Don't Cry For The Forgotten Standing Press

The rise in popularity of the bench press and demise of the standing overhead press was a good thing. The best thing that could have happened to the pushing musculature of the upper body.

Benching is the superior developer of upper body musculature and strength. Its popularity is testament to its effectiveness.

Standing overhead pressing is "old school" and "badass". But it fails to develop the same pushing muscles as fully or rapidly as the bench.

There wasn't some conspiracy to make lifters lazier and weaker by making the supine bench press more popular than the standing press. Before racks and benches, it never occurred to lifters that they shouldn't stand and put weights overhead. That is what man does with heavy objects in a state of nature. You get them off the ground. To be truly alpha, you get it to arm's length overhead.

But lifters are like the other clever primates in their species. They take stock, experiment and adapt their methods to improve results. The same human tendency to make things better that gave us modern houses, cars and smartphones also resulted in the bench press deposing the standing press.

Lifters noticed that bracing their bodies against fixed objects--instead of relying on their own free-standing muscular tension--allowed them to press more weight. Now before images of the smith machine sully your thoughts, remember that while the torso is braced on a metal bench during a bench press the lifter is still moving the weight itself in all three dimensions! What lifters were moving toward when they moved away from standing presses was a bench press, not a smith machine bench press.

Very quickly lifters realized that not only did bracing the torso against a fixed object mean more force could be generated by all the pressing muscles they were trying to develop..but the closer to horizontal the torso became, the greater the amount of pressing muscle that got involved. More muscle, more tension, more weight. Just by lying on a sturdy bench instead of standing up.

In fact, this braced horizontal "bench" pressing translated into even more strength in the vertical movement! As long as the lifter continued to practice the standing version so his body kept the strength-skill of bracing while standing. The now stronger pressing muscles could display the greater pressing strength while standing that they obtained by "benching". And despite the modern propaganda about standing pressing improving bench pressing, it was actually the other way around.

This is anatomy and physics. The human body's pressing makeup is rigged for horizontal pushing. It will get stronger best if this reality is acknowledged. Further, more force can be exerted while braced against unyielding iron than against the straining posture-bracing muscles of even a very strong man.

The standing press has other benefits, namely the aforementioned  total-body tension upon which it relies and which it develops. But for pure size and strength of the upper body's pushing musculature the flat bench press is unmatched. The flat bench is the back squat of the upper body. And all the cranky nostalgia or broscience nutthuggery for the standing press is not going to change stubborn, mean ol' physiology as currently arranged by eons of bipedal primate evolution.

If the standing press is the inferior strength-builder, is it at least the better shoulder health-builder? Debatable. Some have pointed out that while the overhead press may balance the development of front and back shoulder musculature, it also causes impingement; in short the human shoulder wasn't meant to bear heavy loads overhead and athletes who do so as part of their sport are the resilient exception selected for by their sport. The more normal humans who aren't built to withstand that kind of treatment don't end up on tv.

Bench pressing can indeed deform posture if it isn't balanced with upper body pulling strength. A man who develops a 400-lb bench and never does a single dumbbell row or chin up--or who has simply never benched properly--will likely have hunched shoulders as his well developed pecs and front half of his delts overpower his undeveloped pulling muscles.

A proper bench DOES engage the upper back muscles to lock the shoulders in place, and the lats to keep the bar in the groove on the way down. A pre-internet bench specialist who never got rudimentary coaching might have gotten fairly strong  (300-400 lbs) on the bench without ever having learned to get tight or squeeze his upper back or engage the lats. And he'd have the hunched look to go with that kind of benching.

But modern benchers now understand the importance of the upper body pulling muscles to both balance and aid the pushing muscles. Their shoulders are healthier, their postures better, and their benches bigger. Dumbbell rows and the like are as much a staple in the smart bencher's training kit as the bench itself.

Now we must turn to carryover. The best movements (i.e. the high bar deep squat, the barbell bench press, the row or chin) improve several other activities involving the same muscles. So a bigger high bar squat will make the lower body stronger for every lower body activity that requires power: running, especially sprinting, jumping, power cleaning, deadlifting, etc. In the same way the bench translates to improvement  in every upper body push: overhead, incline pressing, dips, or shoving an opponent.

