Why bench with chains

Shorten the lead chain or fold the heavy chains so that they never touch the floor, even at the bottom of your rep. You can wad or ball the chains up if you like. The longer your lead chain and the more wadded your heavy chain, the more shake and instability you will experience while performing a rep. Similar to the bamboo bar for bench pressing and overhead pressing, or the way a cambered bar pulls a squat forward, this variation forces a lifter to fight against the free-swinging chains to maintain stability throughout the lift.

Note that this setup should NOT be used with heavy weights. Add the clanging of chains to the banging of heavy weight, and it can be unpleasant for others around you. Depending on your gym, its culture and environment, that can be an obstacle to effectively training.

Check out my other top rated bench press variations that will help you improve your strength and technique.

Not everybody can afford to buy their own or have access to a gym that offers them as an option. In my early years of training powerlifting, I had to adjust my program to avoid using chains or drive an extra hour to go to a gym that had them. This is my favorite thing to see on social media — people posting about squatting or benching or deadlifting lbs when they add up the chain weight to the bar and the plates.

Some will even throw in elastic band tension on top of it to get an even bigger number. It means you squatted with lbs of chains. There are lots of ways to overload, work through sticking points, and train stability. You can also hurt yourself, which we can all agree is far worse. Learning a new training style or configuration takes time and expertise. Take the time to work with someone to help you get it right before you try to do too much with chains.

Rogue offers a few different kits depending on what you are looking for. You can get pairs with 10lb lengths of chain, 15lb lengths of chain, or you can get single lengths of chain to expand your set.

For smaller lifters or beginners, adding 10lbs to each side of a barbell can add plenty of progressive resistance to help you break through a plateau or a sticking point. Resistance bands and reverse resistance bands are commonly used in the same lifting programs to get similar outcomes, but with added variation. Take a look at my article on Banded Deadlifts , which offers a guide on how to replace chains with bands.

Resistance bands are a great way to get similar effects of training with chains for less money, and easier to bring to and from the gym. When I do banded bench press, I use the 0. Every lifter runs into obstacles while trying to get stronger. Some of the most common ones are hitting a plateau in the amount of weight we can move, and discovering a sticking point in our lift. In both scenarios, incorporating chains is a fantastic solution.

When used properly, chains allow lifters to acclimate to heavier weights, target weak points of their lifts with deferred load, and increase the speed and power that accompanies their strength. Adam Gardner is a proud resident of Utah, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

For the past three years, he and his wife, Merrili, have coached beginning lifters to learn the fundamentals of powerlifting and compete in their first powerlifting competitions.

To establish the value and benefit of chains, we have to define the strength curve. By adding accommodating resistance in the form of chains, we can match the strength curve and allow maximal loading at every point of the range of motion. When Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell first popularised chains, his main intention was to use them to improve bar speed.

The chains will force you to lift hard and fast, in order to complete the rep. For speed training, performing sets of reps on variations of the squat, bench and deadlift works best.

If we look at the deadlift, for example, the most vulnerable position for your lower back is the bottom. By adding chains, we can now minimise low back stress. This applies to the shoulders at the bottom of the bench press, and the hips and knees in the bottom of the squat, too.

A lesser-known application for chains is in isolation exercises such as flyes and lateral raises, where they can be used to intensify the peak contractions.

Chain Flyes : By using chains, you reap the benefits of both the dumbbell and cable fly versions, without any of the negatives. Have you looked at the triceps of powerlifters and strongman competitors recently? They are plenty massive, and very few of those guys waste their time on pressdowns.

Or look at gymnasts—they have massive triceps developed from many reps of dips and pressing motions. Yet, like the very demanding squats and chins, dips rarely make it into other fitness magazines—you know, the ones where the model always purses his lips for the picture.

Too bad, because electromyography studies clearly show that dips activate the greatest amount of motor units in the triceps brachii. To start the exercise, hold the handle bar and boost yourself until you are stabilized at arm's length over the handles, then lower your body as far as possible in between the bars; during this eccentric portion of this exercise you want to lower your body until your biceps make contact with your forearms—your triceps must get fully stretched.

Once you reach the bottom position, press yourself back up by extending the elbows; try to stay as upright as possible throughout the range of motion. Don't lean too far forward because this will increase the recruitment of the pectoralis muscles. If you can't lower yourself under control until the biceps make contact with the forearms, go back to collecting stamps—or you can perform the decline close-grip bench press until your elbow extension strength is sufficient. Doing an incomplete range in triceps dips is a complete waste of your time.

And please do not go for the El Dweebo version, where you put your feet on a bench in front of you and put your hands behind you. That exercise, along with Smith machine pressing exercises, is one of the major causes of shoulder impingement syndromes in the bodybuilding community. At first your body weight will probably suffice as the sole means of resistance.

I have always had the policy of "buy once, and for life. Tree-climbing belts are the best choice, and they are designed to take the stress off the hips. If you have access to the better V-shaped dipping bars, use as narrow a grip as possible, without compromising shoulder integrity, of course. And please, do not cheat yourself by doing chopped reps by not going all the way down, and by coming up only three-quarters of the way.