Shoulder fatigue during bench press

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Hello,

After going from dumbbell pressing to bench pressing in january, my shoulders tend to give in and call it a day before the pecs do. I know for a fact that my technique is good and I've made excellent gains in the chest area, but when I try to shoulder press afterwards, I can barely lift anything.

If I shoulder press before benching, I can lift a "decent amount" even though my shoulders lag behind the rest of my body.

Any hints? (Shoulder pressing before bench pressing is out of the question; I've made to much progress on the bench to be motivated for this ).

You should do shoulder(military) press on a different day than bench press. Shoulder press is also better to do on a machine since the bar is right over your head. My routine usually goes something like this:

bench press/cardio
rest 3 days
military press/cardio
rest 3 days
bench press/cardio
rest 3 days
dumbbell bench press/cardio
rest 3 days

I'll sometimes alternate and do bench press twice in a row too instead of shoulder press or dumbbell bench press.

Not surprising. In both exercises, your shoulders are "shouldering" most of the load and your pecs are along for the ride. Since muscle-building is basically a process of breaking down muscles and then renourishing them, it makes sense that you are developing shoulder fatigue before pec fatigue. I would suggest varying up your routine so that you switch between dumbbell and bench presses as your first exercise. In other words, do dumbbell presses first one day and then bench presses first on your next scheduled "chest/shoulder" day. Good luck.

** Edit - Misread the OP. Thought you were going from dumbbell presses to bench presses on the same day, but now I see that the fatigue is during shoulder presses. My bad.

1. You are over doing it. Slack off a little to give your shoulders a rest, or you will injure them, perhaps seriously.

2. You are concentrating too much on one set of muscles, while ignoring others. You need to--carefully--start exercising the muscles of your upper shoulder and upper back area. Your body needs to be in balance this way. Currently it's not. While the muscle group you have been working on has done well, they are not an isolated part of your body. They are next to other groups of muscles and all of them have to work together to some extent. You will keep having trouble with your shoulders until you learn to stop over taxing them with your current exercises, and learn instead, to--moderately--exercise them with routines designed for those muscles.

I don't really bench ever, as I sorta don't like it. Anyway, if your shoulders are giving out, perhaps you could do incline benching, or even better, do standing overhead presses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDulY9AJc_c Like that. I don't know though, I don't really lift weights for individual bodyparts, in the bodybuilder kinda perspective. My guess would be dumbell benching sorta works more like dumbell flies, putting more stress on the pecs, but barbell puts more on the shoulders, maybe with dumbells, since your arm can freely move, it stretches the pecs more, and yeah...

I love overhead presses, though, fun fun exercise. Not a fan of benching, though...

The best bet for you is to train chest and back together and isolate shoulders and arms on another day, a split program might be best for you. Have a rest day in between and take some time to stretch on that rest day.

You shouldn't be lifting heavily more than 3-4 times a week but I don't think you need to rest for 3 days. Definitely warm up though, I have found yoga and stretching to be great when it comes to preventing injury.