3 reasons why bench pressES are better than push-ups!

Last week's segment did generate some really good discussion on my YouTube channel, and I'm hoping we can get that going again this week, but it also created a pretty good bit of confusion and misinterpretation along with it. Many people agreed with my points, some people disagreed with them, but a lot of people just took away the wrong message altogether. So now allow me to drop a nuclear bomb on top of all that confusion so that you guys just don't know what the hell is going on anymore....are you ready for it?  

THE BENCH PRESS IS A BETTER EXERCISE THAN THE THE PUSH-UP.

...or maybe I do just have dementia.

Reason #1: Not Limited By Core Strength

When you perform a push-up you're essentially in a plank position the whole time, which means that your abs have to be strong and braced tightly for the entire set otherwise your hips are going to start to sag down to the floor and you're going to lose position, and ultimately you're going to have stop the set because you're shifting the load off your upper body and therefore losing the training effect. But also because moving through positions of hyperextension like that under load, repeatedly, or for long periods of time is not really an ideal position for your lower back to be in either. And if you're doing weighted push-ups then the effect here simply becomes magnified. So basically what all this means is that the core: the abs, the hips, the lats - pretty much everything that comprises your torso - is potentially the limiting factor during push-up performance.

So during a properly executed bench press workout there is almost NO CHANCE that you won't be able to achieve high levels of tension and fatigue in the aforementioned upper body pressing muscles. This means that over time you'll be able to strengthen and hypertrophy those muscles to a greater degree because there is no other weak link present in the chain hindering your ability to sufficiently tax them because those weak links have been eliminated from the equation by lying down to push instead of pushing your body back up.

Reason #2: The Shoulder Blades are Pinned and Stable

When you perform a bench press you're able to pin your shoulder blades onto the bench in a retracted and immovable position. This creates a solid and stable base to press from. Contrast this with a push-up where the shoulder blades are flapping around like a limp dick in the wind and are able to move any which way while you press. The scapulae can retract, yes, but it can also protract and even potentially elevate or depress, as well as cause rotational aberrations in the movement pattern. These movement inefficiencies dampen force production which reduces the training effect on the prime movers - the pecs, delts, and triceps.

Reason #3: More Potent Training Stimulus

The final reason to bench press instead of wasting your time with push-ups has to do the intensity of the training stimulus itself. When you perform push-ups, especially if you have high levels of relative strength to being with, it's just too easy to rack up rep after rep after rep and never really accumulate sufficient amounts of fatigue in the upper body pressing musculature or achieve an adequate training effect for the prime movers. The exercise simply lends itself to higher rep performance, even when done in a weighted fashion. That's just the case with certain exercises - that's just the nature of them - that they lend themselves much better to rep performance rather than to going very heavy. For me the Romanian deadlift vs the conventional deadlift automatically comes to mind as another example. It's simply not feasible to max out an RDL. The exercise doesn't work well for it and the intended training effect is lost when you try to do that and the best results are had when sets of 6-8 or 8-10 reps per set are used. Whereas with the conventional deadlift you can basically go as heavy as you can go and still make good progress with it. The exercise simply lends itself to the performance of heavy work and maximal work, as well light and medium work, and the intended training effect can be optimally achieved across all rep ranges.

Instead one can rely on neural factors to achieve the training effect or even accumulating large volumes of total time under tension spread across many small sets performed in a short period of time, but using heavier weights than the push-up would allow because you aren't dependent on that intra-set muscular fatigue. Basically with the bench press you can make damn good progress using singles, doubles, triples, 4's, 5's, 6's, or even up to 10 reps per set, and maybe even more than that! Whereas, with the push-up you really shouldn't bother loading up it to a point where you can't hit at least 8 reps in a set. The benefits just aren't really there beyond that because the exercise is not suited for those types of performances.

And the reasons for this phenomenon basically hearken back to the two other factors that make the bench press superior that I've already discussed in this video:  the bench press provides a stronger more stable base to press from along with no weak links or energy leaks holding back the strength of the chain, which leads to better force production from the prime movers, which simply leads to more effective reps on a rep per rep basis.  As well, because of all that you also end up with more options in terms of effective set/rep/and loading schemes to train the bench press than you do for the push-up - plus you don't have to spend hours upon hours doing push-ups every day - but those are just nice little bonus cherries on top of an already frosted cake. All that to say, score another point for the bench press. It's simply a superior exercise for upper body strength and hypertrophy as compared to the push-up, especially when dissected on a rep for rep basis.

Conclusion

If you watched last week's video then you may have noticed something funny going on by now. Basically, everything that makes the push-up a BETTER EXERCISE than the bench press can also be flipped on it's head, viewed from another vantage point, and be made to show that the bench press is a better exercise than the push-up. Last week you had a lot of people thinking I was creating some kind of silly, mutually exclusive scenario. Inferring from my video that I was suggesting that you should JUST do push-ups and forgo bench pressing altogether, BUT that really wasn't the point of the video at all. Instead the whole point was to highlight the unique benefits of the push-up - benefits that CAN'T be had while bench pressing - reasons to do your push-ups regardless of how good of a bencher you are, and to highlight the OVERALL effectiveness of that lesser utilized but just as valuable exercise. The bench press doesn't really need to be highlighted because everybody already fucking does it anyway, regardless of whether or not I talk about how great it is. That's just gym bro culture, especially with powerlifting becoming more and more mainstream by the day.

On the other hand, in the context of maximal upper body strength or maximal upper body hypertrophy or maximizing powerlifting performance...then yeah, the bench press should be placed into a position of higher value and the push-up can be used as a secondary or accessory movement to eek out those extra gains, help keep the shoulders healthy, increase the upper body work capacity, or whatever.

But of course there are benefits to be had from the bench press that you can't get from push-ups. It's the most isolated non-isolation way to hammer the pressing muscles of the upper body. There are no limits on the ability of the prime movers to produce force except for their absolute ability to produce force. Of course there is value in that! It doesn't really need to be said anymore. But I was never suggesting that you eliminate the bench press altogether, especially if you enjoy doing it and have seen good results from doing it. I was merely offering you a similar alternative - an exercise with similar overall benefits, as well as its own unique set of benefits that the bench press doesn't offer. If you can't bench press right now because of COVID, then push-ups can be made to be a damn good stand in for the time being. But the best long term results will be seen either by implementing both exercises concurrently or by rotating through variations in a properly periodized training program. Both exercises have value, both exercises have their own respective value, and BOTH exercises should be utilized for the unique benefits that each of them confers.

So I hope that clears up the confusion that I created last week!