Smith Machine Incline Bench Press

Chest · Machine

How to do it

Incline bench under the guided bar, placed so the bar comes down on your **upper chest**, not your face. Grip slightly wider than your shoulders, palms forward, unhook and lower until it brushes your collarbones, breathing in; press as you breathe out. Since the path is fixed, positioning the bench is the whole exercise: do one empty rep before loading. You feel it high on the chest. The classic mistake is setting the bench past 40 degrees thinking it works higher; the only thing that goes up is the delt.

Variants

The drawing shows one way of doing it, and the technique above describes that one. Almost every exercise has variants — standing or seated, the grip, the bench angle — and is still the same exercise: if you do it another way, write it in the exercise note and you will have it every time you train it.

Also works: Shoulders, Triceps

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