New research: Bench pressing with the feet up causes greater chest activation

[servant10]

@dawn16 Depends on your goals. If your benching purely for strength gains, then yes it's a whole body exercise.

I personally train with high TuT for all my lifts, including bench. Lighter load but more chest growth and I still add weight and/or reps to it every workout while keeping that time under tension.

 

[kidd101]

@dawn16 Exactly. Most lifts are if done right.

 

[niecey85]

@great_depression Bench pressing with your legs up is terrible for both your spine (no arch = more intervertebral disc compression, aggravated by a tendency to crunch when pushing the weight up becomes difficult, and beyond that because maintaining a "neutral" position is one impossible to determine and two very hard to consciously maintain, it's easier to have a bias to some direction, also jiggling due to instability) and your shoulders (no scapular retraction/depression); and if you were to perform scapular retraction while having your feet up you would end up in a position where there's a high degree of flexion in a point in your lumbar spine (bad) and a high degree of hyperextension in another point in your thoracic spine (bad but you can argue one way or the other). I wouldn't bench with the legs up even if the study said it would give me 90% more gains.

You can probably get the same degree of activation (or more) with dips if you want the extra stimulus.

 

[barney1]

@great_depression buuut buuut the big bros at my chain gym made fun of me for doing this surely they knew better...../s

 

[lauranitu1]

@great_depression It's funny how "bro science" is becoming "science training "