Bench Shoulder Exercises You Can Do

Ever find your shoulders aching and paining after rearranging furniture or lifting boxes? Or you constantly find yourself sit in a forward hunched position and create an overly dominant frontside of the body? It’s probably because of the lack of flexibility in shoulders. 

Shoulders are the main stabilizer when we throw, press or bringing elbows to our body, but easily neglected.  A well-rounded shoulder exercise that includes both of front and back shoulders will increase our body strength and also decrease the amount of load shoulder joints have to bear to make shoulders more flexible, coordinated, and conditioned to handle stress.

Deltoid and Trapezius

A lot of shoulder exercises involve back. The trapezius is responsible for raising shoulders, rotating the shoulder blades, and turning head. These muscle groups are so closely related that a lot of the same exercise work for both. Training for shoulders is like killing two birds with one stone. 

Sharing four shoulder exercises you can do on a bench to train both of shoulders and back.

External Rotation

Athletes aren't the only ones who need strong rotator cuffs. Strengthening this group of shoulder muscles can help anyone prevent shoulder stiffness and injury. keeping upper arm still, rotate forearm away from your body.

Muscle Worked: Rotator Cuff

Incline I Raise

Lie chest-down on an incline bench with a 30-degree angle. Allow your arms to hang straight down with your palms facing each other. Brace your core and raise your arms in front of you until they make a straight line with your torso while keeping your arms fully extended.

Muscle Worked: traps, upper back and delts 

Incline T Raise

Lie chest-down on an incline bench with a 30-degree angle. Allow your arms to hang straight down with your palms facing each other. Bracing the core and squeezing shoulder blades together, raise your arms straight out to the sides of your body until they are parallel with the ground.
 
Muscle Worked: traps, delts and upper back

Incline Chest Press

Chest press is commonly known to target your pecs. According to the a study published on Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2010, an incline press performed at a 28, 44 or 56 degree angle provided significantly more activation to the anterior, or front, of the shoulder.  

Muscle Worked: pecs and delts