Well I started up a type of Westside program today. It was speed day with 9 sets of 3 reps at 50% of my max done with varying grips.
From there I went into JM presses and some side delt work.
On Friday, it will be a max effort day doing multiple sets until I hit a max with 3 reps. Then lying extensions and rear delt work.
Everything else will be worked through the week, but will take a back seat until I break through this Bench plateau.
My legs overpower my upper body as I only did lower body work for a couple of years when I first started lifting. So one intense workout a week seems to maintain them.
One thing I have been thinking about is body weight. I'm sitting around 208 lbs on an empty stomach. I have been so focused on getting my bench up that I haven't really paid too much attention to seeing what increasing my calories would do.
I'm only 5' 7", so I feel good and healthy at this weight. I just didn't want to get into pushing my calories up too much and adding any body fat.
But maybe a new "set point" for a while will allow me to get past this and hold on to most of it once I bring my weight back down.
In terms of the percentage used your bar weight is correct but you need an additional 25% of accommodating resistance - bands or chains. For speed work vary the bars used if possible, if you only have a straight bar do 9 sets of 3 using 3 different grips. This works in a way similar to the typical three week wave with increasing percentages.
For max work, which should be done 72 hours after your speed workout the exercise should change each week so it will take several weeks to repeat an exercise. Varying your max exercises may seem like a task but think of it this way. Week to week rotate your ME bench exercise by switching between straight weight, bands, and chains. On top of that rotation you can also switch between boards- off chest, 1 board, 2 board, 3 board, 4 board (we don't use a 4 board much at Westside outside the taller lifters.) Also we use pieces of foam the with the same dimensions as a 1 board (a standard 2x6 from the lumber yard) we usually only to 1 or 2 foam, never getting into the 3 or 4 range.
If you have access to different bars this as another excellent tool in rotating your exercises. We rotate between a straight bar, football bar, T-bar, 2" cambered bar. It can easily take several months before the exact same exercise is repeated which means the body has had many different stimulus' to grow under instead of the same thing over and over.
Building a big back and triceps is key to having a big bench. I'm by no means saying neglect your pecs but an enormous back and triceps are the real keys to benching big. Building the upper back is one of the most important and often over looked areas that creates plateaus in the bench. You simply need to do more upper back work in as many ways as you can think of, also do it heavy. This build a sold platform for you to push with when you're benching.
For triceps my advice is volume. Huge volume is needed to create growth in the triceps. Louie mentions a number of tricep exercises in the benching article earlier in the thread. Also do band push downs, 100-200 reps per day. The overspeed eccentric helps build the connective tissue and thus prevent the very common triceps tendonitis. I've seen this work in body builders who are typically focusing on building muscle which leaves the connective tissue largely undertrained. We don't have one person at Westside right now that has triceps tendonitis and I can't remember the last time we did. Our best raw bencher currently is at 635, we also have several over 500. People say westside only works for geared lifters which is 100% not true. We currently have many athletes of all types train at Westside and all are experiencing excellent results.