Barbell Shrugged - How To Fix Your Jacked Up Shoulders

Episode Date: January 11, 2017

Jacked up shoulders holding you back? New's flash, you are not the only one. It turns out that shoulder pain and injuries are some of the most common of all dysfunctions for active individuals.   Just like most things we have come to learn and share with ya'll is that this is most likely a result of faulty movement patterns. You can go as hard as you want, and lift heavy things for days ..but the flip-side of that is that you have to take the time to focus on your movement. Believe it or not, it is also a good idea to take care of your joints with the same amount of focus you put into your WOD's ...a few minutes rolling around on a lacrosse ball ain't going to cut it.    So knowing that, we headed over to Ambition Athletics to interview one of our good friends, Max Shank. We chatted it up about movement, kettlebell training, and a bunch of other cool shit he is doing in his gym, and around the world with his workshops.    More importantly, we talked about the shoulder, how it operates, and how we can take care of it so we can go hard and still feel healthy and strong.    If you find this episode useful, Max has put together a resource for the Shrugged fam on taking care of your shoulders. You can find it at daily.barbellshrugged.com/maxshank

It's the little tiny ball and socket on the end, which is the most mobile joint in your whole body, and it's also the most vulnerable joint in your whole body. But the problem is that joint functioning well is dependent on many other things that are of a higher order consequence. So what I mean by that is if you don't address breathing and core strength first, everything down the chain toward that glenohumeral joint is going to be basically on a faulty foundation. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. And we have our guest, Mr. Max Schenck.

And he's an all-around nice guy, a lucky puncher, and has written three books on strength and conditioning, owns Ambition Athletics, where we're standing right now. And today we're going to be talking a lot about the shoulder, because you have a book about the shoulder. I do have a book about the shoulder. He's got books about other stuff too. And today we're going to be talking about the shoulder because you have a book about the shoulder. I do have a book about the shoulder. He's got books about other stuff too and today we're going to be talking about the shoulder. Primarily because we suspect that you might be like us and encountered shoulder issues

from time to time. Especially if you're putting weight overhead regularly or if you move. Ever. You've never moved before? You probably got shoulder issues. Yeah. If you currently have a pulse. Yeah, CrossFitters, weightlifters, powerlifters, like everyone's got something shoulder-related that they've gone through, at least for like a period of time, if their shoulders aren't completely messed up. So being an expert in shoulders, like the CrossFit world is a really big market for helping people out.

Oh, absolutely. It really is. No, absolutely. There's shoulders everywhere. There's so much opportunity. Everybody has them. Most people have two shoulders, so that's like twice as many. I left one thing out. Yeah, you're also a master of the kettle ball.

The kettle ball. This guy loves kettle balls. I am indeed. Do you love getting those emails? Too many people say that. Can you tell me about the kettle balls? I don't like getting any emails, actually, because I'm really bad at answering them. Don't email Max.

Yeah, don't email Max. But this podcast, we're going to answer every question you might have anyway. Perfect. So no need to ask any questions via email. I like that. I know some people that know you have called you like the kettle bell guy, which I don't personally think of you as like the kettle bell guy at all. No.

But somehow you got that reputation. Where did that come from? I think the problem is I was just so good at using kettlebells and teaching them that people associated me with that from the very beginning and that is kind of where i got my start like i i went through the normal cycle that it seems like everybody goes through i started bodybuilding then i did uh crossfit then i did olympic weightlifting and then both of those hurt me a little bit so i did power lifting because that didn't hurt as much that uh, that hurts slightly less. So then I did kettlebells after that. And then, uh, kettlebells, you know, kettlebells are awesome, but there is so much

more. Like if you're going to be consistent for the longterm, which is the whole point of training, like it doesn't, the best program done for one year, isn't going to give you half as many results as, uh, a shitty program done for 10 years, you going to give you half as many results as a shitty program done for 10 years. You know, so you can do a bad program for a long time. It's going to give you better results than a good program for a short time. Consistency is key. Yeah, you need to not be hurt. Right.

To be consistent. And the way to do that is to give yourself the freedom, like the physical freedom to exercise those options. Like, for example, if you're fit enough to walk and that's it, and you don't like walking, well, shit, you're probably not going to do anything. But if you're fit enough to try martial arts and tennis and boxing and basketball, whatever. I almost said tennis twice. I like tennis. You had like three words.

Back at tennis. I ran out of sports. I've been trying to play tennis lately um i also like ping pong a lot and now before you say that that's not a sport watch those guys dude that is serious hand-eye coordination leg strength i mean there's quite a bit of athleticism happening there exactly so the whole yeah as far as like being a kettlebell guy i mean i guess it's okay but really i try to think of myself as like the, the athleticism guy, you know, where you, you take people from level zero and you give them that option. You give them the freedom to be able to pursue as many different things as possible. Like

I think everyone should go through a period where they're focusing on kettlebell training. I think everyone should focus on a period where they are, you know, balls deep into barbell training. I think people should have like a body weight phase that they go into where they start to learn some like basic gymnastics movements. And the prelude to focusing on any one thing I find for me is injury. Totally. Well, you get hurt and you're like, oh, I can only do these things. And you know, that that's half of it too. Like when you get hurt, people deal with it different ways. So like if someone gets hurt hurt what they should do is adapt and find a different path what some people do is they get discouraged and they do nothing and that's the worst thing you can do because injuries pain whatever they're all just temporary action signals in your brain you know just because

you have a bad injury doesn't mean you'll feel any physical pain. I have a torn labrum in three places. It's pretty gnarly. But I actually don't experience any pain because my core is tight, I have mobile hips, and I'm good. So any pain that you feel right now is likely going to be a temporary thing. So you just got to work your way around it and get as mobile and strong as possible. Yeah, I always thought it was weird when people identified as like a kettlebell guy

or like a barbell guy. It's a tool and there's pros and cons to using any tool. And as you just put it, you need to be proficient at using kind of all the tools available or all the major tools available. But identifying it with like an ideology almost where I'm like, I'm a barbell guy and barbell

solve all problems. It really is like, it's very short-sighted thinking in my opinion. It's like you just don't get movement well enough to know that you can use all these other things. Well, it's ridiculous. I always say it's like if your carpenter says, I'm like a saw guy. So if you need anything sawed, I'm going to saw that shit. But if you need anything hammered.

I'm still sawing it. Yeah. I got this saw here. I'm more of a screwdriver kind of guy. That's okay. I thought you were a little bit screwy. Some people like it mellow. He's a power tool guy. You're a screwdriver kind of guy. That's okay. Yeah. You know? I thought you were a little bit screwy. Some people like it mellow. He's a power tool guy.

You're a screw guy. Yeah. Yeah. So you did the RKC thing for a while, didn't you? Yeah. Doing certifications or seminars? Yeah. I'm still teaching RKCs.

