A bench press in para powerlifting is largely decided before the bar moves. The lifter is already lying down when the platform clock starts, the legs are strapped, and everything that will govern the attempt has been arranged while the bar is still sitting in the rack.
That is the part of Siamand Rahman‘s career that coaches keep returning to. The results are the reason people watched: gold in London in 2012, gold in Rio in 2016, and a lift of 310 kilograms in Rio that took the sport past a number nobody had crossed. He died in 2020, at thirty-one, and the footage has stayed in coaching rooms since.
What follows is the mechanism under the numbers. The order the setup was built in, what the shoulder blades and the breath were doing, why the bar travelled the line it did, and how a training week for a super-heavyweight bench specialist is actually organised.
The lift in short
- The discipline. One lift only. Para powerlifting is the bench press, contested from a purpose-built bench with the legs secured.
- The category. The heaviest men’s class, above 107 kilograms, where the bar spends more time bending than it does anywhere else in the sport.
- The record that mattered. Three hundred and ten kilograms in Rio, the first lift over three hundred in the sport’s history.
- The constraint. No leg drive, no arch built off the floor, no contribution from anything below the waist.
- The technical interest. A setup sequence executed in the same order on every attempt, and a bar path that barely deviated between a training single and a competition third.
- What it changed. The ceiling coaches were willing to plan toward in the heaviest categories.
A bench press without a floor to push against
A gym bench press is a whole-body action. The feet drive into the floor, the hips push back toward the shoulders, an arch shortens the distance the bar has to travel, and the bar is pressed off a platform that runs from the heels to the hands. Remove all of that and the lift changes character.
In para powerlifting the athlete lies on a longer, wider bench with the legs extended and strapped, and head, shoulders and buttocks stay in contact with the surface throughout. There is no floor in the chain. Force comes from the chest, the front of the shoulders, the triceps and the muscles that hold the upper back rigid, and nothing else contributes.
That single difference reorganises the technique. Stability has to be manufactured on the bench rather than taken from the ground, the range of motion cannot be shortened by an arch, and the setup stops being preparation and becomes the largest single variable in the attempt.
The setup ritual, in the order it happened
Watch three of his attempts in sequence and the striking thing is not the load. It is that the sequence is identical: the same order, the same pauses between steps, the same number of adjustments before the hands close on the bar.
The order runs from the furthest point of contact inward. Legs positioned and strapped first, so the base cannot shift. Then the position on the bench itself, set by feel against the rack uprights rather than by looking. Then the upper back, then the hands, then the wrists, then the breath, and only then the unrack.
The reason to work outward-in is that every step changes the one before it. Setting the hands before the shoulder blades pulls the shoulder blades out of position; strapping the legs after settling the torso drags the torso down the bench. A lifter who builds in a fixed order removes a whole class of small errors that only become visible under a maximal load.
Where the shoulder blades go before the bar moves
The scapular set is the part beginners skip and the part that decides whether a heavy attempt is stable. The shoulder blades are pulled together and down toward the hips, and then held there, which turns the upper back into a rigid shelf and moves the shoulder joint into a position it can tolerate under load.
The benefit is mechanical rather than muscular. A retracted, depressed shoulder blade shortens the effective distance from the shelf to the bar and puts the shoulder in a packed position where the joint is not being asked to stabilise and press at the same time. Lose the position mid-attempt and the bar drifts toward the face, the elbows flare, and the press stalls at the point where the leverage is worst.
Holding it without leg drive is harder than it sounds. In an able-bodied lift the leg drive helps to pin the torso against the bench and preserve the set. Strapped down, the lifter has to maintain it with the lats and the mid-back alone, for the whole time the bar is out of the rack, including the motionless pause the rules require.
Grip width is a lever decision, not a comfort one
Competition rules cap the distance between the index fingers at eighty-one centimetres, which makes grip width a decision inside a fixed ceiling rather than an open choice. Almost every heavyweight specialist works at or very near that limit, and the reason is arithmetic.
A wider grip shortens the vertical distance the bar has to travel, because the arms are more horizontal at the bottom. It also increases the load on the shoulder at the touch point and reduces how much the triceps can contribute near lockout. A narrower grip lengthens the range, spares the shoulder and gives the triceps more of the work.
Body proportions settle the argument for a given lifter. A very heavy athlete with a deep chest already has a short range of motion, because the chest itself is high off the bench, and that combination is one of the structural reasons the heaviest categories move the largest absolute numbers. The grip is then set to the widest position the shoulder can tolerate for three attempts, not the widest position that works once.
The breath is taken before the bar leaves the rack
The breath is not a detail of the lift; it is part of the structure. Air is taken in before the unrack, held against a closed airway, and kept for the whole attempt. The braced trunk that produces is what stops the ribcage collapsing when three hundred kilograms settles onto the chest.
Breathing out at the bottom, or taking a second breath during the pause, drops the chest by a centimetre or two. That sounds trivial and it is not, because it lengthens the press at the exact moment the lifter has the least leverage, and it usually costs the scapular position at the same time.
The technique carries a real cost. Bracing against a closed airway raises pressure inside the chest and the abdomen sharply, which is why the pressure spikes involved are treated as a genuine medical consideration in strength sports and why lifters are screened for it. Anyone training the method should be doing so under supervision, with medical clearance, and not as a self-taught addition to a general strength routine.
Touch point, pause and the two commands
The bar is lowered to the chest, held motionless, and pressed only when a referee gives the start command. That single rule shapes the whole attempt, because it removes the stretch reflex that a touch-and-go press relies on and forces the lifter to start the press from a dead position.