Yet other factors can and do interfere with this transfer. In the case of the bench, shoulder health will limit displaying strength on the dip, for one example. In the case of the standing press, the ability to generate whole body tension will limit how much pushing strength can be displayed in an overhead press.

To wit, a man who can bench 400 lbs with good form may struggle to press 200 lbs overhead while standing. THIS IS NOT A FAILURE OF UPPER BODY PUSHING STRENGTH, which the bench has built quite well. The lifter will need to build up his ability to generate the specific sort of tension in all his other muscles to maximize his ability to display his pressing strength while standing.

A standing press specialist will always have the edge in displaying standing strength. But by completely eschewing the bench he unnecessarily constantly limits the speed of his pressing strength development by roping it to the limits of what he can do standing. It's rather like relying on the front squat for leg strength. It will do an okay job, but the back squat is so much more complete and efficient and the legs don't get shortchanged because a fatiguing upper back causes the rack position to be lost like in a front squat.

The standing press is emphatically not as bad as relying on the overhead squat for developing leg strength strength (a dumb idea I entertained as a newb), but it is a step in that direction. In training the standing version of the press, the lifter is sacrificing development of the target type of strength (upper body pushing, remember?) for simultaneous development of other qualities (like total body bracing while standing). Kind of like a certain group training fitness fad that tries to develop strength and power and endurance concurrently and thus yields no appreciable gains in any of them.

The standing press will get your pressing muscles strong. The bench will just do it better and more quickly.

It has been said repeatedly that taking the long, old school, badass road of overhead pressing will result in a big bench along with the athletic quality of generating force while on your feet. I have never found this to be true. Standing pressing have been nothing more than a sideshow distraction in my training that hindered my bench progress and made my lower back tired and injury prone.

But who cares about my anecdote? Just look at what actual athletes who need upper body pushing strength on their feet in the field actually do: they bench. Even shot putters bench amazingly heavy in order to throw a heavy object up, up, and away.

Olympic weightlifting dropped overhead pressing because it devolved into a standing double dip torso throw from backward bending parallel. This was arguably just part of weightlifting's evolution from an upper back and arm strength pulling sport to a leg-based strength-speed sport. (Thank you, thigh brush.) In fact overhead pressing can interfere with the specialists' ability to use the arms strictly as conduits for leg power to get the bar rapidly into the catch position!

Strongman has kept overhead lifting in the competitive mix, but allows it to be gloriously sloppy with assistance from the legs and back as needed.

But outside of this one version of competitve lifting modern athletes who need to push people and things are bench pressing a lot. If they train standing up, it's likely they are using their legs to start a push and finishing with a jerk.

Olympic lifting uses the legs to get the bar overhead. Strongman uses the legs and back to get the weight started overhead like Olympic lifting used to for most of the time overhead "pressing" was contested. Powerlifting acknowledges the bench's superiority as a pressing movement and ignores overhead pressing altogether.

Standing and strictly pressing has a foot in the dustbin with other odd, impressive yet inefficient lifts like the two hands anyhow.

Occasionally some of these lifts return when some training guru needs to jazz up his marketing. (We're looking right at you, Turkish get up.) The standing press has managed to hang around closer to the mainstream because at first glance it seems like at least a decent idea. It seems manly with an appeal that is slightly less dated than the handlebar mustache appeal of other old time lifts.

But the bench press still trains the upper body pushing muscles better.

If you love the standing press, however, don't think I'm trying to discourage you from doing it. I just want nostalgic purists to stop hating the bench press, a lift which deserves its popularity. The bench is the far better lift for the primary or only upper body push.

The standing press can be fun. Even I like to mess around with it every few months, just like I do with front squats or cleans. I just know that it's the back squat and bench that drive all my gains in the various squats, pulls, and presses. And in strength applied outside the gym. And I don't shake my head sadly over the fact that you hardly see a standing press (or a front squat, or a power clean) in a commercial gym.

It's great that the bench has become THE press among even the uninitiated. It deserves it. Even housewives know that a big bench means a strong upper body.

Now if only proper back squats can achieve the same mindshare for the lower body...

Update 8/30/2015: A couple months ago my bench max was stuck just under 225. I would play around with the standing press and find that I could get a single or two with 135. In two months I upped my bench max to 265 for a single. I went and tested my overhead press and found that it had automatically gone up 30 lbs to 165 for a single.

