Mark Bell's Power Project - 10 Minute Walk Talk - Steve Gentili

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

We had Elite Powerlifter Steve Gentili in the house. Mark Bell was on vacation so Smokey and Andrew had to fill in for the big guy. Steve gives us a few tips on benching and talks about life before YouTube. ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell

what's the word andrew we're good we've so yeah i just i've been recording but anyway steve there's a chance that some people have no idea who the hell you are so if you could tell us just where you're from that's probably a good chance yeah well i mean because where you're from what you've done what's your background yeah social security number all the basics pretty much so my name is steve gentilly i'm a elite powerlifter in the 275 weight class, currently lifting out of Los Angeles. There you go. And what, tell us a little bit about your background. How old are you? What sports did you play? background of a lot of different sports with emphasis in football so that's that's the sport i chased and pursued the longest but it also led me to the most amount of injuries so coming into powerlifting a little banged up what position did you play uh linebacker then later as i got bigger

they moved me into the end okay and you play just high school you could play in college i played uh all throughout my childhood through high school into college and then a little bit after college with some like arena leagues and semi-pro stuff okay all right what are your numbers uh best lifts in competition so far i've done a 771 squat uh classic raw with wraps and then uh 573 was was the bench and 832 pound deadlift. Cool. So far, uh, what do you think are some of the best things that have helped your bench along the way? Um, what's built up the bench for me?

Uh, I, I think like a lot of guys ask me that, right? Like, what is it about your bench? And like, you seem to excel at that, but I think for me, it hasn't been anything different than the other lifts. I've just been able to stay healthier longer. So like my injuries predominantly are all lower body. Like I'll get a knee injury or a lower back injury and it prevents me from squatting and deadlifting for long periods of time. But whatever it is, week after week, I'm able to find myself under the bench press. So I've had the most consistency over a longer period of time with the bench. So I think that's helped me. You know, whether that's a genetic thing or something I do with my warmups, I'm not exactly sure,

but definitely the longevity has helped me the most. What do your warmups look like normally? I do a lot of preventative care for my shoulder health. So I'll do internal, external rotations. I do a pretty good job of like warming up the shoulder girdle. So doing lat pull downs or like everything from the upper body of everything that wraps around, like you got your hip girdle, your shoulder girdle. So rather than some guys, some guys go into bench bench they just warm up their pecs right yeah and they

don't warm up the shoulder or their back so i do a pretty good job of hitting everything before i get in there not like taxing anything with like huge sets or fatiguing anything but just a generalized warm-up okay that makes a lot of sense yeah i think i've seen mark do it like matt winning showed him yeah like yeah we do we'll do a lot of that a little high rep um four or five sets multiple movements like just pressing movements triceps biceps because i found if i just focused on doing the pressing movement like just warming up the chest and pressing i would fatigue and i still wasn't warm so the amount of time it took my body to get to the right temperature, if you want to call it,

it would be a lot more different sets of different exercises. Do you think the bench press is a, like, I don't want to say quite full body movement, but incorporates pretty much your entire body? Or do you feel like it's just mainly upper body for you? I think the guys that do the best at it have found a way to make it a whole body motion so like if you look at kinetic chains it's going to start at your feet and foot placement so for without a doubt it's a whole body motion and what's um for you have you made any adjustments like kind of give us i know uh give us a breakdown of your setup um are the things that you found works better for you because you're taller yeah so and actually i've had a lot of help with it over the years and um one of the things that

was a huge change for me was i used to go on my toes and that's majority because i have lack of flexibility it was harder for me to get my heels onto the ground but making that transition into putting my heels flat gave me a lot more stability in the movement and it was harder at first so i felt like i lost a little bit of that drive off my chest but but after a few months of switching like the stability was better and i was able to build up the power so in those two months were you thinking like this is not working like this like what made you like two months a long time for someone to continue to do something that's challenging or you know yeah i think it takes it takes that amount of time like i don't know the exact number but a certain amount of reps just to feel comfortable with something

so you want to make sure you give it a fair chance like a lot of times if you try something out for a day like the first time you rode a bike it didn't feel great you know so it's like you got to get you got to spend a little bit of time learning the new position with to give it a fair chance got it cool if somebody's watching this or listening to this right now is there something that you can go back to like maybe when you weren't as strong and you can be like fuck i wish i started doing that much sooner what do you think that would be without a doubt taking care of the shoulders. So doing the external and internal rotation and spending the proper time of warmup. There was a time I was young, I would just walk right into a gym, jump under a bench and start throwing weight on there. And that led to a lot of different

