Hi folks, welcome back to the Stronger is Better podcast brought to you by Starting Strength Gyms. On the Stronger is Better podcast, we focus on principles and process and how the lessons learned through hard physical effort translate to training, business, and interpersonal relationships. What I'm going to talk about today is one of the topics that people ask me about the most, I think for the last five or six years. In terms of programming, it's probably the most common question I get asked, and I've covered it a bunch of times. Number one, in an article for. startingstrength.com called Intermediate Programming for the Upper Body Lifts, there was a live Q&A session that is on the Starting Strength YouTube channel discussing upper body programming. And then through, various forum posts and Facebook posts and stuff like that. So what I'm going to cover today is sort of an extension of the first episode that I did on advanced programming, where I'll deal specifically with the press. All right, so the programming for the press is actually not complicated. It's not difficult, but people tend to make quite a few mistakes in thinking about the press and thinking about how to program the press and then implementing proper programming for the press as things get more difficult. All right, so I'm going to go through the whole thing. I'll give some updates to the programming templates for the press, and then also some updates to my thinking in terms of how I'll approach, especially things like the heavy day and pin pressing and stuff like that. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into it. First of all, bigger picture in order to have a good discussion about programming the press, let's talk about why the press is important. I think everybody can sort of grasp the idea of how important the squat and the deadlift are. Typically, people. who have gone to the gym are going to be bench pressing. They've had some experience with the bench press. The press or the overhead press or the shoulder press, we just call it the press, is one of the exercises that tends to be unfamiliar to people when they first start. It's very simple. You're just taking the barbell from your shoulder up over your head to a locked out position. There are some considerations there in terms of efficiency and proper positioning. under the bar, bar path, things like that. All in all, it's not that difficult of a lift to perform. It is a difficult lift to perform well, and it's a difficult lift to progress in terms of weight on the bar. The benefits of pressing are that of the barbell upper body lifts that you can do, the press works your entire shoulder girdle, so all of the structures around the topmost part of your torso. In a coordinated fashion, very nicely balanced. And it allows you to, I don't want to say target, but it allows you to work your shoulder joint in a way that's very difficult to do any other way. So the combination of overhead pressing or pressing and deadlifting and possibly chin-ups really does lead to like what you could consider a bomb-proof shoulder joint, like as stable as you can get your shoulder to be. Those three exercises, those three movements are critical to shoulder health and critical to longevity in terms of being able to do things with your arms that you want to do without pain or with as little pain as possible. And also in the context of rehab. So if you have shoulder problems, shoulder issues, then those three exercises, the press, the deadlift, and the chin-up. Okay. Or lat pulldown if you want. can't do chin-ups, those are going to serve as kind of your primary means by which you can restore function and restore strength and possibly reduce or eliminate pain. I've had many instances in my coaching career where I've had people come to me and tell me that they're on the verge of having shoulder surgery because their shoulder's been chronically hurting for months or even years in some instances. And the great thing about people who are in those circumstances who have not trained before is that usually in pretty short order, you can make their shoulders feel way better in. a lot of instances, almost completely eliminating pain or eliminating pain completely just by having them learn how to do the press and progressively loading the press in the program. So it works great. There are misconceptions about overhead work, especially in the strength training context. I have also in my coaching career. I've had many instances where I've had people come to me and say, I've had many instances of people tell me that their doctor, physician, orthopedic surgeon, even in some instances, and physical therapists have told them not to, literally to not ever do anything with their arms over their head. So that's both a direct quote and then also, in most instances, it's an interpretation of potentially what that healthcare provider told the person, right? So maybe it wasn't quite so, now, people have been told that directly, I know that for a fact, but maybe to give the benefit of the doubt, in a lot of instances, maybe there was some nuance or some explanation there in terms of being careful with doing things over your head. But either way, ultimately what you get is people having this fear of overhead work with a load because it'll make their shoulders worse or it'll cause further damage. And. Really. Except for a few specific circumstances, nothing can be further from the truth, okay? And for me as a coach, the best assessment for whether or not somebody can do the press safely is literally just can they put their arms up over their head. So if you can raise your arms up over your head, you can and should be doing the press. Loading it is another matter, but again, most people are going to see a benefit and they're. going to see an improvement with a loaded overhead press very, very quickly. So if something's wrong, if something's not working well in that area, meaning that you are one of the rare people who can't overhead press for whatever reason, you'll know pretty quickly, right? So in other words, you won't see that fairly rapid improvement in pain or movement or any other benefits of the press. So it'll become pretty obvious basically is what I'm saying. Okay. So, um, let's set aside all the pain stuff, all the rehab stuff. Um, and, and assume, you know, you're, you're just mostly a normal person. You can press overhead, you can put your hands up over your head and, uh, let's proceed with a discussion on, on just programming the press in the, in most normal circumstances. You're demanding out of your body that your shoulder joint remains stable as you move a heavy load over your head and not only your shoulder joint, but actually your entire body. So it's the only lift that requires you to move your arms, you know, your elbows, your shoulders through a complete range of motion while