World’s Most Dangerous Exercises! (UPRIGHT ROWS)

Years back I threw the upright row exercise into my 5 worst exercises of all time, and buried it in my iron graveyard. Today, I’m revisiting the upright row and all its variations to see if it needs to be dug up or buried even deeper as I cover my “World’s Most Dangerous Exercises”, continuing right here at the shoulder joint.

When I included this originally, I gave my reasons for doing so. Remember, there is no personal axe to grind for me against any particular exercise or movement. I start out with a blank slate with them all and unless given a reason to dislike them…love them all! As a physical therapist, I am trained to look at an exercise on its own merit and determine whether it is something that is safe first and foremost and capable of producing results.

In the case of the upright row, this shoulder exercise is one that needs to remain six feet under. Here’s why.

The anatomy of the shoulder joint is such that there is a limited amount of space above the ball (in the ball and socket) for the bone itself as well as the other many important structures such as the rotator cuff tendons, bursa, and biceps tendon. When the shoulder joint is internally rotated (as you do with the upright row) you are rotating the greater tuberosity on the humerus directly into the joint, leaving less room for all of these structures.

If on the other hand you externally rotated your upper arm at the shoulder joint, you would do the exact opposite. External rotation at the shoulder joint creates extra room for the ball to move within the socket and still leave room for the other structures mentioned before.

When performing the upright row exercise however, you are forcing your shoulder joint not only into internal rotation but you are combining it with elevation. This simply does not anatomically sit well or rank as a safe motion (especially when you consider the repetitive nature in which you do it from set to set, workout to workout. Changing the hand position to be wider and using an ez curl bar, while slight improvements, do not come close to fixing the problem. The only way to overcome the inadequacy of the upright row is to stop using barbells and instead use dumbbells and perform something called the high pull.

The high pull allows you to get your hands up and back behind your body when you lift them. This is due to the external rotation that can be obtained at the shoulder joint rather than the negatively impacting internal rotation. Because the dumbbells are not fixed in place or connected via a bar that cannot pass through your body, you can maneuver them this way to get the relief the shoulder joint is looking for to make this exercise safe.

Mobility doesn’t solve the issue either. Increasing shoulder mobility at the expense of stability in a different part of the shoulder is not solving the problem. The bottom line is, this exercise is a bad exercise that deserves to stay buried in the iron graveyard. There are many other options for developing the delts and certainly the traps.

What often happens? With upright row, upper arms are in position of internal rotation and abduction. If you naturaly have tight subacromial space (or even big tendons) it could be shoulder unfriendly position because rotator cuff muscle (m. supraspinatus) can stuck between acromion and humeral head (upper arm bone). In that stuck position people feel strong pain in the middle of the shoulder (impingement syndrome).

Things become even worse if you are doing upright row with full range of motion (elbows above shoulders) because of less subacromial space (plus if you got some level of kyphosis it’s totally disaster)!

If you LOVE this shoulder exercise and have never felt pain during execution, I advise elbow-almost-horizontally end position (elbows little below shoulders) using dumbbells. In narrow grip position (with regular barbell) there is also problem with wrist joint unfriendly forces (you can hurt some ligaments because wrist and forearm aren’t inline).

But, honestly, there is a ton of better arms, delts and upper traps exercises (face pull, shoulder press variations, push-press variations, shrugs, rowing variations – bent-over BB row is a much more shoulder friendly option for example…)!

You can check your shoulders with shoulder mobility clearing test (FMS). If it hurts, most probably you have problem mentioned above…

Shoulder mobility clearing test (FMS)

Maybe you have problem with inflamed bursa (bursitis).. Or m. biceps femoris long head impingement – maybe tendinitis (but rarely – because it’s mostly problem with external rotation in position of humeral abduction).

Some people could even have a problem with power clean and snatch variations (similar second part of the moves – middle to end of the second pull); shoulder press variations (not enough upward scapular rotation because of some muscles stiffness – rhomboids among others)… you never know… everything depends on individual anatomy! It make sense that pain could occur earlier during upper arm abduction if shoulder blade can’t rotate upward properly (m. supraspinatus “hit the roof” earlier ). Among other things, that’s why shoulder blade needs proper mobility around the rib cage, not just stability.

Plus if you got weak rotator cuff muscles pain could be felt even earlier during humeral abduction. Namely, the main role of rotator cuff muscles is stabilizing humeral ball inside shallow socket. In the case of weak rotator cuff, delts (agonists) could pull up humeral ball a bit during exercise execution so pinching may occur earlier. A proper strengthening of rotator cuff muscles is the something most important when it comes to shoulder health today in general (pinching is so often/common today among various population because, among other things, we have an epidemic of kyphosis – Upper Crossed Syndrome). Of course, don’t forget that we need to strengthen all other around shoulder blade muscles also!