Bench Press for Women.
Bench Press is the smallest part of your total, even if you’re really good at it - but you should still aim to get every possible kilogram out of it. Some women tend to struggle to improve it and there are factors that come into play. Below we will look into how to work around these factors and get you some progress on bench press. There are biological factors that come into play when coaching the bench press for women that don’t necessarily affect men. You will see some powerlifting plans, or even coaches, who just treat women as ‘small men’ in a programming setting, and while both sexes can train in a similar manner there are considerations to take into account. So, if you’re a woman looking to get stronger at bench but feel like you’re spinning your wheels, or even if you’re just interested in coaching bench press in general, read on. See what you think, you might learn something, or you might completely disagree - that’s allowed. Either way, I’d love to see what you think. Frequency. If you’re just getting into powerlifting, or incorporating the bench press into your training, then you’re probably doing it once or twice a week. A lot of bodybuilding plans popularly have ‘chest day’, or ‘push day’, once per week, and this trend tends to filter into some powerlifting or powerbuilding plans too. But this style of training is starting to be seen as too infrequent for most body parts. Things like your legs, lower back and butt can be trained twice a week or so and still improve as they take so long to recover. But your chest, shoulders and triceps are tiny muscles comparatively and they recover very quickly. Recovering quickly might sound like a good thing but a main part of progressive overload is to consistently push your muscles beyond the happy medium of being recovered. They need to be allowed to recover, and then pushed again. Allowing them to recover, then not push them for a while will result in any strength and muscle gains sliding backwards - i.e you’ll lose your gains. So, frequency wise, I’d recommend benching in some form or other at least 3 times per week. I often include one day of competition style bench press, including an @8 single, decently heavy back off work and with a focus on strength, confidence and building competition competency. After that, there will be another two days of accessory work, which might include volume work, paused work, tempo work, etc - it really depends on the technical needs of the individual lifter. Some of the competitive powerlifters we coach will bench press up to 4x per week as well. With any increase in volume you will need to consider the intensity and weight used throughout each session too, as the weekly volume/intensity is an important factor to keep an eye on. Biological Factors. Linking in with the above section is the biological factors to consider. You may have heard of different muscle fibres - some are fast twitch (more explosive) and some are slow twitch (better for endurance) - but did you know they present differently in women than in men? Generally, they are less extreme in women than they are in men. So, a man with a lot of fast twitch muscle fibres will be extremely explosively powerful, and probably has a really big 1rm. But they would struggle to do repetitions with a relatively heavy weight. Whereas a man with more slow twitch fibres would be good at sets of 8-15. Women, however, aren’t as cut and dry as this. Even the most explosively powerful woman would be able to handle an intense set of repetitions of a lift better than any man could. So women tend to be a better mix of both power and endurance and their training needs to reflect that. As well as the muscle fibre difference, women also have less muscle mass than men due to the differences in hormones. Essentially, less testosterone and more oestrogen leads to around about 50% of muscle mass upper body, and 75% muscle mass lower body, when compared to men. If you consider that bench press is already at a disadvantage due to the size of the upper body muscles and then add in that women generally only have 50% of that muscle mass, it begins to become clearer as to why increasing bench press can be so difficult to achieve. Micro Loading. Micro loading is a great option for any lifter looking at breaking through a plateau. But when you consider the above, you can see how it is that a lot of women will bench press around 95-98% very easily but then struggle to hit 100% (or hit a new PB) - especially when you’re stuck with options of 2.5kg+. This becomes even more apparent when your bench press is around 50kg, meaning a 2.5kg increase is a 5% jump! 42.5kg to 47.5kg is a 14% jump. This is huge when you look at it like this but a lot of people would think “well, it's only 5kg.” A great option is to incorporate micro loading into your training. A lot of powerlifting gyms, ours included, will have micro plates. These are plates made up of 0.25kg, 0.5kg, 1kg.1.5kg and 2kg so that you can inch your way up towards a PB. This is a great option to include in training as it gradually increases the volume and intensity with less risk of failing the weight. It is worth keeping in mind that in competition you can only increase by 2.5kg though. To Conclude - Bench press for women will generally be more frequent than you may expect, a little heavier than you’d programme for men (especially on the down sets) and it’ll utilise smaller jumps in order to push you along. What to do next.
If you're programming for yourself, or for others, include the above tips in your plans - and I' more than happy to discuss how to include them if you want to reach out.
If you want someone else to take over and do the programming for you then click the button below!
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Author
Archives
December 2024
Categories
All
Article Submission
|