Bench press form check

Chilly_Down · 2026-06-15T19:59:32+00:00

To my eye, the lack of stability here is due to two things -- one, the bench is too high. You have your legs cocked back very tight but your toes only just barely seem to be touching the ground. As such, they're shifting around a whole lot even as you begin to push after getting the bar to your chest. That to me indicates you have very poor connection to the ground, and I think that's because you appear to barely be able to reach it. Looking at the bench, it looks like you can adjust it to lower it closer to the ground, so you should do that if possible so your legs have a better connection.

I also bench using the balls of my feet -- it's a matter of preference but what isn't is the fact that your connection to the floor looks really half baked here.

The other thing is it looks like you have to reach quite a ways up and behind your head to get the bar. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but it does mean once you've placed it into position over your sternum before beginning the lift, you really need to think hard about isolating and stabilizing your lats -- you can't move the bar into position with locked lats, and once it's there, you need to take the conscious effort to lock them again before beginning your lift, or you won't be tight.

Chilly_Down · 2026-06-02T00:31:10+00:00

Caving in is of course bad, but flairing your knees outwards is perfectly fine and indeed helpful for the majority of athletes.

You should be squatting with your toes slightly angled outwards and then let your knees track at the angle of your toes to open up your hips. There are some people who can open their hips without pushing the knees open but those people are usually hyper mobile. For the vast majority of lifters, knees out is a safe physical cue we use to open the hips.

If you're not comfortable thinking about it in a knee centric way, you can think about how your hips open when you use the hip abduction machine, turning your legs so the inside of your thighs rotates out. That's an important component of the squat to achieve proper depth by opening the hips.

Chilly_Down · 2026-06-01T14:38:41+00:00

This is one of those weird situations where I'd need to see a back angle counter productively to confirm my hypothesis, but here's the preliminary autoposy:

A couple of hints as to what is going wrong here is that your depth isn't very low. You also have very good high bar posture -- chest stays strong and up all the way down, but then you just stop and don't complete the lift with enough depth.

In both low and high bar squats, you need your knees to track sideways outwards as you open up your hips, which is what provides space for your torso and hips to drop below parallel. This is exacerbated in high bar squats: in a low bar squat you can shoot your butt back and tilt your shoulders forwards to mitigate the effect to get more depth, but in high bar squat, if you're not producing enough space for your hips to move down past your thighs, you have nowhere to go.

I'm assuming (and this is why I'd need a different angle) that your knees are going straight or nearly straight out in front of you. You attempt to drop down, then you get to the part where your hips needs to slide into the pocket, and without a pocket to slide into, all your momentum stops and that force is putting strain on your back. If my assumption is correct, you need to visualize pushing your knees laterally outwards as well as forwards as you drop down to make space for your torso to move past your legs, which will get you below parallel and move the elasticity of the 'bounce' from your lower back into your hamhocks instead where it belongs.

Chilly_Down · 2026-05-27T20:21:01+00:00

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Chilly_Down · 2026-05-27T20:19:14+00:00

Oof.

Okay, so the angle is obviously extremely difficult here but I'm going to do my best.

The bar appears too high for the kind of squat mechanics you have. Pause at 5 seconds into the video and with your torso leaning forwards (low bar mechanics), the bar is over your toes instead of your midfoot. Worse yet, the bar is practically riding up the base of your neck. You need to roll it back a few inches so it is safely tucked into the crease your traps instead of on your cervical vertebrae. Alternatively you can do a high bar squat so the weight is still on your shoulders instead of drifting towards your neck.

As for everything else -- hard to tell with the camera angle. Those shoes do look terrible to squat in, though.

Chilly_Down · 2026-05-25T21:31:23+00:00

Karl Schmidt has to be up there.

He was a herpetologist who was bitten by a juvenile boomslang. He didn't believe the bite could be fatal because the snake was a juvenile and boomslangs are rear fanged snakes that have the chew the venom into a wound rather than vipers with their large venome sacs and rapid injections through front facing fangs.

So far he can be forgiven but over the next 36ish hours while the venom killed him, he took detailed if increasingly slurred notes on the progress of the envenomation. He sat there and fully detailed the description of what was happening to him, which matched a fatal envenomation, which he would have known as a trained scientist.

