Many readers have never had shoulder problems—like rotator cuff tears, arthritis or loss of cartilage, which is the cushioning between bones. I hope you never will, but the odds are that sooner or later it’s going to happen. If you’ve been training anywhere near as long as I have, now more than 30 years, you’ve likely had to deal with at least one of those, if not all three, as I have.
What’s the worst part about having a bum shoulder or shoulders? “Regular” people would probably assume it’s the pain you live with every day. Bodybuilders know that pain is something we can manage. What’s often tougher to accept is the limitations that acute or chronic shoulder injuries put on our training. You’d be surprised at how pervasive those limitations can be. For instance, who would think that a rotator cuff issue could make it impossible to squat—because you can’t reach back far enough to hold the barbell across your traps? That’s where front squats come in handy, as well as leg presses and hack squats.
What about presses for the chest and shoulders? Now, there’s a real obstacle. As incomprehensible as this will sound to those who have never experienced shoulder problems, you will not be able to press as much weight in any angle, be it decline, flat, incline or overhead. The real issue here is stability—or lack thereof—and that’s compounded with free weights. You may be able to press the same weights as before, but you won’t be able to keep them balanced while you press them. For many, even if they could manage to balance a heavy weight for pressing, the pain would be excruciating.
So what do you do in this situation? You can simply stop doing all types of presses, and that’s what many men and women with shoulder joint pain and injuries do. You can still work your chest with flye movements and train your shoulders with various types of lateral raises. Even so, it’s just not possible to maintain your size, fullness and density in the chest or shoulders without including presses. I’ve seen enough loss in those areas when people stop pressing to know that’s true. You have to keep presses in your routine—but you can’t go very heavy. You can’t go very light either, or else you lose the benefits to the muscle.
The solution? Preexhaust. Recently, I talked with top IFBB pro Victor Martinez about his chest training. Victor used to routinely use 150s on flat-bench and incline presses for chest and had gone as heavy as 180s. In the late summer of 2012, however, he suffered a spiral fracture of the humerus in a freak accident that occurred while he was posing for a mock arm-wrestling photo with a fan in Mexico. The fan decided to pin Martinez savagely and thus assert his macho dominance over the much larger Dominican-American. Victor now has a three-inch steel rod in that arm that limits what he can press—it starts to bend under very heavy loads. Now he can only press 100s at most. How has he managed to maintain his chest thickness?
Victor does quite a bit of preexhausting, performing incline flyes, flat flyes, then cable crossovers before his first set of presses. That way those 100s feel a lot heavier than they normally would, and his chest has to work much harder to press them.
Here’s how it works for me. Pressing for the chest doesn’t aggravate my shoulders too much, and I’ve found I don’t need to press superheavy to maintain my pectoral mass. That said, I can’t do heavy overhead presses at this time. I have my better and worse days, of course, but, basically, the weights I press overhead are probably never going to be what they were. So I rely on preexhausting my medial- and side-deltoid heads now.
I start off on a seated lateral machine and typically do four sets of 12 to 15 reps. For the last set I use the stack and get about 12 reps with that. Then I drop it down to about two-thirds of the stack for another 10 to 12. From there I do some type of dumbbell lateral raises. They may be standard laterals done standing up for straight sets, or I may go up and down the rack for two or three rounds without resting. At other times I do one-arm laterals, trading off arms, or do seated laterals to failure and then stand up to keep the set going to failure again. The goal is always to get a serious pump and burn in my shoulders.
After all that I do seated dumbbell presses with a weight significantly lighter than the 120s or 130s I used to do or use a shoulder-press machine. Most times it takes only three good work sets of 10 to 12 reps to get the job done and hit the shoulders as hard as I want to. After that I usually finish up with rear delts.
So, if your shoulders are not in a happy place right now or haven’t been in quite some time, you don’t have to despair because you can’t press very heavy. Preexhausting with isolation movements can make moderate weights feel heavier and force your chest and shoulders to work just as hard as they did when your shoulder joints were healthier and you were able to press more. Remember, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and for any problem there is always a solution!
—Ron Harris
Editor’s note: Ron Harris is the author of Real Bodybuilding—Muscle Truth From 25 Years in the Trenches, available at www.RonHarrisMuscle.com.