 So you wanna overhead press, but it hurts. I've got some tips and tricks that you can try pretty quickly that sometimes magically make the pain disappear. But if not, if it doesn't, stay tuned. I've got a little gift for you at the end of this video. The first move that we start people with warm up wise for an overhead press is a rock back progression. It's really good for improving your torso mobility as well as your shoulder mobility. Both needed to overhead press like a rock star. So I'm gonna have Lance do is I want Lance to go ahead and just keep his arms nice and straight like that. He's gonna let out a silent inhale through the nose. Exhale and I want you to just go ahead and push your hands into the ground so your upper back comes away. Just like that. Now maintaining that reach. I don't want Lance to just sag and be lazy. Go ahead and sag, we don't want that. Exhale and reach. You're gonna maintain that reach and I want you to go ahead and rock your rear down to your heels just like that, keeping that nice long reach. And you can just hang out into that position and breathe it out. And a lot of times what you'll find is the longer you hang out in this position you'll be able to push a little bit more, be able to get the hips a little bit back more easily. Now, if that's easy peasy lemon squeeze and you're like, Zach, I need even more mobility. We can progress this to having the elbows drop down so they are right up against the knees keeping the eyes between the fingertips and keeping that hand push the entire time. Just like that. Now what you want to be mindful of and Lance is doing this a little bit is he's rounding a little bit too much in the mid zone. So the way that we fix that, sometimes I'll just have someone go ahead and sag, get nice and lazy. I'm gonna bring your hands in just to smidge. I want eyes looking between the fingertips silent in through the nose. Exhale, push through the hands, push the ground away nice and slow just like that and you'll notice that Lance is a little bit less rounded and I'm just gonna have Lance go ahead and hang out, breathe easy into this position. You'll get some nice range of motion changes in the upper back. Next up is the bear to oblique set. We're gonna start quadruped. So Zach's gonna be on his hands and knees just like this. I like to give a soft exhale and pull the belly up just slightly. And then he's gonna hover his knees off the ground. And so this is our good starting position. If the spine looks pretty good here nice and straight, nice and neutral what you're gonna do is you're gonna, I'm gonna have him pick up his left hand reach it up towards the sky, take his right foot, kick it out my way into an oblique sit. And then Zach, let's go the other direction. Just make sure that straight leg goes nice and straight and good, switch sides one more time. Just like that. Big thing on this one, you can rest. Big thing on this one is make sure the neck stays nice and long and relaxed. You don't wanna let the shoulders take over on the shrugging position. Keep the tension in the armpits and in the lower outer abdominals. So what we don't wanna see is we don't wanna see these shoulders rising up towards the top of the head. This indicates that your shrugging and the shrugging muscles are destabilizing your shoulders, shutting off the abs and not really promoting the mobility that we want for this exercise. So just make sure that before you go when you set, you start, relax a little bit Zach. When you set and you get your nice soft exhale you push your arms just a little bit so that they're long through the ground. And you wanna try to think about the head staying nice and tall, the neck staying nice and relaxed. Even if you're not sure if you're doing it or not, Zach, give me a little shake my head no kind of movement there. I just like that to make sure we're in the right spot. This is really common when you rise your knees up off the ground and you shift the weight onto your arms. So if you're noticing that you're feeling more tension in the shoulders there, bring the knees back down. Make sure you get the neck nice and relaxed and very, very slowly raise those knees off the ground, slowly introducing the load into the arms. The last warmup we're gonna talk about is the bear walk. So we're gonna start in a very similar to the bear to oblique position, the bear position. So we're starting hands and knees on the ground. Zach's gonna give a nice easy exhale. Pull the belly up slightly. Make sure this neck is nice and long. And we're gonna start by floating the knees off the ground just about a millimeter. And then I want you to straighten your legs. Like you're trying to do a downward dog kind of position. So we should feel a really good stretch in the hamstrings there. And you can, Zach, you can exhale and let your heels sink towards the ground. Yeah, nice. I would even lock your knees out a little bit more. Yep, just like that. And so now, Zach, you're gonna take a step with your right foot and right hand. Yeah, keep the knees straight while you do that. And then let's go to the other side. And get in that kind of rhythm. Take a couple of steps here. So this is just promoting some hip mobility. He's got nice shoulder stability that we're working on here. Take one more step and you can rest. And he gets a lot of lengthening through the backside of the leg. Now folks, we can still build a lot of strength in the overhead position without necessarily dealing with pain. Something like a Turkish getup done super heavy can be one way of achieving that goal. So for this, I'm gonna coach Lance through some of the steps that we want for that. So I have the kettlebell on Lance's right side. Because it's pretty heavy, I'm gonna have Lance grip with two hands and you wanna roll and press with two hands up towards the ceiling to get it into position. If I'm pressing with the right, right knee's gonna be bent. Now from here, what I'm gonna have Lance do is I wanna silent inhale through the nose. On the exhale, you're gonna punch the ceiling and roll to your forearm just like that, keeping some pressure through the hand. Now from here, Lance got a little bit too much elbow extension. I'm gonna shift them back just a little bit. Take one more inhale. Now, Lance is gonna exhale. He's gonna push through his hand. Elbow's gonna come up like he's doing a tricep extension. I stay on the bell. Another silent in. Exhale, you're gonna get into the bridge