Fix Your Shoulders With Pulling Exercises

Fix Your Shoulders With Pulling Exercises
Whether your goal is to build a jacked upper body or crush a bench PR 10, you have to push some serious weight to accomplish it. And if you’ve been training hard for years, your shoulders are probably feeling those heavy workouts. When all that pressing starts to break your shoulders down, you could stop lifting and head to the aquarobics class, or you could just get smarter about training.

If you’re lucky enough to have avoided shoulder problems – and you plan to keep training hard – then start doing preventive exercises before you’re beaten up in the first place!

What kind of exercises?

1. Reclined, Seated Alternating Lat Pulldown
This pulldown variation feels similar to some standard horizontal rowing exercises. Reclining back reduces the need for shoulder flexion.

Recline back to a point where your shoulders are comfortable.
Reach long while keeping your chest out, then inhale.
Exhale and pull down to one side; repeat on the opposite side.
2. Short-Seated Lat Pulldown
This helps restore T-spine and ribcage position while improving shoulder function.

Sit on a box at a comfortable depth; you don’t need to be excessively low.
Reach long without shrugging.
Get long/tall through the spine and inhale.
Exhale and pull down to one side. Repeat the sequence on the opposite side.
3. Squatting Lat Pulldown
The seated lat pulldown is great, but if you want to improve shoulder function while improving squat depth and position, give this one a shot!

Sit down to a comfortable squat depth – you don’t need to be excessively low, but some prefer a deep squat to restore hip motion.
Reach long without shrugging.
Get long/tall through the spine and inhale.
Exhale and pull down to one side. Repeat on the opposite side.
The hardest part is staying camped out in what amounts to an iso-squat for an extended period, so consider halving the reps you normally do.

4. Cobra Lat Pulldown
This one not only has a kick-ass name, but more importantly, if you’re a meathead, it just feels great.

Reach long. Use the weight to lengthen the pulling arm while actively trying to push the floor away with the “down” arm.

Inhale and feel the expansion across your chest and back.
Exhale and pull down.
5. Half-Kneeling Lat Pulldown
The half-kneeling pulldown improves shoulder and hip mobility 11.

Reach long with the pulling arm while gently pushing the down-knee through the pad.
Inhale and feel the stretch across the shoulders and in the front of the “down” hip.
Exhale and pull down.
6. Split-Stance Low Cable Row
If you want a more traditional row, this should fit the bill. You’ll use a split-stance so there’s some balance involved. The rotation you can create through the trunk and thorax feels awesome.

Set up in a split-stance position, feeling the entire front foot and using that heel to keep the weight back.
Reach long with the pulling arm while keeping the chest up/out and inhale.
Exhale and pull back.
Wait. Why Do These?
If you had asked me 10-15 years ago, my answer would’ve been simple:

“To create muscular balance and restore range of motion across the shoulders.”
But that changed when I spent a weekend with the guys at EliteFTS. I got to evaluate some of the strongest bench-pressers in the world. And while you wouldn’t expect their range of motion to be great, I was absolutely shocked at how bad it really was.

Just so you know, “normal” range of motion at the shoulder is 180 degrees: 90-degrees internal rotation and 90-degrees external rotation. So as I’m evaluating these bros, here’s what I find:

The first athlete has 90-degrees of shoulder rotation (10 degrees IR, 80 degrees ER)
The second athlete has 30-degrees of shoulder rotation (0 degrees IR, 30 degrees ER)
And finally, the third athlete has 0-degrees (yes, zero) of shoulder rotation!
Second, pain wasn’t the exception – it was the rule. Quite simply, it wasn’t IF they had pain, but how much.

Now, if you asked these guys about their programs, they were all pushing big weights on the bench 6, just like you’d expect. But they were also adamant about balancing their presses and their pulls. This is a common piece of advice you hear from coaches: Pull as much as (or more) than you push.

In many cases, it wasn’t just balanced; they’d actually skewed their programs so they were doing twice, or even three times, as many pulls as presses! But their shoulders were still messed up. What gives? If these guys were working to balance the front and back sides of their bodies, how come their range of motion was so bad across the board?

They were using pulling exercises that created more compression front-to-back instead of expansion and rotation in the shoulder. Now I realize that’s a big statement, so let’s discuss when you should choose bilateral/symmetrical exercises and when you might choose offset or asymmetrical ones.

Bilateral vs. Unilateral Exercises
If your goal is to maximize force production (think getting bigger or stronger), you want to check these boxes:

Simplify the exercise.
Minimize freedom of movement.
Lift heavy loads.
On the extreme end of this, think about a chest press machine: your legs and torso are supported, the movement is locked into a specific arc, and you can use (approximately) a shit-ton of weight.

But doing this is a double-edged sword. Sure, you can build big, showy muscles or superhuman strength, but over time you’re going to progressively lose range of motion.

Now let’s consider the opposite end of the spectrum – one where we might want to restore range of motion and help ourselves feel better. To do this, we’d probably:

Train each side of the body independently.
Decrease load to some degree.
Work through a wider range of motion.
This is why the pulling lifts I showed you in the video above focus on working unilaterally and with offset stances/postures. This allows your body the freedom to rotate and turn, versus simply squishing us front-to-back like we’re a human bench shirt.

Now before I go on, please don’t run off and say, “Mike Robertson told me never to do heavy bilateral movements again.”

No, just find a balance. If your goal is to get big and strong, choose activities that allow you to do that. And if your shoulders are beaten up and you want to move and feel better, choose activities that allow you to do that.