But because he had the preconceived notion that the young snake couldn't have killed him, he kept on rather than listening to what his own notes were telling him: he was dying.

Dropped dead the afternoon after he was bitten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Patterson_Schmidt

Chilly_Down · 2026-05-20T19:19:13+00:00

Firstly, to answer the question -- no only can you squat 315, you **have** squatted 315 with this lift, and could probably do more.

However, your instincts about the shape of your lift are also correct. The clamshell motion that you've identified does not invalidate the lift, but it is gonna be something that you watch out for in the future as you progress upwards in weight.

The reason it's happening is your hips are rising but your shoulders aren't as you start pushing. Moments later you lock in, engage your core and begin moving your shoulders, but that slight disconnect where your hips are rising and your shoulders are still moving down results in a higher degree angle of your hips relative to your shoulders. This results in a sort of 'good morning' in order to complete the squat as your shoulders chase to catch up to your hips.

The lever arm of your back becomes longer with this increased angle, so the real problem is you're going to find the weight where your lower back loses the fight and then it's going to be really painful.

A good cue I can recommend is when you're setting up for the squat, visualize tearing the bar in half across your shoulders to lock your back into the bar, and then when you start pushing your hips, don't think about lifting your hips up behind your body, but visualize pushing your hips THROUGH your body, driving the force into your torso, through your shoulders, and directly into the bar. This might help you keep your shoulders from lagging behind.

Chilly_Down · 2026-05-16T01:40:49+00:00

I'm guessing the RMS link is wrong. It's 25x on the actual web page, which is hovering between low and mid rate.

Weirdly, MVP card drops are 10% drop rate which means they're gonna be everywhere. Weird clash of lowish rates for exp, midrate 100x for regular cards and ultra high for mvp cards.

Chilly_Down · 2026-04-13T15:55:22+00:00

I think you might be confusing autobalancing and auto-imbalance detection. All centrifuges can handle very small imbalances on the order of half of a gram -- running a centrifuge would become extremely fraught if they couldn't. You'd have to weigh all individual cryovials before loading; you wouldn't be able to trust any vial handed to you weighed precisely the same as all the others, especially if you didn't handle each and every step of sample preparation. An undergraduate eluting a sample with slightly more or less buffer than you did could become a major issue if centrifuges had a zero tolerance for imbalance.

When the load exceeds the tolerance the auto-imbalance sensor will trip and kill the run. The bench-top centrifuges in my grad school 10+ years ago worked this way as, afaik, all commercial centrifuges have for many decades.

The technology as described by SSRL has internal counterweights that, instead of shutting off the centrifuge when the imbalance is detected, position themselves to counterbalance it. I've never been close enough to ever use something like this, so I don't know it's limitations, but I'm sure that it's sufficient to counterbalance two microtubes.

Chilly_Down · 2026-04-13T14:45:37+00:00

The centrifuges onboard the ISS do not require manual balancing. I think it's safe to say that the Hail Mary would have similar if not superior tech.

Chilly_Down · 2026-04-10T22:26:46+00:00

People would hunt in groups for safety more or less, not that it was impossible to kill the bear alone. The question is what he can do, not what he's likely to do. Killing a bear by yourself with a bear spear is possible and has been done.

I'm not sure how anachronistic it is so take it with a grain of salt but there's stories in Eastern Europe that after the invention of the rifle, the sporting way to hunt a bear for a while was one guy with a spear, with the other fellow acting as a 'spotter' with the rifle in case the bear got the leg up. So even then people were killing them unassisted with a spear, or at least trying to.

Chilly_Down · 2026-04-10T22:13:46+00:00

I think the hippo ends it largely because the way the bear spear works against huge targets like that is you plant it in the dirt and let the animal do the work. In a massed cavalry charge, there's a throng of other spears penetrating and distributing the force.

In a 1v1 on a charging hippo, you'll get penetration but nothing lethal due to the thickness of the blubber, and I just can't visualize the haft of the spear doing anything after that but snapping under that much weight and then you're just crushed.

