Our weight room was in a hallway.

Welcome to the minor leagues!

We had a cable column machine, a rack of dumbbells and some medicine balls lined up along the wall, which was also right next to a batting cage.

This is where our professional baseball players would train.

On this particular day, Markus, our star pitcher from Germany walked into my “weight room” right after he pitched 7 great innings in the game.

“How we doing big man?” I asked.

Without saying a word, he just pointed to a spot on his shoulder.

I knew what this meant.

His shoulder was hurting.

This wasn’t uncommon.

He had just thrown about 100 baseballs as hard as he possibly could and we were four months into the season. There were a lot of miles on that shoulder.

But was weird to me was how every single pitcher we had was coming in and complaining about pain in the exact same spot.

That was noteworthy to me.

Something we were doing in the weight room…or something that we were NOT doing might be the culprit behind this emerging pattern.

It was my second year in professional baseball at this point, which meant that I had seen nearly 400 baseball games and 95% of my pitchers had pain in the EXACT SAME SPOT.

“What’s going on here?” I thought.

I started to investigate our shoulder strengthening program when I noticed something.

Every baseball pitcher in the world does the same shoulder strengthening exercises.

If you go to any baseball game in America from High School to the Big Leagues, you’ll see guys doing these exercises with a band attached to a fence or with weighted baseballs.

You’ll probably even see them doing them randomly throughout the game.

But the minute I peeled back the curtain, I recognized a MASSIVE problem with these exercises.

To keep this simple and understandable, I’m going to simplify this a lot…

When these baseball players are doing these exercises, they are doing them in a way that the muscle shortens.

Think about a basic bicep curl. Before you start the motion and you are holding the dumbbells by your side, your bicep is long.

But when you begin to do the curl, the bicep is shortening. This is why when you flex your biceps, they look more like a ball.

The major problem here was that when you throw a baseball, the muscles we are targeting (the rotator cuff) are actually lengthening.

This meant we were strengthening these muscles in the complete opposite way that we were supposed to be strengthening them.

I immediately altered their arm strengthening routine and each pitcher that came to me pointing at their shoulder with this familiar pain, had 100% of their discomfort disappear in just a few days.

It was remarkable…and so simple.

My hallway weight room started to develop a reputation as the place where “shoulder pain goes to die.”

In fact, the other Diamondbacks affiliates started to hear rumors about what we were doing and when a new player would be transferred to our roster, they would immediately come in for our special shoulder program.

The real reason that I was able to have so much success with the shoulder is that I knew more about the shoulder than anyone else.

I looked deeper and studied more than most were willing to do.

This unlocked new secrets and strategies that brought bigger and faster results to my players.

The shoulder is a complex joint but in this blog, I’m going to show you the three keys to a bulletproof shoulder.

When I worked for the Diamondbacks, we would always have anatomy quizzes. Our favorite quiz was to see if our strength coaches could name all of the muscles that attach to the shoulder blade.

There are 17 of them.

Here they are...

Let’s look briefly at that last one. The omohyoid. The freaking omohyoid. This ridiculous muscle attaches all the way up under your jaw and somehow makes its way down to the shoulder blade.

But here’s why that’s important.

Imagine you were operating a string puppet. But instead of just a few strings to move, you had 17.

Imagine trying to coordinate all of that movement?

OK, I’ll drop the sassiness because you never have to do an omohyoid curl. But you do need to pay attention to this balancing act so you’re not destroying the health of your shoulder.

The shoulder joint, is where the humerus bone sits into the glenoid fossa (which is just a convenient indentation in the shoulder blade to hold the humerus bone in place).

If you start screwing around with these muscles and creating imbalances, this joint is going to get contorted and now you’re really playing with fire.

The labrum will take more stress than it needs, tissue becomes unnecessarily tight and, oh by the way, their is a MONSTER set of nerves called the brachial plexus right up there too that will get in on the fun and whip up some Thoracic Outlet Syndrome for you.

In short, pay attention to the balancing act.

OK, now you’re really learning the secrets.

There are two major secrets to good breathing…

This means when you take a deep breath in, your upper back and mid back should be expanding equally as the lower and upper ribs on the front.

Try it out.

Take a deep breath in and notice where the airflow goes.

95% of my readers will have 95% of their airflow going into their front lower ribs and stomach.

The other 5% of my readers are lying.

I know how you breathe because I’ve seen it a million times.

Put your hand just under your collarbone.

Sit up straight and take a deep breath in.

Does your upper chest rise with inhalation?

How about your back?

Is it even all the way around?

If you do not get equal expansion all throughout your ribcage (front, back, top and bottom), you have some serious shoulder instability.

Or as Eric Cressey, the head performance coach for the New York Yankees says, “it’s like shooting a canon out of a canoe.”

When you can get air into your upper chest (front and back), you provide a solid foundation for strength.

