dpease@dpease.com | dpease.com A JesusH! Production

World-Dominating Russian bench press routine

YOUR INFO

Lift you are doing: bench press curl deadlift

Current max: REQUIRED

Name:

YOUR EQUIPMENT

Plate type: American (2.5lb / 5lb / 15lb / 25lb / 35lb / 45lb) international (2.75lb / 5.5lb / 11lb / 22lb / 33lb / 44lb)

Add a dinky plate? yes no
(if 'yes', we will allow for up to one of the smallest plates in your set to be added if that gets us closer to your actual correct percentage, even if we slightly go over your target. if you don't know what this means, that's our fault, we had trouble explaining it. just leave it at 'yes')

How many pairs of each plate do you have? (1 pair, or 2x 45lb, 2x 35lb, etc is standard for most home setups. If you lift in a gym, use a high number.)

Bar weight: lbs.

UPDATE 2011-01-31

Embarassing typo fixed. In all cases n x m applies, where n is number of reps and m is number of sets.

UPDATE 2009-06-15

As below, but deadlift instead of curl.

UPDATE 2009-06-05

You can now use this for bar curl instead--just flip the switch. If your max is low and you don't have a lot of small plates available this might not work out well for you, but I'm not exactly sure how to fix it and I don't have that problem so I'm not going to think about it very hard.

WHAT IS THIS?

I got this mysterious bench press schedule as a .doc file from my buddy Matt. He said it was of murky but apparently Russian origin. The .doc file listed percentages only, leaving it up to me to do the math and figure out what plates to use. Since I'm a lazy sack, I couldn't be troubled with that. This script will do the math for you and compute your own Russian bench press routine, which you can print out and take to the gym, or frame, or line your parakeet's cage with. I'm not the boss of you.

Here's an example report. You shouldn't need an example of something like this, though. It's really simple. Just enter your max press and press the button. If you are embarassed about your max press number, enter a fake number. Just one number. That's not exactly a huge investment of time if it turns out you don't like what you see.

Does it work? Matt's about 190# and benches something like 300#, so that's all I needed to know about the efficacy of the routine. I've done it once through, and went from a hopeless 190# to a pathetic 211# in that time.