Invincible Shoulders Tutorial | Shoulder Mechanics, Mobility and Prehab for Calisthenics

in this video I'm going to take you through the steps that I take to prevent injuries in my shoulder joints while training calisthenics or heavy resistance training now this injury prevention routine is geared more towards those of you practicing pure calisthenics where a lot of the elements place a heavy stress on your shoulder joint and requires your shoulders to be in top condition if you don't take care of your shoulders at some point you might encounter some sort of injury or you'll stagger in progress ultimately most traumatic physical injuries are a result of a lack

of strength or Preparation and the reason why I bring up strength is because strength can be range specific for example in a push-up we tend to be stronger in the upper range of motion when our pecs and our shoulders are more contracted but then as we go deeper and our chest and shoulder muscles are stretched out more we tend to be slightly weaker in this position and that's why you see a lot of injuries happen in this deeper range of motion so just because you can handle 200 kilograms out here does not mean you can

handle it down here so the point of my shoulder conditioning routine is to build strength in all of these deep ranges and strength cannot exist without mobility and Mobility cannot exist without flexibility so if you want to strengthen your deep range you first have to train to be flexible enough to reach that range then you have to be mobile enough to move through that range without any weights and only then can you add resistance to actually strengthen that range of motion another reason why you should get into the habit of training your mobility and flexibility

as soon as possible is because through prolonged resistance training our muscles can actually shorten if we don't stretch consistently for the first few years of my own training I've had pretty bad shoulder Mobility resulting in a lot of minor injuries that have paused my progress for long periods of time now since shoulder injuries are some of the more common ones that you'll hear about you're going to need to have a basic understanding of how the shoulder Works ultimately your shoulder Mobility can be broken down into six different types of movements you first have shoulder flexion

where your anterior deltoid is completely contracted and your arms are over your head and in the other direction we have shoulder extension in which in this case your rear deltoid is pulling your shoulders behind your back and your anterior deltoid is fully stretched out you have shoulder abduction and adduction and you also have shoulder external and internal rotation now these movements are controlled by the muscles surrounding our shoulders and particularly our rotator cuff muscles and in order to have healthy and mobile shoulders all of these muscles must be trained now one of the best ways

to approach conditioning of your shoulders is to separate it into its anterior and posterior kinetic chains now the anterior kinetic chain of your shoulder are simply the muscles that lie on the front of your body for example it goes through your chest your anterior deltoid down through your biceps through your forearms and all the way to your fingers and these muscles that I mentioned are capable of working together to generate a lot of force for example in calisthenics the planche is a heavily anterior chain dominant movement as you're pushing with all of those muscles at

the same time time on the other hand the posterior chain make up the back side of our body starting through our lats going through our rear delts triceps and the underside of our forearm if we view our shoulders through the lens of the kinetic chains you'll find that tightness in the anterior chain or tightness in our chest shoulders and biceps will limit our ability to go into extension or also our ability to activate our posterior chain and on the other hand tightness in our posterior chain muscles or tightness in our rhomboids lats rear delt tricep

and the back of our forearm might prevent us from fully utilizing our anterior chain or going into shoulder flexion you might have also heard about some movements that are bad or dangerous for you for example like a push-up where your elbows are completely flared out the reason why these movements are considered dangerous is because most people generally have poor mobility in this direction and therefore poor strength in this direction but if you hopefully condition your shoulders in whatever Direction you want you have the capability of performing any dangerous movement safely and this all comes down

to Progressive overload we humans have a natural superpower known as neurological adaptation meaning that through progressively harder and harder training whether that be in strength or Mobility we are able to become stronger or better at whatever we do I separate my shoulder conditioning routine into unloaded and loaded movement where the unloaded movement is mostly comprised of flexibility work and Mobility work and then loaded work consists of me strengthening those ranges via resistance bands or my own body weight so in this part of the video I'll be taking you through my mobility and flexibility exercises whenever

you are training flexibility or Mobility this is a great time to determine whether you have any imbalances or any areas in which you experience pain so that you can assess how healthy your shoulders are or how much they are at risk for being injured one of the best Mobility exercises that you can do that covers everything single movement range of the shoulder is what's called a shoulder dislocate you're going to want to find a stick of adequate length hold it in front of you in a pronated position and then pass it over your head and