supporting the load with your entire body. So what, what ends up happening is that you end up lifting a relatively light load compared to all of the other lifts. Um, but your body is actually doing. A ton of work in order to make that happen. So in terms of like, if you want to think about things that are functional or things that have a direct. correlation to pretty much any other activity that you do, you know, in a bench press, yeah, you can move a whole lot of weight and a bench press is great for just raw strength, uh, from the upper body, but it's, you're laying on a bench and you're supported by the bench, right? So yes, it is going to help. Um, it is going to, it's going to make you have bigger triceps and it's going to develop your chest quite a bit, but the overhead press has, uh, the press has, has more demands in terms of stability and support that are, that are very beneficial. So you need to have both, right? You need to have the, the raw pressing strength that you get from the bench and you need to have the overhead, uh, strength that puts more demand on your body for support through the, uh, through the press. Okay. So, uh, the, the kinetic chain is from your hands. all the way down to your feet. So your entire body is involved in pressing. A heavyweight overhead. And that's one of the reasons it's so difficult. The other reason it's so difficult. is because you're using relatively small muscles to move, to move the load. Uh, and it's also way up over your head. So there's a mechanical problem that needs to be solved by you and your body in moving that load up over your head. That represents a very long lever, right? So the lever is, is your hands down to your feet. And that's why any deviation in the bar path with. the press results in a, uh, results in a, in a, in a failed lift if it's heavy enough, right? So, uh, you can, you can do a heavy press, you can hit a PR in a heavy press and, um, or, or let me say the difference between hitting a PR and a heavy press and not hitting a PR in the heavy press can a lot of times come down to the mechanical efficiency and your ability to maintain a vertical configuration of the bar over your shoulder joint. Uh, so in other words, it, it's. not always a strength problem. Uh, balance, balance and coordination is always an issue with all of the other things that you're doing. So, uh, you can do a heavy press all of the lifts, but things like the dead. lift and the squat are going to be more tolerant to deviations in mechanical efficiency where the press is very, very sensitive to deviations in mechanical efficiency. All right. So that'll bring us into, into some of the points that I'll bring up later on dealing with the press. Okay. Um, one other benefit that I like to talk about, and this is, um, um, this is just based on, on my experience and based on, um, you know, maybe there's a little bit of subjectivity here, but, uh, it's, it's a, um, it's a fun lift to do. It's a, it's a fun lift to master and get good at. And also if for there's aesthetic benefits that you get from pressing that are hard to get from, uh, from any other lift, right? So if you, uh, I, I really think that in terms of looking like you lift, you lift, so looking like you carry muscle and not just looking like, but actually, you know, actually. So looking the way you want to look as somebody who lift weights, looking athletic, looking more capable, I would say that the two lifts that directly contribute most to that situation are the deadlift and the press. All right, so when you look at somebody and you determine that they are strong and that they lift, I think that those two lifts, the deadlift and the press, are the ones that actually contribute the most to the aesthetic benefits of barbell training. All right, everything else kind of is slow. I mean, depending on how good you are at the other lifts and your training background and stuff like that. There's going to be varying degrees of difference in how you look. But I think because of the effect on your traps, the press puts a high demand on your traps because you're supporting it. the load up over your head at the lockout, um, and in the shoulders. And then the deadlift has this, has a similar effect with just a much higher load. Right. So, um, so yeah, for you guys that, that want to look big and jacked, heavy presses, heavy deadlifts are the way to go. Um, okay. So let's talk about the stress situation. All right. And this is, this is where people are the most likely to screw things up. All right. So when you start a barbell program, when you start starting strength, you're squatting every single workout. You're initially deadlifting every single workout, eventually alternating that with the power clean or with. some other suboptimal pull. Um, and, and then you're also alternating the bench press and the press. All right. So people tend to think about the, the, the slowing down of that progression of that program, uh, as a stress problem, meaning, that it's too much stress. So it is a stress problem, but you have to consider that there are actually two mechanisms occurring simultaneously depending on which lift you're dealing with and. then what kind of stage of the program you're in. So the reason that programs stop working, the current program that you're doing stops working, is not a single factor, right? So you're unable to recover from the demands of the program. It's actually a combination of not enough stress or too much stress, all right? So this isn't perfectly clearly delineated, but generally you can consider the situation with a squat and a deadlift to be a recovery problem. So meaning that the stress starts to become a little bit too high and then you have to throttle back in terms of the stress. So that's a combination of two mechanisms. So the first you're applying. So you need to give yourself more time in order to recover and adapt and be able to demonstrate an increase in force production capacity on the squat and the deadlift. All right. The bench press may be that depending on how strong your bench presses, or it may be a situation where you're not receiving enough stress. If you, if you have a relatively weak upper body compared to your lower body, then yeah, you might need more benching in your program for the press. It's definitely in almost every single case, a situation where you're not able to apply enough stress. So that's why the press stops going up. There's another thing to consider, which I'll talk about in a second. But in terms of the stress, in terms of how much, how much load and how. How much systemic stress and how much localized stress you can apply to the structures that are involved in pressing the load is just not. And it's limited by the fact that you've got to put it up over your head, that you're not supported by anything. So there's all of these factors involved