🔥 Shoulder Exercise Safety & Dangers of Behind the Neck Press

🚨 Training shoulders can sometimes be tricky if we’re not aware of the common mistakes we can be doing without even realizing. Most of us have been thought or seen shoulder press, flys be done parallel to the body (coronal plane) and haven’t thought much of it. However that may not be the best way to do them because of our bony anatomy. For that same reason there can be a big problem in doing behind the neck shoulder press.

✅The reason we don’t want to be doing shoulder exercises in the coronal plane is because of our bony anatomy in the subacromial space. This space limits the amount of movement the humeral head can do without pinching muscle or tendons. We avoid this in general movement through rotating the scapula and making more space for the head to move under. However sometimes this may not be enough especially when dealing with weighted exercises and can cause wear and tear on the muscles and ligaments. This happens especially when doing behind the neck press, now you may say I’ve been doing this forever and I’m okay or I have the ROM to do it. The answer to those statements is if it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t, and unless you change your bony anatomy no ROM will prevent that.

✅We can avoid this by moving the shoulder into the scapular plane where it is less restricted. The scapular plane is about 30 degrees into horizontal adduction. You can try this for yourself, move the shoulder to parallel with the body (coronal plane) and abduct the arm, do the same in the scapular plane and notice the difference. The next thing to remember is since we want to stabilize the shoulder blade by retracting it and depressing it, that will move the scapular plane closer to the coronal plane, so arms will be more around 15-20 degrees with an actively stabilized scapula. Give it a shot your next shoulder day and see if you feel a difference, do you perform the behind the neck press?