Casey Williams, a 540-pound raw bench presser and incredible full-power competitor, recently traveled to the elitefts S4 Compound for some hands-on bench troubleshooting with Dave Tate and Matt Smith. While they were training, we mic'd up the coaches and started some cameras. In Casey's own words, here's what led to the coaching session that Friday:

The problem going into last weekend: I was losing the leg drive that I previously had gotten so much better with.

I told Dave that I felt like this was the problem, so I showed him a couple videos to which he agreed that's what it looked like. So on Friday after shooting the other bench videos, I did some 'speed' work and ended up working up to about four plates for singles.

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Casey goes on, in his log post, to explain each of the corrections that Dave made to sort out these issues. Each of these adjustments in covered in the video, which shows their entire training session.

Here, directly from Dave, are the major points they covered for improving Casey's bench and helping him move closer to 600 pounds:

Some take-aways: first, read Casey bullet points at the end of this article. They are critical to getting stronger. I also want to point out that I knew going into this it was going to be hard to find the issue. He already knows his muscular weakness and I knew this had to be technical. The problem was from the videos I saw, it was really hard to see what was going on and I knew he wouldn't need a total overhaul. Finding the correction to a technical flaw for an advanced lifter is a bitch (but I do love it more than all other aspects). Seeing the flaw is easy — fixing it is another story. I asked Matt Smith to help with this, as another set of eyes reduces correction time significantly. Matt, aside from being one of the best SHW of all time, trained at Westside for 14-15 years with many of those years overlapping when I was there. It was drilled into our heads how to find these issues with those we trained with. Louie gets a lot of credit for the lifters he's created but not enough for the coaches he created. Matt used to help me with the very early seminars so I knew he would be a huge asset with this. The point of all this is that these corrections are very specific to the lifter. I could very well tell another lifter to breath into their chest and it screw their bench all up. This is what was needed to unfuck Casey's bench. 

You can find Casey's full write-up in his training log.

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