Try doing pushups right after you inhale. You will be much stronger and do more pushups than if you try doing pushups right after an exhale.

With lack of good airflow, shoulder instability is just the beginning of your troubles. Neck and shoulder/trap tightness as well as headaches, TMJ pain and increased stress levels are just around the corner.

At some point in your life, you have probably been taught to “belly-breathe.”

This is when you inhale and try to make just your belly rise with your breath.

This hurts my head to think about.

When you breathe into your belly, your ribs don’t expand at all. This is the fast track to neck/shoulder tightness and anxiety (I’m genuinely not kidding).

You now know that you need to have 360 degree expansion of your entire rib cage when you breathe, but unless you are five-years-old, your ribs are probably pretty stubborn by now.

If you are five-years-old and reading this, please send me an e-mail. I have a job offer for you.

Like all of us, we have been breathing a certain way for decades. Your ribs have grown accustomed to your lifestyle and are not inclined to move.

One time, when I was a kid, my mom wanted me to clean my room but I kept putting it off.

Finally, she had enough and sent me up there, closed the door and told me I couldn’t come out until it was clean.

She forced my hand.

I had to get the job done.

In this case, having good abs, is like locking the door and forcing your ribs to behave.

Let’s try it out.

Take a deep breath in and then exhale all of your air…

…like ALL of it!

Don’t stop exhaling until your abs feel like Fort Knox.

Now, keeping them on Fort Knox Status Lockdown, try to inhale again.

With 100% certainty, it is REALLY FREAKING HARD for you to inhale again.

That’s because you’ve shut off the one spot where most of your airflow had been going…your belly.

Now, when you inhale, there is only one place for the air to go…the ribs. Which is exactly where we want them to go.

With each inhale, the air you breathe in will push the ribs from within and, at first, start creating small expansions.

But over time, your rib mobility will continue to improve.

So, enough of the crunches. That’s not what the abs are for!

Don’t worry, you can still have a six-pack, but you’re just not going to get it in the traditional way. You’re going to get them THE RIGHT WAY.

While all of this might sound complicated if it’s your first time reading this kind of science, inside the gym, it’s way easier than you think.

At Weight Room Wealth, all of our programs are created with these concepts in mind.

It just takes simple tweaks and adjustments to the program you’re already doing to make all the difference in the world.

And if you really want to kick it up a notch, you can use one of our programs and get EVERYTHING your body needs…not just for the shoulder.

Click the link below to learn how you can train with us and start living fully charged.

Our weight room was in a hallway.

Welcome to the minor leagues!

We had a cable column machine, a rack of dumbbells and some medicine balls lined up along the wall, which was also right next to a batting cage.

This is where our professional baseball players would train.

On this particular day, Markus, our star pitcher from Germany walked into my “weight room” right after he pitched 7 great innings in the game.

“How we doing big man?” I asked.

Without saying a word, he just pointed to a spot on his shoulder.

I knew what this meant.

His shoulder was hurting.

This wasn’t uncommon.

He had just thrown about 100 baseballs as hard as he possibly could and we were four months into the season. There were a lot of miles on that shoulder.

But was weird to me was how every single pitcher we had was coming in and complaining about pain in the exact same spot.

That was noteworthy to me.

Something we were doing in the weight room…or something that we were NOT doing might be the culprit behind this emerging pattern.

It was my second year in professional baseball at this point, which meant that I had seen nearly 400 baseball games and 95% of my pitchers had pain in the EXACT SAME SPOT.

“What’s going on here?” I thought.

I started to investigate our shoulder strengthening program when I noticed something.

Every baseball pitcher in the world does the same shoulder strengthening exercises.

If you go to any baseball game in America from High School to the Big Leagues, you’ll see guys doing these exercises with a band attached to a fence or with weighted baseballs.

You’ll probably even see them doing them randomly throughout the game.

But the minute I peeled back the curtain, I recognized a MASSIVE problem with these exercises.

To keep this simple and understandable, I’m going to simplify this a lot…

When these baseball players are doing these exercises, they are doing them in a way that the muscle shortens.

Think about a basic bicep curl. Before you start the motion and you are holding the dumbbells by your side, your bicep is long.

But when you begin to do the curl, the bicep is shortening. This is why when you flex your biceps, they look more like a ball.

The major problem here was that when you throw a baseball, the muscles we are targeting (the rotator cuff) are actually lengthening.

This meant we were strengthening these muscles in the complete opposite way that we were supposed to be strengthening them.

I immediately altered their arm strengthening routine and each pitcher that came to me pointing at their shoulder with this familiar pain, had 100% of their discomfort disappear in just a few days.

It was remarkable…and so simple.

My hallway weight room started to develop a reputation as the place where “shoulder pain goes to die.”

In fact, the other Diamondbacks affiliates started to hear rumors about what we were doing and when a new player would be transferred to our roster, they would immediately come in for our special shoulder program.

