Don't Cry For The Forgotten Standing Press

The rise in popularity of the bench press and demise of the standing overhead press was a good thing. The best thing that could have happened to the pushing musculature of the upper body.

Benching is the superior developer of upper body musculature and strength. Its popularity is testament to its effectiveness.

Standing overhead pressing is "old school" and "badass". But it fails to develop the same pushing muscles as fully or rapidly as the bench.

There wasn't some conspiracy to make lifters lazier and weaker by making the supine bench press more popular than the standing press. Before racks and benches, it never occurred to lifters that they shouldn't stand and put weights overhead. That is what man does with heavy objects in a state of nature. You get them off the ground. To be truly alpha, you get it to arm's length overhead.

But lifters are like the other clever primates in their species. They take stock, experiment and adapt their methods to improve results. The same human tendency to make things better that gave us modern houses, cars and smartphones also resulted in the bench press deposing the standing press.

Lifters noticed that bracing their bodies against fixed objects--instead of relying on their own free-standing muscular tension--allowed them to press more weight. Now before images of the smith machine sully your thoughts, remember that while the torso is braced on a metal bench during a bench press the lifter is still moving the weight itself in all three dimensions! What lifters were moving toward when they moved away from standing presses was a bench press, not a smith machine bench press.

Very quickly lifters realized that not only did bracing the torso against a fixed object mean more force could be generated by all the pressing muscles they were trying to develop..but the closer to horizontal the torso became, the greater the amount of pressing muscle that got involved. More muscle, more tension, more weight. Just by lying on a sturdy bench instead of standing up.

In fact, this braced horizontal "bench" pressing translated into even more strength in the vertical movement! As long as the lifter continued to practice the standing version so his body kept the strength-skill of bracing while standing. The now stronger pressing muscles could display the greater pressing strength while standing that they obtained by "benching". And despite the modern propaganda about standing pressing improving bench pressing, it was actually the other way around.

This is anatomy and physics. The human body's pressing makeup is rigged for horizontal pushing. It will get stronger best if this reality is acknowledged. Further, more force can be exerted while braced against unyielding iron than against the straining posture-bracing muscles of even a very strong man.

The standing press has other benefits, namely the aforementioned  total-body tension upon which it relies and which it develops. But for pure size and strength of the upper body's pushing musculature the flat bench press is unmatched. The flat bench is the back squat of the upper body. And all the cranky nostalgia or broscience nutthuggery for the standing press is not going to change stubborn, mean ol' physiology as currently arranged by eons of bipedal primate evolution.

If the standing press is the inferior strength-builder, is it at least the better shoulder health-builder? Debatable. Some have pointed out that while the overhead press may balance the development of front and back shoulder musculature, it also causes impingement; in short the human shoulder wasn't meant to bear heavy loads overhead and athletes who do so as part of their sport are the resilient exception selected for by their sport. The more normal humans who aren't built to withstand that kind of treatment don't end up on tv.

Bench pressing can indeed deform posture if it isn't balanced with upper body pulling strength. A man who develops a 400-lb bench and never does a single dumbbell row or chin up--or who has simply never benched properly--will likely have hunched shoulders as his well developed pecs and front half of his delts overpower his undeveloped pulling muscles.

A proper bench DOES engage the upper back muscles to lock the shoulders in place, and the lats to keep the bar in the groove on the way down. A pre-internet bench specialist who never got rudimentary coaching might have gotten fairly strong  (300-400 lbs) on the bench without ever having learned to get tight or squeeze his upper back or engage the lats. And he'd have the hunched look to go with that kind of benching.

But modern benchers now understand the importance of the upper body pulling muscles to both balance and aid the pushing muscles. Their shoulders are healthier, their postures better, and their benches bigger. Dumbbell rows and the like are as much a staple in the smart bencher's training kit as the bench itself.

Now we must turn to carryover. The best movements (i.e. the high bar deep squat, the barbell bench press, the row or chin) improve several other activities involving the same muscles. So a bigger high bar squat will make the lower body stronger for every lower body activity that requires power: running, especially sprinting, jumping, power cleaning, deadlifting, etc. In the same way the bench translates to improvement  in every upper body push: overhead, incline pressing, dips, or shoving an opponent.

Yet other factors can and do interfere with this transfer. In the case of the bench, shoulder health will limit displaying strength on the dip, for one example. In the case of the standing press, the ability to generate whole body tension will limit how much pushing strength can be displayed in an overhead press.

