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When I bench press I feel it in my shoulders [Article]

Posted by Pascal Landshoeft

Jan 3, 2017 10:00:00 AM

 When I bench press I feel it in my shoulders

When I bench press I feel it in my shoulders

This is an article to have a quick look on why you feel your bench press in your shoulders and how you can adjust, if you wish to. I personally bench press 150kg at a bodyweight of 85 to 90kg and enjoy it a lot. Any questions you might have are well placed in the comments section. 

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Bench press calculator

Somehow you thought that the bench press was the ideal exercise for developing your chest. You have read the muscle and fitness magazine, men's health and some other prints from the local gas station to get advice about how to get a bigger and better chest. Because let us be honest, all you care about is to have bigger arms and bigger chesticles to impress the birds at the beach or at college. Fair goal to have, but when you come home you are surprised to also feel the pain and burn in your shoulders, maybe even more so than in your chest. What is going on here? Have you been cheated by the magazines? Duped by the marketing machine that wants to sell you more supplements and new programs? This might be the case, but let us take a step back and look at the entire picture.

So which is the best exercise for your chest? What do you go to the gym form, sweating and spending your valuable lifetime just to get a burn in an area you did not even want to develop in the first place? Know you are even more confused than before and you ar researching for more information which starts to contradict itself to the outmost degree until your head spins and you stop reasearching and switch on the television.

Misinformation can be a reason for your warped conception. This is not necessarily down to the informant trying to be deceitful, but rather caused by him or her focusing on what you care most about to sell you their product. If the target group of buyers for the magazine is most interested in what the bench press can do for their chest, that is what the focus of the limited space on the page will be about. Still, that is not the reason that you feel the bench press in your shoulders, it is only the reason that you are surprised to feel it in your shoulder.

Rotator for the bench press

The anatomy of the bench press gets your body to involve the pectoralis major, the deltoids and the triceps to comeplete the movement. So if you feel the bench press in the shoulders it can be based on your deltoids being stimulated more than your chest, especially if you are new to the exercise. In addition the closer your arms go to a 90 degrees angle between elbows and torso, the more likely you are to feel the bench press in your shoulders as well as in your triceps and pecs. The pain you might feel can also be skeletal due to your rotator cuffs not being used to the movement. 

Conclusion

It is normal to feel the bench press in your shoulders as it is involved in the movement. You can actively influence how much you fell your shoulder in your bench press by adjusting the tilt between your elbow and torso. The closer your grip and the closer your elbows to the torso the less likely it will become that you feel the bench press in your shoulders and the morelikel it will be that you feel it in your triceps. 

Further reading

On the deadlift

On the squat


On the bench press

 

 


 

Topics: Lift stronger, Bench Press, Powerlifting