bench press
You want your feet on the ground. I see too many people at my gym forget this part. They’ll have just their toes or the balls of their feet on the ground, but not the whole thing, not the heel. Full, flush contact, feet pulled back as far as they will go. There are some variations in which you might take them off the ground: I’ve seen folks brace them up on the bench itself, even. But for the most part, you want your feet on the ground.
The next part is the shoulders. They’re a bit tricky: it took me a few years until I felt confident in them. You want to pull them together, like you’re holding a pencil between your shoulder blades. It’s easy then to have them hunched too far up into your neck. Our traps (those are the muscles in your upper back that probably hurt right now, go head, let them drop) are so tight from all the phones and screens and desks. After you pull your shoudlers together, you want to pull them down, as though you were tucking the blades into your back pockets. Keep them solid and secure.
Then your back. Paradoxically you don’t want it flush against the bench. You want a little bit of an arch, just enough so that someone could slide their palm between your back and the bench. Not too much though: sometimes I’ll see these kids, they probably have been watching too many powerlifters on YouTube, and they’ll be arched up full like a cat on Halloween. Just a gentle bend, nothing more.
And then you look up and there’s the bar. I’ve been working with barbells for about five years now. It’s longer than many but a pittance to some. I’m not a coach or anything but I am someone who tries to do things with intention. I don’t do anything by halves. If you know me, you know this about me: if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do all of it. And so when I look up at the bar, I take a moment to collect myself and think about what I’ve done and what I’m going to do, the weight that I’m going to move, and I try to give myself over entirely to it, to use all of myself to do it. There is a certain truth, I have found, to the presumption that meatheads don’t have a lot going on between their ears. Which is not to say that lifters are stupid, far from it. But rather than in the moment of moving the weight, you have to clear the bullshit out of your mind, because for the next ten seconds, you’re going to need all of yourself for what you’re about to do.
Hands about shoulder width apart. Rotate your palms inward a bit: they call this “bulldog grip.” Keep the bar in the meat of your palm. Don’t let your wrists drop back, but also don’t keep them totally straight either. You want to stack the bar joint over joint, to stabilize it and protect yourself. And then you push the bar up.
I don’t know if what I’m about to offer as a quote is a real quote. I did a little bit of searching but Google is pretty useless these days, and I just combinations of flattering AI slop and SEO-optimized garbage that was also AI slop. But I used to be a dancer. Not the kind you’re thinking, like I don’t know ballet or tap or anything that could get you a job on a chorus line. I was trained in “movement”: contact improvisation, performance art, things of that nature. But I remember hearing someone, maybe a teacher, say to me once that dance is a conversation is gravity. That’s the quote, that dance is a conversation with gravity. I think it’s true of lifting as well. I think it’s why ten years after I stopped dancing, I found that conversation again under the bar.
Because when you lift a weight, however you’re lifting it, you need to think not only about whatever pushing or pulling you’re doing but also its opposite. You need to think about how gravity is acting on you and how you can counter it with the force of your will. That’s why it’s so important that you keep your feet on the ground. Because while you’re pushing the bar up with your arms, you also need to push down with your feet into the earth. “Leg drive,” they call it. One force (the bar upward) requires another, stabilizing force (feet downward). A muscle never moves a weight alone.
It’s high summer here in Baltimore. The air has a sticky weight to it. I bike to and from the gym now, past old, massive houses. Things are quieter here than I am used to, but I take as an opportunity. For what, I’m not sure yet. I think I need the quiet to find out. I’ll let Harry Hosono have the last word: