Shoulder Health During Training

     After my most recent powerlifting meet, I encountered a little bit of shoulder pain. Coming up to the final push when training for a meet, you sometimes need to work through a little bit of discomfort to get competition-ready. After it’s over, however, it is imperative that you address any aches and pain you may be feeling. As a former baseball player, shoulder pain has never been a completely foreign experience to me. During my baseball years, there were a number of precautions I learned to take in order to keep my shoulders healthy.  By doing so, I was able to continue training, lifting relatively heavy things, and throwing. Now, after six years of powerlifting, two meets, and (add how many years you’ve been training) years of lifting maintaining long-term shoulder health is still something I consider essential.  Nobody likes having to deal with nagging shoulder problems, so here are some things that I have been doing to keep the shoulders healthy:

1. Fat Bar/Fat Grips – Anything that requires a large grip handle, especially with pressing motions. Since a thicker bar is harder to get a good grasp on, a fat bar/grip makes it harder to get good force transfer into the bar. Especially in pressing motions, like bench press, it disperses the weight more throughout your entire hand. This does not let your line of force (the bones of the forearm, which should be perpendicular to the bar) act at ideal a mechanical advantage with the bar. When this happens, you cannot lift as much weight. Lifting less weight means the intensity (% of your 1 rep max) will relatively go down, but you will still get an adequate stimulus to maintain strength, and even get stronger. 

2. Higher Reps (Use less weight) – Again, this takes some of the intensity off the shoulder and will give it a better chance to recover from getting hammered on by heavier weights. Plus, who doesn’t like to get a nice pump in doing some high rep work?

3. Decrease the Range of Motion – This goes especially for pressing motions. In a bench press, the anterior (front) part of your shoulder has more stress put on it the closer the bar gets to your chest. Some of the things that I do for this include pressing variations like board press and floor press.

4. Assisted/Accommodating Resistance – I use these to take some of the pressure off the shoulder in the bottom of the range of motion, when coming off the chest. This can be done with the use of chains and bands depending on the set up. But the premise of this is to take some of the load off your shoulder when you are coming off your chest, in a bench pressing motion. I would recommend not overloading the top of the motion if you are going to do this, meaning that as you bring the bar to your chest the weight will unload and as you bring it back up the bar will load again. At the top of the movement you wouldn’t want to be working against 100% of you 1RM even though you can handle that weight when finishing the pressing motion without a problem. 

5. Scapular Work – All the scapular muscle work you can muster till you can’t lift your arms anymore. External rotations, Y’s, T’s, W’s, scarecrows, push up plus…the list goes on and on. The most important, however, is the external rotation work to help take some of the strain off of the rotator cuff muscles for when doing other activities. When I do this, I focus on the quality of how my scapulae (shoulder blades) are moving. I want to really feel the contraction instead of just doing it for reps. Scapular work might be tedious, but this is something I would consider a necessity for keeping them shoulders healthy. 

6. Soft Tissue Work – This is one of my favorites. I could do it for hours. Rolling out the pecs and hitting trigger points in the upper traps is something that I try to do at least every day before I do any upper body work.   

7. Thoracic Spine Extension – This is a movement that is often overlooked. Looking biomechanically at the shoulder, if you reach overhead toward the celling, your thoracic spine needs some extension to assist you with the motion. It does this in the very last bit of shoulder flexion (lifting your arms up strait in front of you). This little bit of extension gives us those extra couple degrees of flexion and shoulder mobility to reach up and get your protein powder jug from the top shelf. I foam roll my back to loosen things up a little bit and stay mobile, plus I like to crack it. 

     All of these things in combination will assist you and give you a better idea on how to keep those shoulders happy so you can keep making them gains!