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The best method for building a chest that’s both massive AND highly functional may not be to do lots of bench press.

I know: it’s heresy!

Before you cancel me, though, please hear me out!

While the bench certainly IS good for hypertrophy and building power/strength (and it’s a lot of fun), it also places you in a position where you have unrealistic stability. You’ll never need to lie down and try and push something so heavy away from you. And if you try standing up - then you’ll fall over.

While the bench press can increase maximum power, there are only a few scenarios where this is useful! And while it’s decent for hypertrophy, it’s possibly not the MOST effective in this capacity.

All this goes double if you’re arching your back and retracting your scapula to try and eke out an extra 5k on your 1RM.

So, what could you use instead? As I have been saying for years, high-rep, short ROM push ups are surprisingly effective for building explosiveness, strength endurance, stronger tendons, and even size in the pecs.

They do come with the slight risk of imbalance - which is why I recommend movements with a higher ROM such as the pec fly (and this should be counterbalanced with more pulling movements).

Cable press lets you do this nicely while ALSO learning to push from a standing position.

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Here’s the paper I mentioned regarding using max weight to build explosiveness:

https://journals.lww.com/nsca-scj/Ful...

This is a contentious point: for a long time, lighter loads were recommended for movements like the sled push if you wanted to develop sprinting power. The reasoning was that heavier loads would interfere with running technique and thereby actually be counter-productive.

Future studies haven’t found this to be quite as true. But they still show that if you exceed a certain amount of weight, you actually start to see diminishing returns. It’s heavier than we thought, but it’s still not “max effort.” This is likely because the neural drive at this point is so different as to have reduced benefit.

That said, this all still needs more evidence. There aren’t enough longitudinal studies, as far as I can tell.

My point in the video was that max strength likely is NOT your limiting factor when it comes to things like pushing ability - or even sprinting or jumping. But even if it were, it certainly isn’t fully established that more weight = more power.