The best exercise for fixing tight shoulders & chest

There’s a secret weapon in my training arsenal that I barely use nowadays, but there was a point in my training career where without it I’m not sure I would’ve been able to continue. And with the amount of people asking me about navigating injuries, I feel almost irresponsible that I haven’t shared this with you sooner. It’s a simple exercise that will open up your chest and shoulders completely reverse pushing related tightness, fix your posture, alleviate stern and pain and prep your elbows for heavy training and only needs to take a few minutes a week for a finite amount of time to get all the benefits from it. So in this video I’m going to walk you through what it is and show you how you can do it yourself at home so you can start feeling the benefits of it today. As I have said before, just like with your lower body, most functional mobility for day-to-day life is going to be covered just by you building strength in your six basic plans of motion across a full range of motion, generally speaking, strength chain properly and you’re good.
However, there comes a time when you’re smashing your pushing strength building up to really high levels in your horizontal pushing, especially with without building sufficiently deep accessible range of motion at the same time, all this strength and development can lead to tightness in the pushing muscles as they grow you specifically your pecs in your anterior shoulder. And this can lead to pain and discomfort if it’s left unchecked, which can potentially derail your training and that is a problem. I have experienced this myself firsthand early in my training career, working really hard on pushing strength and getting really severe stern and pain that stopped me from being able to push hard altogether. Several of my students have exactly the same thing, and I’ve also heard of this being really common in heavy bench pressing. So this sort of tightness at best can lead to hunch forward posture and stiffness.
At worse, it can develop into pain that can literally stop you from being able to continue with your strength training, which is no fun at all. Thankfully, the move I’m going to show you is the closest thing to a silver bullet solution for all these problems that I’ve ever come across. If you want to jump straight into the how to, you can skip the next chapter, but here’s how it works. So just like for our specific lower body flexibility goals, we can do some specific work to target the end ranges of motion and increase the range of motion we have access to for our upper body. We can do specific work to increase the accessible range of our shoulder joint and by targeting the extreme end range specifically, we can get ahead of the tightness that develops as a result of all that pushing strength gain and alleviate all those issues we’ve just talked about.
So upper body mobility is way simpler than lower body. There’s basically two ranges of motion. One is shoulder flexion, which basically targets our pulling muscles, the ones that help extend our shoulder, and then in this case there’s also extension. And so that targets all our pushing muscles, the muscles that flex the shoulder. So if we can build enough accessible range of motion in shoulder extension, we can counteract the effect of having these stiff type pushing muscles. The beautiful thing about this is very much like with the other flexibility goggles. To fix this, you only need one movement. You only need to apply it once or twice a week for a couple minutes and you’ll be able to very quickly build all the range you need in a couple months. You should be able to get to the full range standard and then that is your mobility gained tightness, fix and pain alleviated.
After that, you can literally move on, enjoy your pain-free upper body and just have this in your back pocket ready to use whenever you feel stiff or like you want to open things up again. For me, I pull this out once every couple of months. Literally, if you’re working on mobility forever, don’t think you’re doing it properly. It should really be something that you get done over a number of months and then move on and spend your time on the training that really counts long term building up your strength. So with a theory out of the way, let’s get into the movement. The solution to build all the shoulder extension that you’ll ever need to fix your chest and shoulders is the German hang. Our goal ultimately as a standard to work towards before you move on from this is basically a full depth German hang like this.
Now before you get scared and think that you’re way to begin for this, this is end goal, it’s going to take you time to build to this. Once you get there, you no longer have the problems about having this conversation to solve. So I will show you how to start from any level. This is the end goal that we’re working towards. Eventually anyone can start this at any strength and mobility level, but the sooner you can progress to your level incrementally towards this, the sooner you can say goodbye to your chest and shoulder tightness and having this ever be something that you have to spend mental energy and time worrying about. So same principles as building mobility in any other range of motion. We want to do this under load because the way that we’ll build more accessible range of motion is increasing our strength within the range that we currently have access to.
So we want to do this with our full body weight on it and just progressively increase the range over time. So walk you through how to do this. If you have rings or a overhead bar that you can use, watch this through once and then come back and have a go. Refer to this video as many times as you need. The first step is to obviously grab the rings or the bar. We want to do this with a supinated group. The reason is if we’re going to do a movement, we want to do it properly and get all the benefits from it and you’ll experience massive strength and stability gains in your elbows by doing this with a supinated group. The way you can remember that it’s supinated is if you were drinking soup, you would have your hands facing you. So you want to grab the rings of the bar in a supinated grip and keep them that way.
