 Question is from Leah V 1983. Can you break down the differences between the overhead press versus push press? Which is better for the novice lifter? Excellent. So overhead press is just a straight, press the bar or dumbbells up, straight up over your head. And it's strict in the sense that your body stays tight and rigid when you do it. You've got good control, good stability. A push press is explosive. So a push press is I got the bar, the dumbbells at my shoulders. And then I'm hinging your hips back and you're explosively kind of jumping the weight up. Yeah, I'm boosting it. I'm boosting it with my lower body and my chest or the rest of my body to get the bar. Definitely more advanced. Way more advanced. The novice lifter shouldn't be doing a push press. A push press requires all the skills that it takes to be good at an overhead press plus extra. So if you don't have it like mastered the overhead press, doing a push press is totally silly. Now they do have different benefits. The push press is explosive. So there's a speed element. That's excellent for people who've been working out for a little while. So if you've only ever done overhead presses, try some push presses and watch what happens to the muscle on your body. It's also excellent for people that have athletic pursuits, right? Like if you care about explosiveness and that matters to you. For the general population that's just trying to build muscle, lose body fat, it's probably less applicable than somebody who's like an athlete. Like if I'm someone who's a young athlete and explosiveness is something that I want, then there's a little more value to that. But still, regardless, I would teach a strict overhead press and great form there before I start to incorporate. A strict press is definitely a prerequisite for me. I mean, I would need to see how well that you're controlled and that you're able to stabilize the weight overhead. That by itself is quite the challenge with today's demands in the workplace, at home, like what you're doing constantly, just to be able to raise your arms and have good shoulder mobility by itself is quite the feat. And I think that a lot of people don't realize that. They think that by just lifting something over their head, like that's the end of the story, where we don't even like track to see like where that bar path is, like where your capacity is to bring your shoulder in the right position to be able to now incorporate your shoulder blades to stabilize and get your muscles activated properly. So there's just a lot going on there before we get into going fast. This is why I love the Z-Press. Yes, it forces that. Yes, it forces that. Like it's showing somebody on a, you know, our program in a video, a strict press is tough because I know from my experience, you know, I could stand in front of a client, show them a strict overhead press, then give them the bar and them do it and then fuck up the bar path easily because their body will deviate and they'll just, they'll take the easiest path. That's just natural for clients. So I love teaching with the Z-Press because what I know about the Z-Press is you can't cheat it, you'll fall back. And so if you have a poor bar path, you'll know right away. There's no guessing for you. You don't need a mirror to know. You won't be able to extend your arms all the way up and lock out with the bar above your head and not fall over unless you are taking a good bar path. So I love to teach the Z-Press first and get those mechanics down really well. And then I teach a strict overhead press standing where I teach them to engage their core, activate their glutes and keep their lower body stiff. And then the advance to that is eventually the push press. Totally, and I, this, you know, when I first became a trainer, this blew me away quite a bit. When I had the average 35 plus year old, so 35 and up, come in, who's untrained, just the average person doesn't work out, I was shocked at how little of them or how few of them were able to fully extend their arm above their head without weight. It sounds simple, sounds like nothing. But if you're listening right now, go to your mom or your dad or your aunt or your uncle, somebody who doesn't work out, have them place their back up against the wall and see if they can raise their arms straight up above their head while keeping their hand in elbow and contact with the wall without having to over arch their back or have their butt come off the wall, you'd be surprised how few people can achieve that straight line above their head. When I would train people in advanced age, that was something that I always worked on. And it always blew me away. I was like, wow, you can't even reach straight up above your head. But it makes sense. How often do we do that in our everyday lives? How often do we strengthen that pattern? We don't. I mean, I lost a lot of that. It took me a long time to get that back. And I was still working my shoulders. This goes back to the earlier discussion and the big three kind of, because I would actually incorporate the big four and it would be overhead press. Totally, in fact, functionally speaking, I would even consider it superior to a bench press. I agree. And this is just another example that I did military press and lateral raises and front dumbbell raises. I did all those movements and built great shoulders for a decade of training and then got to a point where, and I totally ignored overhead press. Why? Because I'd arch my low back. I didn't have good thoracic mobility so it didn't allow me to retract my shoulders so I could get my arms up by my ears. And so I just kept building muscle and neglected that movement. And because of it, I have all kinds of poor mechanics. And it took me probably a year on unpacking that and working on that to get to the point where I could actually do a behind the neck press. But talk about the value in that. I mean, I had a lot of neck pain and tightness in my traps all the time. That got eliminated completely. The tracking, just my shoulder, just the whole, the way I would feel the clicking on my shoulder when I did certain exercises because my scapula was rolled forward, completely got rid of that. I mean, this just goes, this is why these movements are so good and a lot of people are bad at them but that's not why you should ignore them. You incorporate them. If they do bother you, they are challenging then instead of just walking away from them you try and unpack that, which this is where why I think that Prime Pro is probably the most valuable thing for everybody because very few people are gonna do the big three or the big four and have perfect mechanics. And it's because they've got breakdown in one of the major joints, if not all of them or most of them and they should be doing movements to just- And it's not completely obvious. Right. You know, you really need feedback and a lot of times like you can get that from a coach that's gonna be able to point that out and look at you but if you're just by yourself doing an exercise you think everything's going great because that's what your body is supposed to do. It's supposed to make it efficient and get to an end point. Like I'm doing this, now I'm getting to an end point but you don't realize like all these compensations that are occurring along the process. Dude, back in the day, bench press didn't become a popular exercise until the 19, I'd say 30, 40s, I think. It was always overhead press. All the strength athletes, if you nowadays, maybe nowadays a little different but when I was growing up, it was like, how much can you bench? That was your, you know how they talked about how strong you are. How much can you bench? Now it's maybe how much can you deadlift squat? That's totally me. But yeah. How much you bench, bro. Exactly. Now back in the day, it was how much you could press over your head. That's how much, that was a test of your strength and that's why I make the argument that the overhead, and the truth is, you know, I, if someone compress a shit ton of weight overhead standing, it means more than if they could bench more off their chest. The overhead press is a very valuable exercise. Yeah.