BE ABLE TO KEEP DOING STUFF ABOVE OUR HEADS

Most of us have things we need to do with our arms overhead - whether that’s doing our hair or putting boxes of seasonal stuff away at the top of some closet out of the way. The shoulder press can be a very functional exercise for improving your ability to safely lift objects overhead. Many muscles and joints are involved in the movement - making it a nice upper-body exercise. Not only will you work all of the rotator cuff muscles, the muscles that move and stabilize the shoulder joint, and the muscles that lift and straighten the arm, but you will also work your core muscles.

IMPROVE STABILITY OF A NOTORIOUSLY UNSTABLE JOINT

This point comes with both encouragement & caution.

The overhead shoulder press exercises take the shoulder joint up near the end of its range this puts many of the muscles in a position where they are weaker - both in strength & stability.

What does that mean? As an example, if you think about holding something that has some weight to it, say a large bag of flour - typically, where will we naturally carry it? Usually somewhere close to our body right? Perhaps close to our chest. This makes us feel stronger & more stable with the item. When we take that same bag of flour, and hold it way out in front of us or way above us and walk around with it, now there are two things:

1. It feels a lot heavier than when we held it to our chest just a second ago even though the bag itself doesn’t suddenly weigh anymore, and
2. Now we feel like we have to concentrate a lot more for that heavy item to not cause a part of our body to move in some direction we didn’t intend it to (& potentially hurting that body part when it moves in a way it shouldn’t have).

So from this what you can see is that when we take our joint to its further ranges of movement, with a load in our hands, the joint is not nearly as stable- it’s more vulnerable.

The ENCOURAGEMENT here is:

Overhead presses can help strengthen the muscles that stabilize our shoulder joint in this further range, which can protect against injury to our joint when we go about our lives doing our overhead stuff (which hopefully doesn’t include carrying houseplants above your head). Whatever you do frequently, whatever you train for, you will increase your ability to do that thing healthfully - when you are untrained for an activity is when you get hurt right?

but. The CAUTION IS:

the exercises need to be done with this in mind, that the shoulder joint is unstable. Start slowly and progress slowly - always be mindful of how you are moving and what you are feeling.

The Gist of the balance between, This is Great! But wait, be careful:

The point is, by mindfully training our shoulder joint & muscles to move overhead with good form, we may increase the stability & strength of the unstable shoulder joint, helping to protect it from injury, buttttt at the same time, because it’s an unstable joint, to begin with, if we approach this movement unwisely, we are also more likely to get injured. So we will start with a lightweight & have it feel almost too easy to begin with.

STRETTTTCCCHHHH OUR MID-BACK AREA

The other bonus of this exercise is that taking the arms overhead will move the middle part of the spine (thoracic spine) into a more extended position. This is excellent because as we age, our upper backs tend to start rounding forward - this is due to poor posture, tight chest muscles, tight thoracic spine, and weak upper back muscles. Osteoporosis and osteopenia (low bone density) can also affect this. The overhead shoulder press will take the middle part of the spine into a more extended position and strengthen the muscles needed for good upright posture.