I love bottoms-up kettlebell carrying variations for teaching scapular control and getting reflexive rotator cuff recruitment. Sometimes, though, folks won't feel these drills in the right positions. With that said, check out today's video to learn how you can usually quickly and easily shift the stress to the right spots in the shoulder girdle:

If you're looking to learn more about our approaches to assessing and training the shoulder girdle, I'd encourage you to check out out one of our Elite Baseball Mentorships. Our next upper extremity course takes place January 17-19, 2016 at Cressey Sports Performance in Hudson, MA, with December 17 serving as the early-bird registration deadline. For more information, check out www.EliteBaseballMentorships.com 

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With all the shoulders I've seen over the years, I've stumbled onto quite a few key "take-home" points. Today, I'd like to share one observation I've made. First, though, I have to tell a quick story to set the stage.

Like a lot of guys with shoulder problems, I miss being able to overhead press, so I've taken to experimenting with a lot of different approaches to see how I can at least "get close" to working it back in.  A while back, I talked about how landmine presses had been working as a nice "bridge" between overhead work and true horizontal pressing exercises.  Check out the coaching cues:

The arm path on a landmine press really isn’t much different than an incline press – so why does the incline press hurt so much more for those with shoulder pain in their injury history?  Having the shoulder blades pinned against a bench limits their ability to freely upwardly rotate; they're stuck in scapular downward rotation. 

This year, to take it a step further, I played around a lot with bottoms-up kettlebell overhead carries and pressing, and my shoulder did great with them.  With this drill, you teach people where an appropriate “finish” position is, and then you can work backward from it.

The next progression would be a 1-arm bottoms-up KB military press:

The unstable bottoms-up position shifts more of the muscular contribution to joint stability than actual force production, so you can get to positions pain-free that would otherwise be really uncomfortable.

Assuming you don't have shoulder pain, these are two good progressions to try to see if you're really cut out for overhead work.

Looking for more shoulder insights?  Check out my popular resource, Sturdy Shoulder Solutions.

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I've talked quite a bit in the past about how much I like bottoms-up kettlebell exercises to get great "reflexive" firing of the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizers in a more unstable environment. I'm also a big fan of carrying variations - so it gets me pretty pumped up when I can combine the two!  With that in mind, today, I want to talk about the 1-arm Bottoms-up Kettlebell Carry.

This is an exercise that I really like to utilize with a lot of our baseball players early in the off-season, as it teaches them to relax the latissimus dorsi to allow proper scapular upward rotation to take place.  My two biggest cues are to "keep the biceps quiet" and "don't let the lower back arch."  If you do these two things, chances are that everything else will "click" just right.  Check out this video for a more detailed coaching tutorial:

I like to program 2-4 sets of 30-40yds on each arm. We'll often use this in place of a pressing exercise with our baseball guys, particularly in the early off-season when we're working to establish optimal scapular upward rotation after a long season.  Give it a shot for yourself and you'll find that it'll quickly be a great addition to your strength training programs, whether you're a throwing athlete or not!

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