in why pressing is so hard, but also why pressing doesn't actually produce enough stress to continue in this linear fashion, predictable, like every other workout, adding five pounds to the bar, right? So if you started your program with a 65, 70-pound press, which is totally reasonable, totally normal. For women, it's sometimes less than 45. Sometimes they'll start with a 15-pound bar or a 20-pound bar. So fairly light numbers for the press starting out. It's going to be a challenge for men to get up to a 200-pound press, and it's going to be a challenge for women to get up to a 100-pound press. If you listened to the last episode on strength standards, that kind of tracks with what I'm talking about, right? So the presses... So if you started at 65 and, you know, 135 is your first goal, you might get there fairly quickly. But then from 135 to 200 for an overhead press for a male, that's going to take some time generally. And then for females, if you're starting with a 25 pound press, you'll get up to a 45, 55 pound, maybe 75 pound press in fairly short order. But then going from 75 to 100 plus is going to take quite a bit of time. So the range for the loads that you're going to be handling and how quickly you're going to be reaching sort of the end of those easy increases is going to happen very, very quickly. Where conversely, like if you start with 135 pound squat or 185 pound squat, you're going to get to 225 and 315 pretty quickly. And if you're a female, you started with a 65 pound squat or a 55 pound squat or something. You're going to get to 135 and 185. Uh, and then you've got two 25 on the horizon or four Oh five on the horizon for men. So that, that range, that scale is much bigger. You have way more room and you have way more time, uh, to, to get there. Right. So, um, so anyway, to summarize, you're going to top out on the press. You're going to top out on the quote unquote easy gains on the press pretty quickly. Uh, because if, if, if you are doing the program correctly, and you started, uh, with a fairly light squat and you go from like 135 pound squat through a three 15 squat in that same amount of time, you may have gone from a 75 pound press to 155 pound press. Um, or sometimes even lower, like sometimes it's a, you know, it's, it's in the, it's one 35 or less for that, for that overhead press. So you've got an individual who has doubled. Tripled in some instances, the lower body lifts, but has only gone up a relatively insignificant amount on the upper body lift. So, you know, you have to remember that not only are you are you increasing the stress in the overall program, but your ability to recover is also improving. Like it's not that's not a fixed variable. So your your ability to recover from stress is improving as you're getting stronger. So that 100 pound, 125 pound, 135 pound, 155 pound press is no longer enough stress to really do anything. You're just kind of you're just kind of slowly inching it along or maybe maybe actually you may actually be detraining in some instances. So what you'll find is that you'll just hit this hard wall on the on the press. And any time that you have this sort of this sort of trajectory where you're going up, and then, you know, everything in the absence. Like in terms of no pain, no injury, no layoff or anything like that. You're just following this process and it looks great. Everything's going well. And then all of a sudden you hit this hard wall and you have this sharp, hard drop off in performance. That is an indicator that there's not enough stress in what you're doing. All right. So I think I've hammered that enough. The press is too light to drive a strength adaptation in and of itself using the basic protocol that we start with. So remember, as a refresher, you're pressing every other workout. So on a two-week period, you're pressing three times. You're also benching three times. The program's designed like that on purpose and it works really, really well initially. OK, that progression for the other lifts tends to go for quite a long time, for quite a while. But your press is going to be the. That's the first thing that's actually going to run into problems in terms of advancing the programming variables to a little bit more complexity and a little bit more individualization, all right? So the other aspect of the press, so number one is that there's a load problem. It's not heavy enough, all right? It's not heavy enough because of all the reasons I just talked about. The second thing is that there's a practice, there's a skill component to pressing, all right? And you know this because, as I already mentioned earlier, the mechanical efficiency or deviations from an ideal or close to ideal mechanically efficient situation results in a failed lift that you could otherwise do. So in other words, you're strong enough to lift the weight up over your head, but there's a technique error, there's a timing error, there is a... The mechanical... mechanical efficiency error that results in you failing that lift. Okay. So I, I, I find it hard to believe that the limiting factor in your press is like your lockout strength, right? And most people are failing a press like, like right here. So the, the, your, your triceps are not the problem. Your deltoids are not the problem. Your traps are not the problem. Um, it's the combination of all of these things. It's, it's those muscles plus your ability to manage that. load up over your head. And you know this because whatever your press PR is, if you can do a press single at 210 pounds, let's say, um, you can do that single again within a couple minutes, and then you can do it again within a couple minutes, right? So, so that's not a true like test of, of raw strength, like a bench press. Like if you, if your PR bench press is 350 pounds, you're not. Again, in three to five minutes, you're probably not even going to be able to do it again the same day if it's a if it's a true, legit, heavy one rep max for you. And the same thing applies to the deadlift. The same thing applies to the squat. All right. So so that that tells me I just kind of reinforces the idea that that heavy pressing is not is not super stressful. And also that there's a there's a skill and a practice component to it. Okay. So we've got to deal with two things. Number one, we've got to deal with the stress problem. We've got to figure out a way to apply more stress or to continue increasing stress stress so that whatever stress whatever strength component is involved in the lift is being addressed. And then the second thing is we've got to deal with a practice problem. And and remember, we actually I actually haven't talked too much about the two factor model, but rip it so has so so you can you can get a quick prime. by reading the Two-Factor Model of Sports Performance article and then looking at the, Starting Strength