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Stability Ball Chest Press
Stability Ball Chest Press is an effective bodyweight exercise perfect for strengthening the chest, triceps, and shoulders. This exercise can be performed at home and requires a stability ball and a set of light dumbbells. To perform the Stability Ball Chest Press, lie back onto the stability ball with the dumbbells in-hand. Keeping your feet firmly planted on the floor and your spine in a neutral position, bend your elbows out to the sides, being sure to keep them at a
Transcript
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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, and we're working on our chest resistance
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...blank
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training. In this video we're going to do a progression from a video we did
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previously; we did a dumbbell chest press. Now, in that video we used a bench and
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then we went through our neural continuum of bilateral, alternating, and unilateral.
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In this video we're going to take those progressions a step farther by taking
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that nice stable base of a bench, removing it, and replacing it with the
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unstable environment of a stability ball. So I'm going to have my friend Laura come out and help
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me demonstrate this exercise. I'm going to go ahead and have her sit on this ball. First
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mistake that people make is usually they try to get into a position without the
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dumbbells, make sure you have your dumbbells. Roll out to a position like
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you're doing a ball bridge, which is our first queuing. I'm going to make
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sure that she's in line with her kinetic chain checkpoints: feet, knees, hips, and
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shoulders are straight. Most of the weight is
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centered between her shoulder blades, so it's on her upper back. Just like our
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ball bridge her glutes should be squeezed like she's got a dollar bill between her
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cheeks. We want her hips nice and stable, as well as drawn in at the belly button,
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so that her spine is nice and stable. From there it's just a chest press. So
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I'm going to have Laura go ahead and push up into our chest press. Notice her
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shoulders are nice and stable, down and back, and as she pushes up she's
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going into protraction, but keeping her shoulders depressed. Laura is doing a
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great job. Now if she had a little bit of upper-body dysfunction I could go to a
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sagittal plane press. So Laura's going to drop those weights close to her
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rib cage, and then she's going to push up, just like she'd push open a door. So
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she comes to here, and then pushes up. What that does is it maintains a little
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bit more space between the humeral head and the acromion shelf, so if she has any
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sort of biceps or superspinatis tendonitis, we're maintaining enough room
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that we don't continue that inflammatory process. Now, of course, Laura's upper body
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dysfunction is almost non-existent. She has great upper body extensibility
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and neuromuscular control, so we can go back to our traditional transverse plane
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chest press. Of course, the advantage of being in a transverse plane press, we get a lot
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more pec fibers involved, a lot more motor unit recruitment from our
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pectoralis major. She's looking good as far as this progression goes, so I might
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go ahead and step it up a notch by having her go alternating. Now, in an
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alternating press we create a torque force that is trying to flip Laura over.
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Which means all of this, that glutes tight thing, all of a sudden becomes really hard.
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That abs tight or that drawn in thing, becomes really really hard because the
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weight is trying to spin or over. She's doing a great job. You might have to
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queue somebody to keep their forearms straight up. One thing people like to do
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in the alternating press is either collapse on one side to try to keep that
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weight centered, we want to keep them out here, as well as the arm that's straight
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they like to pivot it out. We're going to try to challenge them and make them get
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here, so forearms perpendicular to the floor. Great, and Laura's even got this
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down. So what I might do with Laura is go ahead and take one dumbbell away,
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and now she doesn't even have a counterbalance. Now
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all this torque force that's created to try to flip her over just increased a whole
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bunch more, so she's got to get even tighter here, draw-in even more here. Now, I
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have seen a very creative progression that I'm going to warn against. I have seen
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some people try to perform an incline ball chest press, and although
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that makes a lot of sense in the chest, - let's go ahead and demonstrate this,
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I'm going to go ahead and give you two dumbbells back - they drop down
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here, almost sit down on their heels. Although this is an incline chest
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press, it is very creative, what's going on here I'm not okay with.
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All of a sudden her glutes have to literally disengage to get her down
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in that position which means her spine is no longer all that stable. Although she
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might be able to draw-in, this is not the motor pattern I want to reinforce. If we're
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going to do it instable, or unstable incline press, I might just have her
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just do a standing cable chest press, or something different than this, because
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this is just not a position I want to reinforce. Let's see those dumbbels.
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So, the last thing I will mention for this particular exercise is this is a
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stability exercise, which means we're going to use this progression when Laura
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is doing her stability endurance training. I'm not going to use this
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during her strength training. This isn't something I'm going to give her really
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heavy dumbbells for, where she's going to be doing 12 reps or less. I'm going to throw
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this at her when the weights are a little lighter, the rep range is a little
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higher, and my goal is going to be increased neuromuscular control. I hope
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you appreciate the video, the form queues, all the progressions we went through.
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