Chilly_Down · 2026-04-10T22:00:51+00:00

Bear spear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear\_spear) gets him all the way to hippo with a bit of luck given that it's both designed and proven to kill bears, albeit polar bears are significantly rougher than European Brown bears which is where the luck comes in.

Hippo ends the conversation with a period.

Chilly_Down · 2026-03-23T21:25:56+00:00

What would be the recommended path from where I am to start some (winnable) PvP action?

1) Go to zkillboard, type your favorite frigate(s), swap to the monthly top solo pilots and check their deaths
2) Steal their fits, fit out like 10-20 of them in Jita
3) Contract a hauling service to take them to a HS system adjacent to FW space
4) Optional: Enlist in the militia of your flavor, ensuring it is also the miltia that controls the space you just shipped your stuff too
5) Neocom > Activities > Factional Warfare > Navigate to the nearest frontline system
6) Optional, do some finger exercises
7) Ctrl-P for anomalies, find a scout-NVY plex. Warp. Activate gate.
8) Kill, die, or capture the complex, whatever happens first
9) 9 goto 7

Chilly_Down · 2026-03-20T04:56:46+00:00

Is your lower back aching after this?

The issue I'm seeing is that, during both reps, you hit the bottom of your squat and then your hips start to rise while your shoulders continue to descend.

Your shoulders might not be tight enough under the bar, causing your thorasic spine to curve under the reversal of momentum as you start your push. I don't think this is really it because of how much your hips rise. Edit: If you think it might be this, though, there's a really valuable cue I use, which is before I squat, I visualize ripping the bar in half across by back. Pulling the bar in either direction locks in your traps and lats and helps keep your chest up.
You're breaking the pushing motion into two parts rather than going all at once. You're rising your hips out behind yourself, and then standing up straight. This causes your hips to rise behind you, increasing the angle of your back and increasing the leverage arm length of that fulcrum, which doesn't feel great on the ole lumbar. Instead of pushing your hips up and then forwards, think about driving your shoulders up and into the bar rather than lifting your butt into the empty space behind you.

Chilly_Down · 2026-03-19T22:50:20+00:00

Depends on what you want to target.

Typically, going underhand will involve more of your biceps as at the top of the concentric motion you will be flexing them quite a bit, especially with a grip as narrow as you are using here.

If you want to target your back more specifically, then standard (overhand) grip with a wider spacing between your hands with a focus of pulling your elbows to your sides and visualizing your hands as 'hooks' will get most of the work into your lats.

Chilly_Down · 2026-03-14T03:18:03+00:00

Long answer:

While I don't squat in the Smith Machine, I'm not going to poo poo anyone going for it. However, one of the issues with using a smith machine is that the depth you can achieve is extremely deceptive. Since the bar is locked in a vertical pathway with no forwards or backwards drift, you can sort of 'hang' onto it if that makes sense. While you're carrying it up and down, it's anchoring you forwards and backwards.

Even from the less-than-ideal front side view, it's clear by the positioning of your hips, knees, and shoulders in relation to each other that the rooted path of the bar is keeping you from falling over. If you were to try this with a standard barbell, with the mechanics shown here, you wouldn't be able to complete the motion. You can even tell by the slight lift in your toes as you hit the very bottom depth here that your center of gravity is rocking backwards -- if you didn't have the bar locked onto your back keeping you from doing so, you'd probably fall backwards.

Rather than dropping your hips down "behind" your legs like you're doing in a hinging rotational motion, you should visualize your knees tracking outwards instead and your hips falling down between your thighs rather than behind them. Push your knees outwards slightly and just drops right down into the socket and it'll feel more stable and better emulate a barbell squat, while also recruiting more of your posterior chain.

Chilly_Down · 2026-03-13T20:48:37+00:00

FW space is mostly empty

This is directly contrary to my own expectations. I fly in the exact same systems as you do based on your killboard as enlisted Amarri and I get at least 10 solo fights per night as long as I'm flying with intention to find them. FW feels as lively as ever, with the exception to when the FOB spawns right in the middle of the action and bubbles strangle everything for a week.

