Increase Frequency

One of the most important factors that results in our success or stagnation in the weight room is the amount of weekly volume we are performing. Weekly volume is the amount of working sets that you are performing in a week on a specific muscle group or movement pattern. Increasing weekly volume is best done by adding frequency, this is why my first piece of advice to anyone looking to break through a plateau on a specific exercise is to attempt to increase the weekly volume. This sounds simple, but the difference between performing 4 sets of bench press in a week and 12 is huge and will have a huge impact on your progression.

That being said, frequency must be increased with caution, we cannot simple add a load more stress if the body is not ready for it. Weekly volume needs to be built slowly over time. Remember that increasing weekly volume could be done by adding a different horizontal press variation into your week such as a dumbbell bench press . Try and keep the variation specific to the bench press however, performing high repetition press ups will not hurt your bench press numbers but is not specific enough to help move it forward either.

Increase Volume

Another very effective way to increase the weekly volume is to increase the amount of sets you are performing within a single session. If you are someone who only performs 3-4 sets on a specific muscle group per session, your leaving a lot on the table. Let’s imagine your current bench press session consists of 3 x 5, if you could progressively move this to 6 x 5 then you have doubled the amount of working sets and increased the amount of weekly volume. This is another simple way to help break through a plateau, doing more work within the week.

Use Effective Strength Training

If you are someone who has not been taking advantage of proper, well structured strength training programming then you are also leaving a lot of progress on the table. Creating meso cycles or training blocks where you are successfully manipulating the volume and intensity of the training your doing will have a huge impact on how much you can bench press. This can seem complex at first, when in reality it is very simple, we take an exercise like the bench press, we apply stress to it and then we periodically attempt to increase the stress we are applying to it. We do this for between 3-12 weeks and then we change our point of attack and take a rest. Here is an example of a six week strength training cycle.

Week 1 - 5 x 5 @80kg

Week 2 - 5 x 5 @80kg

Week 3 - 5 x 5 @82.5kg

Week 4 - 5 x 4 @85kg

Week 5 - 5 x 3 @87.5kg

Week 6 - 5 x 3 @90kg

In this example we are overloading the body with weight, not volume, to encourage strength adaptations. In this example the individual has a max bench press of between 105-110kg. If you are someone who always uses the same repetition range and the same weight, then its normal to hit a plateau as your not overloading the body enough to create an adaptation.

Use Effective Hypertrophy Training

In the way that some people never perform real strength training and are always lingering in the repetition range of 5-10, some individuals never perform proper hypertrophy blocks of training. Hypertrophy training is where we are attempting to grow the muscle, which we will in turn make stronger. Muscle size is one of the best predictors of strength, however they are not mutually exclusive, that is to say that you can be very strong and not large, however having more muscle mass does make being strong a great deal easier. This is why all weightlifting sports are split into weight categories.

Effective hypertrophy training will involve the accumulation of lots of volume at light weights. When performing hypertrophy we want to be in the 55-70% of 1 repetition max, meaning that we can perform a high number of repetitions and induce high levels of fatigue on the muscle. Mixing this with a calorie surplus (eating more than you burn) and good sleep will enable you to put on muscle mass over time. Gaining muscle mass is not a quick process, it takes time and will need you to be patient, a good block of hypertrophy training should be performed over 3-6 months to see real effects. In all cases attempt to use proper programming principles discussed above, creating adaptation is not an easy task and we need to use all the techniques available to us, especially once we have been training for a while.

Improve Technique

Technique is often not discussed in the bench press, however it is hugely important and can make a real difference. When we perform squats and deadlifts it can seem obvious that these are full body exercises that need a great deal of concentration, whereas a lot of people approach the bench press thinking it is just an upper body exercise. The bench press needs intensity from the full body, with the feet driving into the floor, the lower body tense, the abdominals contracted and ready to take load. The arch of the chest is important and will put your body in the right position. A great video by juggernaut training systems goes into the finer details of bench press technique that you can use to help refine yours.

Bonus: Increase Intensity of Effort

Often times when we have stagnated on an exercise we can fail to bring the level of intensity required to make change to our training sessions. Creating adaptation takes real effort, hard and smart training, you need to show up ready to bring intensity to what your doing otherwise you will never break through any of your plateaus and likely remain an beginner to intermediate lifter. Intensity of effort is not a technique to break through a plateau, but without it you will not be able to apply the other techniques and will fail to break through the plateau, so make sure you are bringing intensity to your sessions.