behind your body until the stick touches your back now if you're just starting out the wider you hold the stick the easier this movement will be and over time you can make this movement Harder by moving your hands even closer you want to make sure that your arms are straight and pass through behind your head evenly you don't want one shoulder moving before the other because imbalances in Mobility are a risk factor for injury now if we look at this movement you're starting here in a slightly internally rotated position of your shoulder and as you

raise the bar above your head you're going into shoulder flexion you're passing through and ending up in an externally rotated position of your shoulders meaning that your elbows are now facing outwards I recommend doing two variations with the second one being where you start behind your back with a supinated position as in Palms forward and then bringing the stick to the front of your body now the second variation starts in a slightly externally rotated position of your shoulder and as you bring it in front of you and you end up here your shoulders are now

internally rotated if you don't have a stick or you're unable to perform the movement on a stick you can also start with a light resistance band and Performing the same movement and moving on to heavier resistance bands over time to get a better stretch whenever you're doing any of the stretching or Mobility exercises you have to stay in a range in which you are only slightly uncomfortable you shouldn't be going all out and forcing through a stretch because this might actually cause damage to your muscles you want to keep it at a maximum difficulty level

of around 5 out of ten you'll find that as you reach your limit the hardest range of motion is this one or your chest shoulders and biceps might be maximally stretched again these are the muscles that make up the anterior chain and is commonly very tight because of how much we train our chest shoulders and biceps so one thing I always do is I track my progress using this stick and try to move my hands closer and closer together over time and some people are able to actually pass the bar through while their hands are

maximally close together we can break this down into more stretches that focus on stretching out our kinetic chains now one of the best ways to get that stretch through your chest shoulders and biceps is with a wall place your hand against the wall keep your arms straight and turn your shoulders outwards very slowly to get a good stretch throughout these muscle groups now since that stretch is generally helpful for opening up your shoulder external rotation I also work on my internal rotation Mobility by placing the back of my hand against my side and gently pulling

my elbows towards the middle of my body again you never want to go super fast or super intense with these stretches as overstitching can actually cause pain and weakness and a great exercise for shoulder extension Mobility is one seated on the floor and take note that in shoulder extension we're actually trying to push behind our back with our arms straight therefore activating all the posterior chain muscles that I mentioned earlier this stretch is great because it also forces a stretch on the anterior chain allowing yourself to put weight on your arms while in shoulder extension

obviously your weight is distributed between your feet and your hands but over time what you want to do to condition your shoulders you want to use more and more of your shoulder pushing itself back rather than putting all the work on your lower back and your legs but for shoulder flexion you can also perform the stretch on the wall or the floor if you don't have access to a wall instead of just forcing your head through you can actually try to push the wall up with your hands and being able to push above is essential

to being able to use your shoulder at that range of motion one piece of gear I highly recommend you invest some money into are rings in addition to its use as a tool for strength training they also make for very good shoulder Mobility devices and before every workout if I have access to rings I will just push down the rings with my shoulders and move them in circles like this at varying depths just to loosen my shoulders make sure the mobility on each side is even and checking for regions in which I experience pain or

tightness one thing you can do on the Rings is get a very good shoulder extension stretch and what you can use this for is stretching out your anterior kinetic chain so if we break the stretch down we first stretch out the shoulders and also the chest and then your biceps and then your wrists and sometimes what I would do in the deepest portion of the stretch is to actually utilize my kinetic chain from this end range motion this is a type of stretching known as PNF stretching where instead of Simply passively stretching a muscle and

then not really doing anything else you actually push from this stretch range and you use the muscle as if you were lifting a very light weight at its end range of motion and also one more thing when I'm in the bottom of the stretch I like to slowly turn my wrists to cover the rotational movement of my shoulder while in that stretch so I'm combining rotation and extension and also you can do this stretch moving your shoulder into its flexion range and this range is often restricted by tightness in your lats rear Del and tricep

another tip is whenever you are in a stretch make sure you are breathing and you are relaxed with your breathing if you're stretching so intensely that you have to either hold your breath or you have to gasp for air you might be overdoing the stretch and it's assigned to tone it back a little bit you can also perform these stretch is on a straight bar if you have access to one I don't have a straight bar that's high enough so I'm just putting this Mobility stick into the ring setup the difference between a ring and

