Face pulls for a better shoulder and back.

Joint damage. If you’ve trained for long enough then you’ve been there before. There’s nothing like training hard, making gains, getting your physique in order only to injure yourself in some freak training accident at the gym. You can tear a muscle, sprain a body part, but there’s nothing quite as horrible as damaging your joints, the shoulders suffering from this injury fairly often.

A shoulder injury is truly nothing to scoff at. You can be put on the shelf indefinitely from a shoulder injury. It prevents you from lifting most anything. Forget about benching or doing bicep curls, a shoulder joint injury can mean agonizing pain, so much so that you won’t even want to look at a weight rack for quite some time. But while you let this phobia get to you, eventually you’ll begin to notice that you’re losing your gains, then what are you going to do? Start training again, that’s what.

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Are you really going to sit on the sidelines and allow all your gains, specifically the upper body, go to waste? Sure, working through injury can be a difficult and delicate process, but if done correctly you can not only keep your physique from deteriorating, but make some decent gains while you’re at it. This is where face pulls come into play.

The exercise requires connecting a rope fixture to a pulley station. The default position of the rope should be at face level. Grabbing the rope with two hands in an overhand grip, arms fully extended, and pulling the rope to your face will work the upper back, rear delts, and shoulders. Performing this movement at a controlled pace, elbows high, and lower weight will do your shoulders good and ultimately strengthen.

Need an example of how this exercise is performed? Then take a look at the video below for more details.

If you have control, take your time, and perform proper chest and shoulder stretches before and in between sets then your shoulders will go a long way to recovering as well as growing stronger.

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