Best Reps for Bench Press

It’s a very common question I get asked all the time in the gym, via email and on the forums. “Can you give me some tips for increasing my bench press?” You see the bench press is often used to measure a guy’s strength. The heavier your bench, the stronger you are right? Wrong. Now anyone who’s knows anything about lifting weights and body strength knows that that this is absolutely not true. However, as far as upper body exercises are concerned it’s probably the best exercise to measure upper body strength.

The standard understanding for how many reps are needed to build muscle is best grasped when examining the boundaries set for the different priorities that different rep ranges are said to be geared towards. Erm, yeah…in other words, let’s look at this in numbers:

Strength = 1-5 reps

Building Muscle (hypertrophy) – 8-12 reps

Endurance = 15+ reps

In the tradition of Arnold Schwarzenegger, most people follow high volume bodybuilding routines that look something like this:

Bench press - 4-5 sets 8-12 reps
Incline press - 4-5 sets 8-12 reps
Dumbbell flyes - 4-5 sets 8-12 reps
Cable crossover - 4-5 sets 8-12 reps.


For Bench Press you can try to do:

Do about 3 sets of 5 reps for your working sets. Don't forget to include warm up sets as well, something like this

12 reps - empty bar
8 reps - light weight
6 reps - moderate weight
3 reps - medium/heavy weight
1 rep - heavy (make this about 10lbs under your working sets)

3 sets of 5 reps

Try to increase the weight for your working sets by 5lbs each week.