I really enjoy teaching people how to use kettlebells properly. It is a fantastic tool that offers some unique benefits. I love dumbbells and barbells and bodyweight training too. But, you know, the nature of kettlebell training with like the swings and everything like that, uh, teaching people to own that like hip hinge pattern, um, it, it can be extremely dangerous. So teaching people how to do that well. And then, uh, bottom up presses are like basically magic as far as I'm concerned. So I have people do those all the time. And in fact, I've actually had people with shoulder problems, pressing weight, give them a kettlebell, turn it upside down, no more shoulder problems. Sometimes it's really that simple. Like you just have too

much horsepower and not enough steering and handling. Yeah. You suggested those to me months ago and I've been doing them a lot, even like a flat and inclined benching, like doing bottoms up kettlebell where the kettlebell's above your hand. That's what bottoms-up is if you've never seen that before. And I do feel like my shoulders feel so much better. They're way more stable than they were. And I really noticed the asymmetry between my right and left side when I tried matching the same weight on each side.

It's like I could do four reps with one kettlebell, and on the other side, 10 pounds less, and I could do zero. I did that with him last week. I kept dropping it. Yeah, we did it both last week. Yeah, and he pulled out all these kettlebells and I got the lightest one. I was like, ah.

Yeah, I definitely noticed that my left was, I could do not nearly as many reps with my left as I did with my right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's kind of like using the rings, but in a different way where there's this unstable object in your hand.

Exactly. And, you know, one of the things I always tell people to look for is, like, what's your gap? So if you can press a 100-pound dumbbell, but the most you can bottom-up press on a kettlebell is, like, 40 or 50 pounds, that's a really significant gap. And that's an indicator that you have tons of strength and horsepower and, like, almost no motor control whatsoever. So if you have a big gap, that puts you at a really high risk for a shoulder injury. Very similarly to the active and passive range of motion gap, if you guys are probably familiar with that. If you can take your arm to this range of motion,

but you can have someone take it to a much further range of motion, the difference between active and passive is going to increase your chance for injury just the same way that if you can press a very heavy weight but bottom up press a very lightweight that's also a big indicator that you're going to injure yourself what's that gaps what do you what do you think that say you have a hundred pound dumbbell press but what should your bottom up press be you know to be considered uh safe within 10 percent within 10 wow shit right so 100 pound dumbbell 90 pound or heavier kettlebell safe? Within 10%. Wow. Shit. Right? So 100 pound dumbbell,

90 pound or heavier kettlebell to match that 100 pound dumbbell. So like for example my best kettlebell press is 106 and my best bottom up press is 97. Alright. Well I got some new tests to do on my shoulder. That would be a good test for everyone

to do actually yeah i suspect we'll do that after we do the show yeah yeah so that's kind of one one test of many you could do to assess the health of a shoulder and you're you're in my opinion you're you're you're shoulder expert you know a lot about shoulders i've had many conversations with you about shoulder health i have a bum shoulder myself and you've uh you've given me a lot of insight into kind of what could potentially be wrong with in my particular case but if we zoom back out like shoulders in general like like like this is like start from the beginning like let's talk shoulders like from like the most important pieces down down to the details like where do you start if you're assessing someone's shoulders oh man well

shoulder assessment is really challenging and uh there are so many moving parts right like uh what aggravates me sometimes and maybe that's the right word for it because it does. It makes me feel angry, is that people try to treat the glenohumeral joint. And really, we shouldn't be treating anything if we're trainers because that word is not allowed for us. That's what most people think the shoulder joint is. It's this thing that moves around. It's the little tiny ball and socket on the end, which is the most mobile joint in your whole body. And it's also the most mobile joint in your whole body. And it's also the most vulnerable joint in your whole body. But the problem is that joint functioning well is dependent

on many other things that are of a higher order consequence. So what I mean by that is if you don't address breathing and core strength first, everything down the chain toward that glenohumeral joint is going to be basically on a faulty foundation. So if you think of the foundation coming from the inside out, you need, I like this term, I can't remember where I heard it, you need proximal stability in order to have distal mobility. So you need to have your breathing and your core strength dialed in. So breathing is always first. And I talk about this a lot in most of the courses I've taught and most of the books I've put out. Breathing is so

important because many people just don't breathe. They half breathe in and they half breathe out. And there's always this like constant low grade stress that they're in because breathing is like a very powerful thing for the nervous system. It's one of the few things that you can do consciously. Like we can all take a deep breath in and take a big deep breath out. But we've also been doing that all day without having to think about it. Conversely, you can't like flex your heart into making it beat at will, you know. So breathing is very powerful. The other thing about breathing is that your breathing muscles plug into a lot of stuff. That's a very technical explanation of it. So your breathing muscles

plug into a lot of stuff and the amount of residual tension or tone on those muscles can pull joints out of their ideal position, which is called joint centration. So everything has to start with that breathing. So no matter how many frigging side planks and scapular stuff you do, if your breathing is faulty and you have an imbalance in the tension of the muscles relative to what they normally should be, all they're going to do is constantly pull things out of their ideal alignment. So everything can be totally destroyed by a poor breathing pattern. So you have to start with breathing. Then very similar on the same line of thinking is the core. totally destroyed by a poor breathing pattern. So you have to start with breathing. Then, very similar on the same line of thinking is the core. And this is especially true with crossbody core activation and also the lateral chain. So apart from bottom-up presses, side planks are also magic. It seems like silly, but just being able to do a side plank with good belly breathing,

tall posture and neck rotations, and I'll get to next stuff in a second is, is absolute magic. I would suggest everybody at the very least, just do some deep belly breathing while they're in a side plank with some neck rotations. And that is total money. So you're, you're always starting with kind of the core center of the body, not like your core, like your abs, but just like you're starting with breath, with your core musculature, even though I just said like not just abs,

but kind of the entire torso and then thoracic spine, neck, all these things that are on kind of the bulk of your body, they're supporting your arm, which is hanging on the bulk of your body. So you have to address the middle part first. Exactly. Like to put super simple. No, exactly. You got to address the middle first.

