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What is the overhead press?

This is an excerpt from Foundational Strength by John Flagg.

Everyone calls this lift the press, but to be precise you should call it the overhead press. This is the last of the foundational movements we will cover, but that doesn’t mean it’s the least important. Given how often we reach over our heads in daily life, the press is an incredibly functional movement that can also help maintain shoulder health and range of motion. Shoulder health is neglected by so many people. When I was working in a clinic, shoulders were the second most common body part treated, with the lower back coming in second. Most people just don’t do much at all with their shoulders from an activity standpoint.

Believe it or not, I considered omitting the overhead press from this book. Why? The overhead press can help with shoulder health and range of motion, but it’s not super accessible because like the bench press, the overhead press has a lower strength ceiling than other lifts. A 45-pound bar (20 kg) may simply be too heavy for some, and lighter-weight Bella bars or old barbells with no sleeves are hard to find. Plus, so many people of all ages have range-of-motion limitations in their shoulders, and that may need to be addressed before attempting the overhead press. While neither of these issues will necessarily lead to injury, they can slow down progress and create frustration—the exact opposite of what I’m trying to achieve with this book. However, I decided that the importance of being able to lift weight overhead in terms of quality of life, longevity, and strength outweighed any reason to leave it out. So this chapter will cover the reasons why you should press, the elements that make up a good press, and the phases of the press. Let’s get started.

Reasons Why You Should Overhead Press

The relationship between the overhead press and the bench press is actually a pretty close one. Just like you would imagine that the squat and the deadlift would build each other, the bench press and the overhead press complement each other as the core of a strength-and-conditioning program. I’ve found that the overhead press helps build the bench press more directly than the other way around. It’s a great builder for triceps strength and shoulder strength, which tend to be limiting factors when it comes to the bench press, even late in people’s strength careers.

Additionally, the overhead press is a great exercise for general shoulder health. There is a misconception that lifting overhead is actually dangerous for the shoulders. In reality, it’s important to get into different positions and to load those ranges of motion so that tissues can build tolerance to those positions. The overhead press allows you to go into these positions and to build that tissue tolerance and strength through ranges of motion that the shoulder isn’t typically taken through. Too often, individuals discover that they have limited range of motion and limited functionality when it comes to overhead work or the use of their arms overhead. Including the overhead press as a fundamental lift within your program can help prevent this and also keep your shoulders healthy around the other lifts. The truth is, no one lift is any more dangerous than another. Since the shoulder is not often used overhead, the press is a great way to train for increased capacity and decreased risk of injury.

Lastly, the athletic development of the overhead press, which is similar to that of the bench press, helps develop power overhead that can be beneficial in sports like football, swimming, and even baseball. One of the critiques of the bench press, specifically with regard to football, is that players don’t lie flat on their back and push somebody away from them, and an offensive lineman doesn’t block with their arms just straight out in front of them. However, they do typically block with an inclined angle, and sometimes they lift the defensive lineman up off the ground to the point where their arms are over their head as they press up on this other player. This is known as pancaking (so named because the offensive blocker “pancakes” the defensive lineman to the ground), and it’s pretty impressive. The overhead press is the lift that can develop that kind of power, which can help you in all of your athletic pursuits.

Elements of the Overhead Press

Here we are going to cover the basic elements that make up the press—the bar-lifter unit, bar path, and bar speed. These elements will help you understand what the lift should look like and help you analyze your lift to make sure you are headed in the right direction.

Bar-Lifter Unit

In the start position of the press, the barbell sits just over your collarbones (see figure 6.1). This puts the bar directly over the midfoot, making the bar-lifter unit fairly balanced over your normal center of gravity. The difference with the press is that the bar travels overhead and creates a long lever arm that affects the bar-lifter unit. Up to this point, we haven’t had to talk about the center of gravity and the bar-lifter unit being affected vertically. With the bench, you’re supported by a stable object underneath you, and with the squat and the deadlift, the effect of the lever arm on the center of gravity is not as extreme.

What happens in the press is that as the bar travels vertically, moving away from the center of gravity, the bar-lifter unit also moves vertically (not forward and backward like with other lifts). This creates the need for a large amount of stability under the bar to prevent it from moving forward or backward. Any forward or backward movement of the bar makes it exponentially more difficult to keep the bar over the center of gravity.

Bar Path

This effect of the bar moving vertically is precisely why the bar path has to be a completely straight line from the start position to lock-out. There is no debate on this like there is with the bench press. In the overhead press, the bar needs to move perfectly vertically. This does create a small issue with your head being in the way of the movement of the bar, but in this case, we will move the body around the bar as opposed to the bar around the body. This will be covered in the execution sections of the chapter, but I want to make it clear here that if you move the bar forward to get it around your face, you make the lift much harder. A straight vertical line is the bar path you need.

Bar Speed

Just like with other lifts, the bar speed changes throughout the press. The first peak velocity happens right off the chest. As the bar approaches your chin, it slows down as you move your head out of the way and is at its slowest around your forehead. Once the bar gets past your forehead and you start to move your head back under the bar, there’s a second peak velocity. It slows again just before lock-out as with the other lifts.

The transition point around the face and forehead is a common sticking point for many people not only because the bar slows down but because it can drift forward slightly, and then it’s hard to bring it back to over the center of gravity. For this reason, it’s one of my favorite spots to incorporate pause work to solidify this position.

More Excerpts From Foundational Strength

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