When training your shoulders, you might notice that your lifting form is weak or shaky. Any instabilities present will be more pronounced using single-side isolation exercises. This may be due to weak rotator cuffs. The rotator cuff helps to stabilize the shoulder. Without strong rotator cuffs for lifting you will be wasting extra energy, getting tired before you normally would. As a result, the increase in your pushing lifts will be limited at best. This specifically may be seen with the bench press or military press. If you’ve reached a plateau on these lifts and haven’t been training your rotator cuff, that’s where I’d recommend you start.

I believe the reason most lifters will ignore rotator cuff training is due to the idea that compound lifts hit all of the important muscles. This is not always the case. You’ll never come back from a major workout complaining of sore rotator cuffs, and nor should you. Without isolation exercises, odds are you aren’t really training the rotator cuff at all. What’s more is that the rotator cuff is a muscle group that isn’t designed for moving large amounts of weight, so it should be trained with light weights and high reps. I understand most body builders or power lifters are not comfortable with the idea of light weight and high reps for anything, but let the end justify the means. If rotator cuff training will increase your lifts, isn’t it worth it?

By now you should at least have the desire to strengthen your rotator cuffs, but if you never have before, odds are you don’t know how to effectively train your rotator cuffs. I’ve already mentioned the weight and rep ranges, but one of the most important aspects is range of motion. If you train your rotator cuff inside a limited range of motion, then you should only see the benefits of stability within that range of motion. You can get the largest range of motion on the bulk rotator cuff exercises, with the exception of lateral raise variations, by maintaining a 90 degree angle between your forearm and your humerus or upper arm. If you hold your arm straight out and turn it, you feel almost no impact on your rotator cuff, but if you hold it at a right angle, rotating your forearm, you should feel about a thousand percent difference on your rotator cuff.

Since rotator cuff exercises are best learned by video or picture I will recommend either my site or YouTube instead of boring you with long written descriptions of how to perform them. Hopefully this will help to add more iron to your lifts, good luck!