And the thing to remember is proximal stability, distal mobility. And if you look at the shape of the joints, it kind of makes sense. Like ball and socket joints are designed to move a ton. You know, your hips and shoulders are designed to move a lot. Your elbows and knees are also designed to move a lot. Your hands, wrists are designed to move a ton. You know, your hips and shoulders are designed to move a lot. Your elbows and knees are also designed to move a lot. Your hands, wrists are designed to move a lot. Your spine is designed to move, but not a ton. Like it could almost just be a post, you know what I mean? Um, but obviously it is supposed to move as well. So you go from the breathing and the core strength. And then the next things that I have people look at are thoracic spine mobility and neck mobility. One of the principles I tell people is that if you have dysfunction in one area, you piss

off the neighbors. Because let's say you have a tight thoracic spine, the neighbors are neck, shoulder, low back. So it's very common for someone to have a tight thoracic spine and back pain, or a tight thoracic spine and shoulder pain, or a tight thoracic spine and neck pain. Because if you have a stiffness in one area, it's kind of like, I'm going to switch gears here for a second,

it's kind of like high ankle sprains. So high ankle sprain is a new injury in response to people taping their ankles. So high ankle sprains don't happen unless you lock the ankle itself into place. So if you have an excess amount of force that your tissue can't tolerate and you've locked in your ankle, well, you're just going to sprain right above where you tape. Right. So like something is going to move. Yeah, exactly. Right. So soccer players get very few high ankle sprains because their shoes are low profile. Football players, hockey players, basketball players are getting tons of high ankle sprains.

And it's because you lock down one area, everything adjacent to that area is just going to try to be hypermobile, and that's how you get problems. So this leads us back into the glenohumeral joint, that little ball and socket on the end. It's already the most mobile joint and most vulnerable joint in the body. So if you have its neighbors stiff and dysfunctional, then it's going to try to be even more hyper extra mobile. And then you're going to cause way more problems because there isn't a lot of bony structure holding it in. It's all muscle and ligament. So you just talked about breath and then you started talking about thoracic spine. You said you're going to touch on neck. How does the neck play into this? Yeah. So the neck is, I actually wrote an article a long time ago called check your neck before you wreck it.

And the whole idea was that many people carry a lot of excess tension in their neck and they actually use their neck as their core in their neck and they actually use their neck as their core because your neck here is actually part of your anterior chain and some of it's part of your lateral chain you know you have these different chains through your body so if you have a lot of tension in your neck when you're doing every exercise that's a pattern that you've now developed so if every time you press a kettlebell your upper traps and your neck are doing all the work, well, that's a learned behavior. And think about it, that's going

to pull this joint out of its ideal position. So you got to make sure that you can release some of that tension, the excessive tension from your neck. So what I always tell people do, doing a set of push-ups, do a neck rotation at the bottom, do a neck rotation at the top, do five pushups looking to the left, do five pushups looking to the right. Um, you know, when you're in the top of a pull-up position, this is a huge one actually. So if you can get in the top of a pull-up position and move your neck freely, that means you've really owned that top position of a pull-up. And for people who do a lot of kipping pull-ups, you don't really own that top position very well. And so you see some people who can't own that top position very well. And so you see

some people who can't own that top position, their shoulders start to shrug up, they start to reach with their neck. So they've developed this pattern that is now learned behavior and it's completely gotten rid of their ability to separate or disassociate their neck from their shoulders. Well, this is interesting. I've had a neck strain recently where I noticed that when I'm doing pull-ups, if I get a little weak, I just shift my neck over to make it work. And I was like, I figured out this little compensation, and then now I have to unlearn that. So I like that.

I've been doing stuff to unlearn that and fix that and get everything else activating properly. But I like the idea of getting to the top and doing some head turns, basically disassociating that from that movement. Exactly. That segmental disassociation is kind of like a cornerstone of how I approach mobility training. So using pull-ups as the example, pull yourself halfway up, do a couple neck rotations. Pull yourself all the way up, do a couple neck rotations. pull yourself all the way up, do a couple of neck rotations, lower yourself all the way down, do a couple of neck rotations. And you'll be amazed at your ability to disassociate

and you'll feel your lats a hell of a lot more and you'll feel your shoulders a hell of a lot less because I'm always surprised to find that many people feel like pull-ups are a shoulder exercise. Yeah. But it's not supposed to be. And that was a problem I was having is the lat wasn't turning on bingo yeah yeah i kind of like the idea of having a set of criteria to to decide whether you own a position or not and so being able to move your neck is is

one piece of that that you just mentioned and then you also fall into the camp of since you already mentioned breathing like breathing to properly breathe in a position i was as soon as you said how do you own a position my my first thought was, can you breathe there? That is the number one thing. So to own a position, you have to be able to breathe there, and then next you have to be able to move there, and then next you have to be able to load it. So breathe, move, load, and that's how you own a position. We have people loading up barbells and doing squats or or whatever yeah benching or carrying things and

they're loading a bunch of weight on and they're still doing they haven't even thought about the breathing piece totally yeah i mean and why would you load a big barbell on your back if you can't go to the bottom of a squat and breathe yeah like it's a horror it's a horrible idea and it seems it tricks you right because you want to load more weight you want to get stronger and everything like that but oftentimes if you just take a little bit of time on the front end and delay that gratification of lifting heavy weights a little bit it gives you way bigger returns over the long term it seems a lot of people are talking about breath right now and that that concept of being able to breathe in a position and that's how you know you really own the position is is really becoming debatably mainstream at least amongst the kind

of the leaders in the field to someone who's brand spanking new that sounds very confusing that you wouldn't be breathing in any position like i just did squats and i'm not dead so i must have been breathing totally so what do you mean being able to breathe like what is the right way to be able to breathe at the bottom of a squat? How do you know you're doing it right? Well, the right way to breathe. Now that sounds silly. I can't do it. I was going to try to make a joke, but there's not like a right way to breathe there. There are roughly like 3000 different, um, types of breathing practice that you can do. Can you breathe through your nose only for a sustained duration? That's a huge one. Um, the, the other thing I look for is, can you take a

full inhale and a full exhale? And that's something that most people don't do. Like I was saying before, they usually take a lot of half breaths throughout the day and that contributes to a lot of stress. And in fact, um, a lot of therapists who deal with, uh, stress and anxiety and depression and things like that, one of the first things they'll do is breathing practice. So, you know, the whole like, I'm not saying go breathe into a paper bag. But what I am saying is that breathing. That could be fun too. Definitely.

Well, if you put some paint in there first, I guess it's all right. You know, someone will hold your chest. You know, when you're little kids, you'd pass out. No. No? We'll talk about this after. Okay. We're definitely doing that next.

So I don't advocate the passing out version of breathing practice. I didn't know you were breathing well. You go unconscious. Easy. What I do suggest people do is take a full inhale and then try to control the exhale as long as possible. That's probably the number one thing I would have people do. Like I have people do many different types of breathing practice, but the primary one that I do is a full inhale

pretty much as quickly as possible through the nose and then a slow exhale, basically as slow as possible. And the reason that's so important is if you can get at least a two to one ratio of exhale to inhale it can down regulate your parasympathetic nervous system will which will get you out of that like stiffness like fight or flight mode okay so we talked about breath we talked about core stability we talked about thoracic mobility we talked about kind of neck mobility and now i'm assuming that we're on to scapular stability exactly so. Let's take a break real quick. We'll come back to that. Cool.

