amount of time for you to hit
maximum force production, but really, from my experience, it's really that neural
adaptation from moving quickly and that early phase neural drive that is going
to increase, and that's what's gonna help you. The quicker you can produce force, in
my opinion, the stronger you can be, and the more that you can increase that
force through the full range of motion. So when you start doing these dynamic
effort bench press sets you'll notice that if you're pausing off, let's say
you're a power lifter, you're gonna pause off your chest, if you practice moving
fast off your chest you're really gonna be able to explode that bar off your
chest during those heavy lifts a little bit more. Obviously, yeah, the bar is gonna
make you slow down and you're not gonna be going as fast, but just that ability to
tap into that force as fast as possible, that's where we're gonna be able to get
stronger here, and it's also just really fun to train this way. It's fun to break
up in the middle of the week. We bench three days a week
on the Power Program, one of them is just all dynamic effort bench. It kind of
loosens me up a little bit, helps me recover a little bit faster, and
it's just really fun. You're basically doing a barbell plyometric and it just
adds some more volume to the lift and it adds some fun to your training. So let's
go over the progressions. There are a lot of people that say that this isn't
really a good technique for beginners, and I definitely agree that if you don't
have the movement pattern down perfectly then you're probably not gonna want to
add explosive movement on top of that, because you're gonna be all over the
place, and this will really kind of expose bad movement pattern if you are
trying to move fast, because you're gonna be all over the place. But for me, even
with younger athletes, once I start training them this way it really does
help them dial in their form a little more, and they've always got stronger
faster, and it improves their coordination. So the
improvement in coordination, it happens really quickly when we started doing
these speed things once the movement is perfect. So if you feel like you've only
been been training for a couple years I still think that
can be beneficial as long as you have solid mechanics and a solid base moving
into it, then it's definitely gonna help your lifts. So the first thing we're
gonna be covering today is just the beginning of our progression. So anytime
we have someone come into the app with the speed bench we're gonna start with
just your basic pause at the chest, control it down, pause and explode back up.
So that's gonna look like this. So you're gonna control to your chest, pause
on the chest, and then explode through as fast as possible. You want to be working
somewhere around 40% on this. The better you get at it the heavier you can go.
You can work with higher percentage of your one rep max. I can move 40% the same as I
can move even close to 70% right now, just the speed that it comes off my chest.
Really, when you're first starting you're gonna want to use lighter weights,
start around 30 to 40%, and you can really start dialing it in with
how you feel comfortable, and if you know that you're moving fast,
you'll be able to feel it. If you're moving fast then you can keep upping the
weight a little bit. So that's the first thing we do, we start them off with the
pause bench, once people start getting good at that then we just do single reps
where you're just going to drop down and explode back up. We usually keep it
around three reps because around three to five reps you start losing power
production. The progression is just getting coordinated and moving quickly.
So once you feel like you're nice and coordinated, you're not all over the
place, you can keep a nice high chest and a nice straight bar path dropping
and coming back up, and the next thing we do is we're going to move to three reps
in under three seconds. So usually the way that we program this one to make
sure you're moving fast enough, you'll complete three reps in
under three seconds, and we just start off with, we usually do like 5-10
sets of three, we'll start off with something we know we can hit three times.
Have your buddy time you from the moment that you drop the bar to the moment that you
lock out on the end of the third rep. And as long as you're staying under three
seconds we just keep building the weight until you miss that three second cut off
time, and then we're just done for the day. After you've mastered that, you feel
comfortable moving three reps really fast, then we start adding bands to our
training. So I'll show you what that looks like.
With the band, you're gonna want to start off, especially if you don't have a huge
bench press, you're gonna wanna start off with a really light band. You don't want
this band to be so heavy that you're having to grind to lock it out at all.
It should still be super fast bar speed, so make sure you're using the really light band here.
The way that we set it up, for us we have these pins that we can just use in the
gym, so we just loop the band over like this. If you don't have the pin then
usually try to find the heaviest dumbbell in the gym, you'll loop it
around the 100-pounder, and then just set another dumbbell on top of that and
that'll keep that dumbbell in place for you. One more thing with the bands that I
didn't mention is you want to make sure they're set up in the exact same plane
on both sides so you get a nice straight line across, and then also that it's
gonna be set up right where your chest is gonna be hitting on the bench. So if
you have your bands set up too far back it's gonna pull you into the rack, or
opposite, if it's too far down towards your belly button it's gonna pull you
forward. So you want to make sure it's right across your chest, right where you're
in a straight line with the barbell. So the first thing we got with the
bands is just gonna be a single rep with a pause. The bands are gonna be a
little bit harder to control, if you've never done them before, and that's why
you want to start off with an easier progression on these as well.
The next thing we got is gonna be just a single rep, pausing at the top to reset.
The best thing about the bands, especially in this scenario, you're able
to drive all the way through the weight. So once we get to those three reps,
once you get really good at it without the bands, you'll notice you're almost
pulling the bar back down to get it moving fast.
With the bands, you're gonna be able to drive all the way back through, and the band's just gonna
pull it right back down on you. Alright, the last one is gonna be just three
reps in under three seconds again. So this one I really like the bands for, because
like I said earlier, right when you lock it out it's gonna be pulling you back
down so you can really execute this as fast as possible with the bands.
Alright guys, that wraps it up today for our dynamic effort bench press
progression. So we love using these for our Power and Athlete program in the
Fitness Culture App. They're great for athletes because the faster you can
produce force the more explosive you're going to be and the better it's gonna
translate to the field. I hope you guys can use this in your
training. If you guys want to check out some of our other videos on benchpress
plateau-busters and things like that, we've got some videos right up here.
Click right up there, and thank you for tuning in.