Your shoulders are the most mobile joint in your body. They allow you to reach, flex, extend, rotate, and more. The tradeoff for all this mobility is a joint that’s more vulnerable to injury. But if you put some thought into your workouts, you can help keep your shoulders healthy with oppositional strength training.
Note: This post is for information only and is not intended to replace the advice of a physician or an assessment by other wellness professionals.
The shoulder joint is at its most optimal position for healthy movement in a neutral position. In this position, you don’t have your shoulders elevated, hunched forward, or overly retracted. They are relaxed down and more or less in line with your ears if viewed from the side. You can read more about stretching to get to neutral in this post.
Once you’ve stretched and gotten yourself into optimal shoulder joint position, you can effectively use oppositional strength training to promote shoulder joint health and function. Oppositional strength training is just a fancy term for working opposite sides – like the front and back – equally. It’s also known as antagonistic strengthening. You can learn more about antagonistic muscle pairs in this article.
For all those strength moves you do in front, you should balance them out with some moves behind you. You need to work to balance flexion, extension, rotation, and more. It’s a tall order and can be somewhat difficult with the shoulder, particularly depending on what equipment you have access to.
Moving In and Out of Optimal
As you strength train, you can’t always keep the shoulder in neutral. Shoulder position is dynamic and changes with all the tasks you do. But it’s important to have a sense of neutral. To use that as your ‘home base’. A nice example to consider is rowing on a cable machine. As you reach forward, you round through your shoulders. As you pull back, you retract and arch slightly back. That’s functional movement – it mimics what we do in our daily lives. Okay, I know – none of us row boats for a living. But we do reach forward to pick up items and retract our shoulders as we bring the items toward our body. When we finish, we need to return to neutral.
There are times when we can maintain a neutral shoulder position during strength training. Many exercises like overhead press and side raise can be performed with the shoulder in a neutral position.
Examples of Oppositional Strength Exercises for the Shoulder
The video below shows a few examples to get you thinking about how to keep your shoulders healthy with oppositional strength training:
If you have access to machines, oppositional strength training is a lot simpler. Cable machines allow you to quickly do oppositional training by simply turning your body. For example, if you face away from the machine, you can do chest flies. Turn toward the machine and you can do a cable rear delt fly. You can also do a lat pulldown after overhead presses. While machines make it easy, oppositional strength training is doable with free weights as well.
Have questions? Let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
