29 May Dan Dalenberg | Week 14 | Bench

Training for the XPC/RPS Atlantic City meet on August 29^th. I will be lifting raw with wraps at 242.

Pretty good bench session. We had a good atmosphere in the gym. My main training partner is a couple weeks out from a meet and he was taking some heavier weights. Intensity was up and our pace was fast.

Bench- 80% x 2 x 2

Work up to 405 for 2 doubles. Moved pretty good. I’m happy with where I am technically. I have a really bad habit of lowering weights really slow when it gets on the heavier side, but with a little bit of cuing I avoided that.

Close Grip- 4 x 8

315 for all 4 sets. My best benches have come from times when I pushed my close grip and incline work but has always been an issue keeping my elbows healthy. Hopefully I can stay on the right side of that.

Finished with a bunch of pressdowns and dumbbell rowing.

A rant on our new bench

Previously I had a Boss Bench from Dynabody that was being loaned to me. The guy that owned needed it back since his business at his gym has picked up a ton, so we decided to just buy our own Boss bench.

I always really liked the pad that was on the old one so we wanted to stick with the same one. The website still advertised the gripper pad so I thought we would be getting the same thing.

We didn’t. The pad on this bench FUCKING SUCKS. It is awful. The covering is slick and you slide all over it. I can’t setup with any kind of arch on the damn thing and as soon as you try to get some leg drive you just slide up the bench. Temporary solution is using that shelf liner gripper material, which works ok. The pad also wasn’t assembled correctly. All of the lag screws were loose and one of them was completely stripped. So that was fun to fix. We have an EliteFTS competition gripper pad on the way.

My recommendation- Don’t buy one of these. The quality isn’t what I would have expected and the pad is hardly better than a regular commercial gym bench.

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Daniel Dalenberg

Dan Dalenberg is a pro level raw and equipped powerlifter with elite totals in the 220, 242 and 275 class. Best official raw meet lifts include an 804 squat, 507 bench press, 715 dead lift and 2006 total. Best equipped lifts include an 950 squat, 715 bench, 735 deadlift and 2400 total at 242. Dan has been training under Brian's guidance using the 10/20/Life methodology since late 2010.

Latest posts by Daniel Dalenberg (see all)

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