position. Sweep the leg like you are the karate kid. Exhale, push. Ideally, Lance is gonna have to change his position. Silent in again. Exhale, come on up. Hold position. You can stop there or flip it and reverse it back into position. Eyes going on the kettle bell. Sweep, slow on the low so that way we can build some eccentric strength also in the support arm. So one alternative to the overhead press that will still allow us to train parts of the shoulder is the incline press. I like to start with a bench inclined about 30 degrees. Zach's gonna grab two dumbbells, put them on his legs and you're gonna, Zach, as you lay back, use your legs to pull the weights up into the shoulder rack position. And he leans back, arms go straight up right away. I don't generally recommend staying down at the bottom. No, that was good, that was good. Do that one more time. Show us how it's done. Yes, and then just bring them down. Show me a press. Now, big things we're looking out here for is I want the elbows about 45 degrees from the sides of the body. One thing that you can do, Zach, that I can coach people on and maybe you won't, but I like a little bit more flair, maybe 60 degrees sometimes. And as long as I'm not seeing the shoulders round over or shrug up, I kind of like it. Yeah, show me a round over one more time. Yeah, just like, you see his head comes off and kind of like cranks his neck. And then show me a little bit of a shrug as you press back up. Yeah, yeah, so all I'm doing there, if I'm shrugging, I'm destabilizing the shoulder, you can put the weights back there. I like this as a starting point. If this is okay, you can get more shoulder training by just inclining the bench a little bit more. So here we've got about a 45 degree angle on the bench. Zach's getting a lot more load on his shoulders, a lot less load on his chest. So it's gonna be harder, but he's gonna get more shoulder training out of it. So just show me the same movements here, Zach. Same cues we're thinking about. Just make sure as you press up, you're not shrugging. Keep those elbows a reasonable distance away from your side, and it looks great. One thing we gotta think about, when we think about pressing overhead for strength and for muscle gain, you don't necessarily need to do overhead pressing to do it. There are other ways that we can train the caps to the shoulders, these deltoid muscles with other exercises without having to do overhead pressing. So one of these variations that I really like is a chest supported dumbbell scaption. So I'm gonna go, Zach's got a really light weight because he's got a really long arm and a really long lever here and huge muscles. Now, as he's gonna lay down here, I just like to say, Zach, get nice and tall like this. We're using the bench to stabilize, and he's gonna sweep long arc with the weight out away from himself and then out towards the side a little bit. And just a nice little pause at the top and then come right back down. Do a couple reps here. Big things that we can look out for, is that can you shrug on this one? So I don't wanna lift this weight with a shrugging shoulder. I gotta make sure that this, as the arm comes back, the shoulder blade comes down with him. He's getting tired. Ideally, you'll get the most overload if his arm is parallel to the ground. So that is the goal because that makes the lever, the force from gravity the most to a post. That actually looks really good. So our fourth and final hack for fixing the overhead press is just fix the overhead press. Sometimes you can just cue yourself and things just kinda clear up. Sometimes it's just the execution, the way you're doing the exercise. So I'm gonna have Zach run through this. So if we're gonna do an overhead press, I'm gonna say, Zach, let's go a bit wider than shoulder width on your grip. I like your pinky right around that ring there. That's perfect there. Now you're gonna walk up to the bar. He's gonna put his chest on the bar. And I want you to dip under just a hair more and then stand up with the bar. Let's take a step back. Nice, just like that. And then just show me a press. See what we got here. It's not too bad. Big things to look out for is sometimes when people press overhead because they're not used to dissociating the shoulder motion from the ab motion, they'll arch their back just like that. Now that's partially a compensation for helping you get extra weight out of a final rep. And a little bit of that, Zach will disagree with me, but I'm okay with that on the last rep or the last, maybe the last week of the last program. But you know. I would be okay. You know, it's okay. It's okay. So show me another bad one, arch in the back. And we don't want that. So what I like to think instead is as you press up, Zach, keep the belly back, keep a slight little engagement in the abdominals. Yes, and you see he bends his knees a little bit because this is also gonna help him keep his heels down. So that's another one as long as when the back arches, you're pushing your weight forward, your toes. Yeah, exactly like that. You have to step forward because your heels come up off the ground. You got a lot of weight on the toes. So one of the things that I really like on this is when you get to the top, Zach, I want you to cue glutes and heels. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Try it one more time. You had a little shift there. That was perfect. That was perfect. I like that. Honestly, those are my favorite cues for this. Another conceptual thing I like to think about when I press overhead is I wanna make sure that you can't stop the traps from working during this, but you can place more emphasis on the deltoids. The point of the overhead press is to train the deltoids. It's not necessarily to train the upper traps. It's okay if they're involved. I just don't want this translation of the shoulders coming up towards the ears. So just make sure that when you finish your press, you're getting a nice squeeze in the caps of the shoulders and not so much this elevation of the whole shoulder girdle as a unit. Thanks for watching. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you need something else to watch or if you feel like you still need to work on your overhead shoulder mobility and cleaning up the overhead press, my buddy Zach made a great video. I'm gonna put it right here on a bunch of different drills that will help you with all of those things. So definitely check that one out.