As Men’s Health Fitness Director, there are few days I look forward to more than our cover shoots. Effectively, you get to spend the day with a cool person, feeding them Haribo, bananas and rice cakes, helping them get a massive pump and occasionally teaching them a few new moves – all while shooting the breeze about training, nutrition and life.

Our latest cover with Brett Goldstein stands out in my mind, not just as an absolutely iconic shoot – Brett lifted weights underwater, hopped into an ice bath with me for an interview and trained in a countryside garden in Wimbledon – but also because we managed to get him a huge bench press PB right in the middle of it all.

Here are the exact tips I gave him to add 10kg to his bench – instantly.

1. Use Your Legs

Once Brett was seated on the bench, I told him to bring his feet back slightly, then slide his bum and knees forwards so his feet were planted firmly on the floor, almost underneath him rather than out in front of his knees.

From there, I told him to drive his feet hard into the floor while pushing his upper back into the bench pad as I handed him the bar. (We had no actual bench-press set-up – we really were MacGyvering this one.)

By driving your feet into the floor and your upper back into the bench, you create tension throughout your entire body, effectively turning yourself into one big coiled spring.

It sounds like strange advice, but many of the best bench pressers in the world will tell you just how much of their press comes from their legs.

Try lifting your feet off the floor when you bench and see how much power you lose. Then go the other way: drive your feet hard into the floor and your back hard into the bench. You should immediately feel how much extra power you can generate from that added stability, full-body tension and leg drive.

2. Bring Your Chest to the Bar

The next cue I gave Brett was to breathe deeply and bring his chest to the bar.

This is a little bit of a hack for a bigger lift, straight from the powerlifter’s playbook. It’s less about building muscle and more about moving as much weight as possible – although, to be fair, moving more weight can often help you build more muscle over time.

I instructed Brett to take a big, deep breath and think ‘big chest’, really filling up his torso. As he pressed his upper back into the bench pad, I wanted him to actively imagine bringing his chest upwards to meet the bar, rather than simply lowering the bar towards his chest.

You don’t have to lift yourself off the bench or do anything too dramatic. The idea is simply to create a bigger, more stable base through the torso so the bar has slightly less distance to travel.

That ‘meeting in the middle’ reduces the range of motion a little and can help you move more weight.

3. Expand and Explode

Once the bar met his chest in the middle, the instruction was simple: exhale hard, drive the feet into the floor as forcefully as possible and imagine you’re trying to break the bar.

That means a big, explosive exhale, with all of your energy driving down into the ground to create that leg drive and blast the bar away from your chest.

This intentional inhale on the way down – creating a big chest – followed by a powerful exhale on the way up can create a really effective rhythm. That’s useful not only for hitting one-rep-max PBs, but also for getting into the flow of higher-rep sets.

Down and in. Out and up. Expand, contract and explode.

Brett hit a 10kg bench press PB on the day and, honestly, he made it look so easy once he factored in these few cues that I think he could have squeezed out another three to five reps with the weight.

Not too shabby in the middle of a cover shoot.

Or perhaps it was all the Haribo and Percy Pigs we’d given him to help him get a pump.

Read our full interview with Brett at this link. You can subscribe to Men’s Health by clicking here.