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Quote from: T0ddday on August 24, 2012, 04:25:11 pm

Quote from: D4 on August 24, 2012, 01:42:37 am

T0ddday, when you didn't bench for a year and just did those other exercises instead, I know your bench strength went up after utilizing the exercise again for 3 weeks, but in the mean time did your chest atrophy?

If anyone else has experience with this, I'd like to hear it too.

I'm happy with my current physique, and upper-body wise I want to focus on getting my push press way up since I want carryover to basketball and it'll also get my bench up anyways, so I'm considering taking out the bench press since I'm already pretty decent at it, but not at the cost of chest atrophy.

If it did, it wasn't obvious.  Everyone's different but generally I tend to hold on to muscle mass pretty easily.  However, I would bet you wouldn't see much muscle atrophy from dropping bench unless you are either extremely muscular right now OR you also embark on a very restrictive diet. 

What you will see when dropping an exercise like that is a loss of muscle tonus which will happen pretty quickly but also resume pretty soon as you start targeting the muscle group again.  I don't know your training history, but I would wager that most of the people on this msg board (though there are exceptions), have added (or lost) very little actual muscle mass as a result of their weight training and incorrectly assume gains or losses in strength, muscle tone, and body weight are the direct result of significant gains or loss of muscle tissue.

This may be a stupid question, but what do you mean by loss of muscle tonus exactly?

Maybe I should just do some 3x5 Bench once a week after my push presses

Think of it as semi-permanent pump.  For example, if you don't work out at all and then do a bunch of close-grip pullups your biceps will fill with blood (post workout pump) for a couple hours after the workout.  If you continue to do this the pump will always reduce in size following the workout but the between pump muscle tension will be greater than before you lifted at all.  This adaption to a semi-tense muscle state (muscle tonus) is very often misinterpreted as actual hypertrophy.   

If you go on vacation and sit around and drink pina coladas for a couple weeks you will lose your muscle tonus (that bicep vein may become less visible)  but actual muscle loss will be minor provided you didn't have an extreme amount of muscle or go on an extreme diet. 

If you want to keep your muscle tonus in your chest you will need to do some movement that involves the chest.  This doesn't have to be bench press.  In fact if you don't intend to add mass or strength high-rep dumbell flys could even be better.  I don't train bodybuilders but I do know they know every trick in the book as far as which exercises do the best job in getting blood flow into muscles to maintain tone.  It's very crucial for them when dieting.

Ohhh yeah I know exactly what you're talking about.  I'm one of those people who thought that was hypertrophy as well lol. 

So as long as I'm not going on a restrictive diet/keeping protein high enough and just doing any chest exercise like flyes or even push ups here and there, my chest should stay looking exactly the same, while I continue to increase upper body/bench press strength with push presses.

And even if I decide to ignore the loss of muscle tonus, I can just basically just get it back and get my chest looking back to how it is now whenever I want by just doing direct chest exercises again for a couple sessions.  right?

That's a pretty good strategy.  Might take a couple weeks of a couple sessions per/week but you have the right idea. 

 Yeah that sucks. Those spotters are supposed to be FOLLOWING the bar, and are standing there with their thumbs up their asses.