What is the purpose of the board for the bench press and how is it different for the overloading from the eccentric hooks?

So the boards are simply what we use—I learned this from the west side, is we use all five-board, four-board, three-board, two-board. It’s basically training partial range of motion.

Partial range of motion training is what we’re doing is just basically overloading the system. Normally if I have an athlete who is on a plateau, or I need to accelerate them to get stronger for whatever specific time period, I will use simple tricks like this to overload the system, the organism, the body.

What I do is use a movement, say like the bench press and they’ll lift the heavy load—normally what they can’t do for the full range of motion for a partial range of motion. What the body does is the body gets used to that overload—it’s stressing the system and the body has to make all these requirements to register that new load. That is why I use the board press.

For example, a five-board is obviously are a shorter range of motion than the four-board and the three-board and the two-board, so generally what I like to do, I like to use a three-week or a four-week protocol and the athlete will go as heavy as they can with, say, for instance, a four-board and try to keep that same load week to week and try to maintain that same load until they touch their chest, do a full bench with that load.

I use that method for different exercises, like squats and so on and so forth. Normally I do that only for specific purposes because I am a big advocate of training the full range of motion. So only special cases. Obviously advanced athletes I use that method for.

The difference between the eccentric hooks, the eccentric hooks is basically you’re using extra load from the top of the movement all the way lowering the movement—I like to use like five to six seconds in the eccentric—lowering the weight, the load falls off anywhere from 20 to 30%, sometimes I use 40% extra on the hooks.

So say, for instance, I have 300 pounds on the bench, I may have 40 pounds on the hooks, 40 pounds on each side. So the total weight is 380 pounds. So they’ll lower the load essentially slow so the body gets used to that overload all the way down, touch the chest, the extra load falls up, and boom!

They explode up.

So that’s another advanced method and that’s what’s different for the partial range of movement board press, the eccentric hooks. So I like to use both of those methods.

Watch or listen to other Dominate Discussion episodes here.