Bench Press

1. Its a compound exercise! Well that’s true, bench press is a compound exercise. There is nothing magical about “compound exercises”! All it means is that you are working out more than one muscle at a time rather than one single muscle as you would in an isolation exercise. So what! If the criteria for determining which exercise is best for chest was the number of muscles that the exercise used then we would all be swimming for our chest workouts! Bench press only triceps, pecs, and shoulders whereas swimming uses chest, shoulders biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, calves, lats, and every other muscle in the body. Does that make swimming a better exercise for pecs than bench press? Of course not! In the same way, you cant say that bench press is better than dumbbell flys because it is a compound exercise
2. It raises testosterone levels!No more than anything else does! Many people seem to think that squats, bench press, and deadlifts somehow magically are the exclusive copyright holders on this physiological response. Not so!!! Think of it this way. The testosterone levels are raised in response to the muscles being worked hard. How can the body possibly tell the difference between the following:
   • 8 reps of bench press followed by 3 minutes of rest (4 min total)
   • 8 reps dumbbell fly, no rest, 8 reps mil press, no rest, 8 reps triceps pushdowns (4 min total)
   It cant! I would actually say that if you could measure the amount of testosterone produced by the above two activities that the 4 minutes of bench press would produce far less testosterone than the 4 minutes of isolation exercises. Why? Because work = force x distance. There is more work done in the isolation workout.

What I do in my training is about 60% squeezing exercises to 40% pushing exercises. For my pushing exercises I prefer dumbbells to barbells.