Can Losing Weight Affect & Increase Your Bench Press?

The best bench pressers are typically the heaviest. When your body weight is higher, you have several advantages in terms of strength compared to when you're lighter. While it's likely that your bench press might drop a little as your body weight does, this isn't always the case and there are ways you can maintain or possibly even increase your bench while losing weight.

  1. Body Weight and Leverages

    • The biggest advantage you have when at a heavier body weight is your leverages. The bench press, along with the squat, is the exercise most affected by losing weight, according to strength coach Mike Robertson. When you're heavier, the bar has less distance to travel as you'll have more fat on your mid-section and torso, so can almost bounce the bar off this fat. With more cushioning around your shoulder and elbow joints, you may also feel better supported when carrying more weight.

    Strength-to-Weight Ratio

    • If you compete in powerlifting, all is not lost if you lose weight. Powerlifting competitions are split into weight classes to give better representative scores. When your body weight drops, you may drop down to a lower weight class, so even if your bench drops slightly, you could still place highly or even win your class. Contests are often judged using the Wilks coefficient -- a formula that calculates your strength-to-body weight ratio, so provided your relative strength doesn't drop, you may actually place higher and score better when losing weight, even with a lower bench-press weight.

    Strength Training While Dieting

    • To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn, which can lead to a lack of energy and potentially a loss of muscle mass and strength too. To maintain strength, keep training heavy and avoid high-repetition, high-volume training, advises strength coach Erik Ledin of Lean Bodies Consulting. Training heavy is the best method for maintaining muscle, even if it means reducing your total workload; you can reduce your workout volume by up to two thirds to maintain strength while dieting, adds Ledin.

    New Lifters

    • If you're fairly new to strength training, you may actually be able to increase your bench press while losing weight. When you start lifting weights, your body is extremely responsive to this new stimulus and most of your gains are due to neural adaptations, according to trainer and powerlifter Nia Shanks. This means you can often add weight to the bar several weeks in a row without too much difficulty, even if you're in a calorie deficit and losing weight.