And then you’re getting not only shoulder extension development, but you’re going to be prepping your elbows for any of the work that you’re going to do. Building up to high level calisthenic skills, which you are inevitably going to need as you progress your strength. So the first step is to just get upside down. This might take a few attempts, but the key thing to remember is jump into it because if you’re early on with your strength and trying to pull yourself up, you’re basically pulling yourself through a tucked front lever, which is quite an intermediate strength skill. So we want to skip that and just jump up. Basically get our hips above our shoulders so our tall, so is upside down. This is the first step. Just get used to getting in an upside down position, and if you can’t yet, then this is a really good strength and body awareness basic thing to have down.
Once you can get upside down, you want to extend your legs out. This is going to make it really easy to control your position. So just like with our other lower body flexibility goals, we want to do reps rolling through as deep as we can get while still having the strength to pull back out. So remember, we’re building strength here. We’re not doing passive stretching. We’re actively trying to flex the muscles that are getting stretched by this movement, which you’re going to feel is your shoulders and your chest normal to feel a big amount of tension in these muscles because they’re probably not used to it all. The better that you’re doing this to work on that. So you just want to do reps reaching your feet towards the ground. If you at any point find that you either can’t pull back out or you need to bail because you’ve overloaded yourself, you can just drop down to your feet so you’ll be fine.
And as we do these over time, our goal is to just get deeper and deeper working up to the point where eventually over time we get to the point where we can securely hold ourselves in this deep bottom position at no point in my feet or knees touching the ground, have the discipline to keep the load on your upper body. That’s how we’re going to get it stronger. Again, ideally you’re able to pull back out every rep. If you can’t, that’s okay, but just try and go to a point where you have the strength to do so so that you can practise building that strength to pull out. When you’re doing these reps, really think about that contraction pulling against your body weight with your chest and shoulders as if you’re about to pull out of the movement the whole time. The more you can practise intentionally flexing those muscles, the faster they’re going to get stronger and the faster you’re going to unlock more range of motion and get all the benefits from the movement.
And so that’s what progression basically looks like. Don’t be deflated if you’re just doing reps like this for a while. Over time, you’ll build confidence and strength to be able to move deeper in terms of programming. Very simple, exactly like with our lower body stuff. So for whatever period of time it takes you to go from where you’re at now to the end goal, I suggest doing this once or twice a week for simplicity’s sake. Just put it after your upper body strength training because that should be happening once or twice a week, and it’s going to mean that those muscles are warmed up and ready to go. You’ll get the most depth and it’ll mean you’ve got plenty of recovery before your strength training sets, which we don’t want to have just done mobility stuff and made ourselves weaker for the core strength work that we want to be maximising progress in.
And in terms of workload, I would just again, aim for 10 reps. Doesn’t matter how long it takes, doesn’t matter how deep you get. Aim for 10, and if you want to do more, you can, but as long as you do something and really flex hard near your end range of motion, you’re going to make progress. Once you get to this level where you’re basically at the limits of your shoulder joints, range of motion, and your muscles are no longer really limiting factor, then you’ve got all the range that you’re going to get. And at that point you can stop and you should see by this point how easily this mobility sticks around. I’ve barely trained this since I unlocked this movement some seven, eight years ago, but it’s there when I want it. If I start to feel tight, if I experience any pain, if my shoulders are just needing something to open them up, I’ve got it and it can feel amazing to do every once in a while.
As I alluded to before, if you want to comprehensively cover your upper body mobility, then the other range of motion you can work on is shoulder flexion. So if you find this helpful and want to video running through that, I’m happy to do one. Let me know. Of course, all of this mobility stuff is arsing on the cake of a proper strength training programme. If you were trained to maximum intensity across the entire range of motion of your basic movement patterns, then you are giving yourself the best chance possible of having functional mobility in terms of having strength through a full range of motion and the ability to use your body well and enjoy life. This specific end range stuff can be really useful for specific cases like this. But as I said, it’s a finite thing. Get it done and then focus on the real work of building up strength and muscle mass and improving your body composition and athletic ability. As always, if you need help with that link below to find out how we do it at home in 40 minutes a week. Otherwise, please go and implement this if it’s relevant for you. Let me know how you go. Thanks for watching. Appreciate you all. We’ll chat soon.