Radio podcast episodes on Two-Factor. So the thing to remember about practice is that it has to be specific, right? So skill acquisition is specific to the thing that you're trying to accomplish. So in our context here with the press, if we're talking about more practice and more stress with the press, it actually works out really, really nicely. Because it'll help orient your thinking in terms of how to proceed. And it's very simple. You need to press really heavy and you need to press really heavy really often. Okay, so how do we get a heavy press? We already said that the press is not very stressful. So sets of five, sets of eight. I've heard people recommend like doing sets of eight to improve their press, their overhead press. It's not going to work. Okay. All you're doing is making yourself tired and maybe catching a pump, but that's not actually going to make your muscles bigger, and it's not actually going to improve your press. Increasing the weight that you can put up over your head is going to do both of those things. So practice is specific. And if we need to put more and heavier weight up over our head, then we need to practice exactly that thing. We need to figure out a way to make the weight as heavy as possible and practice putting it over your head as often as possible. So in this way, the press behaves a lot more like an Olympic lift, specifically more like a snatch. So if you're doing the Olympic lifts and you're snatching a weight that you can do for sets of three or sets of five, you're actually not getting better. at snatching heavy weights up over your head. The way to get better at snatching heavy weights is to lift very heavy weights and put them up over your head as often as possible. And you can do that because the snatch is light and you can do that with the press because the press is light. And when I say light, I mean, in terms of the amount of stress that you're actually applying to yourself. or so it's, it's, uh, it's, you can recover from, from that stress. You're, you're applying, you can recover from that level of frequency. Okay. Um, and then in terms of like wear and tear on your body, the overhead press, the press does not, uh, contribute to a ton of, uh, wear and tear, right? There's some, some instances where you may run and run into problems with the bottom position, but those can all be fairly easily addressed, um, over time. Okay. So, uh, so here's where we are. The press is not stressful enough after a given time. And it needs to be practiced because there's a, there's a high skill component to the press. And when I say high, I mean, when you compare it to like bench pressing, squatting and deadlifting, uh, not as much of a skill component as like doing the power clean and the snatch for sure. But there is, there is a skill component to the press. Okay. So we've got to press often and we've got to press heavy. So that eliminates anything beyond sets of five generally, um, and starts to skew things more towards, uh, towards the heavy single side of the, uh, of the force production continuum. Okay. All right. So hopefully I've clearly laid out sort of the, the ground rules that we need to be operating under, um, and made it sort of clear that, uh, how we proceed needs to be dictated by the realization. Or by the, the, the principles of, uh, of stress and practice and how those are going to, uh, integrate into, into our, our method here for doing. the press programming. All right. So let's start. So here's the protocol. Okay. And this. is a little bit different. Um, if you've only read the article from starting strength.com about upper body program is going to be a little bit different, but not too different. The principles remain the same. The only thing that I've changed a little bit is sort of the application or how it's done. And by the way, this is, this is the way I do it. This is my personal preference. It works. It works great. Uh, almost every single time. But as long as you can, as long as you can wrap your head around the, uh, fundamental principles that I've, that I've discussed, uh, you are welcome free and encouraged to try other methods of doing this. All right. So, so this isn't a hundred percent prescriptive in terms of like, this is the only way to do it. This is the way that I've found that works, uh, predictably. And that's relatively, uh, relatively easy to incorporate into, uh, into, into normal program. within the novice program, intermediate, and then advanced programming, and it also fits well with the goals that most of the people I work with are looking to achieve, all right? And those. are going to be, you know, health, longevity, increased muscle mass, and then also just looking better, right? So this checks all the boxes for me. All right, so here we go. Here's the protocol for press programming, and the question you may ask is like, okay, so when do I do this? And the answer is really simple. It's whenever whatever you're doing currently stops working, and you'll know, right? So I really don't want people to fail squats in training. So I'm going. to do lots of things. I'm going to be very careful with bar speed. I'm going to be watching what my lifters are doing, and I'm going to make generally preemptive programming changes, anticipating what my lifters are doing, and I'm going to make generally preemptive programming, changes. So I'm going to be anticipating whatever, anticipating potential problems with a, Uh, and also with the bench press with the, with the press, I realized that a failed press attempt is number one, not that big of a deal from a stress standpoint where like grinding through squat reps and then, and then ultimately failing gives you kind of the wrong kind of stress. If that's a, for, for lack of a better way of explaining it, where that really doesn't occur with the press. So in other words, I'm not terribly concerned with somebody failing press reps. Uh, just one important caveat there is that I, that the proportion of completed reps to failed reps should be significantly higher. So you should be completing more reps successfully than failed reps because, and this happens with the Olympic lifts too. I've seen people who, um, who just get into this downward spiral because you get so used to failing and you become okay with failing. So failing is not okay. It's just generally acceptable if, if you need to push up to that level. All right. So, yeah, just a quick note. This idea like work up to a fail, which I've which I've heard Olympic lifters talk about. That's that's such an awful idea. And it and especially with the kind of people who typically go into Olympic lifting. I think it's generally just an just an awful idea. Like you should just you should just be skirting the line of failing. So failing occasionally is fine, but you should be successful more often than not. The one of the cool