Cool. All right. Welcome back to Technique WOD. All right. Welcome back to Technique WOD. I'm Mike McGoldrick with the Barbell Shrug Podcast. What are we talking about? Are we talking about today we're going to talk about thoracic spine mobilizations

or T-spine mobilizations. All right, so why is it important to even worry about doing any type of T-spine mobilization? Well, anytime you want to raise your arms overhead, whether it be in a handstand or you're doing pull-ups, hanging from a bar or any kind of barbell work where you're you know Push pressing or jerking it overhead if you don't have a flat upper back or a you know a mobile t-spine It's gonna be really hard to raise your arms overhead, right? So if you picture yourself with you know a rounded upper back like this It doesn't matter how much you do any type of a shoulder mobilization you need to make sure that your upper back is flat first So picture trying to round your upper back and then raise your arms overhead.

Doesn't matter how mobile your shoulders are, you see? So if you have a round upper back, you just can't get them overhead. So always work on a flat upper back first. All right, so how are we gonna fix this issue? Well, first thing is if you feel that you're rounded or you're in this forward position, always try and just adjust it first.

Simply ask yourself, can I sit up straighterer or ask the person that you're looking at that might have you know a rounded spine just say can you sit up straighter and if they can then boom they fixed it okay next let's say that now that you've asked them to try and sit you know straighten their posture up a little bit and they still have some rounded issues or if it's they're just kind of really tight maybe short here in the front here are a couple of quick mobilizations that we'll go over that you can do yourself the best time to typically do this is going to be any time like just before you're

doing any of these overhead movements so whether you're front squatting or you're push pressing overhead or doing any kind of a pull-up anytime before you're doing the movement so grab your your handy dandy roller. This is a mobility kit roller and we'll start off with some real basic T-spine extensions. So start off with the roller in the middle of your upper back, hug yourself and then work on extending over the roller. Try to open up and there is no right or wrong way to do this, right? You can raise the arms overhead, You can move side to side.

Or you can hug yourself again and rotate sideways. There are a ton of different ways to do it. All right, so the next thing you can do once you've worked on the roller, if you want to hit an individual vertebrae one at a time, is get something like a peanut, which is a couple of lacrosse balls like this. And then this is a little bit more direct. It's gonna hit one individual at a time. So you would set it up here,

start again, just like the roller in the middle, upper back, and you hug yourself and then do the same kind of extensions over it. Again, not just one way to do it. You can raise the arms overhead. You can just sit down on one spot or you can kind of roll up and down a little bit. It's going to be much more direct as the surface area of these is a lot smaller than a roller. A roller is getting like, you know, two or three at a time. It's a little bit more global. This is way more

direct. Alright, this next one's a little more complex to set up and it's typically going to help you when you're putting yourself in a front rack position or just before you go overhead. So it's more of a T-spine extension shoulder flexion kind of a bias and external rotation as well. So get a band and you can wrap it up two or three times just depends on the thickness of the band. Put it around your elbows

and then you'll grab a PVC pipe I always turn the PVC pipe vertical so you can spread your hands apart and then when you do this you turn it and it really kind of torques the shoulders find a box that's pretty low and get on your knees and then you can place your elbows here on the box and kind of drive forward here and push your head through your arms. You go side to side. Now this isn't just getting my T-spine, it's getting my lats, it's getting my shoulders, it's getting a whole lot of stuff all at once. Just kind of move around and find where those tight areas are. Spend a couple of minutes there. If you feel your hands

start to slide together again, just widen the PVC or turn it back vertical and then push the torque back into it. Alright, so give that a few minutes and then retest your front rack and see if that helps as well. Alright, these next two are a little more dynamic in nature. You can do these before or after. I typically like doing them before. They just help me really open up my shoulders and make sure everything's nice and wide, especially if I'm going to snatch where I need to really kind of open up my arms.

So start on your hands and knees. And locking this elbow, let's say I'll start with locking my left elbow. Take my right hand, and I'm going to try and reach down, whereas if I'm trying to push my shoulder and rotate, try and picture rotating your upper back, keeping your hips square. Try to reach the hand all the way through through and then open all the way back up. And repeat this, you know, eight to ten times a side. You can switch arms. Same thing, I'm trying to, I'm locking the elbow, I'm trying to push this shoulder up through the ceiling

while reaching this other arm through, rotating at the upper back, keeping the hips square. And the next one here, you're going to lie on your back. Alright, so bend the knees, turn to one side, arms down at one side, so my left arm down here. With my right hand, I'm going to try and trace the floor all the way over my head and then back across to the other side now one thing to remember here is you're gonna try and keep this leg down it's natural to want to kind of open up especially if you're pretty tight so you could always have someone come over or you could put maybe a plate

on your side to hold it down but just you know try and remember to kind of squeeze and keep that down again trace keep that arm straight really open up and then this last one's real simple um something i do almost every day i spend two or three minutes a day doing it kind of break it up throughout the day periodically it's just dead hanging from a bar kind of helps put you in that position inactive where everything just kind of lines up so it's as simple as you know getting on a pull-up bar and then just hanging and work on really letting the shoulders relax and kind of sinking into that in the bottom all right it's gonna help

pull you into that straight position can even add some side to side into it just to kind of get a little extra pull in there. All right and here are three more of my favorites that I like to do. All right here are three more of my favorites that I like to do in case I have a buddy around. I typically do these before training as well. So have someone hop up to a bar and you can come behind them, place your hands on their upper back and then slowly walk forward. They're going to be relaxing and hanging inactive so they're not tense, they're not fighting back and they're going to talk to me and say, is that fine, is that

good? Go a little further. Alright right. Walk up just a little bit of pressure. And then when they're done, ease off really slowly. So if you could see the position he's in, he's in that really extended position. So what that might mock is maybe getting ready for a kipping pull up or in the bottom of a muscle up. It's going to really help open you up more of a real global stretch. Sit, stand, stand, sit, sit, step straight. Straight, stand now. Down, stand now. Downtown. Okay, this next one is another partner stretch. Have a buddy get down on the ground, sit on his butt and feet forward, arms overhead and you can come up behind and you take your arms, try to push your knees into the middle, you know,

his mid upper back. Arms come down and you push them right in between where your knees were attaching to his upper back. So if you can look here where my hands are, I'm kind of grabbing my knees and I'm using my arms to kind of squeeze his arms in and make sure that he's nice and locked out. If you can pretend that he's in a good overhead position, externally rotating, and then you can slowly start pushing your knees into his mid upper back mocking that same extended position that we were just on in the bar when he's overhead and then again he kind of talks to me hey how's that feel harder and then we when he's done, slowly ease off.

