How I benched 315 by first time benching (it's not genetics)

The first time I ever benched properly a few months ago, I was messing around with 225lbs and a thought i may as well try doing 315, with a spotter of course. And I got the rep! It looked ugly as hell. My arch collapsed, no scapular retraction, no leg drive, who knows what I could have done if my technique and tension was on point.

But keep this in mind it wasn't the first time I had worked out. Before this, all my upper pushing work consisted of push up and dip variations. When it comes to calisthenics and gymnastics, I have barely entered the intermediate level relative to some of those monster gymnasts out there, who knows what they can do.

What I am trying to say is there it is possible to climb through the open window into the house of great pressing strength. If you want a big bench, benching is important, but here are a few reasons why I think you should add high volume calisthenics into your program:

• Most pressing exercises can be done anywhere, so when traveling or can't get to the gym, you can still work on your pressing strength
• It will build up your work capacity so you can train harder, for longer.
• If done smartly, it won't impede your recovery.
• If you pick your exercises correctly, it will make you hella strong. 

One program I recommend would be the 100 push up program for any level of strength, it teaches you to follow a program through and be patient which is so important if you want to get anywhere in life, it will improve elbow conditioning and give you great endurance and work capacity.

Here are a bunch of exercises that you can use to increase your bench:

Beginner exercises 

• Push ups and it's variations
• Tricep dips
• Straight bar dips
• Handstand holds against a wall
• Planche leans
• Plyometric push ups

'Advanced' exercises

• Planche variation holds
• Planche variation push ups
• Freestanding handstand holds
• Handstand push ups, freestanding and against a wall
• Handstand push ups with a close grip
• Handstand push ups with one hand elevated
• Full ROM handstand push ups
• Tricep blasters
• Ring dips
• One arm handstand holds against wall
• Weighted dips

Hope this helps
Enjoy the gains
Alex

Get a Freestanding Handstand

The handstand is an awesome exercise for anybody, it helps your jerk if you are a weightlifter, your bench if you are a power lifter. It also puts a lot of stress on the deltoids and the triceps. There are so many benefits to this exercise, so I will make an article soon on the full list of things it can help you out with, they also look really cool.

A lot of keyboard idiots will say that the wall assisted handstand (hs) and handstand push up (hspu) will give you just as much of a strength benefit as the freestanding variations, this could not be farther from the truth, if you have ever tried a freestanding hspu you will know what I am talking about, it will challenge the grip, core, back, as well as hit the arms and shoulders that much harder. Also, imagine having to find a wall every time you want to show off your sweet handstand, I've been there, it's not as cool.

If I am going to be completely honest, the hs is a grinding exercise, you will have to do 100s, and eventually it will click and you will have it. But there are some exercises that you can try out to monitor your progress, these are listed below. If you want you can work towards each progression in order until you can hold it for 10-20 seconds, then move onto the next. Alternatively, you can just use them to see how you are doing.

1. Frog stand
2. Chest to wall handstand
3. Kick up to handstand against wall
4. Back to wall handstand
5. Forearm stand against wall (make sure you have flexible lats)
6. Forearm handstand free standing
7. Handstand with one leg against wall
8. Kick off wall for 6, 5 second handstands (hands about 1ft away from the wall)
9. Kick up to freestanding handstand

The most important thing to learn when it comes to getting a hs is learning to kick up, I read a book that will explain it much better then I ever could, so I will put a screenshot down below,

The overall key points are:

• lean forward
• first leg goes up in an arc, second leg comes in to your body and straight up, it does not go in an arc like he first

After a long time of grinding, I have found some cues that will help you hold a handstand, the idea is to over do it on the kick up, then balance out with muscular effort. Important things to remember.

• Brace your abs
• Keep your fingers spread out and 'dig' them into the ground 
• put your lats in your front pockets/ round your shoulders forward and spread your lats (protract the scapular)
• keep feet together and legs straight
• Once you have found your balance, shift your shoulders forward slightly, as if you are about to drop into a planche. (this will give you more control).