things about the press and then the Olympic lifts is that they especially for barbell coaches, you're shifting a little bit more into performance training and into into sports coaching. And that's that's an important skill to have and to develop, I think, if you're going to be successful working with a broad range of people. So, yeah, there's no other sport or. Well, that's not true. There's there's no other good coaching that I can think of that involves you practicing. And failing. All right. You want to you want to push to fail. Occasionally, you want to push into that area where you're just like right on the edge, but you don't want to be consistently practicing failing because that will become what you do. So bad idea. Okay. Anyway, so when do you make changes? Whenever things start going wrong, whenever what you're doing right now is not working. Initially, in the novice linear progression, you're alternating the press and the bench, right? So you're pressing on Monday and Friday on week one, and then you're pressing on Wednesday, week two, and then on week three, it flips back. And now you're pressing again on Monday and Friday. All right. So the most obvious thing you can do based on what I've already discussed is to add another press day. All right. Before we get there, though, so let me let me back up one step. The thing that you can't do is reduce stress. So you can't take away reps. And this is, This is a common mistake that people make is like, okay, I'm starting to fail press reps. So I'm only getting like four instead of five or I'm only getting three instead of five. So it's like I do a set of five, I do a set of four, I do a set of two, and then I fail. So hopefully by this point you understand that it's not a stress, too much stress problem. So like going home and drinking milk. Or reducing to three sets of three instead of three sets of five. Or eating more food. That's not going to make your press go up. So it'll definitely make your deadlift and your squat go up if that's actually the problem. And then the deadlift and the squat going up can also help your press start to go up as well. But if we're dealing specifically with the press and we're dealing specifically with a situation where... You're doing things mostly right and the press stops going up, then that's not the deal. It's not that you need to recover more. All right. You need to, you need to press more. So number one is make sure you get all your reps in. So as you're going along and let's say you, you missed a rep, you missed two reps or whatever, you're supposed to do three sets of five. So step one in the press, uh, programming protocol is to get all your reps in. So you've got 15 reps, whether you're male or female, if you're doing three sets of five or five sets of three, you've got 15 reps to complete for that workout. So that's step number one, you're going to do all the reps. So if you did five for set one, you did five for set two, you did three for set three, and then you failed the last one. Um, that's okay. You've got two more reps to make up. So rack the bar for a second or two, unrack the bar and then get your two reps in. You're done. All right. So you're just going to continue that for as long as you can. And that may get you a few more weeks. It may get you a few more workouts, whatever. It'll get you a little bit more time where you're not changing much. All you're doing is just continuing on. And now instead of three sets of five or five sets of three for the workout being a completed or successful workout, now it's did you get all 15 reps? And the answer should be yes, like just get all the reps. All right, so you're going to get all 15 reps no matter what number of sets it takes. Another important thing to remember is that you don't require a lot of rest in between these. So you don't have to, like, do a set of five and then wait eight to ten minutes. You'll have to do that on the squat as it gets really heavy. That doesn't apply for the press. All right, so you rack the bar, wait a couple minutes, unrack it, and go again. If you're in the situation where you're making up reps at the end of the three sets, then just rack the bar and then knock them out. Just rack and unrack and then do them and get them done. All right, in other words, it shouldn't take much longer than it takes to do the three sets of five. So do not spend 45 minutes pressing. Don't spend an hour pressing. Don't make your workout two hours. long because you're, you're doing this, like, um, doing one press rep and then resting five minutes and then doing another pressure up. You don't, it's unnecessary. You don't need to do it. Okay. All right. So step one, get all your reps in step two, which is where I was, where I was headed. And then I had to back up. So step two is going to be to add a second press day. All right. So there are a couple of ways to do this. Um, you may want to try, and by the way, uh, when do you move from getting all your reps done to adding a second press day? Uh, I would say that it's, once you get down to like in your first set of five, you can't do even close to what you were supposed to do. So let's say you're like supposed to do a set of five on set one, but you only end up doing two or three on set one. It's probably time to just add another press day. Otherwise you're going to be doing triples, doubles, and singles for too long of a time. And that just tells me, okay, let's move on to the next, to the next step. There's very little, there's very little time to do triples, doubles, and singles for too long of a time. So let's just, There's danger or there's very little downside to preemptively moving to the next step. So that's another thing to think about. Like, don't be super anal about this. Once you're tired of just making up reps, go ahead and just move to the next step, which is adding a second press day. So the thing you'll notice is that things get harder. They don't get easier because the problem is that we need to practice and we need to increase stress. So it doesn't get easier. It actually gets harder. So going from easier to harder is not a bad thing, especially in this context. Okay, so you can always just move on to the next step whenever you're ready. So after you have spent some time completing all of your reps, the next thing we're going to do is add a second press day. And once it's time to add a second press day, I like to just immediately move to heavy singles and sets of five. So this is where this idea of the compressed Texas method comes into play. And I think that name is dumb. I wish I wouldn't have said it that way, but whatever. So the reasoning originally is because when you're doing a Texas method, You're splitting up volume and intensity, and then in a traditional sort of Texas method, if you look in practical programming, you're actually reducing the work for the