Be careful on this one. Nice and easy, come out of it. Cool. How's that feel, Mike? It looks better. All right, this last one's a little complex, so you'll have your buddy pop down and do a squat, and then he's going to grab with his left hand, he's going to grab the opposite ankle, and with that loose arm, reach reach up high and overhead and then you can come

over and just kind of help push him into some more rotation so this is more of a t-spine upper back rotation rather than extension but it's probably gonna get a little bit of everything and again talk to him and ask him how it feels good it not too good as in good or bad hurt It hurts so good. Hurts so good, that's a good sign. Slowly ease him out of it, switch arms. Remember you're trying to torque at the spine right, you're trying to torque his upper back rather than at the shoulder. So I could come over and just pull on his shoulder and it's not really doing much to his upper back. So make sure you get him in a good position to rotate here. Very nice.

All right, guys, so to summarize, any of these mobilizations that I showed you, they're okay to do before and after training, but typically you're going to do them any time you do any type of overhead work. So always before you do any kind of overhead work, whether it be holding a barbell on a front rack, pressing it overhead, hanging from a bar, or handstand push-ups. So always do them before if that's somewhere where you're really tight and restricted. For more videos, head over to TechniqueWOD.com. Nope. What is it? BarbellShrug.com. And to have another look at the rollers I make and I sell, check out mobilitykits.com.

I make these for when I travel to competitions. They're real handy and convenient. The cap pops off. You can put anything you want inside of it. It comes with a bunch of different items. So head over to mobilitykits.com to learn more about it. How was that? Was that just great?

That was just fun. It felt good. It felt good. It was just moving, baby. Join the conversation every week after the episode over at barbellshrugged.com. This is also where you'll find new episodes of Barbell Shrugged, Technique WOD, Nuggets and Pearls, Barbell Business, Get Change, plus new articles every day on our daily blog written by us, guests of the show, and some of the biggest names in strength and conditioning. So, go there and leave a comment now.

Oh my gosh, wow, that's so cool. Yay, that's so awesome. Did you like this video? If so, subscribe to our channel and share this with your friends. And if you want even more free awesome resources to help you reach your fitness goals, plus some updates that we only share over email, head over to barbellstruck.com and sign up for the newsletter and we're back talking about the shoulders of the back shank not not butt plugs not butt plugs not on the show we would never say that on the show no no no that's why we're not gonna bring it up no this is a family show from what I understand. Yeah. Yeah.

Families of adults. A lot of people have tried to make it a family show that have no control over the show whatsoever. Interesting. Yeah, this is a family show. They demand the free show be what they want it to be. All right. So we were starting to dig into the scapula and scapular stability. Oh, yes, the scapula. All right, what are your thoughts?

Basically, the scapula needs to move in a big circle. It needs to go through a couple of basic range of motions, protraction, retraction, which is forward, backward. That's part of like a scapular pushup. It needs to go up and down, which is elevation and depression um which is a very common move in gymnastics prep they'll do a lot of shrugging up and overhead to get the scapula to rotate upwardly and elevate um and that's important for like handstands and actually for olympic lifting as well like if you can't have that like good active shoulder um you're going to be on like a faulty foundation once again. I always think of

the shoulder blade as like, so since the shoulder blade is where the glenohumeral joint plugs in, you need that shoulder blade to provide bony support. So that's where you're going to have the strongest structure. Like a bone is obviously much stronger than a muscle because it's just rock solid, right? So if you want to push forward, you need to have that scapula point almost like a spotlight in the direction that you want to push. So, for example, if I'm out here, the best way for me to push forward is not going to be back here because now I have no bony support. So I need to be strong right here. So that's why it's so important that when you do push-ups, you finish in scapular protraction. And when people don't, all they do is they mess up their rotator cuff because now that scapula is not providing bony support anymore.

Your rotator cuff is. So your range of motion doesn't end with the elbow. Exactly. It should end with your shoulder. Exactly. So if you're just doing this right here and your elbows are moving, all you're doing is you're forcing your rotator cuffs to provide all the support instead of letting those shoulder blades move naturally with it.

What about for bench press where, you know, for me, I've always been taught pin those shoulder blades down and back. Totally. For a bigger bench. And then it all comes from. With a bench behind you, that's a perfect strategy. With no bench, it's a horrible strategy because now the bench is providing you that support. And actually what you'll find is people who do a lot of benching have zero scapular control other than this.

And that creates new problems because now they've got this posture locked in so they're now going to hyper extend at the low back generally, their ribs are going to flare upward which is a very common compensation for any kind of overhead work. It's part of quote unquote good bench press technique if you're trying to bench as much as possible like in powerlifting it's a part of the game because you get your chest

higher so it's a shorter range of motion etc. so it's a good idea in one context but as far as like the totality of all athletic movement because you get your chest higher, so there's a shorter range of motion, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a good idea in one context. But as far as the totality of all athletic movement, it can be problematic if that's all you've ever done. Without a doubt. I mean, I always tell people, ask themselves, what's the goal? Why are you training?

If you are training for a powerlifting competition, I'm the last person you should go talk to because powerlifting to me is boring. I'm sorry. I don't like it. It's boring to me. Watching someone do backflips and crazy shit and capoeira whatever and watching someone uh you know run through a line of people in a rugby match those things are really cool or watching someone kick someone in the head and knock them unconscious during a fight like those athletic movements to me um are what light my fire right so if that's not to say

that you just because you don't like powerlifting that you don't like strength like you compete in strongman if i'm not mistaken yeah yeah i've competed in strongman a bunch because it's fun you know what i mean and the whole point is i guess the message i'm trying to hopefully get out is that you have to decide what the goal of your training is. So the goal of my training is to be a better athlete. So regardless of how much weight I lift or don't lift, as long as I end better athlete than when I started, then it was a successful training session. If you're a powerlifter competing in powerlifting,

success is measured by did you lift more weight? And did you lift more weight is such a small sliver of a metric to guide your entire behavior if you're not getting paid for being a competitive powerlifter. Like the whole point, like I was saying before, is you want to give yourself options because, you know, I would wager there are a lot of people right now competing in powerlifting that are going to get over it. And if they have a powerlifter's body when they're over it, there aren't going to be a ton of options available to them. So I would encourage people to always prioritize athleticism over everything else

because you want to be lifting and training and doing stuff your whole life. You need to have options. And the way you have options is you have greater movement capacity. Is that not a part of pretty much any sport that you compete in for a long period of time? Like after you're done, there's likely a process of undoing the damage that you did to yourself in some capacity? Dude, I played soccer for 15 years at a high level. So I was completely torqued. I was right foot dominant.

I played right defense a lot. Sometimes I would play right forward, but I would always play on the right side. So not only was I twisted this way, I was also twisted this way with my eyes. So if I'm standing on the right side of the field, I'm never looking right. Sideline's over there.

