Guides / Coaching
Programming around a client's shoulder
A practical way to keep training hard when one joint cannot. Swap the movement, not the effort.
First, the boring part. If your client has pain they have not had looked at, the answer is a doctor or a physiotherapist, not a different exercise. Nothing below is medical advice, and a coach guessing at a diagnosis helps nobody.
Swap the movement, keep the effort
The instinct when a client says their shoulder hurts is to make everything lighter. That is usually wrong. What they normally need is the same hard training, applied somewhere the joint is not complaining.
A client who cannot press overhead can still train hard. Their legs are fine. Their back is fine. Their triceps are probably fine in a different position. Losing four weeks of training everywhere because one joint is unhappy is a bad trade.
What a good swap looks like
A good substitute keeps the muscle and the difficulty, and changes the angle, the range or the grip. Some examples that usually work:
- Overhead press becomes a landmine press or an incline press at a lower angle.
- Flat barbell bench becomes a neutral grip dumbbell press.
- Wide grip pulldown becomes a neutral grip pulldown.
- Back squat becomes a front squat or a hack squat if the bar position is the problem.
What a bad swap looks like
Offering a harder version of the thing they said hurts. If a client tells you they cannot do a push up and the only options you give them are decline push ups and weighted push ups, you have not helped. That sounds obvious, and plenty of software does exactly this because it only knows how to make an exercise harder or easier, not how to make it different.
Write it down once
The most valuable thing you can do is record the limitation the day you learn about it, in a place you will see next time you write a block. Not in your head. Not in a WhatsApp thread from March.
Three months later you will not remember which shoulder it was, and your client will notice.
Keep testing carefully
Shoulders get better. Every few weeks, try one light set of the movement you removed and ask honestly how it felt. If it is fine, put it back in gradually. If it is not, wait. The swap is a detour, not the destination.
CoachBlocks keeps a notes field on every client for exactly this, and it is in front of you every time you write their next block. Start free.