Over a decade of coaching team sport athletes, powerlifters and everyone in between, I’ve seen my share of injuries and the ways in which strength coaches can help athletes return to their sport. It’s not the coach’s job to fix or prevent injuries, but the way we coach and program for our lifters can play a huge role in speeding up the recovery process.
During my time working with amateur and professional baseball players, I saw more shoulder injuries than any other type of setback. I learned to appreciate how throwing a baseball incredibly fast thousands of times could negatively affect one’s shoulder health. We couldn’t train baseball players the same way we’d train a general fitness enthusiast with shoulder problems. A desk worker with shoulder pain from years of typing at a computer who wants to do barbell strength training 3 days a week isn’t going to need the same “shoulder rehab” program as a baseball player recovering from a surgically-repaired rotator cuff.
Most of the readily-available advice on training for shoulder health comes from either of these extremes, and much of this advice is excellent for the specific populations. But guess who shouldn’t train like either of those avatars? Powerlifters. An experienced, competitive powerlifter who gets shoulder pain while benching or squatting doesn’t need to throw a baseball 90 miles per hour. And they’re probably not “weak” from head to toe like the average Joe, so they likely won’t benefit from run-of-the-mill physical therapy exercises.
So what’s a powerlifter to do for shoulder health?
In my experience, lifters who include some variation of the following exercises in their training routine on a regular basis experience fewer shoulder aches and pains than those who don’t. This is a completely observational, unscientific statement. But I’m confident in this statement because these exercises are:
- Loadable: You can actually use progressive overload to get stronger at these exercises over time, which can’t be said for many physical therapy exercises like stretching, breathing drills and rotator cuff exercises with resistance bands.
- Specific: Strength athletes like powerlifters don’t have the same postural issues as much of the general population (think desk workers) OR the same mobility demands as overhead athletes, so treating them like one or the other is misguided. These exercises actually address many of the adaptations that occur at the ribcage, shoulder blade and humerus from years of heavy powerlifting training.
Here are my three go-to movements that actually work to promote shoulder health for people who like lifting heavy things:
Trap Raises
The lower traps are perhaps THE most important individual muscle group for keeping the shoulder moving in such a way that reduces the chances of pain. The lower traps do two main things:
- Upward Rotation: As you reach overhead, the shoulder blades should move like hands on a clock (your left shoulder blade clockwise, the right one counterclockwise) along the rib cage. Training the lats, pecs and spinal erectors aggressively can create muscular adaptations that reduce scapular upward rotation, so strengthening the lower traps can restore some of that to make reaching overhead easier.
- Posterior Tilt: When you set up to squat, bench or deadlift, we want the shoulder blades to tip backward and sit flush against the ribcage. This creates a strong upper back position AND prevents the head of the humerus from gliding forward in the socket, which is often painful. We most often see anterior humeral glide as a lifter lowers the bar to the chest while benching or when a lifter reaches their hands for the bar while squatting.
Why are the lower traps more important than the rotator cuff muscles? The main function of the rotator cuff is to keep the “ball” in the “socket,” or the humeral head centered in the glenoid fossa. So while the cuff is indeed responsible for external and internal rotation of the shoulder, it also needs to keep the shoulder anchored in place. Powerlifters don’t need a ton of shoulder rotation in either direction to train for their sport, and they’re already really good at stabilizing the shoulder joint. Think about getting the upper back tight while setting up to squat, bench press or deadlift – that’s centration of the shoulder joint.
So rather than focusing on strengthening the rotator cuff with external rotation exercises, opt for more lower trap exercises such as the head-supported trap raise:
I like to place trap raises either during the warm-up (in a non-fatiguing set-and-rep scheme) or toward the end of upper body days after performing bigger accessory exercises like rows, lat pulldowns and triceps extensions. The lower traps come along for the ride on certain upper back exercises, but deserve direct training in a typical hypertrophy rep range (8-20 reps/set, leaving 1-3 reps in the tank).
Landmine Presses
Shoulder injuries often require a lifter to stop bench pressing until the pain resolves. It’s important that the lifter find exercises that train the same muscle groups and/or movement planes as the bench press. Things like push-ups and triceps extensions can help preserve some semblance of bench strength, but what if there was an exercise that could maintain the bench press AND improve shoulder health?
There is, and it’s the landmine press.
Landmine presses strengthen the shoulders similar to an overhead press, but the angle of the press tends to make it less intrusive for both the deltoids and pecs compared to overhead pressing or benching. Plus, when performed correctly, landmine presses strengthen the serratus anterior, a crucial muscle that assists the lower traps with scapular upward rotation.
Whether you’re doing 1-arm landmine press variations or the 2-arm Viking Press (my personal favorite), you want to make sure you’re reaching/punching through the lockout of each rep to get the shoulder blade to move through a full range of motion. Imagine you’re punching a hole through the corner of the room where the wall and ceiling meet, like this:
The biggest feather in the cap of landmine presses: you can actually load them up heavy. There’s nothing wrong with forearm wall slides and rotator cuff rehab exercises in the right context, but you simply can’t compare the loading capabilities. Loading and strengthening the tissues you want to keep healthy is a must, and landmine presses get the nod in this case.
I like to prescribe landmine presses like most other accessory pressing movements: sets of 6-12 reps between 1-3 RIR.
Kettlebell Windmills
Most shoulder health exercises focus on moving the shoulder blade and/or the humerus around a stable torso, which makes sense in many cases. But when it comes to powerlifting, it’s often excessive stiffness in the torso that leads to suboptimal shoulder function: using a huge arch while bench pressing, constantly bracing the lats while squatting and deadlifting, etc. Kettlebell windmills help lifters take the torso through different positions and ranges of motion while maintaining joint centration at the shoulder.
Windmills fit best as part of either an upper- or lower-body warm-up. I especially love them before squats because of how they open up the entire torso and make it easier to wedge into a low-bar squat position. We usually do 2-3 sets of 5 reps per side.
Shoulder Strength Solutions
Whether you’re trying to get back to 100 percent after a shoulder injury or you’re perfectly healthy and want to keep it that way, these shoulder training strategies can give you the requisite strength and range of motion to keep training hard. Shoulder rotations with a tube can only take you so far, so choose exercises that are actually loadable (and fun to train).
