“To press a lot you must press a lot.”
This saying comes from Russian weightlifting circles.
Kinda like a Zen koan, there is some enfolded meaning within it.
One of the simple ways of looking at it is like this:
“To press a lot of weight, you must press frequently and with volume.”
That means if you want to get stronger in pressing, you need to be pressing often and more than simply maxing out.
Lots of pressing gets the smaller muscles of the deltoids and triceps stronger.
Another way to look at it is this:
“To press a lot of weight, you must press a lot of different ways.”
It seems that sticking to just one form of pressing is a sure way to get stuck on a plateau sooner or later.
In Next Level Kettlebell Training I showed some of the many different press varieties that can be done with a kettlebell.
These include:
Push Press
Side Press
Bent Press
Jerk
Upper Body Push Press
Rotational Press
Bottoms Up Press
Each one of these is hitting the body in a different way. And it’s not that you should be doing all of them at one time (though it is great if you know how to do them all and I mean knowing that is built into the body).
But working on a few of them in a targeted way, can help translate to better lifts overall in pressing.
And that doesn’t even touch on the pressing varieties discussed with bodyweight training in that workshop.
Use variety, use volume, use frequency in the right ways and you too will be able to press a lot.