My bench sucks 1073 dicks

The title pretty much says it all. On a slightly enlightening note, a trusted friend and strong person told me today that perhaps one of the contributing factors to my shit-show of a bench press is the rack height. He pointed out that the bar was pretty low to start, and because of that I was pressing, rather than pulling, the bar out of the rack. A wise observation: problem is, the racks are shit, and the next notch up is so high that I lose even more tightness trying to get the bar out at that height. It's royally boned. But I'm thinking that maybe next week when I get to my heavy set for the day, I'll get my spotter to help me with the un-rack, and see if that will help me keep a little tighter and maybe get an extra rep. Who knows.

Dave Tate always says you have to pull the bar out... 

Sorry I let you down huge, huge man. 

Anyways, here's what today's work sets looked like

135 x 3

150 x 3

170 x 4

Tried and failed on a 5th rep at 170. After the work sets, I had a 5 x 10 bench at 100 lbs - that was incredibly easy, even with 90 seconds rest. On the last set, I rested an extra few minutes at least (that's when I was having a conversation about the my shitty un-rack), and then was able to bang out 16 reps, 6 better than last week. my 5 x 10 row and lat pulldowns weren't easy, but they weren't especially hard either, even going all out on the final set of each. In the end, I left the gym today feeling like I didn't work hard enough, and just generally like a bag of dicks. 

Even she can bench more than me. 

Next week is 180 on the bench for reps. I'm still hitting the prescribed 5/3/1 reps every week, so I'm going to keep at this bench program until the day when I am unable to hit the prescribed reps. That should be at least another couple months away, and hopefully (dear god, hopefully), all this accessory, speed, and max effort work will FINALLY start to kick in and break this horrible horrible plateau. And if not... well it will be time to stop benching all and try some crazy Chaos and Pain bullshit for my upper body. I've tried just about every conventional approach, so if 5/3/1 doesn't start working soon, it's time to try something completely fucking ridiculous.