The Wall Technique for Perfect Bench Press Form

Today, I'm going to teach you how to properly bench press using this wall.

Now, this is a very uncommon way of teaching this technique, but I think it'll be helpful for you if you just take a moment to put what I'm trying to teach here into perspective, okay? So, one of the biggest mistakes that I see with the bench press for most beginners is they have a tendency to bring their elbows here.

Elbows flared out to the sides, ninety degrees from the torso, upper arms making a straight line with the shoulders, and the whole shape looking enough like a bench press that most people never question it. It feels like a bench press when the weight is light.

Before we get into why that position causes problems, walk the whole chain once so you have the map.

A bench press is a closed loop that starts at your feet and ends at your hands, and force travels through your legs into your hips, through your hips into your rib cage, through your rib cage into your shoulder blades pinned against the bench, and only then does it get to your arms and out into the bar. Every one of those links either transmits force or leaks it, and your setup is what decides which one happens.

Most beginners only ever think about the last link. They think about the arms, because that is where the bar is.

And this elbow positioning when doing the bench press not only removes the pec from the movement, but it's also significantly increasing your risk of injury in the shoulder and the rotator cuff muscle in the front. I want to be straight with you about the evidence here: I cannot point you to a study that has measured pec activation or injury rate across specific elbow angles the way I am describing it, so take this as what I have seen coaching people, not as settled literature. What I can do is let you feel the mechanical part on yourself right now.

So, real quick, what I'd like for you to do is I want you to put your hand on your pec right here, and I want you to bring your elbow back into this position.

You don't feel the muscle stretch, and if you do, it's stretching along the top of the insertion here on the top of your sternum over into your front delt.

But if you were to take the elbow and move it down and go back here, what you feel is that muscle stretching all the way across to the insertion here in your shoulder.

That difference is not subtle under your hand, and the reason is that the pec fibers run at an angle from your sternum out to the upper arm bone, so the direction you take your elbow decides which fibers get lengthened and loaded. Take the elbow straight out sideways and you are pulling along the top border of the muscle only. Take it down and back and you are lengthening the whole fan.

A muscle that never lengthened under load never really worked.

So, what I'd like you to do is just take a second and pretend this wall here is a giant boulder, and that boulder is sitting on top of your best friend.

Now, my guess is if you wanted to push this boulder off of your friend to save his life, you're not going to position your elbows here and push like this, right? Right, so instead, what you're going to do is you're probably going to try to get under the boulder, and you're going to use your hips to drive as you push up.

Put a real load in front of somebody and their body finds the strong position on its own, in about half a second, without any cueing, because nobody actually has to be taught this.

Right? So, the way that I'm strongest is I bring my elbows in and I put them under me, I position them, and then I use my hips and my legs to get under that, and I drive that boulder that way.

Well, if we were to take the same exact movement and turn it horizontal, that's the same exact form or technique for a bench press.

The bench does not change the physics, it just changes which way gravity is pointing, so the position that made you strong against the boulder is the position that makes you strong under the bar.

Again, we're trying to position ourselves so that when we're pushing this, we can get under it and drive with our hips.

So, the way that this works, I'm just going to quickly walk through this setup with you, show you what it looks like, is we're going to get ourselves where we're either eye level with the bar, if you have a spot, if you don't have a spot, you're going to need to go a little bit higher.

Okay? And the reason is because we're going to need to use our shoulders to pull ourselves out and into this position here.

Lie too far down the bench and the hooks end up behind your head, which means the unrack becomes a long reach backward, and every inch of that reach pulls at the setup you are about to build. If you are alone, line your mouth up with the bar. That extra few inches of clearance costs you nothing and saves the position.

Hand width comes next, and there is a way to find it that does not involve guessing.

So, do it with an empty bar, find out where your hands are in the bottom position of the rep, and that's exactly where they should start.

Bring the empty bar down to your chest, let your elbows settle where they naturally want to sit, and look at where your hands landed, because that spot is your grip. I use the knurling as a landmark so I can find the same spot every session without measuring.

What you are aiming for is your bones stacked under the bar, forearms straight up and down at the bottom, so the load runs through bone instead of being held up by muscle fighting a sideways angle. I have not seen research that has tested a perpendicular forearm against other angles for load distribution, so treat that as a working rule from coaching rather than a measured finding. Go too wide and you shift work off the triceps onto the chest, go too narrow and you shift it the other way.

Now the foundation, which is the part almost everybody skips.

So, a lot of guys, you'll see them lift up. And what they're doing is they're squeezing their shoulder blades together and putting themselves on this nice stable platform on the bench.

Here, my shoulder blades are squeezed together, my lats are engaged, and I'm using them to hold my body onto this foundation rather than laying flat here.

Lying flat means your shoulder blades are free to slide around on the bench under load, and a shoulder blade that slides is a shoulder blade that cannot give your arm anything solid to push from. Pin them down and back and your upper back becomes the floor.

Stability changes what your nervous system does with the weight, not just how the lift feels to you. When Lawrence and colleagues had lifters press on an unstable bar setup, muscle activation patterns and bar path both changed compared to a stable press, which tells you the nervous system reallocates effort to controlling the load instead of moving it (Lawrence et al., 2017).

Now, the reason why I want to be careful about how I unrack this is because if I do a bad job and I have to reach too far back, basically what I'm doing is I'm pulling my shoulder blades out of the position I just put myself in, right? We want to be able to keep this core, strong, stable position on our shoulder blades.

Ten seconds go into building that platform, and a sloppy unrack undoes every bit of it before rep one even starts.

So, if we go a little bit higher, you can see it's much easier for me to reach and I don't lose this position when I unrack the weight.

Take the bar out with your elbows wide, because that is a pulling shape and it keeps your blades locked, and then once the bar is over your chest, bring the elbows in underneath it.

Now, when I go down, I'm going to go straight down and the bar is going to go between my sternum and my nipples here.

Research: Lawrence MA, Leib DJ, Ostrowski SJ et al. Nonlinear Analysis of an Unstable Bench Press Bar Path and Muscle Activation, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research back in 2017.

References:

Lawrence MA, Leib DJ, Ostrowski SJ et al.. Nonlinear Analysis of an Unstable Bench Press Bar Path and Muscle Activation. J Strength Cond Res. 2017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27548799/