Shoulder Pain Series: BPA Exercise
Shoulder Pain? Improve your shoulder health
In order to maximize back development and maintain shoulder health, make sure to include small isolation movements for the middle and lower traps, rhomboids, and rear deltoids.
Compound movements will often leave these muscles underdeveloped. It’s essential to train these small muscles with exercises such as:
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- Retract shoulder blades prior to initiating movement
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- Use a neutral grip so thumbs are facing you to bias external rotation
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- “Pretend your biceps is a rotisserie chicken” (???????? ??? ????) to maintain joint centration during rotation
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- Maintain slight elbow bend
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- Straight elbows, initiate movement with shoulder blades
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- Hands pull away from body, keep elbows tight to body, maintain flexed elbow
These exercises can be done twice per week for a few sets of 12-20 reps. Make some room for these by adding them into your warm up, in between work sets as a filler exercise, or in between workouts whenever you have free time.
BPA Exercise
The BPA exercise, or band pull apart exercise, is an excellent exercise for improving shoulder health because the movement strengthens the muscles in your upper back and the stabilizer muscles in your shoulder joints. Building these areas will improve your posture, and increase your bench press, squat, and deadlift. If you are having upper back pain due to computer use or slouching, this helps strengthen the posterior deltoids, trapezius, and rhomboid muscles. This is also a simple exercise that can be performed anywhere with the use of an elastic resistance band.