Bench press world champion.
A man who lives with the bench press, and what lies beyond strength.
This documentary follows Yusuke Suzuki, who supervises B.A.D. GYM URAWA. It runs 3 minutes 22 seconds. He talks about the day he first met the bench press at fifteen, what went through his mind the moment he became world champion, and why he built a gym in Kita-Urawa.
What he says in the film, written out in his own words.
It started in my first year of high school, when an older student invited me to join the powerlifting club. I had been practising Chinese kung fu since I was three, so I had some confidence in my body, and I was the kind of child people said was reasonably athletic. That is how I got noticed, and in a sense I was made to join.
The moment I became world champion, I did not think for a second that I was finished. There was still plenty to learn from other people, and I had started to see, as an equal and through other people's eyes, a world I had not been able to see on my own.
So from here, if I keep chasing my own bench press as far as it goes, I might become world champion again, see the same world and the same view again, and share that time with the people I once looked up to. The single most important thing for that is simply to keep benching.
There is a process for turning what you could not do into what you can. It begins with a clear desire, then a date by which you intend to meet it, then a concrete plan for getting there. Go through that process and you really can make the impossible possible. It is exactly the same whether you are in your teens or in your eighties or nineties, and people of every age are working on it.
Young lifters in their teens and twenties getting stronger is only natural. But a lifter in their eighties or nineties still getting stronger. Is that not remarkable? I think that experience of succeeding changes a person into someone who will keep taking on challenges for the life they want.
B.A.D. is short for Body Art Design. The idea is to design your own body the way you would a work of art. I chose the name because I wanted to build a gym that works as a place to grow into the person you want to be.
Phones and computers have made modern life convenient, and at the same time we carry a long list of physical complaints: forward head posture, an over-arched lower back, stiff shoulders, back pain. Bench pressing correctly is a way to recover the position the human body is meant to hold, a better breathing pattern, and a body that simply feels good.
Know your own body, widen what is possible for it, and make your life richer. I want to provide the trigger and the place for that.
Build strength. Build people. Build the future.
This film was produced by BODY ART DESIGN in Matsumoto, Nagano.
The B.A.D. Method is the thinking in this film, broken into steps you can actually stand on. At B.A.D. GYM URAWA in Kita-Urawa, the free trial is where you take the first one.