🚨 AC JOINT PAIN WHEN BENCHING ?

✅ The main reason you’re experiencing this pain in this area is, as always, caused by the internal rotation of the shoulden that can occur through a wrong targeting of the barbell on your chest (which is sitting too low) or even tight muscles (like the pec minor) pulling your shoulder forward.

🔥 With that said, the most common cause of AC Joint pain related to bench press has to do with 2 main issues: 👇

• (1) “where you place the bar on your chest”.
  (2) the angle of your arms when performing the exercise.

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Making sure the barbell targets your middle chest/nipple height is crucial when benching. It’s not like this spot is “magical” for some reason, but it allows your shoulders to stay safe throughout the movement. As we’ve seen previously, the natural bar path of the bench press is not a straight line but some type of “arch”, I dare to say – which makes our middle chest/nipple height the “right spot” to target with the barbell, on the descent part of the movement.

🔥 Going lower makes us internally rotate the shoulders, which over time, under constant overuse, could cause microtears in the acromioclavicular joint and therefore cause pain as a result.

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(2) Rule number one works IF rule number 2 is set in place. If our arms are bent at a 75 degree-ish angle, we can hit our targeted area safely, wth our shoulders externally rotated. If we try to do the same thing but keeping a wider arm angle, then our shoulders internally rotate and cause troubles again.

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Another great cue (3) can be stretching your pec minor out, which due to our constant “computer mode” posture & “everyday is chest day”, it can be tight & cause internal rotation of the shoulder.

Speaking of stretching, I’m actually drawing a mini e-book on upper body stretches. Got many question on this, so I figured why not do it. If you guys will enjoy it, then I’ll do the lower body as well!