Whether you agree or not the barbell bench press is one of the most highly regarded weight room exercises period. Have you heard this conversation in the gym lately?
"So how much weight can you use for preacher curls?"
"I'm moving some heavy weight, how much can you use for kickbacks?"
"I've been struggling on those and I have a kickback meet coming up in a few months!"
I'll take a wild guess and say this conversation has never and will never take place. The truth is the vast majority of individuals measure their strength and even their manhood based on how much they can bench.
You could be at the gym, or even at a bar having a beer but when the topic of working out comes up people are almost certain to ask the infamous question, "How much you bench?" If you don't care how strong you are then I don't know why you're lifting weights anyway. The bench press is a benchmark of your strength plain and simple.
Back to the conversation we didn't hear at the gym. What our friends above should have been asking each other isn't how much weight they use when doing kickbacks but rather how much weight they use when they're performing an external rotation exercise.
Did I lose you there? I know, I know we declared the bench press is the true measure of our strength not all these isolation and stabilizer exercises right?
This is true, but have you ever heard the expression, you're only as strong as your weakest link? When you bench press there are four tiny muscles that play a major role in whether your bench press takes off or if you're going to suffer from a bench press blowout.
Build these muscles up and you can dramatically decrease the chance of blowing out your shoulder. If you're benching heavy weight and not paying attention to these muscles you run the risk of muscular imbalances, shoulder pain, and getting stuck in a serious plateau.
When bench pressing it is essential to have stability and strength in the shoulder. The four relatively small muscles predominantly responsible for stabilizing the shoulder - teres minor, infraspinatous, supraspinatous and sucscapularous - are known collectively as the 'rotator cuff'.
When these muscles contract they pull on the rotator cuff tendon, causing the shoulder to rotate. While bench pressing you may experience some rotator or shoulder pain, during part of the movement. This is likely due to weak muscles in this area. Weak muscles are often but not always the cause of rotator cuff impingement syndrome and associated rotator cuff tears.
If you have the rotator cuff strength of a little girl, your body has no choice but to limit the amount of weight you can stabilize and move to prevent injury. It's not uncommon to see an individual break through a bench press sticking point simply by incorporating direct rotator cuff training.
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