A few years ago when I still had my Olympic barbell with weight plates and wanted to be able to bench press but had no bench or power rack in my small little second floor apartment, I came across this excellent insightful video by Bret Conteras where he teaches you how to floor press with only a barbell and at least 45 pound size plates:
I actually got the bar into pressing place in my own slightly different way that I found took less effort. I did the glute thrusting method where you pop it up a bit and immediately rock it softly into place, but I did it with the bar on my tough abdominals so that the bar didn't have to travel so far (I'm pretty tall).
I could get weight that was far above my pressing strength into place because I guess my glutes were strong enough. So you want to make sure yours are as he says in the video. I did do the barbell glute bridge from time to time and can testify that it can really work the glutes. It isn't a bad exercise. But I mostly stuck to my deadlift and variations of it, like the one legged deadlift, which really hammers the posterior chain with minimal load needed (it is a humbling lift).
I also did something like the variation of pressing that he mentions in the video where you use leg drive and thrust your ass up and use that body momentum to explosively press the weight up hard and fast to lockout. This is good for overload and explosive strength. It is kind of like doing a horizontal push press. But this is not all I did. I also did the stricter pause variation as well as the faster but still strict, as in keeping your body strictly on the floor, touch and go variation. Word of advice for when doing fast touch and go floor presses. You want some padding under your up arms and elbows so you don't smash them against the hard floor.
So, I hope this helps people out there who want to do a barbell bench press type workout but only have a barbell and plates. Or who just want to do such a workout because of other reasons, like that it is safer and you don't need a spotter. And it indeed is. For safety and even strength purposes, I find this exercise or benching from a dead stop off of pins in a power rack or blocks to be superior to the conventional bench press. It is much safer because bar cannot go any lower than where you start from so there's no way the bar can fall on you and hurt you, and you eliminate the stretch reflex, which makes it harder, like Bret said in the video, which also means there's less chance of a pectoral tear.
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