How To Get A Stronger Overhead Press (FIX THIS!)

Come on, Jeremy got this. If there's one exercise that is the most stubborn and frustrating exercise to improve on, it's got to be the overhead press. It's just one of those exercises where it seems impossible to progress on regardless of what you do. And if you can relate to this, then you've probably attempted to break through this plateau by just hammering away at it with some more volume and some more reps. Yet you're probably met with little to no success. Now, although there are various ways that we can try to program our workouts to break us past this plateau, the truth is that many individuals just aren't ready to overhead press to begin with. More specifically, they lack the sufficient range of motion and mobility in key areas that then makes it consistent. It'll be harder for them to press weight overhead, which is why it may seem like you can't get any stronger with your overhead pressing, regardless of what you do. So in this video, I'll cover two such restrictions that are the most common culprits and how to test if you're actually restricted in these areas. Fix these areas and your pressing will feel so much smoother, you'll finally be able to start seeing some progress with the overhead pressing. And who knows, maybe you'll even grow to love this pain in the ass exercise. The first restriction that's limiting your strength with the overhead press is poor mobility in your thoracic spine, or in other words, your mid back. Given the high amount of sitting and slouching that most of us do every day, our mid backs get locked up into this forward hunch position. This then negatively affects our overhead press since an inability to extend at the mid back has been shown to limit shoulder strength during overhead movements. And to illustrate why exactly this is, here on the left is someone with poor mid back mobility, and here on the right is someone with better mid back mobility. Now, when we press weight overhead, our upper arm cannot elevate past a point where it's roughly in line with the shoulder blade. So with a tight, rounded mid back, you can see that your shoulder blade can't tip back as much and as a result, your arm won't be able to achieve a full range of motion overhead. Whereas if your mid back is able to extend back, it gives your shoulder blade room to tip back and hence enables your arm to effectively press overhead. Now the problem is that if you lack this mid back mobility and then you go to try to press overhead, you're going to end up compensating for that lost range of motion. By either arching at the lower back, which causes a ton of compression and a decrease in core stability, or by creating an inefficient bar path by pressing the bar forward slightly rather than directly upwards. These compensations are detrimental not only for an increased risk of injury, but also for just limiting the amount of weight that you can press overhead and essentially the amount of muscle that you can build on your delts. In addition to this, though, a tight mid back often comes with tight lats as well. And given the attachment points of this muscle on the upper arm and its function to pull the arm down, you can see how tight lats can also restrict your overhead pressing ability by creating a downward pulling resistance every time you try to press your weight overhead. Which is why many of you watching will likely feel quite a bit of resistance even when you just press your arms overhead with no weight at all. And is again why many of you will tend to arch the lower back whenever you attempt to press overhead. Now, with that being said, there are two simple tests that you can do to determine if there is sufficient extension in your mid back and sufficient mobility in your lats for overhead pressing to be a good fit in your current program. First, we're going to test your mid back mobility with something called the occiput to wall test, A test that's been shown to have high validity and a strong correlation when it comes to screening for thoracic mobility restrictions. To perform the test, stand with your heels butt and back flat against the wall. Then engage your core to flatten your lower back against the wall. From here, see if you can touch your head against the wall while keeping your chin tucked in and lower back flat against the wall. And if the back of your head can't touch the wall, or if it can, but your chin has to point upwards to do so, that indicates that your mid back mobility could definitely use some work. From here though, we'll then test for the lats as well. By moving your feet forward a couple steps and bending at the knees, try to keep your head against the wall. If you're able to do so now and again, flatten your lower back against the wall. Then you want to raise your arms straight overhead until your fingers touch the wall. You should be able to achieve this position while keeping your lower back flat against the wall. If you can't, then it's an indication that your lats, and likely your mid back as well, just don't have the sufficient mobility needed to effectively press overhead. Which then means that pressing more weight will not only become more difficult for you to do, but you'll also tend to compensate by compromising in other areas like the lower back when you do press. So instead, instead of just continuously hammering away at the overhead press without making any progress, take a step back and focus on these various restrictions. But to do so, it's not as simple as just stretching the lats and doing a little bit of foam rolling. Yes, that is part of it, but if you want to actually then see performance benefits in your pressing as a result of this, then we need to take a different, more integrative approach. And that's exactly what I'll share with you today with a simple three step routine. Step one of this routine involves mobilizing the problem areas which are your mid back and your lats. So all we're going to do is take a foam roller or a sock stuffed with a couple tennis balls and start foam rolling these areas. For your mid back, place your hands behind your head to open up your shoulder blades and just slowly roll out just that mid to upper back region for about 30 seconds or so. Then move on to the lats by leaning onto your side and rolling out your lats from your armpit all the way down to your lower back again for about 30 seconds per side. As you do so, you can move side to side as well as up and down, but try to keep the pain or discomfort at about a 3 out of 10. All that we're trying to do here is mobilize these areas a bit to decrease the muscle tension and