I Take My Accessories To The Limit
I track my skull crushers like a competition squat — and I occasionally pull a heavy single on them.
Walk into most gyms and watch what happens after the main lift. The bar gets racked, the logbook gets closed, and the next hour is “something heavy for 12 to 15” or five sets of rows at whatever weight was on the machine. The main lift gets percentages, bar speed and a training max. The accessories get vibes.
I treat them the same. Every accessory I do has an estimated rep max, a prescribed load, and a line in the log that gets compared to last workout or to a specific point in a previous training block. Not because I’m obsessive (although I am) — because accessory work is the foundation the main lifts stand on, and you don’t leave the foundation unmeasured.
The Logic
Your bench doesn’t increase JUST because you benched more. It goes up because your triceps, your upper back and your shoulders became capable of supporting a heavier bench. If those lifts aren’t progressing, the main lift eventually stops too — and most people struggle to solve these frustrating plateaus, because they neglected to write down the majority of the work they did in the weight room.
Stress has to go up over time for adaptation to continue. That applies to a rope pressdown exactly as it applies to a deadlift. The only way to deliberately increase stress is to know what you’ve done during past training sessions and blocks. The accessories won’t move as fast as the main lifts — they shouldn’t — but they should be moving, and you should be able to prove it.
Go Heavier Than Feels Normal
The second thing I do differently: I load accessories much heavier than the industry default. Skull crushers, pressdowns, rows, extensions — every one of them periodically drops into a 2–4, 3–6 or 4-8 rep range. Heavy supportive work builds the kind of tissue and tendon tolerance that 15-rep sets never ask for, and it raises the ceiling your higher-rep work can progress toward.
I take it further than most. I’ll run singles, doubles and triples on lifts you’d never see in a powerlifting meet, because I enjoy it. I’m not telling you to do that. I’m telling you that a heavy set of 5 reps on a skull crusher should be a normal, occasional event in your program instead of something people flinch at. The risk associated with this approach drops significantly when that 5 rep set is based off your tracked previous performance in similar rep ranges.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Every accessory has a working rep max on file, ready to be referenced the next time the variation makes it into the training rotation
Load is prescribed off that number by rep range — heavier range, higher percentage — not always simply guessed from the most recent set
Progression is planned in blocks: the rep range comes down and the load comes up over time, with the pace scaled to the size of the muscle and the complexity of the movement.
It all gets logged. Every. Single. Set.
Nobody ever stalled a bench press because their pressdowns were too heavy and too well-documented. Plenty have stalled because they weren’t.
Coach Ben