To wit, a man who can bench 400 lbs with good form may struggle to press 200 lbs overhead while standing. THIS IS NOT A FAILURE OF UPPER BODY PUSHING STRENGTH, which the bench has built quite well. The lifter will need to build up his ability to generate the specific sort of tension in all his other muscles to maximize his ability to display his pressing strength while standing.

A standing press specialist will always have the edge in displaying standing strength. But by completely eschewing the bench he unnecessarily constantly limits the speed of his pressing strength development by roping it to the limits of what he can do standing. It's rather like relying on the front squat for leg strength. It will do an okay job, but the back squat is so much more complete and efficient and the legs don't get shortchanged because a fatiguing upper back causes the rack position to be lost like in a front squat.

The standing press is emphatically not as bad as relying on the overhead squat for developing leg strength strength (a dumb idea I entertained as a newb), but it is a step in that direction. In training the standing version of the press, the lifter is sacrificing development of the target type of strength (upper body pushing, remember?) for simultaneous development of other qualities (like total body bracing while standing). Kind of like a certain group training fitness fad that tries to develop strength and power and endurance concurrently and thus yields no appreciable gains in any of them.

The standing press will get your pressing muscles strong. The bench will just do it better and more quickly.

It has been said repeatedly that taking the long, old school, badass road of overhead pressing will result in a big bench along with the athletic quality of generating force while on your feet. I have never found this to be true. Standing pressing have been nothing more than a sideshow distraction in my training that hindered my bench progress and made my lower back tired and injury prone.

But who cares about my anecdote? Just look at what actual athletes who need upper body pushing strength on their feet in the field actually do: they bench. Even shot putters bench amazingly heavy in order to throw a heavy object up, up, and away.

Olympic weightlifting dropped overhead pressing because it devolved into a standing double dip torso throw from backward bending parallel. This was arguably just part of weightlifting's evolution from an upper back and arm strength pulling sport to a leg-based strength-speed sport. (Thank you, thigh brush.) In fact overhead pressing can interfere with the specialists' ability to use the arms strictly as conduits for leg power to get the bar rapidly into the catch position!

Strongman has kept overhead lifting in the competitive mix, but allows it to be gloriously sloppy with assistance from the legs and back as needed.

But outside of this one version of competitve lifting modern athletes who need to push people and things are bench pressing a lot. If they train standing up, it's likely they are using their legs to start a push and finishing with a jerk.

Olympic lifting uses the legs to get the bar overhead. Strongman uses the legs and back to get the weight started overhead like Olympic lifting used to for most of the time overhead "pressing" was contested. Powerlifting acknowledges the bench's superiority as a pressing movement and ignores overhead pressing altogether.

Standing and strictly pressing has a foot in the dustbin with other odd, impressive yet inefficient lifts like the two hands anyhow.

Occasionally some of these lifts return when some training guru needs to jazz up his marketing. (We're looking right at you, Turkish get up.) The standing press has managed to hang around closer to the mainstream because at first glance it seems like at least a decent idea. It seems manly with an appeal that is slightly less dated than the handlebar mustache appeal of other old time lifts.

But the bench press still trains the upper body pushing muscles better.

If you love the standing press, however, don't think I'm trying to discourage you from doing it. I just want nostalgic purists to stop hating the bench press, a lift which deserves its popularity. The bench is the far better lift for the primary or only upper body push.

The standing press can be fun. Even I like to mess around with it every few months, just like I do with front squats or cleans. I just know that it's the back squat and bench that drive all my gains in the various squats, pulls, and presses. And in strength applied outside the gym. And I don't shake my head sadly over the fact that you hardly see a standing press (or a front squat, or a power clean) in a commercial gym.

It's great that the bench has become THE press among even the uninitiated. It deserves it. Even housewives know that a big bench means a strong upper body.

Now if only proper back squats can achieve the same mindshare for the lower body...

Update 8/30/2015: A couple months ago my bench max was stuck just under 225. I would play around with the standing press and find that I could get a single or two with 135. In two months I upped my bench max to 265 for a single. I went and tested my overhead press and found that it had automatically gone up 30 lbs to 165 for a single.

Now, I admit that I'd done two or three very brief overhead press sessions in the intervening time, but just to play around and to see if I was still getting stronger. I did 135 for five in the standing press after I found I could do a few reps on bench with 225. Then I did 145 for a couple triples another time. But that's all. There was nothing even resembling dedicated, regular, progressive training on the standing press. The 30-lb jump on the standing (strict!) overhead barbell press was strictly due to carryover from the 40 lbs I worked very hard to put on my bench.