Now, I admit that I'd done two or three very brief overhead press sessions in the intervening time, but just to play around and to see if I was still getting stronger. I did 135 for five in the standing press after I found I could do a few reps on bench with 225. Then I did 145 for a couple triples another time. But that's all. There was nothing even resembling dedicated, regular, progressive training on the standing press. The 30-lb jump on the standing (strict!) overhead barbell press was strictly due to carryover from the 40 lbs I worked very hard to put on my bench.

Back To ARP

Back To ARP

Today was my first ARPwave (Accelerated Recovery Performance) session in the better part of a year. The fluid in both knees is already receding again and I was able to get into a full squat despite the aggravated injury in the right knee. I even managed to get up to 8.3 on regular polarity and 7 on reverse polarity. My therapist, Chad, was happy that my foot strength and control is still way better than it was when we first started nearly two years ago.

It's amazing how important foot strength and muscle control are. I mean, maybe that should be obvious.  Everything was weak below my knees. This meant my knee joints were taking the brunt of forces that should have been borne by my muscles. Hence the two years of extreme effusion with any sort of use (even just walking).

I am working hard on regaining my ability to control my toes, spread them out, move the big toe independent of the rest, to keep my arches up as I squat all the way down, etc.

There's no way I can train after an ARPwave session, however. So I'm reducing barbell training to just once per week on my Sunday, my other day off from work (which can be very draining physically). On Wednesday I'll still go to the gym to train with Michelle, but it will be just supplementary back work: DB rows and chin-ups.

My training is very basic and my training for bench and squat is...bench and squat. But for my back I rely mostly on rows with chins thrown in every now and then. And I always do them after bench and squat. So the rows and chins probably won't be hurt by going after the ARPwave therapy and they may even benefit.

I have to work Sunday and Wednesday, but I have Memorial Day off and will be training then. Hope the knee is ready by then. It will be Sundays from there out. That's a dozen bench and squat sessions till the mid-August meet. Linear progression with lots of calories.

I'm Gettin' Bettah..!

I'm Gettin'  Bettah..!

The effusion got really bad over the course of the day yesterday, but that seems to have been the worst of it. Much better this morning. With a thin knee sleeve under my blue Rehband the knee feels pretty damned solid. Good enough to deadlift. But too acute a bend angle and the pressure from the effusion gets to be too much. Still much better than yesterday.

Here's the thing...the effusion isn't something to fight! It's evolution's very smart built-in response to joint instability due to damage or overuse. I tweaked the tissue in the back, tissue first damaged years ago and which took about a year to heal. So now when I re-tweak it by doing stupid shit like extreme stretching, my body responds by generating fluid to stabilize, immobilize and heal. 

With luck, I'll be ready to squat again by next Sunday. Today I'll deadlift which I've needed to do anyway without being tired from squatting. I'm sick of having trouble with 315 again. Christ, I've pulled 506 sumo in competition and 495 conventional in the gym (at about 185 lbs bodyweight). It is surreal to be struggling with three wheels again. 

Speaking of bodyweight and lifts, I'm --perhaps with great delusion-- hoping to squat ~360 Olympic style without belt or wraps and deadlift ~450 without belt while 165 lbs or less. I also hope that this translates to 407 (185 kilos) and 506 (230 kilos) in competition. 

The Twin Cities USAPL Open is in 90 days. That's enough time for 12-15 squat/deadlift sessions. I doubt I'll get to 165 in that time (I'm 155-158 now) and I probably won't add 100 lbs to my squat and deadlift in 3 months either. I seem to gain 8-10 lbs on my squat and deadlift for every lb of bodyweight I gain. So I'd need to gain 3 lbs/month for the next three months. Meh. Maybe. 

I don't really have any bench goals. Ever. But it would be nice to bench 315 one day. Much more important to me are my squat, deadlift, vertical and sprint times. As far as upper body, I 'd much rather be able to do a one-arm chin up (again) than bench 315. 

Today will be a classic bench/deadlift day with back focus instead of squatting. I think these strict DB rows are really helping my upper body pulling muscles the most, especially now that I'm using that semi-supinated grip. It's like the bench press of the back! 

