Healthy shoulders are essential for advancing your fitness career
Most bodybuilders possess a significant aversion to anything other than dumbbells and barbells and cable machines. While standard gym equipment is undeniably the foundation of packing on muscle mass through bodybuilding training, some interesting tools have come into vogue recently that have legitimate application. On the recovery side of things, methods like hyperbaric and graston have exploded in popularity, yet there has been a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for new training tools. That being said, something for your shoulder health is absolutely essential, as your shoulders responsible for a lot of other exercises, as well as functionality. While you have your resistance bands and other basic exercises to get the blood flowing and get you warmed up, have you heard of a pec stick?
Let’s take a look at the importance of healthy shoulders, as well as why the pec stick is crucial for helping to build them.
Importance of Healthy Shoulders
Your shoulders are responsible for much more than you think. Yes you need them for your push day movements such as the bench press and the overhead press, but your shoulder is a very functional joint. Without proper and smooth movement of the shoulders, you risk injury during your exercises, as well as limitations in your day to day tasks. That being said, you absolutely need healthy shoulders.
The Issues With Your Shoulders
A big weakness of bodybuilding training is that it focuses on primarily across two planes of movement – frontal and horizontal (think bench press and bicep curl). Now this is balanced when compared to something like CrossFit which is almost exclusively horizontal (think Olympic lifting and muscle ups), but still neglects one of the primary dimensions of movement- saggital. Of course there are many causes of joint pain, but taxing a joint repeatedly in unbalanced ways is a reliable method to develop it.
You can take your supplements and continue to incorporate progressive overload in order to make your muscles stronger, but if you do not focus on making sure your shoulder joints are in check, then you are only going to get hurt.
The Pec Stick
Introducing the Pec Stick. The most basic way to use the pec stick is with an under or overhand grip. You bend it inwards, either for repetition or a static hold. Because the pec stick essentially functions like a spring, it gives active feedback into the muscles even during isolation, creating a massive pump. Just make sure that whatever brand of stick you chose, you also select a weight resistance that’s right for your goals.
The pec stick will train your shoulders through the saggital plane, offering them more balanced function and potentially appearance. To be clear, shoulder is the joint it works through, but it primarily taxes the pec rather than the delt, specifically the sterno-costal (lower) head, as opposed to the clavicular (upper head) that causes so much shoulder pathology.
It also encourages recruitment of stabilizer muscles like the teres major and inside head of the bicep. Have you ever noticed, that the more weight you bicep curl, the more you need to engage your chest? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, muscles can be trained in groups too – it’s how they were designed to work. The pec stick will help create healthy shoulders and a big lower chest. It’s cheap and a great tool for the home of any bodybuilder.
Pec Stick Wrap Up
When it comes to your bodybuilding career, shoulder health is one of the most important aspects of making sure you stay in the game. A Pec Stick is one of the best ways to keep your shoulders functioning properly and painlessly.
Do you have a pec stick?
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