kylefields10’s BodyBlog

First off I want to explain what a big accomplishment this is for me.  I have been working out for almost eleven years.  Over the course of those eleven years, the one body part that I have had the most difficulty training has been my chest.  It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter what program or rep scheme i did, I could never increase my bench press.  Even through college, my bench was stuck at about 245 for a one rep max.

During almost all the years I’ve been lifting, I have been overtraining.  I always played football and it is a punishing sport.  In the wieght room, we trained our bodies to respond in a state of complete and utter fatigue.  The training was incredibly tiresome and it destroyed our muscles past the point of catabolism.  Looking back at this training style, it is obvious why I never saw much development in my chest or anywhere else for that matter.

 After football was over, I messed around in the wieght room without much drive or focus, and it wasn’t until this past February that i started a quick, heavy, intense, overload training schedule.  I changed my frequency to one day on, one day off, from 5 on 2 off.  I also changed my priority in chest from flat bench to incline.  I also started doing one arm, dumbell bench press to keep my body from compensating to one side.  Every so often, would do a set of flat BB press but not more than once a month or so.

 Anyway, the main point of this Blog was to say that i finally Benched over 300 pounds.  I have never put more than 265 on the bar before.  I also haven’t performed a max bench in almost a year and a half so I didn’t know how it was going to go.  My first heavy attempt was for 275 and It was surprisingly easy.  I racked it and tried 295 and It felt good so i tried for 315, my muscles had just begun to feel a slight pump and i knew that this would be the best set i could do for that day.  I told my spotter that it would be my last set and i would just do as many reps as i could if i could even do one.  I pulled it off the rack and holy crap, I DID A REP OF 315! I was so excited that I did one rep I almost forgot to keep going.  All said and done I did 3 reps on my own with a little help at the top of my 4th.  I hope I’m not coming off as boasting or bragging because i know it’s not a whole lot, but this is probably the biggest accomplishment I have ever made in the gym.  Now I’m excited to go after 350 lbs hopefully by January 2008.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 8:01 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.