The WORST Shoulder Exercise for Bigger Shoulders - STOP!!

You think all gains have to come with pain? Not so! And I am going to show you today exactly how to apply that to your shoulder training. What's up guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM. You know the old saying, 'No Pain - No Gain.' right? Not so! Not if you're training smart because if you think that you have to go through pain in order to gain, you won't be in the gym that long. And the thing is, if you're experiencing joint soreness or injuries that seem to last from workout to workout, there's going to come a time when you're going to start bailing on your workouts because you just simply can't go through that discomfort. And then where you gonna' be left? With nothing because you won't be working out at all. In this past month's Men's Fitness Magazine, I contributed in it our goal here about some of the exercises that need to be revisited because we have probably thought that they were bad exercises and that there's nothing that you could do to help them. So we just kind of throw them into what I call the Iron Graveyard and get rid of them for good. But those exercises do have the potential to give you some pretty major gains if you do them. So do we have to throw them away completely? Or, can we make some revisions to them to get the best out of the exercises without the down sides? And the first one I want to show you in this week's video is the Upright Row. Because we know that when it comes to building shoulders, we know we can do our pressing, we know we can do our laterals, but the Upright Row is a great exercise for what it will do in terms of engaging the shoulder, in getting contraction of the shoulder and helping to build the shoulder. The problem is the mechanics of the exercise put it in that Iron Graveyard and it belongs in the Iron Graveyard, and I'm going to show you why. The first thing we do when we look at the Upright Row is look at the position. First of all, actually, what am I using? A barbell or dumbbells? When we use a barbell, we're actually fixing our hands here on the bar so that there is not a lot of play with what I can do once I raise the bar. When I raise it up and come down, at the top, you will notice that the hands are below the elbows like that. And also we are getting this internal rotation at the shoulder. Well why is that so important? Well if I were to go to a physical therapist, and say, hey, I think I might be having an impingement, what can you do? Or even an orthopedic surgeon, they're going to test me by putting me into this provocative position here, which is basically this position. They push down, and if you get pain every time they push, you are probably having some sort of compression going on inside of your shoulder joint here, an impingement. Well, if you look again at the Upright Row, it's that same provocative position here up at the top. Ok. So your hands right into that position every time. Matter of fact every time I did that, I felt crunching in my shoulders. So what is the alternative? What can you do to not have to abandon this exercise completely but find something you can do? The first thing is grab dumbbells. So guys, when you have your dumbbells, you have a lot more three dimensional freedom that doesn't just lock me into this impingement position but allows me to do things with the dumbbells. The next thing is, you can do a variation that allows you to minimize that.. It's a high pull, but with a high pull we are actually going to be able to externally rotate by getting the hand higher than the elbow. Ok, big difference, when the elbow is higher than the hand, internal rotation, hand is higher than the elbow, external rotation. So what do we do? We get up here, pull up and back, and hands higher than the elbow. Ok. And you'll see right here, as I got up to the top, that there's a lot of engagement here of the entire deltoid. Ok, even front, in here, side through here, and even as I rotate back, you will get the back and the rear delt, too. So it kind of gives me the opportunity to work not just one area of the deltoid, but kind of combine them because we're able to go three dimensionally through this movement instead of having to stay locked in here, in front, because the barbell won't be able to go through my body. So guys, I always say you can train hard or you can train long. Though with AthleanX I get you to train hard, and there's pain, but there's a good kind of pain. It is a pain that you experience when you wake up the next day having worked the muscles appropriately but not overworked the joints. Well you can also train smart. And that's, I think, what AthleanX really strives to do, is get you to train smart. I want to keep you in the gym for a long, long time, ok. I don't want you doing exercises that have short term benefits that wind up laying you up and putting you out of commission and not being able to workout, for the lifetime because this is a lifetime gain, being able to continue to come back and be your best from workout to workout. That's what AthleanX is all about guys. If you haven't already, then head on over the AthleanX.com now and grab your 90-day training program and get the well-thought-out, intelligent approach to training, so that you can be with me on Team Athlean for many days to come. Alright. Guys, I will see you back here in 7 days. If you like this video, if you find it helpful, make sure you thumb it up and leave your comment below . We will address some of these other exercises in the weeks ahead, but for now I will see guys back again in just a few short days.