The Strict Press is a fantastic exercise for working the shoulders, triceps and believe it or not even the core. It's one we use often with our Glasgow Personal Training clients and during our Learn To Lift Glasgow Bootcamps.

Here's some pointers on what a good Strict Overhead Press should look like.

Top tips for your Strict Overhead Press

🔹Grip the bar just outside of your shoulders. This is a good guideline for most people, although this position may very from person to person based on your own particular build and proportions. What we are trying to achieve here is a position where the wrists and elbows are aligned with each other. Too wide a grip and the elbows will be outside the wrists and too narrow will result in the wrists being inside the elbows. Stacking these joints is a very strong and efficient position to press from.

🔹Bar sitting in the base of your palm. Much like bench pressing, setting the bar in the base of your palm will prevent the wrists from cocking back and avoid leaking out force through this inefficient position. It also helps put your wrists in a safer position from the point of view of avoiding pain and injury.

🔹Feet set roughly shoulder width apart. This helps create a nice solid and stable base for you to press from.

🔹Knees locked, legs straight. There is no leg drive in a strict press. By using your legs to drive the bar up you change the movement into a Push Press, which is a fantastic exercise in its own right, but it changes the emphasis of the movement somewhat away from the muscles of the upper body to the legs. In this instance keeping the movement strict and driving it with the shoulders and triceps is our goal.

🔹Core braced, glutes squeezed. As with other major lifts such as Squats and Deadlifts, your strongest and safest position to lift from is with a properly braced core (think taking a big breath into your stomach, tensing your stomach as if your are about to get hit in it and expanding your sides in quick succession).

Squeezing your glutes can also be a big help in creating the stable body position we want for a good Strict Overhead Press and helps enhance your power by displacing force from the ground up.

🔹Bar over the back of you head at lockout. This creates a nice alignment through your body to support a heavy weight overhead and is what we consider to be the correct end point of each rep. Think of pushing your head through slightly as the bar passes your face when pressing it to help achieve this position at lockout.

Learn more and put it into practice

If you can tick the boxes on the points above you will most likely have a very nice looking Strict Overhead Press. However, this isn't an exhaustive list and we will be looking at some other top tips such as bar path in future posts.

If you want some specific coaching on lifts such as the Strict Overhead press and want to learn how to integrate them into your training, take a look at our Personal Training Glasgow and Glasgow Bootcamp pages.

Happy overhead pressing team!