 Our first caller is Johan from Florida. Hey Johan, how can we help you? Hey guys, how you doing? Good. How are you doing yourselves? Good, good. So actually the thing is that I'm calling because I happen to have some shoulder discomfort every single time I've been doing bench presses or the like. And it's gotten to the point where I can't even sleep right or whenever I try to do a bench press, whether I do a shoulder press or whatever, it really, really starts to hurt on both of my shoulders. So it's been really getting to me because this has happened before. I ended up just waiting it out. But I was doing aesthetic and then it came back and I was right at the end of aesthetic when that came back. So I decided just to take it slow and went back to anabolic right now. But it's still ongoing. And as I was telling you, I can't sleep that well anymore right now due to this comfort. OK, that's a pretty common issue. Before we get into details, I'm going to ask you a couple other questions. Before we do that, it is common for people to have shoulder issues, shoulder mobility issues. I do want to know where the shoulder pain is. It's usually either in the front of the shoulder or behind, kind of behind the shoulder. Where do you feel your shoulder pain? Right in the front. OK, so very common, OK? So typically that's bicep tendon inflammation. So the bicep tendon runs over the front of the humerus. That's the top of the arm. And you'll start to get inflammation there and then you'll start to get pain right on the front of the shoulder. And this is a result of poor function in the shoulder. So more presses will actually cause more problems. Now what a lot of people do is they stop pressing and then the pain goes away and they think that's the solution. That doesn't solve the root cause. What you're doing is you're just avoiding movement that bothers you, which is OK to relieve the pain, but it doesn't solve any of the issues at all. So a couple of things we need to do. Number one, let's work on some bicep flexibility. So static stretches for the bicep. That's still not going to solve the problem though. What we need to work on is the mid-back muscles that pull the shoulder blades back and down. And also work on some basic shoulder mobility movements you'll find in a program like Maps Prime Pro. Like an example would be a shoulder dislocate or handcuffs with rotation or even the wall test in Maps Prime. Work on those things because here's the deal, especially common exercises like bench presses and rows and overhead presses. You should be able to perform them without pain. So it's almost never the case where somebody's body just isn't made for those exercises. Usually their body just isn't moving right for those exercises. Yohan, did you listen to the most recent episode that we did on how to improve your bench press? Yes, yes I did. OK, yeah, we addressed some good stuff in there. So we talked about some of the suspension trainer W's. I know I talked about inside there. So a lot of those priming movements I think are going to benefit you. But back to the bicep, I mean, you have to know how to static stretch a bicep, first of all. I don't know if we've even taught that on the channel, have we taught a bicep stretch? Yeah, no, I don't think so. I mean, it's a good one to add to the list. Yeah, you literally can grab like a bar behind your body, straighten your arm out, and then turn your body until you feel your bicep stretch. Actually, in fact, if you did some static stretching on your biceps right before you bench press, I guarantee you probably already feel relief just from doing that. My protocol would be, right, a bicep stretches the opposite of what it would be contracted. So if you contract it, and it looks like I know we're on YouTube, right? So if it looks like this, you open up and you completely rotate the opposite way. I hope we zoomed in on your bicep when you did that. Damn! Look at that. That's right, that's no pump, Sal. That's what it looks like. That's crazy. And you push-ups in the bathroom. This is super common, though, is the point. Like, this is actually something that I would, it was a limiting factor for me with bench. You'd inevitably get up to that point. You'd start to feel pain either in the front or the back of the shoulder. And so this is where I started to put more emphasis on mobility work and also rotational work to get my shoulder to track better and to be able to feel more secure and stabilized. And so, you know, to get yourself back into that mentality of trying to really stabilize, protect, and build strength around and support around your shoulders, everything. OK. All right, perfect. So again, prime before your lifts, work on shoulder mobility. Do some static stretches of your bicep. Do you have prime or prime pro? I only have prime right now. I've been doing some of the static stretches with that, with the wall test. Doug, send him over prime pro, so he's got that, too. But yeah, I would take some of the advice that we did in that bench press episode, because I believe we address all mobility, stability stuff for the shoulder. The only thing we didn't, we didn't address bicep stretching. So that needs to be something that becomes like a protocol for you before you start any of your lifting is get a good stretch on that bicep, and then I would do all the shoulder stability work, and then go into it. And like Sal said, it should feel better right away just from doing that. But it doesn't end there. You've got to keep addressing that. OK, thank you guys so much for you to appreciate that. No problem. Thanks for calling, John. Yeah, I think here's the big challenge with pain with people and exercises. Two things. Either one, they start to decide that this exercise just isn't for me. I've heard many times people say things like, avoid it. Yeah, oh, I can't bench, or I can't squat, or I can't whatever because of this particular pain. That's a problem because you never solve the issue. And it's a fundamental movement. Pressing horizontally across your body is a pretty fundamental movement. And then the second issue is that people will wait for the pain to go away, either by maybe they are doing some mobility work or by avoiding the exercise, pain goes away and they think the problem is solved. It's actually not solved. The pain might have gone away, but you still have the issue and the pain will come back. Or they treat those mobility drills like an intensified exercise. And they overdo it. And a lot of times, exaggerating the inflammation of it. And so there is a bit of a healing process to that as well. But you really have to figure out like that sweet spot of like it's a continual thing. It's a frequency thing with less intensity. Well, the other mistake they make is they lack the correct intent when they do mobility stuff. So one of the challenges I felt that we've always had with creating Prime and Prime Pro as this virtual program and not being there to coach it is getting people to understand the intent. Like you could do a handcuff with rotation and it could be like whatever type of, and not even be hard, just kind of go through the motion. And then you could do it and you'll break a sweat doing five reps doing it because the intent is completely different. So you have to understand when you're trying to gain a greater range of motion, you have to be challenging those in ranges of motion and connecting to those muscles that do that and that there's a lot of intent there. And if you don't understand how to do that and you just watch a video, you just kind of go through the movements. And I do wanna add to that within reason, right? So just like when you work out, you're not trying to go to failure and you're not trying to go beyond a particular limit. So obviously if you're doing a mobility movement and you feel bad pain, there's your edge. So don't go beyond that. It's your threshold. Don't go beyond that. Play within your particular edges of pain. So I'm connecting. Oh, that's a little too far. Let's back off a little bit and then slowly work from there. But I tell you what, this front shoulder pain issue from bench pressing. I mean, at one point, this was like, I actually loved it when clients would come with me with that problem because- You needed to release it right away. Right away. It was almost like an easy fix, that particular issue.