Warming Up

You must also warm up before you begin your bench pressing routine. You have to fill your muscles with blood in order for them to be most effective.

By increasing the blood flow to your chest, and triceps you are not only warming up your muscles, you are also getting a better workout then you would have if you started cold. This is because you are also stretching, and loosening your tendons as well.

Professional athletes do this all the time before games and sporting events as well and there's a reason for it -- it works. If you want to lift like a pro then you should do what the pro's do. Usually some pushups will do the trick. Or if you don’t like doing pushups you can do 10 to 15 reps light weight just to get your blood pumping.