We’re going to talk about bench press tips. These are three quick tips that Starting Strength coach Pete Troupos brings us. He thinks they might help out your bench press. Hopefully, you find them useful.

The first tip is going to be about grip and gripping the out of the bar. The harder you grab the bar, the more likely you are to be able to control your wrists and elbows and get them to do what you want them to in the bench press. It also works for the press as well, but taking a deliberate grip and squeezing the bar tightly is going to help you manipulate the bar and your joints in a way that you want. So, give it a try.

The second tip is going to be about the descent in the bench press. A lot of people treat the descent as a controlled drop to their chest. And what you’ll find is that without any deliberate thought about the descent in the bench press, you end up being inconsistent with that touch point. We want a nice consistent touch point so that we can have a nice consistent bar path. So thinking about the descent in the bench press, think about it as a row, like you’re rowing the bar to your chest. You’re deliberately pulling the bar down to the touch point where you want to touch so that you can keep the bar in the groove and have a more consistent bar path.

The third tip we want to address is the arch and the bench, but thinking about this a little differently. We know we want an arch. A lot of people think about the arch going from the shoulders on the top of the bench to the butt down. But what we want you to do is think about the arch actually going from the shoulders on the bench to their feet on the floor. And by thinking of those as the arch with your butt just happening to touch, you will automatically start to engage your legs and thereby reinforcing the back arch that we want to see and giving yourself a more solid platform with which to bench off of.

Hopefully you have found some, if not all of those things useful. Give them a try.

* If you don´t know how to do the bench press by the Starting Strength methodology, click here. You’ll find the information in the section for this lift in that article.

Bibliographic references:

• Starting Strength. (2025). Simple Bench Press Tips [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/enTxnZFS5Mo?si=Tn0kMutlfoXo8B6m