Best & Most Unusual Shoulder Workout

I talked in an earlier post how being able to travel and speak with some of the best professionals in fitness, strength & conditioning, and therapy is quite a gift. Some of the best moments come from just the time talking on the side with these amazing people. A great example was last weekend while in Raleigh I got to talk with renowned movement expert and therapist, Gray Cook.

We were discussing how our motivations to create our systems, constantly evolve, and just keep searching for better ways to improve how people train and their results really comes from selfish motivations. Both Gray and myself have experienced some pretty severe injuries from our sporting careers. Leaving us to learn how to live the best lives possible while keeping our injuries and pain at bay.

So, when I hear about other fitness and performance professionals hurting, it hits really close to home. I know what it is like to wake-up depressed, frustrated, and even angry. You work hard, you think you are doing the best things possible, but pain drains on you and causes more than just physical pain.

This was really the inspiration for our DVRT Shoulder Restoration Program. Both Jessica and I had destroyed our shoulders in our athletic careers, mostly from bad training. Meaning that if we had just been taught differently we would have never gone through such a struggle.

As Gray put it though, “the good lord must have had a greater plan when he gave us these problems. Our pain was a gift to find a way to help others.” Man, when you put it that way it is hard to ever think badly about these experiences.

Okay, but how, how do we teach people not to hurt, but still get strong and achieve the cosmetic goals they want. After all, we do want to train, we want to train hard, but we want to train smart as well!

These DVRT drills show you how we don’t just use the Ultimate Sandbag, but other functional tools with a purpose to teach better movement strength. A big key is to get people to understand to push DOWN to press up. I know that makes no sense, but as we have talked all week in the past blogs, learning to use the ground changes how the whole body works!

It connects the kinetic chains of the body allowing us to use the RIGHT muscles to produce movement and lift weight. After all, do we want to lift with little muscles like our shoulders or the entire body! As you can tell, the answer is the whole body.

Not just because it will make you feel better, which SHOULD be an answer in of itself, but because it allows us to also use more muscles, and develop not just strength, but stability, mobility, and real world fitness.

Another key is use whatever we are contact with to tap into our muscles. That means if we are holding a weight, to do so with deliberate actions of the hands, or if are feet are on a platform to push hard into the ground. As Jessica wrote about yesterday (READ HERE) this makes everything plank and allows us to train hard while we are training safe!

Lastly, we want to press with the lats, not the shoulders. The lats are freaking HUGE and should be more of a focus than just the tiny shoulders of our body. They allow us to engage so much more of the body, stabilize the shoulder joint, and be stronger while not hurting. Pretty good deal right?

Well, how do we do it in a workout that isn’t boring, that doesn’t distract us from our goals by looking in other places? Also known as a fun, challenging, but productive workout?

Check out the DVRT workout below and save 25% on ALL of our DVRT workout programs HERE with coupon code “spring2018”