The real reason that I was able to have so much success with the shoulder is that I knew more about the shoulder than anyone else.

I looked deeper and studied more than most were willing to do.

This unlocked new secrets and strategies that brought bigger and faster results to my players.

The shoulder is a complex joint but in this blog, I’m going to show you the three keys to a bulletproof shoulder.

When I worked for the Diamondbacks, we would always have anatomy quizzes. Our favorite quiz was to see if our strength coaches could name all of the muscles that attach to the shoulder blade.

There are 17 of them.

Here they are...

Let’s look briefly at that last one. The omohyoid. The freaking omohyoid. This ridiculous muscle attaches all the way up under your jaw and somehow makes its way down to the shoulder blade.

But here’s why that’s important.

Imagine you were operating a string puppet. But instead of just a few strings to move, you had 17.

Imagine trying to coordinate all of that movement?

OK, I’ll drop the sassiness because you never have to do an omohyoid curl. But you do need to pay attention to this balancing act so you’re not destroying the health of your shoulder.

The shoulder joint, is where the humerus bone sits into the glenoid fossa (which is just a convenient indentation in the shoulder blade to hold the humerus bone in place).

If you start screwing around with these muscles and creating imbalances, this joint is going to get contorted and now you’re really playing with fire.

The labrum will take more stress than it needs, tissue becomes unnecessarily tight and, oh by the way, their is a MONSTER set of nerves called the brachial plexus right up there too that will get in on the fun and whip up some Thoracic Outlet Syndrome for you.

In short, pay attention to the balancing act.

OK, now you’re really learning the secrets.

There are two major secrets to good breathing…

This means when you take a deep breath in, your upper back and mid back should be expanding equally as the lower and upper ribs on the front.

Try it out.

Take a deep breath in and notice where the airflow goes.

95% of my readers will have 95% of their airflow going into their front lower ribs and stomach.

The other 5% of my readers are lying.

I know how you breathe because I’ve seen it a million times.

Put your hand just under your collarbone.

Sit up straight and take a deep breath in.

Does your upper chest rise with inhalation?

How about your back?

Is it even all the way around?

If you do not get equal expansion all throughout your ribcage (front, back, top and bottom), you have some serious shoulder instability.

Or as Eric Cressey, the head performance coach for the New York Yankees says, “it’s like shooting a canon out of a canoe.”

When you can get air into your upper chest (front and back), you provide a solid foundation for strength.

Try doing pushups right after you inhale. You will be much stronger and do more pushups than if you try doing pushups right after an exhale.

With lack of good airflow, shoulder instability is just the beginning of your troubles. Neck and shoulder/trap tightness as well as headaches, TMJ pain and increased stress levels are just around the corner.

At some point in your life, you have probably been taught to “belly-breathe.”

This is when you inhale and try to make just your belly rise with your breath.

This hurts my head to think about.

When you breathe into your belly, your ribs don’t expand at all. This is the fast track to neck/shoulder tightness and anxiety (I’m genuinely not kidding).

You now know that you need to have 360 degree expansion of your entire rib cage when you breathe, but unless you are five-years-old, your ribs are probably pretty stubborn by now.

If you are five-years-old and reading this, please send me an e-mail. I have a job offer for you.

Like all of us, we have been breathing a certain way for decades. Your ribs have grown accustomed to your lifestyle and are not inclined to move.

One time, when I was a kid, my mom wanted me to clean my room but I kept putting it off.

Finally, she had enough and sent me up there, closed the door and told me I couldn’t come out until it was clean.

She forced my hand.

I had to get the job done.

In this case, having good abs, is like locking the door and forcing your ribs to behave.

Let’s try it out.

Take a deep breath in and then exhale all of your air…

…like ALL of it!

Don’t stop exhaling until your abs feel like Fort Knox.

Now, keeping them on Fort Knox Status Lockdown, try to inhale again.

With 100% certainty, it is REALLY FREAKING HARD for you to inhale again.

That’s because you’ve shut off the one spot where most of your airflow had been going…your belly.

Now, when you inhale, there is only one place for the air to go…the ribs. Which is exactly where we want them to go.

With each inhale, the air you breathe in will push the ribs from within and, at first, start creating small expansions.

But over time, your rib mobility will continue to improve.

So, enough of the crunches. That’s not what the abs are for!

Don’t worry, you can still have a six-pack, but you’re just not going to get it in the traditional way. You’re going to get them THE RIGHT WAY.

While all of this might sound complicated if it’s your first time reading this kind of science, inside the gym, it’s way easier than you think.

At Weight Room Wealth, all of our programs are created with these concepts in mind.

It just takes simple tweaks and adjustments to the program you’re already doing to make all the difference in the world.

And if you really want to kick it up a notch, you can use one of our programs and get EVERYTHING your body needs…not just for the shoulder.

Click the link below to learn how you can train with us and start living fully charged.