Dumbbell Shoulder Press and Loading

[inhalexhale]

Hey Mark.

I saw your recommendation for loading the dumbbell bench press. I recently started doing dumbbell overhead presses as my main shoulder lift. Loading it was fine at first with a quick clean, but as the weight gets heavier I wondered if that way of loading it could cause some kind of injury.

Any tips on loading/unloading the Overhead DBP, or its execution in general? Cleaning heavy DB's to the shoulder ok?

Thanks!

[Mark Rippetoe]

This is the main limitation of the exercise. How else do you get them in place? Get two stupid guys to hand them to you while they stand on benches?

[inhalexhale]

But what if those guys are so stupid they drop them on my head?

I see what you mean about the limitation. I guess when cleaning them is no longer an option it's time to return to barbells.

[Andy Baker (KSC)]

This is the main reason why most guys who do heavy db shoulder presses wind up doing them seated.

In another life time, I routinely worked up to seated db shoulder presses with 120's for sets of 6. When I made the switch from "bodybuilding" to actual strength training my strength on that particular exercise had little to no carryover to the press, as I think I remember 165x5 being a struggle.

Having spent a lot of time on both exercises, I'm not sure there are a ton of good reasons to have heavy db presses the focus of your shoulder training.