There's nothing for me there. If I need to look at the field, I'm looking only to the left. Then, fresh out of soccer, I'm never looking right. Sideline's over there. There's nothing for me there. If I need to look at the field, I'm looking only to the left. Then, fresh out of soccer, I'm like, okay, let's do fighting. Great, I'm looking left again. And now I'm twisting left again, and I'm kicking again. Everything had me all

torqued to one side. Simple, equal and opposite force being what it is, I did shitloads of right leg forward, right rotation stuff. And that made the biggest difference. So just from a common sense standpoint, if there's something like in a sport that you're doing a lot of, just try to figure out what the opposite of that is and spend some time there.

And don't get caught thinking that you need to have a symmetrical training plan. You know, that's the biggest, that's hilarious to me that people have an asymmetry and then they try to address it with a symmetrical training program. It's like, okay, my right leg's like really weak and rotated this way. So I'm going to do eight reps on the right and eight reps on the left. Wait, wait a second. What? Like the whole point is that it should be asymmetrical

to get you fixed back up where you're supposed to be. So most definitely, everything you do has a cost and a benefit or a cause and effect. There's not a right. There's not a wrong. If you really love playing baseball, you're probably only going to swing one way. Just make sure that you don't overdevelop that side so hard that you get injured.

It's going to cut you short on how long you can be in the sport. So keeping that movement alive with that antagonistic muscle group or with the opposite direction is going to just help you be there longer. Exactly. So it may not make you better today or even next month, but it will definitely make you better in or even next month, but it'll definitely make you better in a year or two, three years. For sure. For sure. And then as far as, I mean, just on another topic, being able to twist for mobility and then eventually for power

is something that I see a lot of lifters lacking big time, especially if you're doing tons of clean and jerks, tons of squats, tons of deadlifts. Very few people are getting that rotational work in. So I think that's maybe one of the biggest, maybe even the biggest takeaway for anyone who's doing a lot of lifting and not a lot of sport. You got to get that rotational work in, you know, start with just doing rotational mobility on the ground, work to doing like rotation and anti-rotation with the band and then finish with doing like medicine ball work. I know I was missing that for a long time competing weightlifting i was always jerking with left foot forward

yeah so i was always if you look at like my back developments like this this trap is more developed than this one you can kind of see how everything just kind of crisscrosses it's like oh you were always stepping out with this foot and then you were fighting this direction but i never had to go the opposite direction. Exactly. Or if I did, it just wasn't nearly as much or as often or as much weight or whatever. Right.

So, yeah, I ended up paying for it, you know, down the road. You always pay the piper. Yeah, CrossFit, weightlifting, powerlifting, they're very sagittal playing dominant sports. Totally. And rotation is just not seen as that beneficial because there's no tangible practical application for twisting or throwing or doing anything

that's not straightforward and backward. Right. So I see why, I understand why people don't really prioritize it because it's not a part of the sport, but it's still a part of athleticism. If you're trying to be balanced as an athlete, then it's still a part of theism. You're trying to be balanced as an athlete, then it's still a part of the game. Well, and interestingly enough,

that's always one... Someone's ability to prevent rotation and then to rotate is one of the first things I check on somebody if they've got some sort of physical dysfunction. And they're going to have to be able to do that if they do anything that's asymmetrical. Like walking.

Like walking, yeah. Anytime you're on one leg at a time. Like being a human requires you to have the ability to prevent rotation and then to also rotate. So, you know, it's really like some simple test, but you'll find that many people are just horrifically weak in their lateral chain and then these spiral lines. Like there's a great book, Anatomy Trains. It's pretty technical. Actually, you know what? It's pretty technical.

Like it's kind of annoying at times. But the idea of these fascial lines or these chains that go spiraling throughout your body in different ways and how they interact with each other is extremely important for the ability to function as a two-legged animal. You know what I mean? So you have to be able to rotate. That's like a complete non-negotiable i've seen guys working with a guy right now actually um he could already bench 320 really strong guy uh squat and deadlift were in the low twos though okay so pretty significant asymmetry

there every time he deadlifted he had back pain uh came in first day he couldn't do a side plank for 10 seconds and his ability to prevent rotation was completely non-existent so same thing i'm telling you guys we did breathing we did some anti-rotation stuff we taught him to rotate again we gave him some lateral chain and a lot of this was you know with neck rotations with deep breathing and he benched twice in two months and his bench press increased by 25 pounds so he's benching 345 now and he and he had two bench press sessions and he'd been stuck in 320 for like a year and a half or two so so the idea that you always want to enhance or increase the horsepower increase the size of the gas tank as the way to get better is kind of a fallacy. Because a lot of times you just need to get better steering, better handling. You need to sort of take the brakes off.

So we talked about kind of anti-movement, we talked about anti-rotation, anti-lateral flexion. That falls into kind of the core stability model that we already touched on. We talked about breathing, we talked about core stability, anti-lateral flexion, anti-rotation are part of that core stability training. Exactly. That's the cornerstone of how your shoulder functions. Because think about it this way, just from a very common sense standpoint. If my oblique is not doing its job as an oblique, my lat might try to be an oblique. And your lat should not try to be an oblique because now it can't be a lat.

So if your lat's not a lat anymore and your oblique's not an oblique, then your teres is going to try to be a lat. Now your teres is a muscle that's like the size of a Snickers bar, not the size of a lat. So if you give a muscle the size of a Snickers bar the job of the lat, you're going to create huge problems because now that can't be a rotator cuff anymore. Now you can't centrate the joint properly. So just being able to breathe and do a frigging side plank could be the cause of all your shoulder problems. So that's why it's so important that you

go through it segmentally, because if you just look at the shoulder, if you just look at the scapula, if you just look at the thoracic spine, or if you just look at breathing, or if you just look at core strength, you might be missing missing something so you got to start with the inside out and then what usually ends up happening is once you get someone's shoulder blades to move well after you've dealt with the breathing and core strength the thoracic and neck mobility uh there's no problem here anymore so what manifested itself as a glenohumeral joint problem now is no longer a problem because it's got a solid foundation. Your rotator cuff was just pissed off that it had to do literally all the work. Now that you have everything doing their fair share and their

job, rotator cuff's like, oh, sweet, this is all we have to do? Perfect. Yeah. Which is oftentimes the opposite of how a lot of people address shoulder problems. They start on the outside, and then maybe they work their way in. But you're like, oh, well, your rotator cuff's weak. That's probably why your shoulder hurts. Do some more external rotations with the band, and then that's kind of the end of it. Exactly. And that's like the easy catch-all. Usually people are making fun of it these days, like type of way to rehab someone's shoulder.

But it kind of misses the big picture of the total system of the human body. Dude, I hate to call people out. I don't even know who the guy is, but I was working with a guy from the San Diego Gulls, the hockey team. And he watched my webinar on shoulders and did some of the exercises. Shoulder felt a ton better. And he came to see me actually. And I asked him what he'd been doing because they have a team trainer, right? And the team trainer had just given him this laminated sheet of paper with shoulder exercises, did absolutely nothing for him. Within the first five minutes of my evaluation, I found out he can rotate about 70 degrees to the right and about 10 degrees to the left. So his trunk rotation was just horrible to one side.

