Incline Bench Press

🎯 Chest🏋️ Bench, BarbellIsolationTriceps (2°)

How to do the incline bench press

  1. Lie flat on an incline bench set at a 45 degree angle, with your feet shoulder width apart.
  2. Grasp the bar a little wider than shoulder width apart.
  3. Raise the barbell above your body and move it over the middle of your chest, this is your starting position.
  4. Lower the bar down so it just touches your chest.
  5. Raise the bar straight up till your arms are fully extended and your elbows are locked.
  6. Return to starting position.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the pectoralis major, which drives the upper arm forward and across the body.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the triceps straighten the elbow to finish the movement.

Every exercise for:ChestTriceps

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A bench fixes the torso angle and gives you something to drive against, which is what lets the load go up without your position wandering.

A barbell locks both hands to one bar, so neither side can drift and the load climbs in plate-sized steps. That makes it the simplest way to add weight and the least forgiving thing to bail out of.

Every exercise using:BenchBarbell

These train the chest too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.