Hope this helps,

Enjoy the gains

Alex

Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 2

This is part 2 of a selection of things I am using to change up my pull up training, if you haven't seen part 1, click here to check it out
Baseballs

Just put a bolt through a baseball and hook it to a chin up bar, you can also use hockey ball or anything strong enough to hold your weight. This requires a whole new level of grip strength. When training these with lock offs, it would give me a dead arm after every rep, this will kill your biceps as well.
Fat gripz

These are grips, that are fat. They will make the chin ups more difficult. Stick them on the bar and use them for the next 4 weeks, take them off and your chin ups will be stronger
Gymnastics rings

These are difficult as hell, but I am not really sure why, one arm chins on this are crazy difficult for me, but I'm working on it.
Rock rings

These are a cool tool by Metolius, normally used by rock climbers. They have 3 levels, each one gets more narrow and the ledge gets smaller, making it more challenging, you can also grab the top and just use it as a chin up handle. I am currently using them to try and get a door frame one arm chin. So I can do them Anywhere.

Thanks, hope this helps,
Enjoy the gains
Alex

progress from the advanced tuck planche to the half lay straddle planche

Progressing from the advanced tuck planche to the straddle seems like an impossible task for anyone, especially if you are built a little heavier than the rest. I was stuck in the adv. tuck planche for what felt like a lifetime, and there were no articles on how to progress between these two progressions that differ so much in difficulty and load on the muscles and joints.

This article will show you the progression that I used to get to the half lay straddle, once I got that for ~5 seconds, I got a full planche (a low/banana planche), so I actually skipped the straddle when using this progression.

Once you can do each of these holds for 5-10 seconds, start doing push ups, when you can do 5 push ups, go onto the next progression. Don't do these progressions until you can do an adv. tuck planche with your knees behind your elbows for at least 5 seconds

1: start doing your tuck planche like this:

If you can't see the image very well, basically, do the tuck planche with your legs straddled, but your thighs still vertical, Make sure not to rest your knees on your arms.

2: Frog planche:

As you can see in the image, lean forward a little more, and push your thighs back, so the are at a 45 degree angle. Almost there.

2:half lay/crooked planche:

Lean forward even more, and push your legs back until they are in line with your torso. It will feel like you almost lock into place. You will find that you will be a lot lower and your back will be a bit arched, this is fine, I actually think it looks cool this way. But as you get stronger try spreading your lats and get into that hollow back position.

Hope this helps.
Enjoy the gains,
Alex (Don't forget to stretch your glutes) Heath

Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 1

In this post, I will be going over the different grips I am using and the grips I am trying to use in order to keep my one arm chin training. Even though I will be speaking about them in regards to one arm chins, you can also use these variations with 2 arms, rows, front levers or even deadlifts if you are a freak.

1: Towels

I know a few of this may find this weird or stupid, but this, in my opinion, is the best place to start. I remember buying 6 tea towels when i was 16, and just doing one arm hangs, and one arm lock-offs on them, and my forearms grew and my grip got stronger, they are also great because the twist, so you can supinate your hands at the top of the pull up and get a great contraction on the short head of the bicep, this free rotation can also help avoid elbow and shoulder pain.

2:Rotating handles

I'm too poor to buy a 'rolling thunder', so I just brought a pair of those cable attachments that rotate, and strapped them to the pull up bar. When you try and hang of them with just one arm it will try and tear your hand off your arm, and may succeed. But when I got a one arm chin on it for the first time, I knew I had reached a milestone in my strength. You could add a fatgrip on it and make it as thick as a 'rolling thunder', I am yet to get a one arm chin off that. But when I am able to do that, I will go out and tear someones arm off just because I can.

3: Eagle loops

These were a little bit cheaper than the 'rolling thunder' so I got them. Normally. Whats cool, is that you can slowly reduce the number of fingers you use until you you get down to one finger, my current best is a one arm chin on 2 fingers.

