How To Bench Press Without Shoulder Pain (4 Mistakes You’re Probably Making)

The bench press is one of the most effective exercises for developing and strengthening the upper body, primarily the chest and triceps. However, despite its effectiveness, it's also the one exercise that lifters seem to have the most trouble with, primarily due to shoulder pain during or after the movement. And in many cases this is simply a result of various tweaks that need to be made in your bench pressing form. In this video, I'll go through exactly what those tweaks are so that you can minimize your risk of injury over time and get back to pain free bench pressing as soon as possible. The first mistake is something that most people are aware of, yet tend to have trouble properly implementing. Whenever we're benching, we want to have our shoulder blades retracted or pinched together as if you were going to pinch a pencil between those blades. This both enables the head of our humerus to properly track throughout the press and and it enables us to better activate the chest by minimizing the involvement of the front delts. If we don't have the shoulder blades retracted, what actually tends to happen is the upper arm will round forward which can irritate some of the rotator cuff tissues in the front of the shoulder. So what you want to do is before you press, depress your upper traps by bringing your shoulders down and away from your ears and then pinch your shoulder blades together. Then maintain this tightness by actively squeezing your shoulder blades together as you perform the movement and avoid the mistake of opening up the shoulder blades and losing tightness at the bottom or as you push up. If you struggle with this, I suggest trying this out. Raise your hands with your thumbs pointed out like so. Then rotate your arms outwards while squeezing your shoulder blades together and focus on really feeling the squeeze in your rhomboids right in the middle of your back. The feeling you get here is the exact feeling you want achieve while performing the bench press. So what you can do is perform that exercise immediately before setting up for the press and then practice maintaining this feeling when benching by using lighter weight and then building up towards your working weight. Another common benching mistake that can cause shoulder pain is pressing with a completely flat back. Although most people won't need an exaggerated arch as seen with powerlifters, you do want to ensure that there's some arch present in your upper back, and the reason for this is similar to what we saw with retracting your shoulder blades, as a slight arch in the upper back places the glenohumeral joint in an externally rotated safer position, meaning that it effectively avoids Putting your shoulders in a dangerous internally rotated position at the bottom of the press, which commonly occurs when pressing with a completely flat back. But to properly implement this while avoiding injury, note that you're not simply arching your lower back. What you want to do instead is arch your upper back by retracting your shoulder blades, as we previously discussed, and then raise your chest up towards the ceiling, which will naturally create space between your back and the bench, which you then want to maintain as a solid base of support for your press. One of the most common mistakes people make with a bench press is touching the bar too high on their chest at the bottom position, which is usually done as a result of excessively flaring the elbows at a 90 degree angle while pressing the bar straight up and down. This is detrimental because, as shown in this 2016 paper that analyzed shoulder pain in the bench press, touching the bar too high on the chest with the elbows flared actually increases the compressive forces at the clavicle and increases the net torque placed on the shoulder, and therefore increases the likelihood of shoulder injury over time. So what you want to do is instead realize that the bar path of your bench press shouldn't be straight up and down. It should actually start above your shoulder, come down to around the level of your sternum or nipple height, and then curve diagonally back towards the starting point. And to achieve this without harming your shoulders, you need to tuck your elbows to roughly a 75 degree angle, such that your elbows remain closer to the body and more or less directly under the bar throughout each repair. This will not only lead to a safer press, but a stronger one as well. A harder to catch yet very common mistake is not properly aligning the elbows during the press, meaning that the elbows are not in line with the hand and not stacked under the bar, which creates unnecessary torque on both the elbow and the shoulder joint. And to fix this, there's two things you need to do. If your elbows are unaligned when viewed from the front or back, then the problem is likely with your grip width. For instance, gripping the bar too wide as shown here, will cause the forearms to be misaligned. And as stated in this review paper, analyzing the shoulder joint is problematic since it increases the demand placed on the rotator cuff and on the other hand, gripping the bar too narrow will also cause the forearms to be misaligned and will turn it more into a triceps dominant movement. Thus, you want to play around with your grip width until you find the width that feels best and enables your elbows to remain stacked under the bar. Now, if your elbows are unaligned when viewed from the side, then it's likely that you're over tucking your elbows too close to your sides when you press. So to fix this, you simply want to adjust the angle of your elbows during the press by flaring them out a little more such that they remain relatively underneath the bar. So as you can see, the bench press is a lot more technical than it may appear. But videotaping yourself performing the bench press from the side and from the back can help you visually see these small errors and correct them. And it's something I'd highly recommend you do. But regardless, try implementing the tips I mentioned as they lead to not only a safer press, but a stronger one as well.

So to sum the video up, here are the main points to keep in mind. As I always try to emphasize, it's absolutely vital that you pay close attention to how you're performing each of your exercises in order to both prevent injuries over time and to progress faster. And if you're looking for an all in one evidence based program that's fully equipped with in depth tutorials for each and every exercise such that you can maximize your efforts in the gym, the way you can do is simply head on over to built with science.com and take the free analysis quiz I have up in order to discover what program and what approach is best for your starting point. Anyways, if you haven't yet done so, I'd really appreciate a follow on Instagram and you if I post a lot of informative videos on there as well as the meals I have throughout the week and the reasoning behind them which I think a lot of you will find useful. And as always, if you enjoyed this video then please don't forget to give it a like Leave a comment down below and subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications for my channel as well as this all really does help me out. I really appreciate the support everyone. I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you next time.

Sam.