So his shoulder was simply experiencing the pain, but the dysfunction wasn't even close to the shoulder. You know what I mean? And I think it was Ida Rolf who said, the site of the pain is usually not the source of the pain. And that's usually the case, especially with something like the shoulder. The shoulder is already very mobile. It's very rare that you're going to have like an actual

shoulder issue sometimes for sure. And usually if everything else is fine, then it is just a question of making sure that you can internally, externally rotate and move it around and through those spirals. I've talked to some people and they ask about, you know, how to find a good therapist. And I usually say, you know, if they start with breathing, you know you're in a good spot, you know. If they start with, like, exactly where the pain is at and they never leave that spot, if you go, oh, my shoulder hurts, and all you do is talk about and look at and move the shoulder

throughout the entire session, you might want to find somebody else. But if you find someone who goes, oh, take a deep breath, and they look at you, then you might be in a better spot. Yeah. Well, I mean, and if you – you have to treat the whole body as one piece. Like we were talking before about how the mind and the body are the exact same, right? Yeah. The whole idea that we split them up into two things is ridiculous.

So in a certain sense, separating your knee from your opposite elbow is just as crazy because your body doesn't have a clear way of communicating what exactly the problem is. It just can communicate that there's a problem. The way it communicates that there's a problem is it makes you feel pain. It makes you stiff or it makes you weak. Simple as that. But it doesn't tell you specifically what's wrong. It's not like you get a message in your brain, hey, dude, your left talus is out of position. You know, that's not going to happen.

You're just going to feel pain somewhere, and we're going to have no clue what caused that issue. That's the next step in evolution, though. Yeah, yeah, just a clear message. Yeah. How are we going to get there? Probably an app, I'm sure. We. Just a, just a clear message. Yeah. That's what we need. Get it back in. How are we going to get there? Yeah.

Probably an app, I'm sure. We need brain implants, man. AI brain implants. New brains. You know, you got like,

we got like talk to text now. I think we're going to have think to text very soon. I hope so. Me too. Yeah. Staring down. Now, how much,

how much would you sacrifice, for think to text? Would you get implants in your brain for it? I want to do the feel to feel. Where you can feel someone else's feelings? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because, I mean, I think that's when you truly communicate.

They make movies a lot cooler. So that's like empathy, right? Yeah. But like empathy on steroids yeah but uh i mean you know i feel like empathy is imagined like i think it's to know for sure okay we can like technologically move this forward i don't know what to be willing to sacrifice for that replace my heart maybe you don't need it the body doesn't need it so if uh if you already have some shoulder issues that was a great segue by the way from empathy to shoulder issues

completely disregard what we're talking about so anyway back to this other thing we might have to edit that part but if your if your shoulder's already hurt and you don't have someone who can take you through any type of thorough evaluation and and you don't have any experts that can really help you out then uh you know where are are you at then? Like, what do you do if your shoulder's already bugging you and you want to keep training? You said earlier, like taking time off and just not doing anything is worse than doing something. That's the worst thing you can do. The worst thing that you can do is just give up because you got to keep moving. And once again, remember what we were just talking about.

We don't know why your shoulder hurts. We have no idea. So train the shit out of everything around the shoulder and see what makes it better and what makes it worse. But maybe even more importantly, um, you know, you have to follow that recipe of the breathing core, thoracic spine and neck scapula and glenohormone. And that's what I go over in the book. Uh, in your, your shoulder book,er Solution. Yeah. That's the whole reason I put that book together, honestly, is my goal is to get people to be able to pursue any athletic endeavor for the rest of their lives. Because I'm not dealing with professional athletes, quite frankly. I'm okay. I work with professional athletes occasionally, but it's not my favorite.

My favorite thing is just to give people the ability to move back. You know what I mean? And what I noticed is people who want to be in shape, the main thing that derails them was injuries. Number one injury is back pain. In active population, it's shoulders. So how do I get more people back in the game? And that's why Simple Shoulder Solution came around. It's so people could could systematically but also simply understand the shoulder a little bit better because there's a lot of moving parts going on there and if you can break it down into these steps it's um it's very manageable yeah i like how that that book really was focusing on on keeping your shoulders healthy but then also making them strong it's not it's not too far down the track of purely rehabilitative but it's not exactly it's not only performance

based it's a it's a healthy blend of of the two like my favorite strength conditioning coaches are always the people that they kind of understand like the strength conditioning world not kind of they do understand the strength conditioning world and they also understand at least like big parts of the pt world if they're not also physical therapists themselves like you have to understand both because they're they're all a part of the same large spectrum they're not different necessarily they're just different parts of the same spectrum well what is physical therapy it's enhancing your movement capacity that's all it's just usually done in a very controlled environment that's it so like in simple shoulder solution i have people work up to

l sit to handstand on the parallettes and skin the cat on the rings which are are pretty challenging exercises but really they're just loaded shoulder circles so it's actually just joint mobility expressed at the highest load and like the maximum iteration of that so um and one is a push and one is a pull skin the cat's pull l sit to handstand is a push so So you're taking your shoulder through its entire range of motion in both a push and a pull across many different vectors. And, you know, I'm sure you guys have talked about this a lot, the importance of horizontal pushing and pulling, vertical pushing and pulling, balancing out by doing more pulling than pushing is huge. So part of the reason I like L-sit to handstand and skin the cat is there are actually movements that anyone can work up to. There are a lot of different progressions that you can lead

there and they're multi-vector. So it's not just horizontal. It's not just vertical. It's everything in between. And that everything in between is what helps you achieve even better joint centration. And joint centration is the key to expressing the amount of strength that you actually have. If your joint is not centered properly, your nervous system is going to go, okay, that is not perfectly safe. So what we're going to do instead is we're going to make sure that you can't contract your muscles too hard. All right? Yes.

So to explain kind of what that means to someone who doesn't really have a good idea of what that looks like. contract your muscles too hard. Alright? To explain what that means to someone who doesn't really have a good idea of what that looks like. You have many different muscles attaching to different parts of the head of your humerus which connects to your shoulder blade. I don't know what the exact number is. Say there's 10.

There's a bunch of muscles that attach onto your shoulder and if they're all contracting the way they should be contracting then it'll keep the joint centered in the joint socket exactly but if one of them is dysfunctional isn't firing the way it should be so too much or not enough yeah for for simplicity's sake let's say let's say there's one top bottom left and right right if they're all four pulling equally then the thing will stay in the center if the top one's not pulling then it's going to pull down a little bit and it's going to pull the joint out of the center alignment, which is eventually going to cause some type of tearing of something. The joint capsule, maybe ligaments, maybe tendons, like

something is going to tear because now it's not sitting in the center like it should be. And before that tear happens, your brain is going to, through proprioception, be aware of that joint position. And it is going to be like a governor in a car that doesn't let you drive too fast. So it's actually going to prevent you from contracting your muscles as much as you could. So it turns off the other muscles because it knows damage is coming. Exactly. Your body is trying to protect you. Your main job of your brain is to try to prevent your melon from hitting the ground and prevent you from getting eaten by a tiger. That's it.