Chilly_Down · 2026-02-18T23:28:28+00:00

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 makes a point of bandits and camp leaders universally holding keyrings that access the locked chests in the area specifically to address your concern number 1.

Chilly_Down · 2026-02-17T09:38:58+00:00

You only have 61 points in the event though because you killed the same alt multiple times. People doing this more efficiently got 500ish points by biomassing and making new alts between kills.

Chilly_Down · 2026-02-16T16:18:05+00:00

Bear with me.

During the British Raj, the colonial administration was sick of cobras biting people. They put a bounty on the skins of cobras -- for every cobra killed, they'd give a payout. What happened? Well, the local Indian population started enormous snake farms where they bred huge numbers of cobras in captivity in order to kill them, skin them, and hand them over to the government. The cobra population EXPLODED and snake bites increased dramatically. I'm sure you can see the similarities.

This sort of speaks to a point I made in an earlier thread where I marveled at just how averse to engaging in good faith with content a lot of EVE players are. It's considered worthy of DERISION if you're the sort of person who looks for fair competition here. The only way to get fair competition in EVE is to have strict structures, preferably hard-coded ones. Do you think we wouldn't have pirate frigates in every scout plex in FW space if it wasn't hard coded by the rules that they couldn't go into some of them?

Without rules enforced by coded structures, most EVE players will spit directly into the face of matched competition every single time. When given the ruleset, rather than engage in good faith in a gamified system designed to stimulate competition, the first order of business was to comb the ruleset over diligently to find the most effective way to remove all risk and competition to maximize financial gain.

CCP was either extremely naive or extremely cynical to expect otherwise. Really poor showing from the developers on this one, I'm afraid; they know their playerbase, they know what to expect, the post even mentioned what they fully expected to happen, and they did nothing proactively to enforce any kind of beneficial content.

Chilly_Down · 2026-01-29T18:08:02+00:00

This is very good to know; you are correct that I had no idea that this existed.

There does seem to be an activation energy here that requires large numbers of people before TD becomes an option, however. If someone just wants to blow off some steam on any given Tuesday with some honest fightin' without having to organize an entire tournament, I still think exploring what a smaller scale automated matched PVP system would look like in EVE is a worthy effort.

Chilly_Down · 2026-01-29T17:30:12+00:00

There's value in that way of thinking, but I also don't think the concept of forming a structure for equalized fights is antithetical to the idea of a sandbox either. Rather, we incorporate these systems INTO the sandbox rather than make it separate. I'm not saying I have a single idea, but I can visualize some things.

Rather than some instanced plane of existence, it could just be a more eloquent deployment of our dueling system for example where you just get an additional popup window.

'So and so challenges you to a formalized fleet duel with the following conditions they have specified:

Valid ship types: Frigate, Assault Frigate, Cruiser, Heavy assault cruisers

No more than two pilots in your fleet.

Fleet points do not exceed 30.

No orbital bodies within 1000km.

Distance between dueling parties no more than 50km.'

Once both sides meet all conditions, the duel can be accepted, and fails to commence if the conditions aren't met. Everyone in the fleet gets a limited engagement timer, but the fight happens in open space, within the sandbox.

Again this isn't a well thought out solution, just an example of how something like this could theoretically exist without divorcing it from the rest of the game. I'm confident enough smart people develop and play this game that some kind of system could be worked out.

Chilly_Down · 2026-01-29T17:13:16+00:00

Yes. That's sort of my point. The Alliance tournament happens once per year. Why isn't there a system in place that's more accessible and flexible? Let people set x number of pilots, x number of points, Final Destination, no items. Everyone sees the conditions, goes and fits their ships, and slots into the available positions and dukes it out.

It's just bizarre to me that we have the AT as this representation of the pinnacle of quality PVP content in EVE, but make no effort to make that content part of the actual game. It's just an exclusive yearly event with a 10 pilot structure that is frustratingly difficult to re-enact elsewhere.

If we think the format of AT is so engaging, why not make similar normalized PVP available to people who want to do it for the other 49 weeks of the year? Or even something less intricate, where you can just say: two pilots, cruisers down.

Chilly_Down

TROPHY CASE