When you tell someone you lift weights, what’s the one question they always ask?
“how much do you bench?”
I’ve heard it so many times and I use to hate answering it, why? Because I had shoulder joint problems that limited me from working my chest to its full potential, at the same time I was going to school to college for a Bachelors’ degree in health fitness and rehabilitation (a mouthful).

The point is I learned about what I should have been doing after I got my shoulder injury. So now I feel it’s my obligation to tell you how you can avoid shoulder problems and quickly increase your chest strength.

The one minor change I used was a specific exercise at the beginning of my chest workouts… and it helped me recover and increase how much I bench. So here it is:

1. Get an exercise ball that is around knee height
2. Get light dumbbells (much less than you can bench) that you can do 15+ reps with on a regular bench.
3. Set the dumbbells on the floor in front of the exercise ball
4. Sit on the exercise ball and roll your body forward so that the middle of the ball is directly below your shoulders.
5. Grab the dumbbells (prop them up and use the ball to leverage with your arms if needed)
6. Hold the dumbbells as if you are doing a standard chest (bench) press.
7. Slowly raise the dumbbells up and back down to starting position for 12 repetitions without overly shaking.
8. Progress to heavier weights and less repetitions as you improve every few weeks

This simple exercise provides several benefits, it is a dynamic warm up similar in motion to your actual chest exercises, it increases your stability and joint strength with is necessary to reduce injury and progress effectively.

There are several other stability exercises like this, that should be included in the start of your weight lifting workouts. I see nobody doing stability exercises and it is killing me to see them have pain – do not skip this, it will make a huge difference. It is vitally important for your body to have this type of stimulation because it improves joint stabilization and your body learns the exercise without cheating.

If you change one thing in your workout make sure this is what you do. I’ve learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

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Tags: stability chest exercise

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Beginners Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.