Is the bench press the same as a push up?

In this blog I will try to persuade you to stop doing the bench press in the gym and start doing push ups instead.

The goal is to protect your shoulders from unnecessary surgery.

February is an interesting time in my practice. People that joined gyms in January have been working out for about 6 weeks. They are starting to increase the amount of weight they lift and their shoulders are starting to bother them.

While the push up and the bench press look similar in terms of the arm motion, they are very different in terms of the shoulder muscles.

The bench press is notorious for causing injuries to the shoulders. There’s a reason why.

When you lye on your back many muscles that are used to stabilize the shoulder joint become inactive. This causes the rotator cuff muscles to take up the slack. As a result, you develop rotator cuff tendonitis and tears.

When you are lifting weights, particularly the bench press, the ego gets involved and there is a need to continuously increase the weight. Muscles and our ego can lift a lot more weight than our tendons. Tendons adapt slower than the muscles. That’s why it is recommended that you increase the weight slowly over a number of months. Many people believe that if they lift larger weights, they will improve faster. This is a mistake. These same people are usually in my office complaining of achy shoulders.

In contrast, by simply being in the push up position, many more muscles are involved regarding the shoulder. The muscles that stabilize the shoulder lock the joint within its socket and there is less strain on the rotator cuff muscles.

It’s fascinating that some of these muscles involve our abdominal muscles, lower back muscles, and one muscle in particular called the lastissimus dorsi. This muscle connects from your pelvis and your lumbar fascia to the front of the shoulder joint. It functions during the push up as a stabilizer, but is inactive during the bench press.

The greatest advantage of the push up is that we don’t feel that we have to lift the weight of the world. Our ego doesn’t get involved like it does with the bench press.

Try just once doing as many push ups as you can. You might be surprised how hard they are. In fact, most people can’t do a single one.

In those cases, it is best to start with doing them against a couch or the kitchen counter and building from there.

If push ups are too easy, you can use a soccer or basketball and do push ups trying to balance on the ball.

To build up to doing one armed push ups, you can alternate the ball from one side to the other, developing the ability to do one armed push ups.

You can also do clapping push ups where you push up forcefully and clap in between each repetition.

The point is that there are a lot of ways to make the push up difficult without the risk of the bench press.

The greatest benefit of the push up is that you stay out of the surgeons’ office. Building muscle but tearing a tendon in the process doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.

For information regarding various exercises, you can ask me or go to www.crossfit.com and learn them yourself.