Rotator Cuff Exercises (Why EVERY WEIGHTLIFTER Needs Them!)

Stop holding back your upper body muscle growth making mistakes like the one in this video - http://athleanx.com/x/train-smarter

Are you putting the handcuffs on the results that you should be seeing in the gym? I’ll tell you, if you’re overlooking this important upper body muscle, you absolutely are. Let me explain to you and show you exactly what I’m talking about today. What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalere, ax.

com. Today we are going to talk about that overlooked, undertrained muscle in the upper body. It’s the rotator cuff. I said you’re putting the handcuffs on your potential in the gym if you’re overlooking the rotator cuff. Now, one of the first big mistakes that guys will make is they they sort of refer to the rotator cuff as a single muscle, right?

I tore my rotator cuff. We got to look at that first and foremost and see what it is we’re truly talking about. As we refer to the skeleton, now guys, for everybody that sent in a name suggestion, he finally has a name, right? I was definitely partial to the uh Jeff Cadavalier. I thought that was brilliant.

I just didn’t think it might get confusing, especially I have a tendency to mumble. It might get confusing between the two of us. So, we couldn’t go with that. But I did like the X-ray name. So, his official name will be Raymond.

We’re going to shorten it X-ray because we’re going to use this guy, as I’ve already referred to, to be able to break down the science behind the strength and show you guys everything that it is we’re trying to understand. So to acknowledge those that sent in that name, uh DFK, DF Nightmare, Lars Nielsen, Andre Santos, James McCllum, and Avatar Ang 926. Guys, you guys all sent in that name, and you guys are getting recognition here for that. So we look at the rotator cuff. Again, it’s four muscles, guys.

And the primary job here of the rotator cuff is to externally rotate the shoulder. What I mean by that is it doesn’t matter what position you’re holding your arm in. External rotation is to take the arm and basically rotate it behind us. So if I have it in this classic 90 degree position, external rotation would be pushing it back and behind us. If I’m an athlete, a pitcher, external rotation is moving it back this way.

You can see how important that is. The motion backwards. Okay? Even if I have my arm straight in front of me, external rotation is turning it backwards because the ball and socket, as I’ll show you on here, is rotating externally outward. Here’s the four muscles.

We start off with the suppinatus. Now look on the other side first. This is the scapula. Okay, this is called the spine of the scapula. Something that sits above supra above the spine would be called supraspanatus.

The one that’s below the spine is called the infraspanatus. So we have our suppinatus tendon and and muscle that runs here. We have our infraspanatus here and we have our teris minor here. They all insert in the same spot on the outside uh you know sort of the top portion here of our upper armbbone. The main role of those three muscles guys is to externally rotate the shoulder.

If I turn this guy around he basically has one more muscle that’s on in the rotator cuff group. It’s called the subscapularis. It’s the one inside here right there. Subscapular. In other words, inside on the underside of the scapula.

This one’s job is to internally rotate the shoulder. The problem there, guys, is that we know that we have plenty of muscles that internally rotate the shoulder. We have our lats that help to internally rotate our shoulder, right? We have our chest that helps to internally rotate our shoulder. They’re all pulling everything this way.

We don’t need any extra help there. If you don’t train the rotator cuff muscles though, these small little guys, the super spin, infraspin, teras minor, if you don’t train them, consciously train them, then you are not externally rotating the shoulder, you are going to develop an imbalance of a forward rounded shoulder. I want to point out guys, this number two most popular injury that keeps guys out of the gym or the most injured joint that keeps guys out of the gym, i. e. not training at all and not making progress is the shoulder.

The low back is number one. The shoulders number two. The knee is number three. So, if you’re not protecting your shoulders, guys, it’s damn hard to do bench presses, overhead shoulder presses, even tricep work without really hurting yourself. You need to keep your shoulders healthy.

You need to have a conscious effort on externally rotating your shoulder with an idea of strengthening them. Again, I showed you here. It doesn’t matter the position. It’s going to these muscles will contract to externally rotate the head of the shoulder here in the joint. But when people refer to a torn rotator cuff, they’re usually referring to just one of those muscles getting torn because of this overuse or pinching inside the shoulder joint.

So, let’s take one more look at that and then I’ll show you some of the exercises that you can do to help to combat this. Okay. So again, we have our the the head of our uh humorris here, which is our uh the uh the main bone up here in the arm that goes and it’s formed the shoulder joint by having all this ligamentous capsule and and again the tendons from these rotator cuffs again cuffing cuffing it creating some sort of stability for the joint. We’ve got the deltoid that runs over the top and then we’ve got our acromium which is this this bone right here, right? It forms the roof of this joint.

So when people talk about tearing the rotator cuff, what happens is usually they’ll get an inflammation of the bersa that’s in their shoulder that will close down the space that’s in here or they’ll start to have a migration of the the head higher into the into this space. Why? Because there’s an imbalance of strength between the deltoid and the fact that we never train our rotator cuffs. The rotator cuff is going to pull this thing down and maintain that space. If all you do is deltoid training, this is going to close more and more and more and more until your head of the humorous is way up in that joint.

Now, when you try to up and raise your arm up, you get a grinding and the tendons are right in that spot and you’re going to eventually grind it down like like a rope over a piece of metal to the point where that thing just tears and completely tears or partially tears and that’s when one of the muscles here of the rotator cuff gets torn. All right. So, the focus here, guys, is we want to make sure that we are actively working on training. And just to sort of underscore this point, you can’t just be following any training program. I one of my pet peeves is to look at training programs and see how many times they’re asking you to externally rotate versus internally rotate.

And in an upper body workout from one of them, I’m not going to name names. One of the most popular workout programs available, an upper body workout had 420 repetitions in that workout. Guess how many of them externally rotated the shoulder? Zero. Not a single rep of the 420 in this upper body workout externally rotated the shoulder.

You want to talk about creating imbalances, that’s the fastest way to get there. And Athlete X, we make sure that we build in dedicated external rotation. dedicated shoulder rotator cuff work because we want to be able to combat that. We don’t want to be just like the other guys. We want to give you guys smart training.

All right. So, I’m going to show you just a couple of the moves that you can do to combat this in your training. Again, light work, yes, but very, very important for the stability and the health of your shoulder.

[Music] So there you have it guys. There’s just some options. Again, what I wanted you to notice is the difference in my position. It was always external rotation. It didn’t matter if I was laying on my s