The Best Exercise for Strengthening Your Shoulders
Pressing a barbell overhead has somehow acquired the reputation as a dangerous exercise for the shoulders. Doctors and physical therapists routinely advise against the exercise weightlifters refer to as simply The Press on the false assumption that an injury known as “shoulder impingement” is the inevitable result. Not only is the press perfectly safe for the shoulders — as evidenced by the fact that shoulder injuries are the least-common injuries for Olympic weightlifters who use the barbell overhead — but the correctly performed press is the best exercise for keeping shoulders strong. Here’s why.
1. Shoulder Impingement Is Misunderstood: Shoulder impingement occurs when the rotator cuff tendons get “pinched” between the head of the humerus and the AC joint, formed by the end of the collarbone and the bony knobs at the end of the shoulder blade.Impingement means an entrapment of soft tissue between two bones in the area of a joint. You can safely experience this entrapment feeling for yourself: sit or stand up straight and raise your arms from your sides to a position parallel to the floor, with the palms of your hands facing the floor and your elbows bent at 90 degrees. Now, raise them just a little more. The pressure you feel in your shoulders is the impingement of your cuff tendons against the AC.
Now, rotate your hands up so your palms face forward, elbows still at 90 degrees, and raise your hands up over your head. Then shrug your shoulders up at the top, like you’re trying to reach the ceiling with your hands and shoulders. Pressure’s gone, right? This is the lockout position of the press, and notice that at no time in this process did your shoulders feel impinged. This because the shrugging of the shoulders at the top pulls the AC knobs away from the head of the humerus, so that impingement is anatomically impossible in the correct press lockout position. The press simply cannot impinge your shoulders.
In fact, shoulder impingement injuries are common only in athletes that use their arms overhead without a shrug. Swimmers, volleyball players, and the racquet sports report most of the shoulder impingement injuries. They’d be far better off if they trained the press as a part of their sports preparation.
2. Why The Press Is the Best Exercise for Shoulder Strength: Since a correct press is done in a standing position, the exercise works all the muscles in the body. Everything between the bar in the hands and the feet balancing against the floor participates in the exercise. Legs, abs, and back muscles, as well as the obvious shoulder and arm muscles, all work together in a correctly performed press. Sixty years ago, the press was the primary weight room exercise for the upper body. For men who trained with weights, a bodyweight-on-the-bar press was considered a good starting point.
And back then, shoulder injuries were essentially unheard of because the press made the shoulders strong — the whole shoulder, not just the front of the shoulder like the bench press does. The takeover of upper-body training by the bench press was an unfortunate development. The bench allows the use of heavier weights, but at the expense of the involvement of more of the body, and more balanced shoulder strength, front-to-back. As a general rule, more muscle mass working at the same time all over the body is much better for strength training than isolation exercises. The coordinated use of all the muscles while standing on the floor with a barbell in your hands produces the most useful strength adaptation — one that actually applies to all natural human movements.