As home gyms and smaller shared facilities evolve, more of them will adopt the same standardised equipment as conventional fitness centres, albeit adapted for the practicalities of the space.

A good example of this is the foldable weight training bench, which has become an increasingly common cornerstone of many people’s personal fitness equipment, particularly if they take it seriously enough to have appropriate weightlifting or powerlifting plates.

However, whilst the ever-popular bench press is sometimes believed to have been created as a result of the existence of the weight bench, in reality, the opposite is true and the latter was created as a way to standardise a difficult and remarkably controversial floor lift.

Legacy Of The Lion

Whilst perhaps best remembered as the first officially recognised professional wrestling world heavyweight champion, George Hackenschmidt was also hugely influential in the world of bodybuilding and strength training.

Arguably his greatest legacy was being the first person to perform what was known at the time as the floor press in 1899.

The motion is similar to the modern bench press; after rolling a 164 kg (362 lb) barbell over his face, he performed a successful, strict press and kickstarted what would become a strength training tradition.

Performing a strict floor press is extremely difficult and almost nobody could match his record for 18 years, at least not whilst still following his technique. It would take until 1916 for it to be beaten by Joe Nordquest, and even then he only beat it by a kilogramme.

The Rise And Fall Of The Belly Press

At the time, the form was far from a priority; in an era of strongmen and strongwomen, strength was measured by the raw numbers irrespective of how they were achieved.

This led to the rise of the “belly toss”, first used by Georg Lurich in 1902, where the weight is positioned over the abdomen before the lifter bridges upward, effectively catapulting the weight into the overhead position.

It remained popular but extremely controversial due to the focus less on arm strength and more on flexibility.

The epicentre of this controversy was in the late 1920s, as the particularly flexible weightlifter Bill Lilly was able to achieve some remarkable world records using his abdomen to drive the weight upwards.

The future weightlifting entrepreneur Bob Hoffman was extremely unhappy with this, arguing that the lift was not truly undertaken by the arms, whilst others would go so far as to describe it as the work of a contortionist, and even a 207 kg lift could not convince the critics otherwise.

Making The Bench

In the 1930s, a number of measures were taken to standardise the bench press and create the earliest rudimentary types of weight bench.

What lifters found was that if they lay on an elevated surface, they could not push up as effectively with their abdomen, so they started to lie on wooden boxes and press the barbell from their chest.

This isolated the deltoid and chest muscles directly and led to the first standardised bench presses that banned bending the legs, lifting the glutes or back from the bench or separating the heels of your shoes to get an advantage.

The only issue with this version of the lift is that it requires a spotter to hand the weights to the lifter and set them up in the right position. Today, spotting is an incredibly important part of weight training, but at the time it was not always popular.

This would change by the 1950s, which would lead to the development of the bench rack. This allowed people to theoretically bench press themselves and made it easier and safer to spot, as they only needed to lift the barbell back onto the rack.

This innovation truly standardised the bench press as we know it today and could be credited with inventing powerlifting beyond an alternative version of strength athletics.

The creator of Mr Olympia, Joe Wieder, described the bench press in Muscle Power magazine as the greatest of all lifts, and training benches had developed to become stronger, more robust, more ergonomic and more versatile.

The Quest For A Thousand Pounds

Eventually, this popularity and a constant push for true competition in non-Olympic lifts would lead to the founding of the International Powerlifting Federation, and by 2004, as reported by Slate, powerlifter Gene Rychlak Jr would rather controversially achieve a 1000 lbs press (453 kg).

The controversy came with the use of a bench suit, which means that this record has spun off from the raw record first held by Mr Hackenschmidt, and the current record holder is Julius Maddox with a 335.5 kg lift in 2019.