get them a little bit more relaxed, as this will help set us up for success with the next steps. Now on that note, if you don't have a foam roller or tennis ball handy, or if you just like to experiment with another way of mobilizing these areas, then you can use the following alternative for these, you just place your elbows on top of a bench or couch with your hands together, engage your abs and then sit your hips back into your heels while simultaneously dropping your chest towards the ground. Hold that bottom position for a few deep breaths while keeping your core contracted before returning back up and then repeat for more reps. You should feel this stretch in your mid back as well as your lats, and for an even deeper stretch in your lats, you can hold onto any sort of stick or pole with an underhand grip, like so, and bend your elbows behind your head. Next, it's time to move on to active stretching. After any sort of passive stretching or foam rolling, like we did in step one, which can temporarily increase your mobility and decrease tightness. It's important to follow that up with now actively moving these muscles through their full range of motion to lock in the mobility gains that you previously made. It's basically teaching your brain how to now use your increased mobility from step one. To do so, there's two active stretches that we're going to use. First, we'll focus on the lats with an active lat stretch. For these, get into the starting position with your butt on your heels and your forearms on the ground, like so. Then bend your torso over to one side. From here, reach up and around as far as you can by really thinking about pushing your arm outwards. Hold the M position for a second or two before returning to perform more reps. You should feel a deep stretch in your lats down along the side of your body that you're reaching with. To deepen the stretch even further, you can simply bend to one side a little bit more during the setup. You'll want to repeat this for about 5 to 10 reps per side. Next, we're going to move on to seated wall slides, a move that'll not only further actively stretch our lats, but will also teach us how to use our increased thoracic mobility in an overhead pressing motion similar to the overhead press. To set up, sit down against a wall and crawl your feet as close as you can towards your butt. Engage your core and contract your glutes so that your lower back isn't excessively arching off of the wall. Instead, there should be no, or at least very little space between the wall and your back. The back of your head should also be touching the wall with your chin tucked. Next, perform a wall slide by placing your elbows and wrists on the wall and slowly press your arms up and down against the wall like so. As you do so, focus on keeping your back as flat as you can against the wall rather than arched, and keep your elbows and wrists in contact with the wall as you slide them up and down. You want to perform about 10 to 15 reps of this. Now, if these are quite difficult for you to do without keeping all that intact, don't worry about it. Perform it as best as you can. For now, even if your back comes off the wall and even if your wrists can't stay against the wall, just keep practicing and your form will improve over time. The great thing about this exercise, though, is that it not only prevents your lower back from compensating, but it also helps engage your mid and lower traps in your back as you slide your arms overhead which are important muscles that play a major role in stabilizing your overhead press. So expect to feel these mid back muscles working as you perform this movement. Next is the final piece of the puzzle. After improving your mobility with the previous two steps, and it's important to now transfer and ingrain that into your overhead pressing so that your brain understands how to use that increased range of motion or to load, which will help achieve our goal of actually boosting your performance in that movement. To do so, you'll want to, over time, progress through the following exercises, since each will progressively challenge your mobility a little bit more. So first up is a kneeling single arm kettlebell or dumbbell overhead press, then progress to the standing single arm dumbbell press, then progress to the standing two arm dumbbell press, and then finally, if you wish to do so, you can now progress to the standing barbell overhead press. For all of these progressions though, keep your core and glutes engaged to avoid arching at your lower back and press straight overhead to flex fully utilize that increased range of motion. But basically, the idea is that you place a progression you're at into your program where you'd normally be overhead pressing or just add that movement as extra assistance work. Then after a week or two, once you master that progression with more load, and feel like you've achieved adequate range of motion in your lats and your mid back in that pressing pattern, you can move on to the next progression. So to summarize the action plan, what I recommend is to perform step one and step two on a regular basis, just to improve your mobility as quickly as possible. You'll also want to do these two steps as a warm up before you perform whatever progression you're at from step three, work through the progressions over time and eventually you'll be back to your normal barbell overhead pressing. But this time it'll feel much smoother and you'll very likely be able to work up to much heavier weights than you were prior to this. And at this point, your pressing movements alone should be enough to help maintain that increased mobility that you've achieved. Meaning that you'll no longer be having to do those mobility exercises anymore. Or at least not as often now. Trust me, I know that corrective exercises are not fun, but if you want to stop spinning your wheels in the gym and actually break through the plateaus that you're stuck in, then you need to address these things as it'll pay off with more gains and less injury in the long run for a step by step program that shows you exactly how to incorporate important corrective exercises like these into a weekly training routine so that you can build lean muscle and break through plateaus in the most effective way possible and simply head on over to billwithscience.com and take the analysis quiz to discover which of our science based programs is best for you and where your body is currently at. Anyways, that is it for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this one. Thanks for watching. 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