 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke and today we are discussing what to do when you have an achy shoulder during your pull-ups. Okay, so the first thing that I need to beat into your brain is even if you can do a bunch of pull-ups, if your shoulder hurts, you can't do them the way that is sustainable, right? And so that weight, just the body weight even, might be too heavy for you even if you can do 6, 8, 10 pull-ups in a row. Okay, so what you might need to do, if you're getting 10, you could probably still do this and make some corrections. But if you're getting 5 or less, you definitely want to find a way to unload your pull-ups, make them easier on you. You can assist yourself with a band, you can assist yourself with one of those machines that is made for this, or my personal favorite, you can do a lat pull-down where you can adjust the weight really finely. So what I need to do is check my ego at the door, find a lower weight that will allow me to find the right positions for my pull-ups, and then I can gradually build that back up with a new pattern, right? But it's going to feel a lot different. You're not going to be able to just knock pull-ups out the same way, because when you do it automatically, you go into, you know, whatever way makes your shoulder hurt. Okay, this goes for any type of shoulder pain, if you have it on the top, if you have it in like the armpit area, if you get clicking in your clavicle area, like all of that stuff, this is the rule, right? Use less weight so that you can practice. You're going to have to be conscious, you're going to have to think about the movements that you're doing for a little while until you can re-educate how to do it correctly. And then what you want to do is gradually get up into this, I'm not thinking about it anymore, I can just kind of push myself. That is step one. Now, step two after we've checked our egos at the door, which is hard to do, especially for me, at least on the pull-up. I've always thought I was really good at the pull-up, but sometimes I get shoulder pain on the pull-up, so am I really that good at it? I don't know. After we've done that, then the solution I hate to tell you could be really complicated. Shoulders are some of the most complicated joints that we have around. They're influenced, even during the pull-up, they're influenced by everything else in your body. You find this, especially because we walk on two feet, like your foot can cause shoulder issues, but what I like to see is really good pull-up technique at least first, or pull down if you've taken my advice and you're lowering the weight a little bit. So what things am I looking out for if people have shoulder pain during a pull-up? Biggest things are stick their chest out too much like this, and what that does is it just gets the ribcage kind of, it can get it off kilter, right? Some of this is okay because it allows for the shoulder blades to come back, gives you a little bit more room in the shoulder, so you're going to have to make sure that you do it at least a little bit, right? I don't want to do my pull-down with my shoulders rounded forward and my back really round like this, because then I can't get my shoulder blades backward out of the way. I can't get my shoulder joint to move in the way that it needs to move, and then I put undue stress where it's not liking. Yes, so we talked about that. What do we talk about next? So yes, it's complicated, but big things are, we're not sticking our chest out a whole lot, and then it's not just that people do that at the top. I think people do that too much at the bottom as well, and so you'll get this arched back position where the belly kind of sticks out, and the lower ribcage kind of sticks out, and you have a little extra tone in your back muscles. That to me is a big no-no, so I'm actually going to cue you at the bottom where your arms are stretched part of this pull-up as well. I'm going to say, hey, if you're arching this way, I need you to take a really big exhale and reverse it. I want your back to be rounded, not arched, okay? Let me try to do it. Rounded, not arched. Hopefully that makes sense. This is very important. If I can keep that rounding when I'm at the bottom, then I get a nice good stretch. Then I know I'm not overusing any particular muscle, right? And when I get that nice good stretch, then I can use those muscles to help pull myself back up to the top of the pull-up. I don't know how to say this nicely. Most people, when I give them that advice, they don't do it enough. They don't actually do what I'm asking. They go in the right direction, but they don't go far enough. So if you're here and you're hanging like this, they'll go, okay, yeah, I got it. And it's really not changing anything at all. It's not, it's hardly changing anything at all, at least. So what you may need to do, if you can't do it, because it's really hard to cue while you're hanging from a bar, especially if you haven't taken the weight down like I asked you to in the beginning, you may need to do a completely different exercise. You may need to really learn how to do planks or how to do push-ups. It's probably my favorite one here because it involves the shoulder a little bit more. It gets the shoulder blades moving around. You may need to watch the 100 or so other videos that I made about push-ups and other like pushing exercises, handstands and stuff. If you can knock those out with really good ribcage position, then I'm less concerned that you're not going to be able to get those ribs down as your arms are trying to stretch out like that. But if you can't even do it in a plank, I'm not expecting you to be able to do it in the pull-up or in a bar hang like that. And even, okay, this is a good segue. So part of my series on the push-up and on handstand, they kind of went hand in hand, hand in hand. Oh, that's killing me. Part of that series was we talked about hanging exercise. So I'm hanging from a bar. I'm getting that nice good stretch, and I'm making sure that I have good ab tone so that my shoulder gets in a good position, so that my ribcage is in a good position. And if I can nail some of that, it's more likely that I'm going to be able to do my pull-up really, really well. So if we've learned anything, it's one, check your ego at the door. And two, watch a bunch of other videos. Make sure you can do a really good push-up if some of your queuing hasn't really fixed anything. Okay? I don't like chasing the game of if I do a pull-up and I shift a little bit. Maybe I should try to un-shift. I don't think that works very well. I think you should try... You should have the intent of making your grip even on both sides. Because when you start to twist, your hands twist as well. Because again, everything is connected. That's one of the themes of this channel here. Everything is connected. So I need to be able to make sure that I can pull down evenly with an even grip.