Building Strength with the Behind-the-Neck Overhead Press

This past year I spent a month straight in the hospital due to internal bleeding caused by my chronic portal vein thrombosis (PVT). Veins in my stomach and esophagus burst and I had to be rushed to the hospital where I spent weeks on the threshold between life and death, losing copious amounts of blood intermittently and being unable to eat for days at a time. I entered weighing around 102 kilograms, but the grueling process took its toll, and although they were able to save my life and stitch me back together, I had lost about 17 kg of lean mass by the time I left the hospital at the end of July.

Gaining the weight and particularly the strength back has been slow work but I’ve managed to put back on about 12 kg of muscle and get my 5 rep max on the bench press back up to over 105 kg (it was previously around 120 kg). When I got out of the hospital I was incredibly weak and frail and most of my strength had left me. The weakness was in no place more noticeable than in my overhead pressing. I had hit a 1 rep max of 83 kg on the strict overhead press a couple weeks before the medical incident took place. When I was released 5 weeks later, 50 kg felt like a load of massive bricks, a weight I had been able to rep out with ease just those few weeks prior. Weak and beaten I stood before the daunting and task of regaining my previous weight and strength and to that I discovered some secrets that worked quite well for me, one of which, pertaining to the overhead press, I’d like to share now.

The overhead press (OHP) is a notoriously difficult exercise. As soon as I broke the 60 kg barrier i.e. a 20 kg (45 pound plate) on each side of the bar, I began to occasionally get stares or positive comments from other gym goers and those only increasing with each added plate. I think it probably has to do with the fact that most regular gym guys bench press or incline press, and perhaps do some dumbbell shoulder presses, but very few spend significant amounts of time working on gritty task of increasing the strength in their strict OHP. So of course, in this particular movement they are weak, since the amount of anterior deltoid strength required to get out of the hole is enormous and the neural physiology isn’t adapted for the movement pattern.

At any rate, I found myself below the 50 kg mark again and wanted to get back my previous level as quickly as possible. So I decided to look for an approach that would allow me to work on the weakest part of the movement and really focus on the deltoids as opposed to the other muscle groups involved in the OHP such as the triceps from the elbow extension at lockout or the pectorals from excessive thoracic extension that typically comes with heavier weights. I looked through various exercises with diverse implements: the seated dumbbell press overhead press, various machine presses, dumbbell and cable lateral raises, but only met the criteria I was looking for, namely, a movement that was: highly stable, went through a massive range of motion, deltoid focused, and, most importantly, able to complete with maximally heavy weights. This movement was the seated behind-the-neck smith machine overhead press. I met all the criteria, the smith machine leads to an extremely stable environment, the fact that it is seated means you cannot help in the press by using lower body musculature, the fact that it is behind the neck gives an incredibly deep stretch and focus on the front deltoids and finally, it is an easy exercise to incrementally overload with plates and thus weight.

So, my pressing program over this period consisted of two overhead pressing days a week. After about two months or so of slowing easing back in to weightlifting - I had to be careful since my body still needed time to heal from all the surgeries I had undergone - I added this exercise on my second pressing day of the week. It wasn’t long - i.e. a matter of 2-3 weeks - until I really noticed my pressing strength increasing overall as well as particularly in my strict OHP. I was able to add about 2 kg to my OHP week over weak and over the course of the next two months I was able to get my 1RM OHP back to over 70 kg.

Now there could many factors that caused this. It could have been due to the fact that my nervous system and muscle memory just grew back and any exercise would have had the same effect - a dumbbell overhead press or a cable front raise - the main reason for the fast progress was just eating food and letting muscle regrow. It could have been the fact that I was doing my OHP 1 day a week and that on the other day, because I was training a weaker position, I was forced to use less weight and less to a better stress-adaptation-recovery pattern for my particular genetics. I could have been mainly due to just eating more food. Regardless, I think there is some reason to believe that the exercise itself was also a factor. It allows me to load up heavy weights in a compromised position and thus maximally train the nervous system and put the a lot of stretch and stress on the front deltoids in a heavily weighted scenario, which we know is also very beneficial for hypertrophy.

So if you’re looking for a variation for the OHP, you’re looking to gain strength and size, and you haven’t tried it yet, let me suggest some form of the seated behind-the-neck overhead press. Start putting it in your workouts for a mesocycle or two and see if it doesn’t lead improved strength in the OHP, especially getting out of the hole.