Why you’re not ready for Overhead Exercises
A lot of people decide to do an exercises. Hardly anyone thinks if their body is ready for the exercise.
Let me ask you…
When you try and lift your arms straight overhead (shoulder flexion), do any of these happen?
Do your elbows need to bent to reach all the way up?
Does your scapula hike up without you realizing?
Does your lumbar spine extend while you try and reach up?
Do your shoulders round forward during the attempt?
There is a very good chance at least one of these things are affecting you. Don’t worry, you shouldn’t feel bad. But let’s face it. There are two macro reasons why you are unable to do this..
- You never thought about it, so you never actively tried to maintain ranges of motion and DEFINITELY never tried to improve it.
- Your lifestyle doesn’t put you in situations to move your body in those ranges of motion. Simply put — your body forgot those ranges even exist.
Ideally, you should have about 180 degrees of shoulder flexion if you’re doing overhead exercises like ‘Chin Ups’ ‘Military Press’ ‘Dead Hangs’ etc. One exception being ‘Landmine Press’ because that movement doesn’t require your arm to reach completely overhead.
What happens if you don’t have that range of motion right now, and you do the exercises anyways?
You’ll probably get stronger now, while risking injury later.
Our joints should be able to function like a relay race. During shoulder flexion, we should be able to express movement first through our glenohumeral joint, secondly from our acromioclavicular joint, etc.
Once one joint completes it full range of motion, the next starts where the last one left off. Team work.
Your shoulders might not have the ability right now to express much range of motion with effecient teamwork.
Ignoring this will develop dysfunctional joint coupling patterns.
Just because your shoulders are like this now, doesn’t mean they are doomed to be this way forever. There are steps you can take towards improving them.
Please comment & message me if you’d like me to discuss this topic deeper. Maybe you’d like me to talk about what the next step is in discovering the problem. Let me know.
I’ll leave you with a quote I really like. Cheers.
“Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.” — Nicolaas Bloembergen