A few decades ago, I was in a band. We played block parties, birthdays and some small clubs down in the village. It was a lot of fun. We used to rehearse in the garage where our drummer lived and many of the kids from the neighborhood would come out and watch us play and hang out.

One day I came to practice very excited. The reason for my excitement was that I wrote what I believed to be a fantastic riff. I sat with the band and I played it for them. They didn’t seem quite as excited as I was. Long story short, it turns out that what I wrote was the song “Over the Hills and Far Away” by Led Zeppelin. Now I had never heard this song before and in no way was trying to pass someone else’s music off as my own. It just turns out that a couple of decades earlier a very famous rock band wrote the same riff as I did.

They can Venmo me the money

Now, I am not saying that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant ought to pay me royalties (though if they want to they are free to contact me about it), but in no way did I not write that riff.

In the spirt of that riff, I have some good news. Today I invented a new lift, which I am calling the Wife Beater Press.

In essence, the lift works like a barbell 21 only instead of targeting the biceps you will be targeting the pectorals. The lift, following the bicep curl, is a bench press that plays with partial range of motion. I came up with this while doing my post workout cardio on the stair climber this morning and threw 3 sets of it in just to try when I was done. The pump was tremendous.

Here is how it works. You get on a bench as if to do a standard bench press. Similar to normal 21s you will do three parts. Start with halfway through the ROM to the top of the press for 7 reps. Then back the bar all the way down to your chest and go from your chest to the half way point of the ROM for another 7 reps. Then back down to the chest and do 7 reps of the full ROM.

Proper Full ROM For Benchpress

While I don’t usually give specifics on weights because I think it is important for you to key in your own weights by fully understanding your RPE, because this is a new one I want to be as specific as possible. My first set I used just the (45-pound) bar. I could absolutely feel the muscles firing, but came nowhere near burning them out. For my second set, I added a 25-pound plate to either side bringing the total weight up to 95 pounds.

Doing the Wife Beater Press at 95 pounds totally blew my chest up. I would say it clocked in at around 8.5 RPE. That is I think I could have got two more full ROM lifts out of it but I wasn’t sure. I left the weight the same for the third set. I had to stretch and walk around a bit. I could feel a serious pump in my pecs. That third set clocked in at roughly 9.5 RPE. It was about 50/50 that I would have been able to make another full ROM press.

Larry Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger, inventors of the Arnold Press*

I am at the very start of being back in the gym and my 20-rep max on bench press is 125. That’s the first few weeks for ya! So think of pushing at about 75% of your 20-rep max for this one. I would suggest, however, that you do the first set with just the bar and really gauge it from there.

In the meantime, people have been lifting things since the dawn of man and barbell 21s have been around for a long time. Has someone else thought this up? Well probably.

Still, I am going to call them Wife Beater Presses and claim that I invented them anyway. If anyone has a problem with that, they are free to call up Larry Scott and the two of them can come and complain to Arnold and I about how we are total dickheads. In the meantime, give these a shot and let me know in the comments below what you think! I am really curious to see if you guys enjoyed this lift. I am thinking about trying out different lifts in the 21 format and seeing if I can get a 10 lift workout which targets the entire body with all lifts in the format of the barbell 21. Would you guys be interested in trying something like that?

*Side note: I know the Scott Press displays slight variation from the Arnold Press. The larger point still remains.