Before the Rack: How Did People Bench Press Without One?

Every so often you find a piece of lifting history that makes the modern gym look like it has lost its imagination. And, in my view, the bench press is one of those pieces.

The rack is so structurally central to the contemporary gym that its absence barely registers as a historical possibility. It is simply there, bolted down, loaded with plates, usually occupied by someone doing a weight they probably should not be doing. But for the first half of the twentieth century there were no racks. Lifters had the floor, a barbell, and an approach to horizontal pressing that would give most modern gym-goers genuine pause.

I was drawn to this after a weekend conversation with a friend about my home gym experiences. For context, this is more a story about my stupidity than training heroicism. For two years I benched pressed outside, in the Irish weather, and usually at night. In a quote resembling Oscar Wilde, I was training in the gutter, but I was looking at the stars. And rain… so much bloody rain that I eventually bought a cheap plastic gazebo.

Anyway, I encountered this issue that people tried to solve a century ago. How to heavily train my chest without a bench. I did floor presses, pullover and presses, bench pressed on a plyometric box (which sucked from a comfort perspective) and eventually took the ‘soft’ option and bought a bench press. Now I am civilised and train with a roof (with insulation no less!) but I remain enthralled with how people in the past trained heavy without the luxuries of the day.

So, with that in mind, lets look at how people bench pressed before well, the bench press.

The Pullover and Press

The dominant chest movement of early physical culture was not the bench press. It was the pullover and press: lie flat on the floor, drag a loaded barbell over your head from behind, get it above your torso, press it upward. It is what you do when you want to press something heavy while horizontal but have not yet invented a reliable way to hand it to yourself at chest height. As solutions go it is admirably direct and only slightly terrifying.

This was the world of physical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, led by names like Eugen Sandow, Arthur Saxon, and George Hackenschmidt. Physical culture was a worldwide health phenomenon that represented the genuine precursor to modern gym culture. Gymnasiums, barbells, and dumbbells were appearing in greater numbers, and with greater interest came more variety in lifts and displays of strength. Trainers in those days experimented considerably more than their modern counterparts, partly because they had to. Few could call upon the vast resources available today. They were working things out as they went, which partly explains why the pullover and press existed at all and partly explains what happened to it later.

Arthur Saxon, one of the Germanic strongmen who defined this era, regularly pressed over 300 pounds this way and wrote about it with the confidence of someone describing a commute. He documented the lift in The Development of Physical Power in 1905, presenting extraordinary numbers with the matter-of-fact tone of a man who considered this sort of thing unremarkable. George Hackenschmidt, the Estonian wrestling giant who appeared to have been assembled rather than born, totalled 360 pounds in 1899. These were not casual numbers produced by men in favourable circumstances. They were competition lifts, performed in front of audiences, using a method that required wrestling a loaded barbell into position before the actual pressing had even started.

There is also, for the record, a photograph of Hackenschmidt performing something resembling a bench press in 1911 (chest elevated, pressing upward) which suggests that even in the pullover and press era, people were occasionally experimenting with elevation. Nobody made much of it at the time. The floor remained the default for another three decades.

Some People Were Always Going to Find a Way

The problem with an uncodified lift is that form standards exist only in the sense that everyone has slightly different ones.

The pullover and press had barely settled into a recognisable shape before lifters began experimenting with what became known, with only moderate diplomatic generosity, as the belly toss. Instead of pressing from the chest, you brought the bar to your abdomen, applied a generous hip thrust, and used the resulting momentum to send the bar upward. George Lurich managed 443 pounds this way in 1900, which put him well ahead of Saxon and Hackenschmidt and raised immediate questions about whether what he was doing and what they were doing were meaningfully the same exercise.

Even Saxon, who wrote approvingly about stricter technique, deployed the belly toss when the weights got heavy enough to make his published philosophy inconvenient. The gap between what a man writes about lifting and what he actually does when nobody respectable is watching is a recurring theme in fitness history btw. And as an aside, huge shout out to a powerlifter who recently agreed to revoke his competition lift for not meeting the right standard DESPITE the judges approving it on the day.

Anyway, a modern iteration of the belly toss in the bench press is the tendency by some lifters (me included) when they bring their hips off the bench and squirm upwards until the bar has been pressed. I also like to do the wiggle-waggle squirm to further erode my dignity.

