7 Exercises That Are Making Your Shoulder WORSE

Train Without Pain Here - https://athleanx.com Subscribe to This Channel Here - https://bit.ly/2b0coMW

This MRI says that this shoulder has a completely torn labrum, a shredded rotator cuff, degeneration of an 80-year-old, a subacromial spur, and a messed up AC joint, but I’m still training, and I’m training hard. How? Because I know the seven most troublesome exercises for a bum shoulder, and a lot of people out there don’t. As a matter of fact, they keep doing them and making the situation worse. Today, I’m going to show you how to keep doing them by making some important fixes so that you can keep making gains forever.

And it starts with an exercise that most people don’t expect to be in this list because it’s not as obvious as, let’s say, a bench press when it comes to damaging your shoulder. And it’s the pull-up. And I know all too well how difficult this exercise can be when you have a torn labrum that I got from throwing a baseball on a bet with the Mets that didn’t go so well. However, it’s a great exercise. So, the point is not to have you skip the pull-up.

The point is to allow you to fix the pull-up so you don’t feel the exercise in the way that it’s hurting you right now. And the problem with this exercise is that it has a traction stress. Right, when I let my body go here and I hang, it wants to pull my arm up. And when you don’t have an intact labrum, you lose the stability of that ball inside the socket. You basically have a suction cup that doesn’t work anymore, and it just pulls.

So, as you get a pull on your humerus, it feels uncomfortable. But, it doesn’t mean that you have to stop doing the pull-up. It means you have to learn how to stabilize the pull-up first. So, before you even do a single rep, you have to create extra distance between your shoulder and your ear. If you think about that distance and maximize it by pulling down, you’ll already put yourself in a much more stable position, so you won’t have that traction stress.

So, it’ll look like this. Again, I’m down the bottom here. This would be fully at a dead hang. I pull down this way, and now I’m ready to go, and I can pull up. Now, when I come down, I really want to be careful about that traction stress, and I want to be able to maintain that tension throughout my scapula and shoulder girdle so that I don’t fall back into that position.

So, going slow is point number two. Treat every single rep of yours a little bit slower on the way down and don’t avoid full extension. You want to be down here with full extension at the elbow for the best results of the exercise. You just don’t want to undo those shoulders and let them start to ride up and again get that traction stress. If you make those changes, this exercise can stay in and you can build a much bigger back because of it.

Now, of course, you didn’t have to wait too long to have you already probably knew is wrecking your shoulders, but it doesn’t have to because again, the bench press is a classic chest building exercise, but you have to do it right. So, a lot of times what’s susceptible here is multiple structures in your shoulder. Your bicep tendon, your rotator cuff, your labrum a little bit, but not as much. But, the key here is that to do the exercise, you’re getting your elbow back behind your body to get the bar down. That puts your shoulder into extension.

At the same time that it puts it into extension, the bicep tendon, the long head, is going to run across this area, get stretched, and especially under load can become problematic. Again, the rotator cuff attaches on the front of the shoulder, too. So, what would be the aggravating parts of a bench press? Number one, the position of the elbows. If you flare your elbows out on a bench press, what happens is you get more internal rotation at the bottom.

And that actually hurts just to demonstrate that for you here. The bar starts to drift forward, you get internal rotation of the shoulder, more extension, and more aggravation on that bicep tendon. So, you have to make sure that your elbows are more tucked. So, to do this, you’re going to pull your elbows in a little bit closer, drop them at a 45° angle to your sides, and that feels so much better. Again, taking a lot of the stress off of that tendon.

If you go extra wide in your grip, a lot of times people think that this is beneficial because you don’t go as low, but what happens is at the same time that you’re not going as low, you’re also not able to pinch your shoulder blades back as much either. If you thought about doing a row, if your elbows were tight, you can really get your shoulder blades squeezed together. To do a proper bench press, getting those shoulder blades held and stabilized is really important. So, by going more narrow with this, you can actually get your shoulder blades pinched back more, allow the arms to drop back, and keep your shoulder blades there when you press. A lot of times what people do is they lead with their shoulders, and as soon as they do, they lose that retraction, and that sets off a cascade of issues.

Now, it doesn’t have to be just the barbell bench press. That is definitely going to be the more problematic. If you still have discomfort after making those tweaks, then I would highly advise that you just skip the barbell bench press and shift over to the dumbbells. And the key about dumbbell bench pressing is you have that independence from the bar. Your hands aren’t fixed on a bar.

So, even when you make those alterations in elbow placement, you actually can let your hands match them, so that biomechanically you’re in a much better position because your hands are able to rest over your elbows and provide a much more stable shoulder joint. But also, I think with dumbbells, your key is just to go slow. Every time you lower those weights, you should go slow. Make sure that you’re not aggravating anything. When you go fast, you don’t have the same level of control.

So, for me, no matter how heavy you go with these dumbbells, if you go slow, keep the elbows tucked, and keep that good relationship between the wrist and the elbow, you’re going to find that you can continue to do the dumbbell bench press or bench press without having to stop altogether. Now, the difference between those first two exercises and this one is that those were great exercises that you really should continue to do. In this case, we have a shitty exercise that’s not worth fixing, instead finding an alternative we should do instead. Now, what are we talking about? What’s the shitty exercise?

Well, you probably heard me say this way more often than not, and that is the upright row. I cannot stand the upright row, and you’ve probably heard other influencers telling you it’s a fine exercise to keep doing. It wrecks your shoulders. Influencers, remember, don’t care about what happens to your shoulders after they give you the exercise. Me, everything I prescribe as a strength coach has to actually have a durability component, too, because the guys that use it, like professional athletes making millions of dollars, have to be able to continue to do what they do for a long time.

So, this exercise would never pass for me because when you do the upright row, you’re putting your shoulder into an internally rotated position by having the elbow higher than the wrist. Then you’re adding load to the exercise, sometimes a lot of load, that just further drives you down. And as you elevate the shoulder, you get more aggravation, ultimately impingement, rotator cuff inflammation, problems in the shoulder that you don’t want to deal with. The issue is it’s so easily fixed with a pair of dumbbells and an exercise called the high pull. Because here, all importantly, what we do is we drop the elbow relative to the wrist.

So, now you want the wrist higher than the elbow. It’s still doing the same thing at the shoulder, right? The exercise is being used to bu