press and the bench within the context of what I'm talking about here. So rather than keeping it over a two-week period, we're going to pull it all into a single week and do two pressing days and two benching days within a single week. All right, so that's the idea. So anyway, we're going to do two pressing days and just split them up into a volume day and an intensity day. So a volume day where you're doing sets of five, and then the heavy day is going to be singles. And now this is where you're leaning into the practice aspect of it. You were already doing some of that when you were doing the complete all your reps protocol, but now we're intentionally going to start driving up the weight on the singles. All right, so let's... Let's just say you're doing a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, still, you're still on your, on your generally on your novice program for your squats, your squats are still going up every workout. So within a three day, uh, training week, what you could do is set up your, uh, your bench press on Monday. So like your three by five bench press on Monday, then you're going to do either a three by five or five by five press on Wednesday. And then you're going to do both the press singles and bench press on Friday again, right? So you're doing both upper body lifts, uh, within the same week. If your bench press is still going up, uh, and you're not having any problems, then don't mess with the bench press. Just plug in the, the, the press protocol, wherever it makes sense. And it doesn't matter if they're back to back days. Like if you go Wednesday, uh, volume press and then Friday, uh, heavy singles press, you'll be just fine. Or you can split them up if you want to. You can go Monday, Friday. It does not matter. Okay. So you're going to give yourself two press days. How to determine whether you're going to. to do five by five versus three by five is really simple. It's like, how, how bad is it? Like, how bad is your press? If you're squatting three, 350 pounds, 330 pounds, 315 pounds for three sets of five, and you're pressing one 25, uh, you need to be doing five sets of five on your volume day. If you are, uh, squatting three 53, you know, same deal, three 15, three 30, three 50 for your, your three sets of five squat. Um, and you're pressing, uh, one 85, you could probably get away. with three sets of five. All right. So, um, you'll, you'll figure it out. So one day is going to be sets of five and one day is going to be singles. So let's set like three to five sets of five on day one, and then five to seven singles on day two. And once again, like what, where should you fall within those ranges? It really, it doesn't matter. Like you'll, you'll figure it out. Eventually you may want to be doing more singles, especially when you move in like into like. a four day split and you have a day where you have a press priority day. Uh, like if you're doing an upper body day and then the press is the priority on one of those upper body days, you can do a bunch of singles. You can do 10 of them. Okay. But just get a bunch of singles, get a bunch of, of sets of five. All right. Now here's the important thing to understand. Initially, just set your singles at whatever the heaviest press is that you've done, right? So you've already been doing this, this, uh, get all your reps in. So you should know like what a heavy double, what a heavy single is for you. Just set the, just set the single at that weight and you're going to, you're going to. knock out, let's say five to seven singles at that weight with a short rest. And I, I like, you don't have to do this, but I like the idea of, of short rests. So, um, because again, it's not super stressful if we're going to be practicing, which is really what we're doing on the heavy singles day. We're practicing the press specific. Because we're doing a heavyweight overhead for singles. So that practice tends to be more useful, especially at this stage, if you're limiting rest time. So I want you to be a little bit fatigued going into the next single. It helps. It helps. So I tell people to limit the rest time to two minutes or less, 90 seconds or less, something like that. So you're not going to spend five to seven minutes resting in between those singles. So it's fairly short. Rack the bar. Don't even take your belt off. Just wait a minute and a half or so or even a minute and then just do the next one. So that's the important day. The singles day is the important day. So that is the day that you need. You need to be increasing the weight on the bar and it can be two pounds, five pounds, one pound, whatever, whatever is appropriate. But the weight needs to go up on that day, especially at the beginning when you first start doing this for the. sets of five day you're going to pick a weight that you can complete for sets of five so if you just look at your training log and look at like when's the what's the last load that you completed at sets of five and then that can be your sets of your weight for the sets of five if you need to like if if you don't know what that is because it's been a while since you did sets of five just take your your single for for that initial weight that you're using for the single and just set your sets of five at like 85 to 90 percent doesn't matter just set set a weight and then. start working from there initially you're going to go up in weight on both days two pounds five pounds one pound whatever increases makes sense for you and your strength level and how good you are at these lifts just start slowly increasing the weight on both of those days all right eventually you're going to get to the point where uh you're not able to increase the weight on both of those days and that's perfectly fine that's normal okay because remember we're, We're both increasing stress and continuing to practice. All right, so what you'll do at that point, so this is going to be step three in the protocol. Step one being complete all your reps. Step two, add a second press day. My preference is to go with heavy singles and then sets of five on separate days. And then step three is going to be to implement a range for both days. Okay. Okay, so, oh, and by the way, on your sets of five day, also limited rest, short rest. So two minutes or under for the sets of five. Okay. And there's a lot of reasons for that. There's practice, there's having a little bit of fatigue. Also, it's just not necessary to rest a bunch. And then also it's going to determine when I'm going to move to the next phase and not artificially keep me at phase, what? Is this phase three for? too long. Okay. So if, if I'm, if you're unable to complete your sets of five with two to, with two minutes rest, um, it's time to move to a range is what I'm saying. Okay. So that's going to tell. me let's, let's move to a range. And when I say a