Should i do incline bench before flat bench

Your chest muscles should be fully activated, and your arms shouldn't be doing a bulk of the movement. The flat barbell bench press also utilizes the anterior deltoids and triceps. When performed correctly, the lats, lower back, and glutes are also firmly tensed. Your arms should be parallel to the barbell and your hands wider than shoulder-width apart. Lock your shoulders back and squeeze your shoulder blades together.

While performing a rep, squeeze your chest together. The bar should touch just below your nipples. Focus less on the weight going up and more on the curving motion from pectoral to elbow. Keep your entire body controlled and stable throughout the movement. Use a lighter weight if you're new to this exercise, as you will need to keep your overbearing shoulders and triceps at bay.

When performing the flat bench press , bodybuilders tend to lift with the bar slightly closer to their neck than a powerlifter to stimulate more muscle growth, whereas a powerlifter lifts to move more weight via form.

Doing this under heavy weight is a risk to your shoulders and elbows, especially the rotator cuff muscles. The incline bench press is performed like the flat bench press but on an angle. For beginners, the incline barbell bench press is an easier exercise form-wise, especially with a wider grip.

The incline bench press activates as much of the upper-chest muscle as the flat bench press [ 1 ]. The outer pectoralis major also gets a great workout along with the front deltoids. The incline bench press engages the shoulders, triceps , and core stabilizing muscles as well. The only difference is the incline barbell bench press activates less of the middle and lower chest , which allows you to feel your upper chest more while performing the exercise.

The incline barbell bench press is best used to increase hypertrophy in the upper pectoralis major the part that connects to your collarbone.

However, you will need to focus to isolate the upper pecs. You might have good genetics, be tough enough and disciplined enough to train hard Awesome, thanks for the sound advice everyone. I agree with the statement about it being hard to get away from flat bench press.

I think that I've believed it for so long that it's hard to let go. Almost like a screaming kid at the store you pretty much have to wrench me away from that exercise, lol.

I think though that I'm going to start with incline from now on. What I think I'm going to do after reading up on this some more around the internet is a type of A-B routine that switches every two weeks.

Let me know what you guys think and maybe what kind of rep scheme you follow. Seems like this thread might be sort of eye opening for more than just myself. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength".

Leave the ego at the door and get on the incline straight away. Hell, I'll usually do incline press then flys before even thinking about flat. I ain't saying flat doesn't have it's place, but the upper chest gets so damn neglected and it is what will make you fill out right.

Ain't nothing like having that huge ass rock ledge and your shirt draping off you like it's a curtain. Incline, it is your friend. Originally Posted by BigBlueBear. If I do incline, it is on a total different day than flat bench. I do my flat bench with my triceps. I do incline on a pec day. However, there are some cons to performing an incline chest press. Because the incline chest press puts more stress on your upper pec, it develops this muscle group more, while the flat bench tends to build mass over the entire pec.

You never want to overtrain your muscles, which can happen if you train the same muscle group two days in a row. Overusing any muscle can lead to injuries. As mentioned, the pectoralis major is comprised of the upper and lower pec. When flat benching, both heads are stressed evenly, which makes this exercise best for overall pec development.

The flat bench press is a much more natural fluid movement, compared to your everyday activities. However, just like the incline chest press, there are some cons. Also, the angle of the flat bench press puts the pec tendons in a vulnerable position. Most shoulder injuries and overuse injuries can be stemmed from flat benching. Many torn pecs in bodybuilding have been the result of heavy flat bench presses. As a personal trainer, I see shoulder injuries among men as the most common injuries.

Common mistakes are:. I am training for strength and fat loss. I lift as heavy as I can with continuous progressive overload. I know I asked a bunch of questions so thoughtful partial answers are cool. Thanks in advance! The program you are following is a bodybuilding-style program, in that it splits workouts into different body parts so you have an arms day, a leg day, a back day, etc and uses a large number of different exercises for each body part, with sets in the rep range.

This is in contrast to powerlifting or general strength training programs, which are likely to involve a fewer number of different exercises, but with each exercise chosen to involve a greater number of muscles, and performed in the rep range. There likely isn't any strong reason for doing incline press before bench press, except that the incline is the harder of the two, and the idea is probably that if you have to do one of them while fatigued, it should be the one where you'd use heavier weights, in order to reduce the difference in weight between the two exercises.

It's perhaps better to do a 30kg incline press and then a 40kg bench press, rather than a 45kg bench press and then a 25kg incline press. There's also a good reason for always doing your exercises in the same order: It simplifies programming. If the muscles used by two different exercises overlap and you were to swap the exercise order from workout to workout, then the weights you would be lifting for each would increase or decrease depending on the order that you perform them in, which makes tracking your progress much more difficult.

If last week you did a 30kg incline press and then a 40kg bench press, and this week you decide to bench first, how do you know what weight to use? You can't just use an increment from last week's weights, because last week you were incline pressing while fresh, and benching while fatigued, and now its the opposite.

As for whether there's a better arrangement than the above, then yes, a strength training program example would likely benefit you much more than a bodybuilding-style program if your goal is to gain strength and lose fat, rather than maximise muscle size. Actually, even if your goal was to maximise muscle size for bodybuilding purposes, you'd be far better off doing a general strength training program for at least the first 6 months of your training in order to get a decent strength base, and only after that move to a more specialised, bodybuilding specific program.

The reason for this is that bodybuilding programs are designed to add muscle to people who are already strong and for whom adding additional muscle is difficult. Whereas when you're a novice lifter, adding muscle is easy and the complications of a bodybuilding program super long workouts with huge numbers of different exercises, body part splits are likely to only make it more difficult for you. I would question any program that sets any of this in stone. In the big picture, the order here is a tiny detail.

Which exercise you do first will have no effect on your goal of burning fat and gaining strength. Now, here's the kicker: If you want to reap all the benefits, go for variation. Don't stick to always doing exercise A before exercise B. You should vary this. The real goal should be to get the variation, so your progress doesn't plateau because of lack of new challenges. You're getting caught up in details.

I doubt even the creator of the program can tell you why the dumbbell press is between two barbell presses. Sure, you should do all of them, but you should also do a large number of other pressing exercises and variations and orders. You'll find them. But in the grand scheme of things, every exercise is a detail. It's the ensemble of a hundred different exercises that give you the progress you need.