So anything it can do to prevent you from doing stuff that you shouldn't it's going to try to do to help you survive. Off the top of your head, do you know how many muscles attach right there? No. Not off the top of my head. I have to sit down and count them. Way to make them look dumb. You got four rotator cuff

muscles. You got a few deltoids. Then you got stuff that attaches just to the scapula so what i mean is like it depends which joint you're specifically talking about but there there are a lot of stuff plugged in for sure see how he pulled that right out yeah no it's good i mean you said depends what you're talking about like a lot of people think you only have one shoulder joint but you have you can't have four depending on how you think about it exactly which sounds really weird to say you have four shoulder joints per side but if you've

never looked at anatomy before like you think you just have one but you do have four technically shoulder joints per side exactly well and actually you have even more because you could go sternoclavicular acromioclavicular glenohumeral scapulothoracic scapulohumeral i mean you got all these different joints i was trying to redeem myself by knowing all those anatomical terms. I love where you're going with this. The first four were the four I was talking about. Now everyone knows you're smart. That's good.

Redemption. There you go. So programming-wise, like, if you were to have someone come in and they're relatively healthy, they don't have anything wrong with their shoulders, like, how do you structure programming for someone's upper body just in super general terms? I'm usually going to prioritize some upper body gymnastics. It's going to be push-ups, it's going to be rows, it's going to be pull-ups, it's going to be a lot of levers as well.

I'm a big fan of doing front levers and front lever progressions. And the proper progressions are good for anybody. So just balancing out the pushing and pulling and then really prioritizing body weight exercises and then, of course, bottom-up kettlebell presses as a good metric for the primary overhead movement. Truly, for any overhead pressing, any strict pressing, I'm going to do bottom-up presses 90% of the time.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's significant. Push presses, I'm not going to do bottom-up presses 90% of the time. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's significant. Push presses, I'm not going to do bottom-up. That would be a little dangerous. And other than that, I'm mainly doing handstands. So it's handstands, bottom-up presses, and push presses as the main overhead lifts. So that seems to be primarily more gymnastics bodyweight oriented with the exception of a few things that you mentioned,

like the bottoms- up kettlebell pressing. Exactly. I think that's a good idea. If you look at gymnasts as a sport, they tend to have the strongest and simultaneously most mobile shoulders of any athlete. The bodyweight movements I think are

the healthiest version of upper body work you can do. Without a doubt. If we consider how important proprioception is, which is body awareness, proprioception is all of the body, all of the time. So when you're doing exercises where you move your entire body at the same time, like a chin-up or a push-up or a handstand,

it affects you completely differently than if you sit in a chair and you do seated dumbbell press. Very different. So anytime you can get your entire body to work toward the same goal which is called intermuscular coordination that is always of a benefit yeah the i've noticed that with myself like even when i was back competing in weightlifting i still used to do since i did gymnastics when i was super young i've always done handstands and handstand push-ups and things like that my shoulders always felt better if I was doing handstand pushups versus a lot of overhead pressing with a barbell.

It seems like it's kind of the same thing, but there's something about it. And I don't even know all the details about this, truth be told, but it just, it felt better on my shoulders. It's probably because you were tightening up your core more. That's probably the most common thing. So if you can get like um like i said that intramuscular coordination that uh proximal stability to give you distal mobility that's probably why you experienced that because you had to zip everything up and get in like a nice hollow position for those handstand push-ups now your shoulders have a better foundation to launch off of yeah i experienced something similar when i was weightlifting with uh doing stuff in the

rings uh ring handstand holds and stuff like that was better for my jerk than more jerks or pressing or anything like that just having that stability piece and i probably was only a fraction where i could have been had i been doing something like bottoms up presses if i if that was taking up 90 i I'm curious how much, how much of that gap existed that if I had closed it, you know, what I would have been capable of and jerks otherwise. Totally. Yeah. I mean, bottom up press is just how you own the position, right? You know, you own your rack position because the instant that you get that kettlebell upside down right here, your whole body has to, and this is important, reflexively stabilize everything.

And then when you're halfway up, the weight is so far away from your center of gravity that it's got a bunch of extra leverage on you. So you've got to have everything lined up and locked in perfectly, and you've got to control that top position. And especially if you're doing things very quickly, you almost never own the top position

because that's the end of the lift. And you go right back into the next one. So you're like... Yeah. So that's like the common little half kind of finish. And that can develop a lot of problems too. You don't lock and own those new positions. Yeah.

I feel like they probably do in weightlifting a little bit because they have to stick. They've got to get white lights and whatnot. But in CrossFit, if you're just flying through reps as fast as possible, maybe not so much. Yeah, and bodybuilding too. If you're never owning the top position, that's the whole point. Whatever the sport is, you've just got to own that top position.

So, I mean, that's why, like, bottom-up carry, overhead carry, all these different things where you have to reflexively stabilize are huge. And that's how you lay strength on top of that good foundation once you've done the breathing, once you've done the core, thoracic, neck, scapula, and glenohumeral. Excellent. I think it's a good place to zip it up. Yeah, absolutely. We talked about a lot that was in your book today, just out of normal conversation,

since we were talking about shoulders. But can you give us a brief run-through of kind of how your book is laid out and what's in it? Yeah. I mean, we basically did just go through the whole thing, but basically it goes through like a couple of self-evaluations you can do. It goes through all the different exercises for breathing, all the different exercises for core strength, the testing and retesting in between each thing

so you can figure out what the biggest money movements are for you. And then it goes through every segment individually, wraps it all together into a way that you can structure like a warm-up or a workout and then ultimately lays a solid foundation of strength on top of it with various movements not limited to like a supinated grip barbell press all the way up to like the skin the cat and the l-sit to handstand so it's pretty bitching i'm really proud of it cool so we talked about a lot of the concepts on the show but as far as like practical examples and which movements to do when and whatnot all the all the photos and links are contained within the book yeah so actually the cool thing about the book is and i do this with

all my books because in our in our field it's very difficult to drive the point home well in just written word so i actually have like a full video library that you get with the book as well. So you get a bunch of videos and you get the book. Excellent. Very cool. And if people want to watch you work out on Instagram, where do they do that? Well, my name is Max Shank,

and basically all my social media is Max Shank because I'm the only Max Shank. The only one. The only one. That's right. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks, guys. Appreciate it. That's right. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Let's do it again. You bet.