4: Homemade chin up handle

I just made this from chain and a pole my mate found in the woods, all we had to do was wash the blood off it and lay low for a while (that was a joke). This is good because it allows you to be able to do one arm chins anywhere, just strap it to something overhead. You can also put fatgripz on them. They also allow you to do neutral grip one arm chins on a regular chin up bar. I found the neutral grip the easiest to learn when first doing the one arm chin.

This post is already pretty long, so I will be back with more ways to switch up your chin ups.

Enjoy your gains
Alex

Me and 'ladies man' my local paper boy

Around the world - more interesting than cardio

Around the worlds are a training method developed by bar hitters in New York. The original idea consisted of push ups, pull ups and dips, 10 reps per exercise with up to and beyond 40 sets.

Sounds a lot like metabolic conditioning. So if we take this idea and put our own exercises in, but making sure that we hit the whole body, you have a work out that will make you stronger, improve GPP and burn a hell of a lot of calories depending on the exercises and the volume that you do it.

For example, today I did a circuit of one arm chins (2 reps), pistol squats(3-5 reps) and press to handstands (1 rep) for 6 rounds, and i got an effective work out in 20 minutes, and it hit my conditioning as well, jsut doing each exercise one after the other with as little rest as possible.

You can pick any 3 exercises: calisthenics, barbell work, strongman, even some isolation exercises if you want to bring up a lagging body part.

If you are training strength movements, as I am, and still want to train like this, I would recommend adding in a 'spacer exercise' or 2 to help you rest between sets, for example, I was training around the worlds yesterday, with handstand presses (1 rep) and one arm chins (2 reps). I added in a set of bulgarian split squats to help me rest more between sets. A 'spacer exercise' should be relatively easy and can be done for high reps, push ups or skipping are also good exercises



I hope this helps if you are stuck for a workout, remember, be creative, and enjoy the time away from the world, this work out can also really help clear your head.

Enjoy the gains
Alex

One arm lock offs for big dudes

Why the one arm lock off? It puts a tremendous amount of tension on the biceps, it will help improve endurance and work capacity, and it also looks cool as hell to see a big guy pull one of these off. I spent the majority of my first year in college training these. Hopped on to the preacher curl bench and got a 66lb preacher curl with one arm for 30 reps within the next few weeks.

What is a one arm lock off? It is when you hold the top of a one arm chin for time. I know its sounds easy, but just give it a go.you'll find that you get up with 2 arms, let go of one of them and you will drop like a 200 lb man trying to do a one arm lock off. Think about how strong your back and arms are now, now think about how much stronger they will be if you could do a one arm lock off for 10 seconds.

It is also a stepping stone to the one arm chin, which is also an awesome exercise. One of my goals as a personal trainer is to get as many people over 190lb doing one arm chins for reps.

The progression level:

1. Hold each lock off for 5 seconds, at the top (chin over the bar), middle and 3/4 of the chin, this is one rep.
2. To set up, do an archer pull up, with the main arm under hand, and with the other hand is going to hold onto the bar with just the 4 fingers, work your way down to a single finger, then down to just your pinky finger.
3. When you can do each progression level until you can get 5-10 sets of 2 reps, then progress onto the next level.

Once you get down to the pinky it may not be so easy to progress onto the one arm lock off: here are a few ideas to make the final step.

1. Add weight to the lock offs
2. Hang a loop off the bar at shoulder height and use your pinky on the loop to assist the one arm lock off
3. Increase number of reps and sets
4. Only assist yourself on the top of the one arm lock off, only use one arm on the middle and/or bottom holds.

Before you start one arm lock offs, become a monster at 2 arms. see if you can get 100 in 10 mins, at least 12 chins with your chin clearing the bar and 5 sets of 3 frenchies.

Don't forget to train both arms.

Enjoy the gains
Alex

You want a 500 lb bench what??