Today's Goals:

Bench Press 175 x 5

Deadlift 335 x 1

DB Row 90 x 8 (strict)

Chin Up + 10 x 5

Long Torso, Low Bar...Short Torso, High Bar

Gary's Note: Instead of letting my pressure blood pressure take a beating from idiots cheering for the existence and continued upping of the minimum wage, I thought I'd use this space to celebrate my return to training. My enthusiasm is for the ideas behind training to be a physically superior version of myself. Right now I'd rather talk body proportions and their effect on squatting than take apart liberal flat earth economics.

Long Torso, Low Bar...Short Torso, High Bar

I have long limbs and a tiny little torso. If I let the barbell ride low on my back, then in order to keep the bar in the balanced position over the middle of my foot I have to bend over into a good morning. So these days I keep the bar high on my traps so that my torso needn't go flatter than 45 degrees at any point in the squat. 

I was training up my "it's complicated" friend, Michelle, on the squat. Michelle is a short white woman with a thunder booty, extremely long torso and stubby femurs. She is a natural bencher and squatter. As I watched her squat it was so obvious: her long torso made a low bar squat a much better idea for her than it would be for me. My short back means I got to push the bar up higher; her long back means that she gets to push the bar down.

This low bar/high bar war has always annoyed the piss out of me. You would have thought that somebody would have noticed by now that the length of the torso relative to the femurs would dictate where on the back the bar could be placed to allow the lifter to maintain a good back angle. 

Short-backed (relative to femur length) lifers need a higher bar or they will be doing a good morning when they squat. Longer-backed (relative to femur length) lifters can get away with higher bar, but would would get a better balance of hamstring and quadriceps involvement with a lower bar. 

Michelle's lower bar will keep her back at the same angle as my higher bar keeps my back. Too high a bar on her and she has to fight harder to stay in balance. The higher bar position on her longer torso means the bar gets forward as she descends. 

Long torso/short femurs: you have the option, but should probably lower the bar down your back.

Short torso/long femurs: stick with high bar. Your "low bar squat" is a good morning. 

In fact, a good guideline is to do what it takes to get the squat to look like a squat. If it looks like a good morning, you're doing it wrong. Sooooo...put the bar on your back in a place that allows you to hold a good back angle even when it gets heavy. That place will depend on how long your torso is compared to your thighs.

Squatting in High, High Heels

And speaking of making the squat look good, please wear appropriate shoes with the appropriate heel height for your proportions. Don't limit your ability to squat nice because you refuse to squat in heels and want to squat barefoot.

Some people can squat barefoot and look just fine. I'm talking here of Asians from Asian country and people with relatively long lower legs. All heels really do is essentially lengthen the lower leg. So if you have relatively long lower legs and can squat deep without your heels leaving the floor...great! 

Otherwise get shoes with a heel that lets you do that. 

I have Risto shoes and I added a 3/4" heel block to them to make the overall heel even higher. My squats have never felt better. My knees DON'T extend way over my toes when I wear these heels. I feel nice, solid and secure in my squat with my high heels. 

A lower heel just means my heels will come up slightly when I go deep in the squat. How much depends on how low the heel is. 

I don't get why people recommend a heel but stop short of recommending enough heel. How much heel is going to vary with the lifter. It's definitely a one-size-fits-all deal. I'm not built to squat. I can't low bar and I need a lot of heel. If you're reading this, you probably are better proportioned to squat, can let the bar ride low and need little or no heel. I'm just asking you to give it some thought. 

Freedom: Another Word For Nothing Left To Sell

Six years ago I joyously broke into the world of libertarian financial publishing. A couple months ago I barely escaped with my life. I'm still breathing, but slowly rebuilding my bank account and piecing back together my soul. I got paid to write and to explore the ideas that I loved...and to travel!...but I also had to sell some ideas that cost me some sleep.

At my first writing job, I used flowery prose about liberty and free exchange to get people to click on links. On average I would append every 500 words with a linked request to "click here to learn more." These links led to odious "long copy" designed to capture the attention of people too old for the internet to have taught them that the investment world is hopelessly jiggered and rigged against them by central banking and corporatism. But I got paid not to tell them that they don't need fancy schemes to protect and grow their wealth. Gold, silver, Bitcoin. There. That would have saved them at least $30 in annual subscription fees to any number of libertarian-smelling financial newsletters.