range, here's what, here's what I mean. Let's say that at this point you're pressing 200 pounds on your singles. All right. And it's getting, it's getting really tough. So what you'll do is set a, set a 10 pound range. So if you've already done 200 and you've done it for five singles, then you're going to say to yourself, okay, my range is going to be from one 95 to two Oh five or one 90 to 200 or one 95 to two 10, you know, whatever, just set, set a range for yourself. And then now it's really important. that you limit the rest time. Okay. It's because what I want you to do is accumulate a lot of practice within that rep range. With a short rest and over time, as you're able to, towards the top end of that range, that's going to tell you when to move the range up. So it's kind of a simple hack for dealing with advanced programming in a situation where you have to do it early on, and you haven't really gotten into advanced programming, and you don't. really know sort of like the – you don't have a frame of reference for when you should do things. So this is a simple way to do it. So we're going to limit rest time. Um, I'll even tell people on the singles day to rest less than – less than 90 seconds or less. All right, so 90 seconds, two minutes max. So it shouldn't take a whole bunch of time. And then if your range is set from 195 to 205, once you're hitting most of your singles, so let's say we're at seven singles, and you're hitting five of those at 203 to 205, it's time to bump your range up. And you can bump it up by 2%. Two pounds, five pounds, doesn't matter. Just scoot the whole range up. So now your range becomes 197 to 207 or 200 to 210. Okay, so that's the way it works. Now, instead of a single number going up, now you've got this range that moves up over time, and you'll be able to get a lot of mileage out of this setup. You're going to do the same thing for the sets of five. So for the sets of five, you're going to set your range 10 to 15 pounds between the bottom end and the higher end. Then limit your rest time two minutes or less, and then get all those sets of five done. Once you're getting up towards the top of that range, move the range up. So those are going to be independent of each other. This is an important thing to understand at this point. Once you've gone to a range situation for the sets of five and the singles, only move up the range whenever you're at the top of that range. So in other words, the singles and the sets of five don't move up at the same time. The singles move up when it's time for them to move up. sets of five move up when it's time for them to move up. Another thing I like to do once we start getting into the range step of this protocol, so again, step one is get all your reps. Step two is add a second press day. Step three is the range. Once you've gotten to this point, I like to switch. the volume work. So the three sets of five or five sets of five to strict pressing. So I still want to practice the heavy singles with the hip movement and the bar bounce. And then I want to do strict pressing for the sets of five, just because they're harder. That's it. That's all it is. No magic, just because they're harder. They'll make you focus on the bar path a little bit more. And then yeah, you just get a little bit more, a little bit with a lighter weight, you get a little bit more strain and a little bit more time, you know, to use the. bodybuilding term or exercise science term, a little bit more time under tension, uh, with, with the strict press. All right. So, um, the last step, all right, so step four is going to be to add a third press day or a third press movement. Okay. So if you're on a four day split, like you're doing upper body, lower body over four days, it's pretty simple. You can just add a pin press on, uh, one of the lower body days. All right. So for example, Monday's press bench day, uh, Tuesday is squat day. Um, Thursday is press day. Friday is deadlift day, uh, or whatever, whatever, whatever upper, upper, lower setup you have. So what you'll do is take your pin press and put it on one of those lower body days. And then a couple of protocols you can use. You can either do a rotating, uh, rotating rep range. So week one, You'll do a heavy set of five. Week two, you'll do a heavy set of three. And then week three, you'll do a heavy single. And the way I like to program this is to just have people work up to a heavy set of five. You're going to try to shoot for a new PR on the pin press, starting out at about eyebrow level. And you're going to try to hit a PR every week. I don't want you to fail the pin presses. So you're going to have to pay attention to the weight, and you're going to have to not push too far. So pin presses are not – don't look at them as like a strength deal, even though they are. Look at them as like specific practice. So what the pin press does is it puts the bar at exactly the point where you are likely to fail. So it's like the inflection point between where it's just like the bar bounce versus mechanical efficiency and then lockout strength. So the coordination of your traps, your shoulders, your pecs. everything that's going to get the bar up over your head. So the pin press puts the bar at the hardest, quote-unquote, part of the press, and it makes you lock the bar out from there. So they're very difficult to do, but you'll get good at them the more you do them. So a heavy set of five, just one set. Week two is a heavy triple, just one set, and then week three is a heavy single. And you're going to aim to shoot for above. Initially, you won't be able to. Initially, you'll be doing about the same weight as your normal press for your singles pin press, but eventually you want to exceed that by quite a bit, 20, 30, 40 pounds in some instances. So start working on that pin press. A quick tip about pin presses, when you set up the bar, make sure it's close enough, so make sure it's right over your shoulder joint. And then the way to think about pin presses is to not push the bar. You want to shrug the bar off the pins. So there's a little tip for you on doing the pin presses. So if you're... Adding it as a third day, you're going to rotate through fives, triples, or ones. Another way to do this, and I like to do this, and by the way, I think the idea for this came from one of my clients, James, in the UK. We were just talking about his pressing, or maybe it was Steve in Brussels. I don't remember. We were just talking about pin presses and how to incorporate them because he was doing the rotating rep ranges. And after some time, that gets repetitive, and you stop kind of making progress on those two. So two things you can do. You can either alternate the height of the pin press. So one height is like eyebrow level. The other one might be forehead level. So it's kind of like a one-hole difference in your rack. Another