Here I am going to be laying out my long term upper body strength goals (aim to get this aged 25, so 7 years), for my lower body I have not chosen to have any serious long term goals, I wouldn’t mind being able to dunk within a year, but apart from that I am just going to have fun and see how much I can squat. All of these targets will seem pretty far fetched, but you can’t hit anything without aiming at something. So here they are:
500 lb bench press: I don’t know how much I have to weigh to get this as a natural athlete, or if it has even been done before, for now, my main pushing strength I will be working planche and handstand push ups. But I will incorporate partial bench presses working up to 500lbs and slowly increasing the ROM over the 7 years. But I will be very careful of elbow pain and will progress at a very slow pace, it will not be my primary focus for now.
100 one arm pull ups (50 each side) ok, this one is straight out crazy, Jasper Benincasa could do 25 on each side, alternating arms each rep, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go for twice that,  I am planning on doing this through steady state cycles, slowly increasing the number of reps as the cycles progress. Once I get 10 each side, I may have to get more creative, maybe do some west-side style training, I don’t know, I will think about it closer to the time.

100 Full planche push ups: This is going to be a challenge, I am currently doing crooked planche push ups (below), or about 10 reps, so I will aim to get 100 of those and work from there, to try and get my work capacity up before i do it in harder movements such as the full planche.

120kg strict curl: I am a torso dominant athlete, and so my arms have always lagged behind, After seeing Denis Cyplenkov do it, I thought I had to at least give it a go, I will go over how I plan on doing this in the near future

Enjoy the gains
Alex

A cheap way to get a better grip on the bar

Ever noticed that when you into your pull up work out, the grip starts to get tired, your hands start to sweat, and suddenly its not pull ups that your failing on, but just holding onto the bar?
don’t get me wrong I believe that developing grip strength is very important when doing exercises like pull ups, i could list the benefits for days (I may do at some point soon :L) but if you want to test your gripping strength, something like a thick bar is better than wetting up your hands before every set.
I am currently training one arm pull ups (cheeky picture of me below), so every issue that you get with regular pull ups is doubled when you switched to one arms. And I do not want to be having to deal with slipping off the bar half way through my set. You can always use chalk But an impromptu chinning session when you are out and have some spare time will leave you chalk-less and slippery, unless you want to carry your chalk around with you.

I was training a client one day, we were doing super sets with chin ups and farmers walks with fat gripz. Into the 3rd or 4th set, his hands started to slip on the pull ups, so we wrapped one of those Pilates bands around the bar and it worked perfectly.

These bands can be brought off Ebay for under £5, simply cut a couple of 3-5 inch sections off and wrap them around the bar when doing pull ups and enjoy the friction.
Enjoy the gains,
Alex

Getting 100 reps of a difficult exercise (periodisation method)

Everyone that has been doing calisthenics for a while has at least heard of a program that gets you 100 push ups or 200 sit ups. And these programs are fantastic. But what if you want to get super high reps of an 'advanced' exercise (e.g dips or handstand push ups)?
when it comes to doing difficult exercises for high reps, you will plateau quickly, so multiple methods will have to be used, this one is called the periodisation method.  I will be using push ups as an example, when your target reps is 100.

1. Start a routine where you are doing 100% - 200% of your target reps a day. Example: make sure you are doing 100-200 push ups a day
2. find your max, during the day, just go for max efforts when you feel like it, only go for a max effort 2 or 3 times a week. Example: you currently have 32 push ups.
3. add some kind of small resistance, for example: resistance bands, pause reps, a different variation. and work up to your current max without the resistance.Example: change to diamond/ close grip push ups and work back up to 32 push ups (While keeping your total volume daily at 100-200 push ups)
4. Test your max, it should have increased 
5. Take a week of just doing your regular variation, getting 100% - 200% of your target reps daily. Example: go back to doing 100-200 push ups daily, making an effort to increase the reps in your sets. 
6. Repeat steps 1-4

 Now obviously the harder the resistance, the longer it will take you to get back to your max, but the rep increases will be much better, so have a think about how much resistance you will use. Also change it every cycle, keeping up variation is another way of keeping from hitting plateaus.

Enjoy your strength gains.
Alex