What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Altheanx.com. Now, look, even if you're not lifting right now,
there's certain things that you and your body better be able to do. For instance,
check this out here and I want you to try this. Could you actually take your arms and put them
behind your back like this and see if you can even get close to touching your fingers together? Now,
see if one that's kind of creeping up the bottom there, causing you some discomfort? And if it is,
we've got some problems. And remember, you go test both sides because obviously
both of our arms are important. Now, guys, remember, it doesn't matter even if you're
lifting, but I have a follow up question if you are, because this is a lifting channel.
Are you doing any of the following exercises? A Bench Press, Dips, Bench Dips,
Lat Pulldowns or even Barbell Rows. Now, as you can see those exercises are pretty diverse,
they cover a lot of different muscles groups and they're very popular exercises that most
of us are doing it for following a training program. Well, if you're doing any those
and you had any of those issues on that first test, then you've got really big problems.
And the issue here, guys, is that all of them have something in common,
and that is, you need to have extension of the arm and internal rotation of the shoulder
to be able to do this properly. Now, if you go back and look at all these exercises,
if you don't have that, what happens? Well you're playing Russian roulette with your own
biomechanics because every one of those exercises gets worse and worse. The second I don't have
adequate internal rotation and extension of the shoulder, every one of those exercises
changes for the worse. The shoulder gets tilted forward dramatically, that s not what we want.
As a matter of fact, not anything that we want from looking for long term health
of our joints when we train. So, let's take the best price for an example, you're going to need
a lot of extension of your shoulder to get the bar down. But you're also going to need a bit of
internal rotation, right? Because we know that the arc of the bench press goes from a high to a lower
point on your chest, which is going to require a little bit of shoulder into rotation. Now,
we want to control that, and get to that in a second, but you're still going to need that. Well,
if you're having a hard time with this test and you can't get that arm,
maybe even beyond your waistline, you're going to have a real hard time with bench pressing safely.
So, we need to do is a few things. Number one, un-shrug your shoulders. Now,
you've probably been told to pull your shoulder blades down and back, but what can happen is you
could actually disturb the normal biomechanics of shoulder motion if you're really trying to pinch
and squeeze your shoulder blades back. But if you simply just worry about what's happening from
here to here, from the neck to the shoulders, you can fix a lot of your issues biomechanically.
Now, what happens on the bench press is you allow for a better execution of the exercise
and actually better gains, because when the shoulders start to tilt forward, because you lack
the extension of the arm, the shoulder has to dive forward. And when it does, it actually minimizes
the activation of the pec major and it gets the pec minor in a better position or the delts in
a better position to push, which takes away a lot of the effectiveness of the exercise itself.
So not only are you costing yourself your shoulder help, but you are costing yourself gains in the
process. So, by doing that shrug down and pulling it down, you put yourself in a better position.
Now, one great thing you can do right before you bench press or any of these other exercises, for
that matter, is something called the Can Opener. You get down on the ground into a pushup position,
you leave one hand down as you rotate in the opposite direction, open up to the sky,
drive that one arm up as high as you can. But what's more important is what's happening to
the arm in contact with the ground. Do you notice anything? You should, it's in a lot of extension
and you're getting out of that anterior tilt of the scapula because you're driving your chest up
towards the sky as much as you possibly can. So, you're getting that opening of the chest while
the arm is staying in the extension that you're probably lacking right now. But beyond that,
you're getting some additional extension through your thoracic spine and through your hips, which,
by the way, are two additional requirements of a properly performed bench press. Right? If you need
your leg drive, you need to be able extend through the hips and that's going to drive
thoracic extension at the same time. So, this is a great thing you could do,
30 seconds, both sides a couple times right before you're ready to go and
actually perform your bench press or any of the exercises that I showed you. Now, beyond that,
we have to work a little bit more diligently to fix this thing once and for all, because that's
more of a stretching warmup. I'm talking about how do we get to the root problem here, which is
your lack of mobility? And I've showed you guys this before, it's called the sleeper stretch,
what it does is it helps us to restore motion into internal rotation. Now, notice,
I'm not saying go in strengthen internal rotation, we don't need that, we need to
strengthen more in the external rotation. But we still need to have normal biomechanics
and range into internal rotation to perform any of these exercises properly. So, if we
get in this position here, we just try to keep the arm down and press on top of that forearm,
not allowing the shoulder to tilt in the process, that's the key. You can get a lot closer to the
ground if you allow your arm to just tilt in that direction. You keep the shoulder pinned down and
back and just work on what your body will give you. And over time, this stretch is going to
allow you to get more internal rotation and have less problems when you go back to the bench.
Now, the last thing you can do is actually what we talk about, where the test becomes the treatment,
right. That initial test, the one that Jesse failed so miserably here,
it's called the Apley Scratch Test. Well, you can actually work on your body's ability to get
more into internal rotation by simply performing it again with intent and purpose as a stretch.
What you do is you have two options. Number one, if you have a band and a pull up bar, you can hang
the band over the pull up bar, reach behind you, grab it, and then simply lean forward a little bit
and work your way out. So you're increasing your range of motion into interpretation,
getting that hand higher up the back. But you don't even really need any of that
equipment. If you just want to do this at home or in your office, back yourself up to a doorway,
grab on to a closed doorknob and simply lower yourself down. Squat down as you're able to,
because you're going to bring your hand higher up your back as you do. Again, hold this in that
more stretch position here for about 30 to 45 seconds. Do it a couple of times a day and I
promise you over time, this is going to help you to get into that range that you're missing.
But the bottom line here, guys, as well, all these exercises are great exercises. If your body's not
prepared to do them, then they actually can become detrimental to you. And that's the important thing
as you got to make sure that you're preparing your body to do whatever is asked for, not just doing
what you think is supposed to be done. If you're looking for a step-by-step plan,
guys, all of our programs build that out for you. That's all available over at Athleanx.com. If you
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