I Benched 245lbs Today!

Really, I did. A new personal record. Given that I weight 155 soaking wet I think that is pretty good. I’ve NEVER had that much weight on the bar before. People were giving me funny looks. Wondering if I would be OK pushing that much weight off my chest. You see, I wasn’t worried….because I wouldn’t have to get anything off my chest, I would just have to hold the weight where my muscles were at their strongest, near (but not at) the point of full lock out.

I have started a new style of strength training, that directly applies the most basic law of physics to weight training. We all know (or at one time knew!) that Power = Work per unit Time. Your muscles grow by generating increasingly higher amounts of force in a smaller period of time. I have been lifting (on and off) for the past 10 years. My typical routines have invovled doing 2-4 sets of 6-12 reps for 6-8 exercises and increasing weight when I can (when I can remember what I actually did during my last workout). I’ve gone through periods where I have made decent gains. I am by no means a bodybuilder, but am much stronger than I was back in high school or college and attribute much of that to weights. The gains have been slow and gruelling.

This new routine tears that philosophy away. The technique, now called Static Contration by Pete Sisco, and popularized (using a slightly different methodology) by Charles Atlas back in the 50’s (touting that he turned himself from a 97lb weakling to a total babe magnet using his Dynamic Tension (R) method!) focuses on putting very very heavy loads on your muscles at their strongest point. The benefits of this style of workout include (based on my own observation):

• Less prone to injury; since your joints are never forced into their weak range of motion, where they are most prone to injury
• Lifting heavy weights gets your body use to what it is like to lift heavy loads (muscle memory)
• Saves time: lifting in this manner takes hardly any time. My past several workouts have taken about 10 minutes (no joke). Working out with a partner will take longer (and is advised), but even then you will be in and out of the gym in 1 hour (including 15 minutes of cardio and stretching!).
• Feels good! I leave the gym feeling moderately pumped, and not wiped out. The next day or two I feel like I got a great workout in, but I am not crippled. It is a great feeling.
• Ego boost: lifting heavy weights is fun…don’t deny it! It’s also funny to see the looks on people’s faces when you throw 300 pounds on the barbell to do a shrug hold!

I’ve only been lifting like this for a few weeks so I can’t speak to the gains and whether the are better than other methods of working out. All I know is that it feels good and my progress over the past three weeks has been great, especially given that I have only worked out once a week for a few minutes each time. I will continue to detail my progress in this blog. Hope to see that 400 bench soon :)

FYI: I’m also using the static contraction approach to supplment the bodyweight exercises I normally do (sit ups, push ups, etc). I’ll talk more about that later.