How to Increase Your Bench Press: 10 Proven Tips

In this article, I’ll share ten of the best tips and strategies I know for increasing your bench press.

My best bench press to date is 162.5 kg (358 lb) which I’ve done on two occasions in competition.

Daniel Richter bench press 1625 kg — Benching 162.5 kg at a local powerlifting meet.

I have also been a huge bench press nerd for over a decade, reading and saving every interesting bench press study I find.

The tips in this article will be a mix of my personal experiences with different methods, but also based on scientific evidence to the extent that it is available, other people’s experiences, and even bench press tradition.

If you’re looking to increase your bench press, I hope you will find at least something helpful in this article.

Let’s jump in.

Prefer listening to reading? Listen to our podcast episode about increasing your bench press here:

Podcast: 10 Tips to Increase Your Bench Press 🎙️

1. Find Your Form (or Borrow Someone Else’s)

Productive bench press training will depend on you establishing a solid bench press form.

If your form is inconsistent, other training interventions become toothless because you’re constantly changing what you’re doing, and the new stimulus is misdirected.

The most important factor for your bench press form is that it lets you …

bench press in a way that is reasonably comfortable and also pain-free,
replicate the form consistently,
and lift as much weight as possible while still allowing for the previous two points.

If you’ve yet to develop your own form, take a look at our guide on how to bench press.

Then, start practicing that, and allow for micro-adjustments that make it your own.

Anytime you lift, you will do so with micro variations in movement path, body position, muscle activation, et cetera. These variations will vary in how strong and efficient they feel (consciously or not).

Over time, your brain will nudge you (again, consciously or not) toward the most effective technique for you at the time.

This means that simply training the bench press will hone your technique and make it stronger and more efficient.

Bench Press Bar Path — The bar path of a novice (A) and two elite (B & C) bench pressers.

But, it requires that you establish a foundation from which you begin practicing, and are open-minded to gradually changing your form.

Everyone’s form will look slightly different because of differences in limb length, joint structure, and strengths and weaknesses, so be open to finding your form.

Also, be open for it to change as your strengths and weaknesses change over time.

2. Use a Wide Grip (Probably)

Studies show that, on average, trained lifters seem to be about 5–6% stronger in the wide-grip bench press compared to the close-grip bench press.¹ ²

Close grip vs wide grip bench press strength — Mean bench press strength in 14 trained men tested in the close grip and wide grip barbell bench press. (Larsen, 2020)

A wide-grip bench press is usually defined as something like 1.5x your shoulder width, whereas a narrow or close grip is defined as 1.0x your shoulder-width.

If you intend to compete in powerlifting or just want to compare yourself to powerlifters, the maximum allowed grip width is 81 cm or 32 inches (the distance between the two ring markings on a powerlifting bar).

There is less of a difference in strength between a medium grip (defined as something in between) and a wide grip, so the most important thing seems to be to avoid the super-narrow grip.

Unless you’re one of the few who are stronger with that style.

3. Arch Your Back (But Maybe Not Always)

A study of trained powerlifters showed they could lift 4.2 kg or 9 pounds (3.5%) more in a one-rep max with an arched back than a flat back.³

Arching your back in the bench press means your chest is lifted closer to the bar. This decreases the range of motion, especially in the weak bottom part of the movement.

Bench press arch — Perhaps this image can give you an idea of what I mean by arching. The red line shows my arched spine, in principle.

Arching is an effective strategy for acutely increasing the weight you can lift in the bench press, but an excessive arch might be detrimental to your long-term muscle and strength gains because of the shortened range of motion.⁴

For this reason, if you bench press with a very arched spine, it might benefit you to do some of your training with a longer range of motion, either by benching with a more flat torso position or doing some other chest exercise with a long range of motion, like feet-up bench presses or bar dips.

4. Get Consistent

To get good training results, you need to establish a consistent training schedule.

You may perform The Perfect Workout™ every time you train, but if you only do so every now and then, it will still be far worse than if you did mediocre workouts but on a regular schedule.

This is another one of those tips that no one wants to read, and yet it is one of the most important points of all.

Take the time to plan when and where you are going to train. Use one of our many bench press programs if you need help with the training plan.

5. Progressive Overload

If you’re at strength level X right now and want to increase your bench press to strength level Y, there is only one way to do that: lift more.

You might add weight to the bar, do more reps, or do more sets. Either way, you need some form of progression.

There are plenty of advanced training programs that forget this simple factor.

Lifting more than you did last time doesn’t come easy (except maybe in the beginner stages); it requires you actually to try harder.

