bench press

See also: benchpress and bench-press

English

bench press (plural bench presses)

(weightlifting) An exercise performed by pressing the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.
- 1974, Charles Gaines, George Butler, Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, page 18:
  ...Nubret has pushed and pulled maniacally at iron while sustaining a diet that would explode an ordinary metabolism—doing for that renowned chest, for instance, forty sets of twenty benchpresses (pushing 210 pounds off his chest a total of eight hundred times every other day) […]

exercise

bench press (third-person singular simple present bench presses, present participle bench pressing, simple past and past participle bench pressed)

(weightlifting) To press the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.
- 1988, Frederick C. Hatfield, “Powersource: Ties that bind”, in Ironman, 47 (6): 21:
  I went home and bench pressed 30 pounds more than I had ever done before.
- 2017 November 16, Jo Ellison, “Help: the gym has turned us into slobs”, in Financial Times‎^[1]:
  And I’m definitely getting stronger. I can now bench press — oh — at least 10 kilos without my arms collapsing underneath me.