The bench press is a big favorite for athletes & bodybuilders alike. It’s the king of upper body strength exercises.
But, a common issue that occurs on the bench press is pain in the shoulder.
It can be debilitating and make you feel hesitant about bench pressing.
But there are ways we can significantly mitigate, or even eliminate shoulder pain on the bench press and I’m going to give you four methods right now.
Fix Your Positioning
You knew this was coming. A great deal of shoulder pain on the bench press can be avoided by just fixing our technique.
One of the biggest points to remember is to keep the shoulders locked down and back throughout the entire movement.
Doing this keeps the scapulae in a stable position. If the shoulders are winging out or elevating as we’re bench pressing, it’s going to place the muscles of the rotator cuff in a compromised position.
Another is to make sure that your elbows stay tucked, because again, the elbows flaring out will put the rotator cuff at risk of injury.
Proper Warm-Up
If we want to be able to keep our strong positioning on the bench press, we need to warm up the muscles that’ll help with that.
If we want to be able to keep our scapulae locked down in place, we need to warm up the muscles involved in scapulae stabilization.
We can warm up by performing exercises like scapula push-ups, band pull-aparts and external rotations.
Accessory Exercises
What tends to happen is the front of our body and our pushing muscles end up becoming very short and tight because of the amount of sitting that we’re doing in the modern world.
And these are the muscles that we see in the mirror, so trainees tend to spend a lot more time working on them.
But if we have an imbalance between our pushing muscles and our pulling muscles, it’ll make the shoulders very immobile and if we’re jumping on a heavy bench press with this imbalance, shoulder pain is inevitable.
So by performing more accessory exercises like the face pull, rear-delt flies, and row and pull-up variations, we can even out this relationship and build back the mobility in our shoulders.
Dumbbells
When we perform upper-body strength movements with a barbell like the overhead press, bench press and rows, our hands are in a fixed position, so our shoulders have to moved through a strict range of motion.
But, we may not have that range of motion, and if we're trying to force a range of motion out of our shoulders that it doesn't have, it's going to cause stress and pain to that joint.
But, when we use dumbbells for these movements, since we have two separate pieces of equipment that aren't fixed to each-other, our shoulders have a lot more freedom to move through a range that's comfortable.
Want a free bench press warm-up routine to prime your shoulders? CLICK HERE.
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