Another good day of benching in the books. As soon as the Arnold is over I will have to start looking for a full power meet to train for. My bench has been feeling good and moving up. My current PR is 430 and that has been over a year ago. My last meet I missed 425 on my second because I got a little lazy with it and came back and hit it on my 3rd attempt pretty easily, the meet before that I missed 440 on my 3rd attempt due to a back cramp. Long story short, I'd love to hit 450 in my next full power meet.
To mix it up a little today I decided to hit close grip bench and pause every rep. Typically, I pause the first rep of each set and touch and go every other rep.
Warmup:50 light triceps pushdowns, 50 light cable face pulls
Bar x 20, 135 x 10, 185 x 10, 225 x 10.
On my working sets I try to keep my pauses all longer than a competition pause would be and be explosive off my chest.
275x3
315x3
365x3
405x1 PR - Wasn't easy but probably not a true 1 rep max. Plus with the longer pause I was pretty happy with it.
To finish it off I hit 100 cable triceps push downs and 100 cable face pulls, both relatively heavy in as few sets as possible. I don't know exactly how many sets it ended up being, by the end of it I had to hit a couple sets of 5 of each to finish it off.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow. It should be a big day to see where my deadlift is at.