What's Your Ratio?

If you struggle with your posture, your pressing power, or your shoulder health, you need to be doing as many face pulls as possible throughout the week.

For optimal shoulder health, your weekly pull-to-push ratios should break down to 2:1 for the average person, or up to 3:1 if you sit for prolonged periods of time or you have an injury history around the shoulders, neck, or upper back. Due to the restorative range of motion that the face pull brings your shoulders, you truly can't get enough of this type of movement.

So how do we get in that much "pull" volume? Add movements like the banded face pull into your normal programming in superset fashion. Between sets of pressing or direct shoulder work, simply add in 5-15 reps of banded face pulls in a post-fatigue type setup in order to maximize the trainability of the upper back (working into those ratios) while not adding any more joint or CNS stress into the equation.

Adding in banded face pulls throughout your dynamic warm-up in superset schemes can also skyrocket your overall pulling volume, again without doing a ton more highly stressful pulling movements like rows, deadlifts or high-angle vertical pulling.

Sprinkling in banded face pulls between your sets of direct shoulder work not only helps solidify your programming ratios, but they'll also elicit the metabolic pump effect. Any time you can maximize the localized blood flow into the tissue to extend a set without adding any more joint stress, that's a win for shoulder health.