With that continued transition of lifters moving to Powerlifting America, this means a continued number of lifters having to adjust for the bench depth rule. And what we have seen popularized is a transition to a sink style of benching. And while this is very effective, it is also a larger scale change for many lifters who have biased to a more soft touch, high arch style of bench press prior. In my opinion, unless you are someone who has an extreme arch and short ROM like Sean Noriega, Meg Scanlon, and Eddie Berglund, there likely is lower hanging fruit to adjust first before making larger scale technique changes. For those who are more borderline and only need a slight adjustment to hit depth, there are 3 low interference options that I would use as the starting point before making more large scale changes. In my latest YouTube video, I break down these 3 options and use Abigail as my case study and example, as we are going through these changes with her right now. Within that, we look at the before and after with her bench depth (can be seen above as well) how we were able to make low interference adjustments to improve her bench depth without having to adopt the sink style method. For a more in depth look at bench depth and all considerations though, I would definitely recommend checking out Sean’s video on Powerlifting Now where he goes through all things bench depth. And for my video, click the link above to view!