thing you can do, and this is what I prefer to do now, is take either whatever. the heaviest pin press was on your single. Day or the lightest pin. press was on your single day. So you'll take that weight. Excuse me, I think I misspoke. Whatever the heaviest press was on your singles day or whatever the lightest press was on your singles day. So depending on which one you choose is going to determine how you proceed. So if you're going to take the lightest single, set that on the bar and then do it for like three sets of three. And you can do that on a separate day or you can even do it on the same day that you. that you do your singles presses. So that's one way to do it. Take your lightest single and then do it for three sets of three off of the pins. Another protocol that I've used is to take the heaviest single and put it in the pins. You have to be good at pin pressing to get benefit out of this one. Put it in the pins and then do do as many reps as you can without failing. So I'll try to shoot for like three to four guys who are good at pressing can get three to four out of that. But what you're doing there is, It's like taking the heaviest weight that you can put over your head, and then you're just practicing putting it up over your head with a little bit of assistance from the pins. All right, so that's going to depend on how good you are at pressing and especially how good you are at pin pressing. So if you've been pin pressing for a while, that's another way to make the press programming harder and to get more out of it. Okay, so again, you can either do that on a separate day or for the guys that start pressing really heavy. So I've got some clients who are pressing 270 plus, 250 plus. For those guys, I will have them do three sets of five on the volume day because that press is heavy, right? And it is actually contributing to some overall systemic stress. So we're going three sets of five on the volume day, and then I may have them do four singles on the singles day because we're talking about really heavy. Heavy loads now. And then after those four singles. We'll reset the pins, put it in the pin press, and then do one of these other protocols for the pin press. So we're doing press and pin press on the same day for the heavy pressing day. So that's the last step in this. And overall, this kind of four or five-step protocol, this represents like two years of press programming. So once you get to the point where you're splitting up your press days, you're doing two press days a week, and you're doing singles and then volume, you'll run that setup for a very long time. And a very long time depends on quite a number of factors, but it's not like the all reps thing to adding a second press day. That may only be a few weeks. But once you switch to singles plus volume. That could be your press program for six months, could be your press program for a year with very little modification. gratification. Especially once you go to the ranges, you start adding ranges, that'll get you a lot of mileage. Because remember, your bench press is still going up, your squat, your deadlift is still going up. So that tends to be a nice balance between the stress aspect of press programming and the practice aspect of stress programming. So that's kind of the sweet spot for improving your press is the split up between the volume and the heavy and then doing two pressing days per week. You usually don't have to add the third pressing day, the pin press, until quite a bit down the line. So again, you'll know when that is. when you start getting kind of frustrated with your singles, they haven't gone up for three, four, five weeks in a row. Maybe that's when you start adding the pin press, but that's pretty far down the line for most people. Okay, so just as a quick review, here's the protocol again without all the explanation. So number one thing you're going to do is complete all your reps. So keep the novice set up where you're alternating between the two. So if you're doing a lot of, the press and the bench, and then just get all your reps in, all right? Once you get to the point where you're not able to complete anywhere near the first set, so you're like down to doubles and triples for that first set, add a second press day. On that second press day, you're going to do one day of fives, and you're going to do one day of singles. Set the load at the heaviest press you've done, even if it's not for a single, but that's where you start. And then set the fives at some offset, you know, 85%, 90%, 80%, doesn't matter, but set your fives, and then run it from there, adding weight to the bar every time. Make sure you're doing reasonable jumps. Then next thing is to switch to a range. So instead of adding weight every single time, now you're going to set a range, 10 to 15 pounds, and then now the range goes up, but the range goes up once you've hit most of the sets towards the top of the range, okay? Then the last step is to add another pressing day or another pressing movement. So either a third press day if you're on a four-day schedule or adding pin presses on your heavy press day. So if you're going to add another press, it's going to be pin presses. We need to go heavier and harder, not lighter. Don't add a third pressing day that sets of eight. It doesn't work. I mean, you can try it, but it typically does not work. You've got to go heavier and you've got to go harder because of the stress and practice situation. So pin presses are where it's at. Start at the forehead, either rotating 5-3-1 through a three-week cycle. Don't fail reps. Don't practice failing. Look at the pin press as specific practice. And if you fail, you're practicing to fail. Don't practice failing. Do not fail. Even if the weight is not where you want it to be, you will get better at them. All right? So either rotating five sets. Five. Three. One. On the pin press over a three-week cycle. Or take the heaviest press that you can. did do as many reps without failing as you can, or take the lightest single that you did and do like two or three triples at that weight. Okay. Um, so yeah, there it is guys. That'll, that'll get you, uh, that'll get you honestly like years of, of progress on your press. It slows down. It's frustrating. The press is a very frustrating lift to do, but, um, in terms of, uh, uh, upper body strength in terms of shoulder health, in terms of even aesthetics, um, there's not many things you can do better for yourself than, uh, than working on your press and getting it really heavy. All right. So if you have any questions, if you have any topic ideas, please send them to podcasts at ssgyms.com. Uh, thank you for listening. I think, uh, this is, uh, at this point, pretty comprehensive in terms of how to handle the press. So if I missed anything, let me know. And, Thank you very much. I'll see you next time.