problems. So I think taking the time to do the proper warmup and also doing a lot of the prehab, I like to call it, for the shoulder would definitely be something I would have done a lot younger. Take us through one of your warm-ups. So, I mean, are we talking 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Oh, man, I like to say this, dude. The older I get, I feel like my warm-ups are longer than my actual workouts now. Because it's just like getting into the right zone and feeling like I'm ready for those bigger lifts take me a lot longer than they used to. So I think starting off with small movements, like I usually start with a foam roller and

just roll out my whole body. Doesn't matter if it's upper body, lower body. The generalized warmup is pretty much the same. I start with a five minute walk after that, and then I'll get into the specifics of the motion. So if it's a squat workout, i'm doing the bands the hip circle if it's upper body yeah like a dumbbell snatch um banded external internal rotation and then i get into some of that shoulder girdle stuff the pulling the pushing with the band new favorite word yeah yeah so then what does your actual training session look like for like a heavy bench uh it's pretty basic man you know like the the warm-ups i try to

keep the the rep schemes low so i don't i make pretty big jumps for bench usually like jumping a plate at a time and the repetitions are under you know like 135 for 5 225 for 3 315 for 3 and then anything over three plates i'm doing a single are you trying to conserve as much energy but i'm able to do that because i'm already warm from the from the other stuff so your top sets are your main concern you want to make sure you can put all the energy towards those top sets 100 maximize those okay what about for do you ever do any volume like do you ever do sets of 10 or sets of eight or anything yeah yeah so like you know you break down training cycles from different phases right like right now we're predominantly talking about strength strength

phasing peaking for for me but with hypertrophy work it's something completely different got it there's a lot more volume more sets and reps and even the accessories will be different on those if you're working up to a couple sets of 10 are you going to be doing the smaller um smaller Got it. There's a lot more volume, more sets and reps, and even the accessories will be different on those. If you're working up to a couple sets of 10, are you going to be doing the smaller reps, amount of reps up until your main sets? Or are you going to be saying, I'm going to do 10s all the way up? Well, because the intensity of the weight isn't as demanding. So the overall mechanism on the body isn't going to be as hard. I don't need to do as much of a warmup. So it'll be you know like with

hypertrophy work your your working sets are your warm-up yeah and for your strength set so it's a little different a little less work so what about after the heavy work is over and you know any accessories for the day or do any any kind of like uh you know post-workout movements to you know keep your shoulder mobility and all that good stuff i'd go a lot by feel now so like if i if it was a great workout things moved well then i'll spend a little bit more time with the accessories but a lot of what you run into with getting stronger is running into injuries and trying to avoid those injuries so um you know if i felt like my tricep didn't move or the elbow was hurting a little bit on the extension, then I might spend a little less time working the tricep to allow that to heal and more time focusing on other things. All right. So earlier you were talking about kind of people who are trying to do whether it it be youtube videos or motivational you know inspiring

instagram posts etc they're getting a little too scientific now you and i were kind of talking about motivation right and we were kind of talking like well what the hell did we do before youtube because we're both in our 30s like i remember before youtube it didn't always exist yeah yeah sometimes you just you had to find a magazine or you don't you just need literally to get a motivation just get your ass in the gym and just do something. And there's, but there's so much information out there now that people are getting more nitpicky rather than starting to just pick one way to do it and putting effort into that. Well, doing a, doing a pull down that way. Isn't the ideal you need to, you need to use this grip or this rep scheme.

And you overstimulate yourself, right? You need to use this grip or this rep scheme. And you overstimulate yourself, right? Because if you start to think about all the different trainings, it's going to be overwhelming. Rather than just picking a certain way to do it and just fucking giving it 100%, you're starting to exhaust yourself before you get into the gym just trying to pick which way to do it. So you're almost like defeating yourself before you even get in with all the information out there. Yeah. And then you're second-guessing your coach and second-guessing what you're programming. And then you like, and then you're second guessing your coach and second guessing what your program.

And it's just not leading to anything positive. Uh, I'm no, I'm super guilty of this. I'll go to certain people, uh, such as like Marcus and, I'll be like,

well, so-and-so does this. So-and-so does that. And I can see it in his eyes. He wants to strangle me, but, uh, I imagine as a coach,

you might get that a lot. Cause there's so many, there's hundreds, thousands of people and coaches that do different things. And they all fucking work, man. Like you're going to start comparing different professional opinions. If you ask 10 professionals, you're going to get 10 different opinions. And there's the right, the truth of it is there's no right way to do anything.

