Do you want strong, sexy shoulders? You gotta include the overhead press in your strength training!
Okay, that sounds way too much like an infomercial.
Seriously though, building up your shoulders is an awesome way to make your physique really pop. Equally important, it's a sign your upper body is really strong.
While the overhead press trains your shoulders primarily, it also trains your triceps. Those are the main movers, but if you do the standing barbell press you can turn it into a bit of a full body lift. Your arms do the moving and the rest of your body works to keep your stable.
Here's how you make it happen:
Set the bar at about the height of your collarbone. Choose the appropriate weight. Place your hands on the bar, slightly wider than your shoulders. You'll have to play around with it to find the placement that suits you best.
Having the bar at that height allows you to do a little dip with your knees to get under the bar and unrack it. As you start increasing the weight on the bar this becomes more important.
Take a couple steps back away from the rack. You want to get into position without wasting time and energy with a lot of steps.
Your feet will be a little bit wider than your shoulders. Flex your thighs and butt to keep your body stable. Brace your core for the same reason. Pack your lats (those big muscles on the side of your back) to further increase your stability. You'll be able to press more weight safely from a stable base.
Take a big breath in and drive the bar up with your arms. You want to drive it up in a straight path as much as you can. In order to do this, you'll move your head back just before the bar passes it. Or you can try to push the bar through your chin. After it's past your head, you bring your head back forward. Fully extend your arms to get a full range of motion. Exhale slightly as the bar goes up. Lower the bar under control back to the starting position. Repeat for the prescribed repetitions. When you're done, walk the bar back into the rack.
A couple things to think about: you want to stay upright. Leaning backwards with your upper back turns the shoulder press into more of an incline bench press. Only, there's no bench to support your back, which isn't great.
You can also opt to do a standing dumbbell press. The barbell offers the chance to use more absolute weight. Using dumbbells ensures each arm works evenly.
You can also do a seated overhead press, either with dumbbells or a barbell. Sitting means your body doesn't have to work hard to keep you stable so you can focus on really going heavy. This is fine, of course. Personally I prefer to do mostly the standing version precisely because of the balance element.
When it comes to sets and reps you have options. If overhead pressing is your main upper body push lift for the session, shoot for 3-5 sets of 3-10 repetitions. If it's more of an accessory lift, you can hit 2-3 sets of 5-15 repetitions. Either way, once or twice a week is plenty.
The most important idea is to progressively overload. That means over time you'll be increasing the weights, the sets, and/or the repetitions. This is how you get stronger. Strength is an adaptation that happens when you ask your muscles to do more. If you do the same 3 sets of 10 reps with the same weight every session, your body will adapt to that and then stop adapting.
Overhead pressing is the best exercise to develop your shoulders. You can top off your shoulder workout by doing a couple accessory lifts after. Add in 2-3 sets of 8-15 reps of dumbbell lateral raises. These really focus on the middle part of your shoulders. Keep the weights light and avoid using momentum to move dumbbells.
Finish your shoulder workout with 2-3 sets of 8-15 of either facepulls or rear delt flys to train the back part of your shoulder. This area is often neglected and showing it some love will really cap off your shoulder development.
The overhead press is the best exercise for building up strong, powerful shoulders. If that's your main lift for shoulders, you'll be good. But if you want to get a little extra, you can follow that up with a couple accessory lifts. Hit them once or twice a week consistently and in a few months you'll see a really noticeable change.
Have fun and get strong!
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