It’s no secret that having a strong core can improve your overall athleticism and performance.
Proximal stiffness, the ability for your body to create tension throughout its midsection, is key to distal mobility – the ability of your extremities to move freely without restriction. This means that in order to maximize efficiency and power output from your limbs, you need to have a strong core.
This is especially true when it comes to performing the bench press. A strong core serves as a foundation for your upper body, allowing you to keep your torso rigid and stable during each pull-up or push-down of the barbell. This ensures that all the force generated is transferred directly from your arms shoulders to the barbell, rather than being absorbed by a weak core or lost through poor form.
A strong core also ensures that you are able to maintain good posture while benching, allowing you to use less energy as you press. This is especially important when it comes to maintaining an arched back position throughout the lift;
having a strong core will allow you to stay in this position without straining or losing tension in your midsection.
How a Stronger Core Stabilizes You While Pressing Weight
When performing a bench press, your core muscles are activated in order to stabilize you while lifting the weight. This stabilization helps you to generate the necessary force throughout the extremities to press the weight. Without an efficient core strength, the force generated by your arms and chest will not be transferred as efficiently to the weight, reducing your ability to press a heavier weight.
Having a weak or deconditioned core can compromise the function, form, and intent of upper extremities during the bench press.
Weaker core muscles can also lead to poor form and spinal misalignment, which puts you at risk of shoulder pain and injury. During a proper bench press, your core muscles work to stabilize the spine and pelvis which prevents excessive strain on the shoulders when lifting heavy weights. This reduces the risk of associated shoulder injuries and helps you achieve your desired results from the exercise.
Boost Your Bench Press with Core Activation: Anchor and Prevent Excessive Rotation for Optimal Performance
Anchoring refers to how well your body is able to remain stable throughout the movement, and rotation refers to how well you are able to move your arms in a circular motion around the spine. By strengthening your core muscles and improving spinal stability, you will be able to raise the strength threshold of the anti rotational and anchoring movement at the trunk, and potentially increase the strength of your bench press.
A very effective tool that we heavily utilize at WPT is the Kiro Core Harness which is a specialized harness that allows you to work the core at variable levels of resistance in oblique planes of motion. This allows us to work both the local and global stabilizers of the trunk and spine, hip, and shoulder to increase distal mobility.
As you can see, having a strong core is essential for increasing your bench press and improving overall athleticism. While basic Core exercises such as planks and Russian twists are ok for building strength in this area, when done appropriately, there are more effective measures to really enhance true core strength, so it’s important to make sure you also keep up with other forms of exercise to ensure you have complete fitness. It’s only when all aspects of physical fitness come together that you can reach your full potential as an athlete!
And if you need some extra coaching breaking past your plateau, message us INTERESTED to 770-629-9577 for a free consult and trial session with us.