How to Fix Your Incline Bench Press (Elbow Position Is Everything)

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Why You Can't Get the Bar Down on Incline Bench (And the Elbow Fix)

If the bar stalls six inches off your chest every time you incline press, your elbows are in the wrong place. Not your shoulders, not your mobility, not your bench angle.

Today we're going to start with incline. And the first lesson I'm going to teach you with incline is if you have a hard time going all the way down, the easiest way to think about it, and if you guys remember, I teach you guys with your flat bench, that elbow position is so important.

On flat bench, the elbows aren't flared out at ninety degrees to your torso and they aren't pinned tight to your ribs either. They sit somewhere in between, and from that position the bar travels down to a specific spot. The bar is going down around the nipples, sternum area, whatever works best for you as far as your flexibility and arm length is concerned.

The bar lands there because that's where it stacks directly over the elbow joint, so the forearm stays vertical and the load runs straight down through bone instead of being held out in front of you by shoulder tissue that was never built for that job.

Now tilt the bench up. The bar path has to change with it, but most people don't change anything about their arms, so the elbows stay where they were and the geometry breaks.

So if we were to take that sweet spot position and simply just rotate the shoulders, that should kind of be the same place that you go when you're doing incline.

Rotating the shoulders means the upper arm swings forward in the socket so the elbows travel slightly toward the front of your body rather than sitting out wide at your sides. Your hand width on the bar doesn't change. Nothing about the movement changes except that one rotation, and it's enough to move the bottom of the rep several inches closer to you.

So a lot of guys, they get their bench and they kind of go here, and they have that hard time getting down.

When the elbows stay flared wide on an inclined torso, the upper arm swings away from the body while the shoulder is already partly flexed, and that combination jams the head of the upper arm bone against the top of the socket. The joint runs out of room before the bar reaches your chest, so your body stops you because bone has hit bone, and no amount of stretching fixes a bar path that's asking for a position the joint can't make.

But if you, again, just change the position of your elbows, notice I can set this thing on my clavicles and get that full range of motion.

The bar landing high, up near the collarbones, is the tell that you've got it right. On an incline the chest fibers you're loading run from the sternum up toward the shoulder, and they're at their longest when the bar is high and the elbows are forward. Loading a muscle at that length is where the growth stimulus is strongest, which is the whole reason you're inclining instead of just doing more flat bench.

So you get a better stretch on the chest, you get the full range of motion, and there's less tension on the shoulders because the joint isn't pinching at the bottom of every rep.

Setting it up starts before you lower the bar. Unrack it, let it sit over your upper chest, and think about driving your elbows slightly forward and under the bar instead of letting them drift out toward the walls. Lower until the bar touches between your clavicles and the top of your chest. If it touches lower than that, the elbows are still too wide.

Do it with an empty bar or something light first. You're teaching the position before you load it, and once the path is right the weight can go up.

The incline isn't a harder press than flat. It's the same press rotated, and so is your setup.