Critical Bench is the definitive source for all things Bench Press. They recently did an interview with Dave Delisle, the man behind Bench Press Blueprint.

Here's the link:

Critical Bench Interview with Dave Delisle

He's a bench press master – listen to him!

Miss any one of these 3 components and your bench press is doomed. You will fail. Right technique? Not good enough if your training or mental preparation is lacking.

You surely get the picture.

I'm here to tell you today that you can totally nail the physical aspect today. Or at least start down the right path.

Training is the simple part. It's not easy, but it is certainly not complicated.

There are 4 things you have to do from a physical standpoint (nutrition notwithstanding):

1. Get brutally strong
2. Build strength through your natural sticking point (and everybody's got one)
3. Improve your lockout power, which — surprisingly — is vitally important on a lift that takes less than 5 seconds to complete
4. Improve your burst power

Each of these components requires specific training. Brute force is simple to achieve – lift more and more. While you don't need to perform MAX singles, you do need to get very good at triples and sometimes doubles. High intensity is the name of the game here: Use forced reps, negatives, rest-pause, and partials.

To build strength in your sticking point range, you have to train for it. Essentially, you do partial reps using boards.

Improving lockout power and endurance requires lifting in the lockout range. A lot of elite lifters in the bench press use chains, which I wholly recommend. Using chains makes the bench press a superior progressive resistance exercise. You can use bands, too. The idea is that the weight get "heavier" near lockout.

Finally, you have to work on your power, which is defined as force over time – increase the weight over the same time period or reduce the time it takes to do a lift with the same weight – either way, your power output has climbed. Try to explosively press the barbell up as quickly as possible. You obviously need to perform more reps with less weight to build this sort of explosive power, but it's essential to building a big bench press.

If you want to learn more, check out Bench Press Blueprint where Dave Delisle and I show you exactly what Dave does with his training (the physical aspect of ripping off a great bench) that's allowed him to improve his bench from a little over 300 pounds to well over 500 pounds in the span of less than one year.