My name is Sandeep, and I have bad shoulders. A childhood spent in front of the computer playing videogames, and an early adulthood ambition to do a lot of pull-ups resulted in terrible shoulder mechanics that have caused me pain and frequent bouts of neck spasms. At first, I figured this was a unique problem. I told myself I had a long neck, weak shoulders and all other kinds of rubbish. But it wasn’t. The more folks I coached and saw move around me, the more I noticed that everyone suffered from some version of this problem.
What am I talking about? Obviously, not everyone has shoulder pain or some kind of neck issues. But be it due to our modern lifestyles and all the sitting hunched over, our propensity to being chest breathers or even one too many ‘chest days’, most of us lack the ability to reach over our heads without compensating elsewhere in our body. The most common version of this is a lower back arch. If overhead pressing hurts your lower back, this is probably why.
At the Strength System, before every overhead pressing day, we test our trainees’ range of motion in flexing their shoulder joint (taking their hands overhead) using the back-to-wall shoulder flexion drill.
Here’s a great video by coach Eric Cressey on how to do it –
If their thumbs hit the wall, boom, let’s press. If they don’t, as is common with folks with a hunch or with tight pec/lat muscles, we have them substitute the overhead press with a landmine press. This allows them to comfortably press in the range of motion that their body allows them without creating compensations. This is a movement that, in addition to teaching good shoulder mechanics, allows us to load them up and continue training the pressing pattern, while we also simultaneously work on their shoulder mobility through corrective exercises such as YTWs, lat and pec stretches.
If you’ve been having shoulder pain or back pain when you press, we highly recommend trying out this approach to it. Test, and if you fall short, try the landmine press.
Sandeep
sandeep@strengthsystem.in