The Slow Lifts: Bench Press, by Mark Rippetoe - Jun 06 CFJ

The longer I stay in this business, the less fond I become of the bench press. And it’s not the fault of the exercise itself, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if it’s incorporated correctly into the program.
It’s the injured shoulders, the big pecs and little legs, the $400 six-layer denim/moly-steel shirts, the 18-year-old football players who can “do 500,” the spotters with traps more fatigued than the bencher’s pecs.
But mainly, it’s the noise.

Not at my gym, of course. The vast majority of my members learned a while back that the best way to keep their shoulders healthy was to press and bench press in equal doses, quietly. But there are other gyms in which the bench press is the only upper-body lift done and is the main trapezius exercise for spotters, since deadlifting is pretty scarce in these places. And the yelling just annoys me all out of proportion to how much it should. I get really tired of spotters trying to sound like Macho Man Randy Savage, with their hands on the bar “spotting” every rep.

At CrossFit Wichita Falls/WFAC, spotters don’t touch the bar unless it’s going back down or has been stuck for long enough to get them worried. We all squat and pull, so our legs are generally in proportion. Just now there are no competitive powerlifters here, so most of the members don’t even know what a bench shirt is. (Quite honestly, if a bunch of them starting spending money on bench shirts, I’d probably feel compelled to raise my dues.) Here, benching is just another exercise, not the absolute measure of personal worth it is in some circles, and the noise level is commensurate with this more balanced, peaceful, logical worldview.

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