The touch point is chosen to make that dead start survivable. Low on the chest, at or just below the line of the nipples, with the forearms close to vertical when the bar arrives. If the bar lands too high, the shoulder takes a position it cannot press from; too low and the wrists collapse backward.
The pause itself is a holding problem, not a strength problem. The lifter is supporting the load in the weakest position of the lift while listening for a command whose timing is not his to control, and any loss of tightness during that interval is not recoverable. Training therefore uses long paused singles at submaximal loads far more than heavy touch-and-go work.
Tracing the bar across a heavy attempt
Trace the bar across a video of a good heavy attempt and it is not a straight vertical line. It is a shallow arc: down and slightly toward the feet on the descent, then up and back toward the shoulders and the rack on the press.
The reason is joint mechanics. The shoulder is strongest pressing along a line that ends roughly above itself, and the touch point that protects the shoulder sits lower than that, so a bar pressed perfectly vertically from the touch point finishes in front of the joint and stalls. The arc reconciles the two positions.
What separated the heaviest lifts on film was how little that arc varied. The same curve at an opening attempt and at a third, with the deviation confined to the last few centimetres of the press, which is where fatigue shows up first. Consistency of path is the most reliable visual marker of a lifter who is genuinely in control of the load rather than surviving it.
The Siamand Rahman powerlifting week, block by block
The training structure behind a single competition lift is less exotic than the lift suggests. A siamand rahman powerlifting week, and the week of any serious specialist in the heaviest categories, is built around a small number of heavy exposures and a large amount of supporting work that never approaches a maximum.
The heavy days are few. Competition-style paused singles and doubles at high percentages, taken once or twice a week, with the setup rehearsed exactly as it will be executed on the platform. Everything about those sessions is a dress rehearsal, including the straps, the commands and the rack height.
The volume days look nothing like them. Higher repetitions at moderate loads, close-grip work, board or pin presses to attack a specific sticking point, and a large amount of upper-back and lat work whose only purpose is holding the scapular set. Triceps volume is treated as a priority rather than an accessory, because the lockout is where a heavy paused press is most often lost. Broader accounts of structured strength training describe the same distribution of intensity.
Three attempts and the arithmetic of a competition day
A competition gives three attempts, and the opener is a tactical decision rather than a warm-up. It has to be a weight the lifter can complete on a bad day with a slow command, because a lifter who fails all three attempts records nothing at all regardless of what he can do in training.
The second attempt is where the medal is usually decided. It is normally set close to a recent training best, and it establishes a total that opponents have to answer. The third is the ambitious one, chosen with the other lifters’ declarations already visible, and the order of lifting means a competitor with a lighter declared weight goes first.
Records sit slightly outside that structure. The rules allow a further attempt beyond the ranking lifts for a record, which is why a lifter who has already secured the competition can still be seen taking a load nobody needs to match. That is the mechanism behind most of the headline numbers in the sport, including the ones that appear at events like the recent world-record meets.
What the rulebook allows and forbids
| Element | What the rules require | Why it matters technically |
|---|---|---|
| Body contact | Head, shoulders and buttocks stay on the bench | Removes any option to shorten the range with an arch |
| Legs | Extended and secured to the bench | Eliminates leg drive and the torso stability it provides |
| Grip width | Maximum of eighty-one centimetres between index fingers | Caps the shortest available range of motion |
| Descent | Bar lowered under control to the chest | Prevents a bounce and forces a controlled eccentric |
| Pause | Bar motionless, then a start command | Removes the stretch reflex and adds a holding demand |
| Press | Even extension of both arms to lockout | An uneven finish is a failed lift regardless of load |
| Attempts | Three in the ranking, with a record attempt available | Turns weight selection into a tactical problem |
What the three-hundred barrier changed
Round numbers do not change physics, and they do change planning. Before the barrier fell, a heavy programme in the top category was built toward the high two hundreds, and the numbers above that were treated as theoretical. Afterwards they became a target that somebody had already hit, which is a different conversation with a coach.
The second effect was on selection. A demonstrated ceiling changes which young athletes a federation invests in and how long it is prepared to wait, because the payoff at the top of the sport is now visibly larger. That has been the pattern across several disciplines within adaptive sport, where a single result reorganises a national programme faster than any policy document.
The third was on attention. A lift that is legible to people who know nothing about the sport does more for a discipline’s visibility than a decade of steady results, and the heaviest bench press in the world is legible to anyone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the legs strapped down in para powerlifting?
To standardise the lift. Securing the legs removes leg drive and any attempt to use the lower body for stability, so every athlete presses from the same conditions and the result reflects upper-body strength alone.
How is a competition bench press different from a gym one?
The bar has to be lowered under control, held motionless on the chest until a referee gives the command, and then pressed to an even lockout. The pause removes the stretch reflex, which is why a paused competition single is always well below a touch-and-go maximum.
Does a wider grip always mean a bigger lift?
It shortens the range of motion, which helps, and it loads the shoulder more at the bottom while reducing what the triceps can contribute at the top. The best width is the widest a lifter can hold safely across three attempts, and that is an individual answer.
Why do the heaviest categories move such large absolute loads?
Partly muscle mass and partly geometry. A very heavy athlete with a deep chest has a shorter distance to press, and the combination of a short range with a large cross-section is what produces the numbers seen at the top of the sport.
Is the breath-holding technique safe to copy?
Not without supervision. Bracing against a closed airway produces sharp pressure changes in the chest and abdomen, and it is treated as a medical consideration in strength sport. Anyone training it should have clearance and a coach watching, rather than adopting it from footage.
The lifts are remembered as a number, and the number was the easy part to see. What the footage actually preserves is a sequence: legs, position, shoulder blades, hands, wrists, air, and then a bar that travelled the same shallow arc whether it held two hundred kilograms or three.
