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.