twice a week, and they go heavy just once during the week. I also make sure they learn proper technique before piling on the plates and do plenty of specific lower-back exercises to ensure that their lumbars can take the stress if they do lay back. It’s extremely difficult to learn how to lay back when performing a military press. It takes a great deal of practice to lay back at the precise moment and do it smoothly. The military press is one of those exercises that’s easy to learn but tough to master. I can teach athletes how to snatch or clean and jerk faster than I can teach them the finer points of the military press. That’s why I allotted so much training time to it. Sure, there were a few who merely muscled the weights up, but having excellent technique upped the numbers appreciably. Naturally, I don’t recommend excessive layback, but in reality, that just doesn’t happen. So stress to the lower back really isn’t a problem. Speaking of injuries, I can say with certainty that one type of injury prevalent today was unheard of when the military press was the primary upper-body exercise— damage to the rotator cuff muscles. We didn’t even realize there were
such muscles. No one who pressed had any trouble with them simply because the exercise strengthened them. Rotator cuff injuries started occurring soon after the bench press replaced the military press as the main exercise for developing shoulder girdle strength. The bench press was overtrained to the extreme and usually done with sloppy form, since all that mattered were numbers. At the same time, the part of the back that houses the rotator cuffs was neglected, so the weakest-link concept emerged, as it always does. You just can’t slide around a natural law. Walk into any commercial gym in the country, and you’ll find a half dozen people with rotator cuff problems. It’s become almost epidemic and isn’t likely to change in the immediate future. Whenever people approach me asking for advice concerning their rotator cuffs, I tell them to start doing military presses. If they’re very weak pressers, I have them use dumbbells. As they gain strength in the movement, they graduate to the Olympic bar. Keeping your rotator cuffs healthy is a real plus for the military press. There are other benefits as well. It’s one of the best—perhaps the best—
exercises for developing the deltoids completely. It works all three heads thoroughly, whereas other upperbody exercises, such as the flat- and incline-bench press, neglect the lateral head. It’s a great movement for building strong, impressive triceps. All you have to do is look at photos of the great pressers of the ’60s to verify that. Phil Grippaldi, Bill March, Norb Schemanski, Ken Patera, Bob Bednarski and Ernie Pickett immediately come to mind. Their amazing triceps and shoulder development was a result of doing lots and lots of military presses, period. Military presses become a part of the routines of all my athletes, both male and female, because the shoulder and back strength gained from handling heavy weights in that lift converts directly to every athletic endeavor, such as shooting and rebounding in basketball, throwing and hitting in baseball, firing a lacrosse ball at 100-plus miles per hour and hurling a shot into the next county. That’s not the case with the bench press. Too much benching causes the shoulders to tighten and limits range of motion, an important consideration for athletes engaging in activities that require a great deal of flexibility in their shoulders.
Overhead pressing can help build the supporting structures of the shoulders, such as the rotator cuff muscles.
www.ironmanmagazine.com \ NOVEMBER 2006 287
Free download from imbodybuilding.com