 Question is from Thunderbolt. I've been having chronic shoulder pain which makes it difficult and painful to bench press. Are there any other exercises that work the chest without using shoulders? You're asking the question, you're asking, you want the wrong answer. You wanna go around it. Yeah, that's not the right way. Are there exercises that you could do that won't hurt your shoulder that'll work the chest? Yes, are they going, is this gonna result in reduced performance? Maybe, I mean. No, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do for the chest. There's nothing you can do with the chest that doesn't incorporate the shoulders. What I mean is, I'm sure there's exercises that will not bother. It won't stress the shoulder. Yeah, that won't bother his shoulder, but then he's gonna lose strength and he's gonna lose performance because he's gonna be avoiding the best, most best exercises. And he's not addressing the root cause. That's it. The real question should be, I've been having chronic shoulder pain which makes it difficult and painful to bench press. What can I do to get my shoulders to stop hurting? So I would take a break on your heavy benching and I would focus on shoulder mobility, upper back thoracic mobility and really figure out why the hell your shoulder's hurting in the first place because you're gonna be avoiding some of the best, like bench presses and incline presses are some of the best chest building exercises you could do. Listen, this is extremely common. This is very, very common because of upper cross syndrome, which is the rounded shoulders and the forward head, which almost everybody has this. Most of us, it's a spectrum of how bad it is. It's built into the environment. It is, cause we do everything in front of us. We don't ever do anything behind us. So of course, it's going to train our body to be closing forward. Now, when you're doing the bench press it is not advantageous for you to be in that position. It is more ideal for you to be in a retracted position to where your shoulders are peeled back. But that's hard to do that because your brain just tells you to get this weight up. And if your default pattern is to always allow the shoulders to roll forward because you're that way most of your day and you get under a 200 pound bench press, you pull that bar off and then you drop it down. Your body just goes get this bar up and what it'll do is it'll push everything forward but you need to be able to stabilize the shoulder girdle and keep it peeled back while you press. This is why we created a program like Prime Pro and arguably the most valuable program that we created. When I think of everybody, athletes, trainers, your advanced age clients, people just getting into working out, to me that is those programs Prime and Prime Pro, in my opinion, should be in everybody's exercise library just because everybody's going to deal with stuff like this whether it be the shoulders, the ankles, the hips and instead of trying to find exercises that don't bother it, like Sal said, you need to figure out why that is, especially when it's chronic pain and we're not talking about acute injuries, we're not talking about somebody who fell and broke their arm or tore their rotator cuff. We're talking about somebody who, man, I don't know what I did but when I bench, it just aggravates the shit out of my shoulder. Well, that's not fucking normal. I mean, it's normal in the fact that a lot of people deal with it but it's not normal that your body should feel that way doing a fundamental movement like a bench press. So let's figure it out and let's address it. Now, we don't see you in front of us so I can't say for sure but more than likely the point that Sal's making is probably correct and before you go into benching what you should do is prime really well. In fact, I know that I just did, we all did our Friday fitness tips that go up on our Instagram page and I actually gave a tip in regards to bench pressing and the tip that I gave was about priming before you get into that because of this exact situation because I know that this is super common. A lot of clients of mine would do this and I suffer from this. As to this day, if I get into a bench press a lot of times when I get under there my shoulder is clicking and I can feel it like catching and it totally gets aggravated unless I go and I spend five or 10 minutes priming all my back muscles that are responsible for pulling my shoulders back before I go bench and then when I actually put the work in and I do that I get under the bench I feel extremely comfortable. Yeah, all those stabilizers, rotators like if you're not expressing any rotational movement at all like this is gonna become a problem you're just not gonna track as optimally as you could even though it doesn't seem like it's even part of the process because I'm just pressing the weight right in front of me and all I have to do is this one simple move out in front but if that's all your emphasizes and you're loading that process continuously it's gonna stress and it's gonna start pulling everything out of track just a little bit to where you could counter that by just expressing more movement that your shoulder is very capable of doing. So to take the time to really kind of go through that and figure out where the sticking points are where the deficiencies lie is gonna be like massively advantageous if when you come back to bench you're gonna see a performance increase and also it's just gonna stabilize better which then alleviates the pain but yeah you gotta go back to the root and see what's going on.