

Written by Eric Lilliebridge

Benching has always been the harder lift for me to make gains on out of the 3 main power lifts. I’ve tried changing up my grips for multiple training cycles, I’ve tried out bands before and a lot of different accessory work to try and make my bench go up and get stronger. But over the past couple of years there’s only been one accessory lift that’s actually helped my bench out a lot and has helped give me noticeable gains, and for me that has been doing board work to overload on my heavy days. I mainly only do board work when I’m training and prepping for a competition because that’s the only time I ever really push my bench the hardest is when training for a meet.

The way I incorporate board work into my training is I simply just do them at the very end of my heavy bench workout. On my heavy days for meet training I always do 3 sets of a single pauses just like you would do in a meet, and I pyramid up each heavy workout in weight on each one of the sets until the last couple weeks before the meet. Right after I get done doing my paused singles, I do two sets of board work. For the first couple heavy workouts when I start my training cycle, I’ll do the first set of board work to a 1 board and the 2nd set to a 2 board. Then the last couple workouts I’ll change it up a little and start doing my first set of board work to a 2 board and the last set of board work to a 3 board to really focus on getting my lock out strong and overloading with heavier weight than I can do full range.

Check out this video of Eric working up to 550×1 in the gym and then doing some board presses after…