You need to add 2.5 kg (or 5 lbs), dig deep, and both physically and mentally overcome the increased challenge of lifting something that you’re not sure you’re going to be able to. You need to cultivate a mindset that you can and that it has to be done.

You know what the little man in green said: Do or do not, there is no try.

Keep track of what you lifted last time, and try to improve on that in any tiny way possible.

Add a small amount of weight; usually 2.5 kg or 5 lbs
Add a rep
Add a set

Or something else.

The best way to keep track of this is to log your workouts in our free workout tracker.

How often should you add weight or volume like this?

You’ll progress the fastest when you’re a beginner, and then slower and slower.

Here are some pointers to give you a rough idea:

Beginners can add weight every session.
Intermediates can add weight every week, or bi-weekly.
Advanced lifters can add weight every month, or training cycle.

You can read more about these different training levels and how the training changes on the links below:

Beginner Bench Press Program. 2x/week.
Intermediate Bench Press Program. 2–3x/week.
Advanced Bench Press Program. 3x/week.

6. The Only Correct Number of Sessions Per Week

How many times per week should you train the bench press?

In my experience, beginners can increase their bench press strength with only one session per week, but they’ll gain strength even faster with two sessions per week.

Now, if you were to add in some more chest and tricep work (but not necessarily the bench press) on a second session per week, one bench press session per week becomes much more viable, even for the more advanced lifters.

One meta-analysis of 22 studies comparing one, two, three, or four workouts per week found slightly better strength gains the more sessions participants performed. When equated for training volume, however, this effect disappeared and there were no difference between different training frequencies.⁵ (Note that the studies in this meta-analysis used various exercises, and not only the bench press.)

My general recommendation, however, is for most people to bench press two to three times per week.

There is only so much volume you can productively squeeze into a training session, that it will sooner or later become a limiting factor.

This general recommendation applies to all training levels.

If you’re benching twice per week, both of those sessions can be pretty high in volume and intensity. If you’re benching three times per week, you’ll need to reel it in a bit on at least two of the sessions. Use the heavy-medium-light approach.

If you’re advanced, you can even go up to four or five sessions per week, like in two of the versions of our Bench Press Boogie program, but I recommend you only do so when you’re completely adapted to training three times per week and feel like you could benefit from even more volume.

You should view training frequency as mediator for

engraining the technique faster and better, and
allowing more training volume.

Training more frequently will help develop your technique faster, and you can simply handle more training volume if you spread it out over more sessions in a week.

7. Keep Increasing Volume

The more you lift, the more you’ll lift.

At least to a point.

My mind always goes out to endurance athletes when I think about strength training volume: there is a very clear relationship between how many miles they log per week, and their race performance.

I believe there is a similar relationship in strength training, and that gradually increasing your training volume is one of the keys for you to keep progressing.

So, how much should you train?

It depends on many factors, two of the most important ones being:

What you are accustomed to. The more training you’ve done recently, the more you can handle (and need, in order to keep progressing).
How hard your sets are. Sets that are taken closer to failure require longer recovery periods and generally “cost more” in terms of training volume. If you do sets where you stop a couple of reps before failure, you can do more work in total.

To give you some ballpark numbers, here are the average number of bench press sets in our beginner, intermediate, and advanced bench press programs.

Level	Weekly Bench Press Sets	Weekly Assistance Sets (Chest & Triceps)
Beginner	6	4
Intermediate	10–13	9–15
Advanced	20–30	9–12

The numbers above refer to the working sets, meaning the actually challenging sets you do after your warm-up sets.

In the intermediate and advanced programs, more of the sets are lighter, allowing for the high volume.

Don’t look at the numbers above and decide to double your training volume suddenly.

Use the 10% rule: Don’t increase your training volume by more than 10% per week. Once again, our workout tracker is great for keeping track of this.

Read more about training volume in our article How Many Sets per Muscle Group per Week?

8. You’re Going to Need Bigger Pecs

Your pecs are your primary movers in the bench press. They’re aided by your front delts (which are quite a bit smaller) and your triceps.

In the wide-grip bench press, which most people are the strongest in, your pecs and front delts contribute 78% of the force necessary to lift the bar through the hardest part of the movement, and your triceps contribute 22%. In the close-grip bench press, the same numbers are 63% vs. 37%.¹

There is a very strong relationship (r=0.866) between pec muscle size and bench press 1RM, as evidenced by the results from a study in 18 collegiate athletes below.⁶

Bench press strength and chest muscle size — The athletes’ bench press 1RM is on the y-axis, and the cross-sectional area (measured by ultrasound) is on the x-axis.