a bar setup is that the ring setup allows free movement of your wrist and the bar locks your wrist in a pronated or supinated position make sure you do both wrist positions so that you can stretch out your shoulder in all directions and one more thing you can try if you have fairly good shoulder mobility and you can perform shoulder dislocates is you can use a high bar setup to dislocate using assistance now I haven't mentioned adduction and abduction because I've never really seen them be a problem Mobility wise however if you did want to

build your abduction strength you can train it through the range of what's called a butterfly on rings but with feet support still if you're consistent with any one of these exercises and you're constantly progressively overloading you are bound to get stronger in these ranges and maybe one day you'll be able to perform a butterfly on these still rings without any feet assistance and now because we've slightly opened up our ranges of motion by releasing some tightness in those muscles I was talking about we are able to add strength to those ranges through a loaded movement

or light band work these are the movements I use to isolate my rotator cuff muscles and also to condition my anterior and posterior kinetic chains of my shoulder I'll grab a light resistance band and attach this around your elbows height so that you can line up your arm within this plane of motion I bring my elbow to the side my shoulders are forward and I internally rotate my shoulder with the load of the resistance band underneath and on the other hand we want to cover our shoulders external rotation Mobility so you want to line up

with the resistance band bring your shoulder square and then open up your shoulder as far out as you can you can adjust the difficulty of the movement by moving closer or farther away from the band's Anchor Point but you want to stick to a difficulty that you can do at least eight to ten reps out of because you don't want to risk also injuring these small muscles I know I'll have an uneven amount of exercises for each shoulder motion but this one is pretty overpowered what you want to do is fasten a light band again

at around shoulder height you want to pull your elbow back so there's a little bit of tension and then rotate your shoulder backwards and up to where your ears are again you never want to go super heavy with these movements and also make sure that your elbows are as still as they can be throughout space and the last band movement I always do in my warm-ups and also part of my conditioning is combining both internal and external Rotation by standing a distance away from the Anchor Point making sure my shoulders are facing forward and my

arm is behind me and my elbows are rotated externally and from here I'm bringing the band fully in until the back of my hand can touch my back so what I'm doing here is I'm strengthening My Shoulder Through external rotation all the way to internal rotation and of course make sure to do both sides as you want to make sure that your strength throughout these ranges are even again make sure your shoulders are not moving throughout this movement you don't want to let your shoulder roll back as you're not getting as good of a stretch

and lastly because I discussed the anterior and posterior chains of your shoulder and why they are important for calisthenics I also like to condition These Chains individually back to about a waist high anchor with a band facing forward and then pushing as far forward as I can and then my posture chain which is responsible for removing my shoulder into an extension range this will also allow me to strengthen me pushing behind my back and my extension range it is also important to vary the Heights in which you condition your kinetic chains as you want to

be able to utilize these muscles at various different positions these exercises cause a lot of growth in my progress once I Incorporated them into my warm-up and conditioning routines so if I'm doing these as a warm up I'm always doing a dynamic switch as in I'm moving through every stretch that I'm doing after a workout feel free to do passive stretching to improve on your flexibility and then that is about it for this video you can try out these exercises and also try out these movements to make sure you don't have any lingering injuries or

serious Mobility problems now of course you can still make progress in strength without doing every single one of these movements but as you get to harder movements and harder elements and calisthenics a lot of what's considered proper technique and clean form requires a good amount of strength throughout these ranges of motion so shoulder flexion or shoulder overhead Mobility is incredibly important for maintaining a straight line in a handstand shoulder extension Mobility allows us to use the full range of our back and also better flexibility in our chest and shoulders allow us to go deeper in

movements such as dips or push-ups and we also need to be strong in both shoulder external and internal rotation in order to do some certain variations of movements so it is imperative if you want to be a well-rounded athlete stay safe and make sure you are responsible in your trainings remember getting injured can pause your progress for up to months at a time or in some cases even years and that's something we all don't want because it slows us down in our pursuit of our goals if you made it to the end of this video

thank you for watching I know this topic might be a little bit complicated but learning how the body works and learning how to train safely can make a very big difference on how well your strength training journey goes I know I'm a little bit late but I would like to express my thanks for 100 000 subscribers I currently do not possess the necessary processing power to fully comprehend that fact but nonetheless I would like to continue making videos and share all the information that I've gathered from my last five and a half years of training

in hopes that what has helped me can also help you and our respective Journeys through this sport since I do think as this sport is growing and more people are getting into it people need to know what's beyond surface level thank you again thank you for watching