The bench press is one of the most effective exercises for developing and strengthening the upper body. However, despite its effectiveness, it’s also the one exercise that lifters seem to have the most trouble with; primarily due to shoulder pain when benching or after benching. And in many cases, this is simply a result of various tweaks that need to be made in your bench press form. In this video, I’ll go through exactly how to bench without pain and how to permanently avoid shoulder pain when benching.
The first bench press form mistake people make that causes shoulder pain is failing to retract the shoulderblades throughout the press. Whenever we’re benching, we want to have our shoulder blades retracted or pinched together as if you were going to pinch a pencil between those blades. If we don’t have the shoulder blades retracted what actually tends to happen is the upper arm will round forward which can cause shoulder pain when benching. So what you want to do is before you press, depress your upper, and then pinch your shoulders blades together. Then, maintain this tightness by actively squeezing your shoulder blades together as you bench press, and avoid the mistake of opening up the shoulder blades and losing tightness at the bottom or as you push up.
Another common mistake contributing to shoulder pain while bench pressing is benching with a completely flat back. Although most people won’t need an exaggerated arch as seen with powerlifters, you do want to ensure there’s some arch present between in your upper back. And the reason for this is similar to what we saw with retracting your shoulder blades, as a slight arch in the upper back places the glenohumeral joint in an externally rotated, safer position. But to properly implement this while avoiding injury, note that you’re not simply arching your lower back. What you want to do is arch your upper back instead by retracting your shoulder blades as we previously discussed, and then raise your chest up towards the ceiling which will naturally create space between your back and the bench which you then want to maintain as a solid base of support for your press.
Next, to bench press without pain, you need to avoid the mistake of touching the bar too high on your chest while excessively flaring the elbows out at a 90 degree angle and pressing the bar straight up and down. This puts the shoulder in an internally rotated position and can thus cause pain when benching. So what you want to do is instead realize that the bar path of your bench press shouldn’t be straight up and down. It should actually start above your shoulder, come down to around the level of your sternum or nipple height and then curve diagonally back towards the starting point. And to achieve this without harming your shoulders, you need to tuck your elbows to roughly a 75-degree angle such that your elbows remain closer to the body and more or less directly under the bar throughout each rep. This will not only lead to a safer press, but a stronger one as well.
Lastly, avoid the bench press form mistake of not having your elbows stacked under the bar. This creates unnecessary torque on the shoulder joint which can then cause shoulder pain. If your elbows are unaligned when viewed from the front or back, then the problem is likely with your grip width that needs adjusting. If your elbows are unaligned when viewed from the side, then it’s likely that you’re overtucking your elbows too close to your sides when you press. So to fix this, you simply want to adjust the angle of your elbow during the press by flaring them out a little more such that they remain relatively underneath the bar.
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