You just got to know why you're doing it and what way you're going to do it there might be a few wrong ways to do things but those are the easy probably easy ways to avoid yeah and i i think it's less and less and most of what strength and uh strength strategies are debatable right because if there was only one way to do it we would all do it the exact same way and we don't like there like there is no best way to get bigger. There is no best way to get stronger. And that's why there are 10 different guys leading the industry with all these different ideas and trying at different ways. But my point to that being, don't sit back and try to pinpoint the exact strategy that you think is going to be most effective for you and just go after one and

try it out. Cause the best way to see if something's going to work is try is trying it out for yourself. And like, that doesn't mean that you're going to try six programs and have success with six different programs. But if you're giving it a shot and with the right intensity, man, you're going to see some results. Got it. So some actions a day is better than planned action tomorrow.

Right. That should be on a shirt. Wow. But it should have the word violent in there okay there it is that was close yeah who's somebody you followed early on um for what not just for some of that motivation like was there a turning point well that's the thing man it was like there wasn't anybody specifically that i would watch like youtube back then wasn't used for like googling someone's name and like you would just type in epic bench workout and it'd be some random dude with heavy metal music playing just smashing weights and that was that's all i needed to get motivated i didn't need well why is he doing it that way and like oh i noticed that his hands are a quarter inch tighter on this set

than on that set i wonder like no, I wasn't worried about that. I was just watching him do his thing and get fired up and go in there and try it for myself. And they weren't really, they weren't explaining anything. There was no, it was literally, it's like they just took a camera,

took some music and followed some dude, do a back workout. Exactly. And there, there was no science to it. Like there was no, no thought out of how we're going to teach this specific modality of exercise. It was just somebody pouring their heart into something, and that, to me, got me fired up.

Is there anybody around right now that gets you fired up like that? A ton of guys. There's a lot of the top lifters out there. Everybody kind of watches each other, and there's a lot of guys that do. But there everybody kind of watches each other and there's a lot of guys that do but like for me it's less of what they're doing like i don't need to know the science behind it and just more of them watching the lifting and that's enough for me but there's like there's a lot of information out there we can all do our own research and i encourage people to like people ask me my ideas on stuff and i encourage them to go out there and look at academically supported literature and not just

what somebody else told them because that's the best way to find out a true information but the point of all that being you're just going out there and trying it for yourself because you could debate things all day but it's never going to get you anywhere. Anything else, Smokey? No. We got you here. You came up last night. We fed you. Yeah, man.

Got some meals in today, and you're going to go for a big bench today. Yeah, I was told I came here to lift, man. And all this talking about firing up. I want to get after you. Getting fired up. Doing photo shoots and talking. And I just want to lift, man. You did good in front of the camera, I'll say.

You made my job really easy. I'm a natural natural is what you're saying pretty much yeah yeah all right what is the future yeah uh what are you going for today uh the so my program says 590 uh it's gonna be the first time i've ever gone off program but you know everybody knew when they wrote 590 i was gonna put 600 on the bar. I'm going to take what the day gives me, but I'm feeling pretty fucking good right now. Nice. And where did that program come from?

Chad Wesley Smith does my programs. He's not going to be too happy about me not doing it, but I followed it to a T so far. I followed it to a T so far, so this will be my first time not doing the exact number. How long have you been working with him? Been over a year now. We've made a lot of progress. Majority of it on squats for me.

He took me from 700 pounds and we'll be going for an 800-pound squat. And it's been about a year and and through a lot of different injuries so you know chad's put together different types of strategies that have been really effective do you yourself do you yourself coach anybody i do i i do uh i have a gym back home hybrid fitness in pasadena we have i have a great group of guys that come in there and power lift. And I do a little bit of online. I try to stay away from that just because I enjoy the interpersonal part of the coaching, but I do have a strong group of guys online. Cool.

And, uh, so what's next for you? Are you going to stick with power lifting for a while? Are you going to switch it up soon? Uh, for me, man, like nothing really changes. I like focusing power lifting is always going to be a passion of mine, but for me, it's more strength based. So I enjoy pushing myself and seeing what I can do. I don't know if it's always going to be chasing bigger numbers or if that's going to involve

into something else, but I'm pretty task oriented. And then until I hit that 600 in a meet, then it, then it's really not going to change. Gotcha. Cool. Got anything else? Smoke to change. Gotcha. Cool. Got anything else, Mo? Nope. We're good. All right.

Where can people find you? You can find me on Instagram at ptfitness500. Cool. Thanks a lot, dude. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks for having me. Peace.

Later. That wasn't bad.