Covid - Lockdown - 30+ Days no Bench - Strength Retention

[ckcrown84]

~The Bench Press~
COVID-19 has tasked all of us to challenge our training knowledge and find new exciting ways to train and challenge ourselves. If you fancy yourself a ‘powerlifter’ or bencher (ME!) you have two primary goals.
1) Maintain as much strength output as possible
2) Grow some new baby muscles where you can
As my go-to exercise I chose Pushups, it only made sense. I have been writing and preaching that Pushups can do wonders for bench, especially since it is a compound movement, scalable (to an extent), and works the same damn muscles as the BENCH.
As Lockdown approaches an end (I hope) I needed to get an assessment workout in to see:
1) If my pushup routine implementation was effective at preserving my strength
2) Where my programming should start once gyms open. Starting points are kinda a big deal. I promise.
I put some feelers out and thankfully _______ was
So What’s what now?
March 20th 435 2x1 – Extremely Fast
April 27th 445 2x1 – A bit grindy on the 2nd
Thoughts?
Its expected my bench is a bit down from March 20th when I was in full training mode.
Today I haven’t benched in over a month and have a bit of rust so I am extremely satisfied with 445.
Today tells me that my Pushup routine DOES have a very good dynamic correspondence to my bench (hence I haven’t had a big reduction in output) and that when I go back to training I can pretty much start my bench back at my last weeks of training before gyms closed. I was able to preserve that much strength despite not having touched a bench press in over a month.
Take this, stew on it and ask yourself… What could YOU have done to better improve yourself during this downtime.