One man who eventually lost patience with the belly toss was Bob Hoffman. Hoffman owned York Barbell, coached the US weightlifting team at various points, and generated opinions at a rate that suggested he found silence personally offensive. His influence on American weightlifting during the 1920s and 1930s was considerable — as detailed by historian John Fair in a series of articles and books on the period — and he used it freely when something displeased him.

What displeased him here was the American Bill Lilly, who was pressing 484 pounds via belly toss and collecting records while doing so. Hoffman’s conclusion, delivered in not so veiled terms, was that what Lilly was performing bore a closer resemblance to an abdominal exercise than a chest press. He was using momentum to complete the lift and thereby, in Hoffman’s view, making a mockery of the entire pursuit.

Hoffman used his influence within the American Athletic Union to have the belly toss banned from competition in 1939. It was a decision received with the mixture of relief and outrage that tends to greet any attempt to standardise what had previously been everyone’s own business. The belly toss remained permissible in European competitions for some time, but began its slow fade in the United States, and where American lifting standards went, others tended to follow eventually.

Boxes, Benches, and the Problem Nobody Had Solved Yet

Banning the belly toss and committing to a strict chest press from the floor created an immediate structural problem. The floor is right there and the bar can descend to your chest but no further. A lifter’s range of motion, in this technqiue, is inherently limited.

So lifters started lying on boxes, or benches, or whatever raised the body enough that the bar could actually travel somewhere useful on the descent. Before World War II this remained rare as the floor was still the default and the bench was an experiment most people hadn’t yet had reason to conduct. Jan Todd, writing on the history of lifting, note that prior to the war this kind of improvised bench pressing was an incredibly rare thing. The equipment was crude, the practice was unsystematic, and the critical problem was unchanged regardless. There was no rack. Someone handed you the bar, or you manoeuvred it into position yourself. Every set began with a logistical challenge that had nothing to do with pressing. Check out Reg Park pressing 450lbs. on a box. The idea of trusting someone to deadlift a weight and hold it while I set my bench press is terriyfing with anything over 35 lbs. 450lbs. is a trust exercise!

The Rack and What It Cost

After the war the bench press found its modern form. The critical development, according to John Sanchez, one of the more obsessive chroniclers of powerlifting history, was the emergence of rack stations during the 1950s. Not only did this make the lift accessible to ordinary gym-goers who didn’t have trained spotters available, it encouraged the use of considerably heavier weights. The pullover and press was arguably a greater test of overall strength, but the rack-assisted bench press allowed lifters to isolate the chest in a way that the floor could never quite manage.

Within bodybuilding, Marvin Eder and George Eiferman were two of the most prominent proponents of the bench press during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the lift began attracting serious attention from those interested in pure strength as well. In November 1950, Doug Hepburn became the first man to pause press 400 pounds. By 1953 the Canadian was pushing 500. These were numbers that the pullover and press era had produced via different means, under different conditions and using a different lift. Now they were being produced cleanly, with a bar unracked at chest height, by a man lying on a purpose-built bench. See Hepburn below bench pressing on a new-fangled stand.

Hoffman, having spent years lamenting the bench press obsession of Olympic weightlifters (he noted worryingly in the late 1950s that many had become consumed by the lift) began marketing a five-in-one bench himself, offering flat, incline, and decline pressing angles. Joe Weider declared the bench press the ‘Greatest Lift of Them All’ in Muscle Power in 1957, which is the kind of sentence you can publish when you own the magazine. Within two decades the lift had gone from regular obscurity to lifting celebrity, carried there by better equipment, cleaner standardisation, and the simple fact that the rack made it possible for anyone to attempt serious weight without requiring a training partner or a good deal of spatial awareness.

What the rack did was make the bench press possible as a lift with heavy weights. It isolated the press and made weight comparable across lifters and decades but it also changed what the lift required. The pullover and press demanded full-body coordination across an awkward arc through shoulder mobility, spatial awareness and a kind of improvisational competence that unracking a bar does not compare with. Whether that made it a better exercise is a question for someone else but for me that evolution from floor to racks is fascinating. In it we see changes in competition standards, body ideals and aesthetics. As happened in my own training experience, the ground gave way to boxes, boxes gave way to benches, benches, eventually, got racks.