Of course, muscle size isn’t the only way for you to improve in the bench press.

For one, the bench press has a big element of technique. How skilled are you at keeping your muscles tight and pushing in the right path under heavy load?

Another big element is your neuromuscular efficiency. How strong a neural signal do you send to your muscles, how effectively are your muscle fibers recruited, and how efficient are they at cooperating with the other muscles of your upper body, including antagonists?

But no matter how skilled you are and how efficient your muscle recruitment is, you still need something to create the force. The motor that your skill and neural system uses.

Your muscles consist mostly (~85%) of contractile protein threads. When your muscles receive a signal to contract, these are the threads that generate force when they climb over each other and overlap.

The more of these contractile proteins you have, the more force your muscle can generate.

During your first few weeks of training, most of your strength gains come from improvements in technique and neuromuscular efficiency (although do you still build muscle). But pretty soon, added muscle mass becomes the main driver of strength gains.

This is evidenced by a study in which previously untrained participants trained bicep curls for eight weeks.⁷

For the first four weeks, improvement in neuromuscular efficiency was the source of the majority of their strength increase. But after around one month of training, this flipped, and muscle growth became the major driver of strength gains.

Contribution to strength gains from neural factors (dashed line) or muscle growth (solid line). The left diagram shows male participants and the right shows females.

In the eighth and final week of training, muscle growth accounted for 90–95% of additional strength gains!

Definitely work on your form and skill in the bench press, but for major long-term gains, make it a priority to build a big rack.

9. Use Assistance Exercises. Or Not.

Assistance exercises have the potential to help your bench press immensely. But, they might also do diddly-squat.

For example, in one study, adding lying triceps extensions to bench press training didn’t yield any extra increases in bench press strength over a ten-week training period compared with bench press training alone.⁸

At the same time, my bench press training has taken leaps on several occasions when I’ve incorporated certain assistance exercises.

One such time was when I added dumbbell chest flyes a couple of times per week. They made my pecs balloon, and so did my bench press. Another time, doing one hundred push-ups per day added 10 kg (22 lb) to my bench press in a month.

There is also a rationale that using a larger palette of exercises than the bench press alone will allow you to fit more training volume in without getting overuse injuries.

Assistance exercises can potentially help your bench press, but they’re not necessary for everyone.

You can increase your bench by virtually only benching and just increasing your bench volume as your capacity increases. Some top benchers simply just do a ridiculous amount of bench pressing every week (I’m talking 40–50 sets or more) and no assistance work at all.
You might also stumble upon that assistance exercise that just makes your bench press go “pop”, and you can’t really explain why.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide which strategy to use, depending on what you believe is holding your bench press back currently and which style of training you prefer.

Click here to see our top picks of bench press assistance exercises.

10. Press Like You Mean It

For the tenth and final tip of this list, I want to mention your lifting tempo.

I recommend you press the bar up as fast and hard as possible in your training.

By accelerating the bar faster, you will produce more force. And to produce more force, more of your larger and stronger muscle fibers will have to be recruited. And the muscle fibers that are recruited and worked in your training are the ones that will grow.

One study found double the bench press gains in a group that lifted with maximal intended velocity compared to a group lifting intentionally slower over a six-week period.⁹

A recent meta-analysis supports this idea, showing an average of 16.5% greater strength gains from 24 different studies comparing lifting as fast as possible to an intentionally slower tempo.¹⁰

(I’ve also written about this meta-analysis in this article on the best lifting tempo for strength.)

Note that this goes for the concentric phase.

In the bench press, that is the phase where you push the weight up from your chest.

For the eccentric (lowering) phase, it seems better to control the weight on the way down than just letting it fall without resisting it. Resisting the weight on the way down seems to stimulate both muscle growth and strength gain very well. If you want to read more about this, check out my article on lifting tempo above.

Here’s my recommendation for your lifting tempo in the bench press:

Lower the weight with control and “feel it” in your muscles. Nothing exaggerated, but at least for a second or two.
Pause for a moment on your chest.
Press up as hard as possible.

Not every rep of every set has to be performed like this, but I believe it is a great default tempo in your training.

To Infinity and Beyond

There you go, ten of my best tips on how to increase your bench press.

Building a bigger bench is highly useful in many situations and can be a wonderful pastime, and I wish you the best of luck with it.

Our free workout tracker is a great tool for your training, and it also has a number of bench press programs in it (some of the more advanced programs require a subscription, though).

Download StrengthLog for free with the links below:

Download StrengthLog Workout Log on App Store

Download StrengthLog Workout Log on Google Play Store

More bench press resources: