maratoolPush Press - Behind the Neck
How to do the push press - behind the neck
- Standing with the weight racked on the back of the shoulders, begin with the dip. With your feet directly under your hips, flex the knees without moving the hips backward. Go down only slightly, and reverse direction as powerfully as possible. Drive through the heels create as much speed and force as possible, moving the bar in a vertical path.
- Using the momentum generated, finish pressing the weight overhead be extending through the arms.
- Return to the starting position, using your legs to absorb the impact.
Muscles worked
The prime movers are the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.
Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the calves control the ankle and hold the heel position; the quadriceps straighten the knee and take load on the descent; the triceps straighten the elbow to finish the movement.
Every exercise for:ShouldersCalvesQuadricepsTriceps
How this movement works
The working muscles shorten as they drive the load away from you, and more than one joint changes angle to do it. Load spreads down a chain instead of sitting on one muscle, which is why a compound push handles more weight than any single-joint alternative — and why joint position, not the muscle, is usually what fails first.
It is filed under olympic weightlifting. The bar must move fast enough for you to get underneath it, which makes this a skill rather than a grind: low repetitions, well short of where fatigue starts editing technique.
What you need
A barbell locks both hands to one bar, so neither side can drift and the load climbs in plate-sized steps. That makes it the simplest way to add weight and the least forgiving thing to bail out of.
Every exercise using:Barbell
These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:
- Rear Deltoid Row Dumbbelldumbbell
- Return Push from Stancemedicine ball
- Reverse Machine Flyesmachine
- Seated Cable Shoulder Presscable
- Seated Front Deltoidbody only
Difficulty
Listed at intermediate level. It assumes you already own the underlying pattern and can hold position under load — if the position breaks before the target muscle tires, drop back to a beginner variation until it does not.
Of the 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 46 are listed at intermediate level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.