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GOHEAVY.COM Debates Forum
Re: Duration of bench pause from 60s to present
Posted By: Brad Reid (adsl-76-215-79-52.dsl.rcsntx.sbcglobal.net)
In Response To: Re: Duration of bench pause from 60s to present (Buddy McKee)
Date: Monday, November 19, 2007, @ 7:59 a.m.
Buddy, no sir.
There really was a 2 second pause in the bench press at the inception of the sport and for many years afterward. I do agree that by 1977, fully a dozen plus years after the sport became "official," that it was often disregarded, along with almost every other standard in powerlifting, but it was really there for years. True enough, Doug's bench press was certainly not paused for 2 seconds awaiting a clap on the film... you are certainly correct there.
The great Ronnie Ray of the 1960s and beyond, in training for his bench press, installed an oddity of sorts in his training routine. He would do a set of bench presses where he would drop the weight to his chest and count to 10 or 20 as I recall, then press it up. He wasn't doing this for his amusement; Ray did it so that he was comfortable with the weight on his chest and so that his punch up off of his chest wasn't owing just to catching the signal from the judge, say the way a 100 meter dash man attempts to guess the start of a race. It worked for Ronnie Ray. I guess this is analogous to a judo player needing to develop a comfort being on his back on the mat. Anyway, I recall very long pauses in big meets which caused quite a stir here and there. I wonder if sometimes the head judge just forgot to clap.
Probably the best practice would be to let the athlete drop the bar to the chest and decide for himself what constitutes a non-bounced bar, then have the judges rule on it at the completion of the lift. No one claps at the bottom of a squat for depth, so why at the bottom of a bench press?
In addition to the pauses, heads had to stay flat on the bench, feet flat on the floor, uneven extention was not allowed, the bar couldn't stop during the press out, etc.
I think squats were deeper in the sense that the knees were flexed farther as the shins flexed away from vertical more in the old squat styles on ankle flexion. The legs definitely did more work in past decades, then the advent of wide stances, vertical shins and a shifting of loads off of quadriceps and onto the hip and back muscles.
My take anyway.
Cheers! Brad
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