Close Grip Bench Press Top Tips

The Close Grip Bench Press is an excellent benching variant to use in your training and can be particularly useful for developing tricep strength and building your lockout on your normal Bench Press.

Here's our top tips for mastering the movement:

Don't grip the bar too narrowly

There is a common misconception, particularly in bodybuilding circles, that Close Grip Bench Presses should be performed with a particularly narrow grip, often with your hands positioned only a small distance apart. However, the major downside to this approach is the strain it puts on your wrist, shoulder and elbow joints.

We recommend using a grip roughly equivalent to shoulder width or slightly outside this. Indeed, in research you will often see a Close Grip described as 95-100% biacromial distance, which simply means 95-100% of the distance between your shoulder joints.

This grip width is more joint friendly due to the more favourable angles it creates and has a far superior transfer to building strength and a much greater application to sporting performance.

Keep your elbows under your wrists

This alignment of joints creates the strongest and most efficient position to press from, as well as, being the most joint friendly.

This can sometimes take a little practice but the most common things to try and avoid are the elbows flaring out to the side or shooting out in front of the bar. The former internally rotates the shoulders and puts unnecessary strain here, as well as on the elbows. The latter puts a lot of strain on the elbows and can really reduce how much weight you can lift.

Use a lower touch point than normal

This ties in directly with our previous point about stacking your elbows under your wrists. One of the key implications of maintaining this is that the normal touch point for a traditional bench press, lower chest/sternum area, isn't applicable here.

Instead you will most likely find that you will need to use a touch point that is slightly lower and more towards your upper abs. The difference won't be huge but it's still significant as using the same touch point as your traditional bench press will result in the elbows losing alignment with the wrists (by virtue of the elbows shooting out in front or flaring to the sides) and ultimately create a more inefficient position and decrease your ability to generate force into the bar.

Translation - you won't be able to lift as much and will put needless strain on your joints.

Take home message

In summary, to get the best results out of the Close Grip Bench Press from the perspective of performance, strength building, being joint friendly and transfer to sport, use a roughly shoulder width grip, keep your elbows under your wrists and use a slightly lower touch point than normal!

Get coaching on this and more

If you would like expert coaching on the Close Grip Bench Press and big compound movements, have a look at our Bootcamp Glasgow and Personal Training Glasgow pages and send us a message!