My next gig had me trump up expatriation as the answer to the domestic oppression of the US. The answer to life in the growing police state of the NSA and Doctor Obama: countries where the governments cause even more wealth abortions with regulations and taxes and where the young people are even more in love with socialism. I was even freer to talk about freedom than in my last gig (where freedom was the fig leave covering up the sleazy 70's era used-car salesmanship)...but I was a lot less free regarding my choices when it came to my lifestyle and where to live it. It generates a lot of dissonance when one sells the idea of expatriation but really doesn't want to do it. And company management never let me forget it.

But hey, even if things really are better for Anglo-Americans (that includes Canada...except for that nasty, little, tribal socialist Francophone portion to the east) in Latin America, it takes more than a little reptilian disregard of other human beings to allow one to enjoy greater freedom in the midst of real estate where the local government beats out the US government in the category of pillaging its human livestock.

I was accused by the company top brass of having the plantation mentality one might expect of a descendant of African chattel slaves...because I was so uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the comforts of the master I knew for a frightening freedom elsewhere. But I think what I was merely exhibiting was the desire of a normally functioning human brain for the familiar. Still I tried living in other countries in order to toe the company line. At that point I was no stranger to living in new places; I'd spent the previous two years bouncing around the US and trying different cities on for size. But there is a different and discomfiting tension to living in regions with a different language and culture and whose inhabitants are various degrees of Mestizo instead of the Irish, English, and German mutthood to which even a US-based negro gets accustomed.

It has always amazed me just how eager white folks are to "go native". White people across the political spectrum seem to love visiting -- and even living in -- poor places full of brown people and bereft of plumbing. While the average person can't tell because of my newscast anchor accent, I hail from one of those poor places full of brown and black people and have every desire to stay in the First World. Plus, it really just is cooler to be the only white guy in a brown place where you don't speak the language than be the only black guy in a brown place where you don't speak the language. Anyone who doesn't get that is just embarrassingly ignorant of racial dynamics concerning who runs the world and who is considered a bunch of impressively sexually endowed but otherwise incompetent cartoons by the rest of it.

So I fled back to Minneapolis and ground my toes into the Minnesotan soil, determined never to leave. By then, however, my attempts to pretend that I was expatriatable had led to some decisions that wrecked my life in the Twin Cities. I'd given up the little house that I'd hope to die in and all my possessions had been sold off for pennies on the dollar. I had nothing and my sweet deal on a sweet little place to live was no more.

I was unable to enjoy being back in the Midwestern urban comfort for which I'd longed. I was angry as ever at a planet still so thoroughly infected by state violence and the diseased mind virus that kept people believing in it. But I was almost equally disillusioned with the liberty "movement" and the gimmickry of its most visible media. And I was broke.

It took some months to find a new balance. I had to learn to love what was good in my state-afflicted life again. And to appreciate the good in the liberty movement. Not getting paid to write anymore was the best possible thing for me. I was able to distill both internally and publicly what was good in the movement and what works. The non-aggression principle, property rights, gold and Bitcoin. The latter two are ways to protect your wealth from the predation of the state and its violent monopoly on the money that represents what you've earned. The first two are the guiding principles that simplify economics and whose applications eliminate both poverty and war. I saved the best for last: peaceful parenting.

Peaceful parenting is the only way to inoculate coming generations from the mind virus of statism. This simple idea will change the world. We won't change it with political action. Moving to hearts of darkness and hiding money in foreign accounts is expensive and often uncomfortable rear guard action. Writing articles and books will not change a single heart steeped in the religion of statism. The best (by far) that we can do is to live boldly right where we are. And as the bad ideas die with the old lost brains that cling to them, we make sure that those who replace them have better ideas. We teach them negotiation instead of coercion before they can form complete sentences. We nurture the natural born philosophers in each new, tiny human to which we have access.

And we take advantage of the market in the form of the internet lowering the cost on all the other stuff like non-inflationary currency. No need to go live in a slightly different fascistic socialist state with a different language and less infrastructure. There is nowhere to flee. And that's the good news. Live boldly where you are. Ignore the state where you can. Pay the bastards off when you have to. And teach the newest replacement components of our species how to speak the language of voluntary transaction.

May you, too, find peace right where you are. And may you never have to "click here to find out more" again.

Regards,
Gary Gibson