Landmine Press Benefits – Great Shoulder Exercise!

The landmine press is performed with a barbell and landmine attachment. It is a great unilateral shoulder exercise that is both fun and challenging. This exercise can also serve to be beneficial for a variety of goals such as strength, hypertrophy and power!

Let’s talk about the different landmine press benefits and how they relate to your training! Starting with the main one, its great versatility!

The Landmine Press is a Versatile Exercise:

The landmine press is an extremely versatile exercise in the sense that it can work on a variety of goals, whichever ones you may have! From strength to hypertrophy to power, it is great for all of them. Not many movements can say they have this benefit. Let’s start with strength and power seeing as they go hand in hand.

Performing this exercise heavy is great because it is a unilateral movement, so it really challenges the stability and strength of your shoulders. It can also work well to highlight any muscle imbalances you may have. Being able to use strength quickly and apply force is also vital to the completeness of a lifter. If you add a thrust from the lower body in this exercise, it can help to move the bar with speed which will assist in its power training benefits! Once again, challenging one shoulder at a time is also beneficial to teach each shoulder how to produce power by themselves.

For hypertrophy, this exercise is great for targeting the front delt, but also the lateral delt as it is performed unilaterally, thus demanding more stability from it. I find this exercise is great for working in the 8-12 rep range for hypertrophy. The unilateral nature of this exercise also allows you to focus on one shoulder at a time, and gives you the capability to bring up a lagging side if needed!

Unilateral Nature:

I talked about the many benefits that come from the unilateral nature of this exercise above. Allow me to elaborate on these. When performing an exercise in a unilateral fashion, you allow yourself to challenge stability more, isolate one side to work on muscle imbalances, and it often works on core stability more efficiently, especially if you’re performing the exercise while standing.

Challenging the stability of a muscle or joint is critical for optimal performance during strength training as you need to be able to stabilize the heavy loads you will be lifting! Having the ability to bring up a lagging side is also crucial for the efficiency of your strength to ensure the weight is being moved evenly. This is also beneficial for hypertrophy reasons to work on symmetry in one’s physique.

Lastly, because this exercise is typically performed on your feet and unilaterally, it places a large demand on your core stability. This is because the taller you get, the more uneasy you stand, thus requiring more core stability to counter-act this. Performing the exercise with one hand places a rotational stress on your body as the weight is pulling you in one direction, thus requiring the obliques to be heavily engaged. This is a major benefit as core stability is crucial in just about everything we do, especially when we strength train!

Exercise Progressions:

With some exercises, it is extremely difficult for beginners to perform them. It may also be an exercise where it is difficult to progress from an easy to a more challenging stage. With that being said, the landmine press has plenty of options. One main way to accomplish this progression is to start with a kneeling two-handed version, then a kneeling one-handed version. From there, going into a standing two-hand version and finishing with the full-on standing unilateral landmine press. Let’s explain why this is an effective way to progress the exercise!

When kneeling, you reduce the demand on core stability, allowing you to focus on performing the exercise properly. The two hands part allows you to have more balance while you are trying to get the hang of things. Progressing to the one hand version makes it slightly more challenging as it demands more balance, however, you are still kneeling so there isn’t as much core stability demand as you would have while standing.

When you stand up, you require more core stability, as we talked about before, which allows for a good progression and puts you in a good spot to transition to the full movement. Once you transition from two hands while standing to one hand, you are at the peak of the movement progression. There is a large demand for core stability as you must maintain balance throughout the movement.

If progressions are something you need to do, then transition to the next progression phase when you feel comfortable with your performance in the current phase. Don’t get too comfortable, if you want to see results, you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Always practice good safety precautions though, do not do things that will increase your risk for injury!

Wrapping Up:

Overall, the landmine press is a great exercise to work on strength, hypertrophy as well as power with numerous ways to tailor the exercise towards your goals! It has a great advantage of being performed unilaterally as well! Lastly, it is a fantastic exercise to be done if you are a beginner as it is almost a guarantee that you will be able to find a progression phase that works for you!

With that being said, give the landmine press a try, it’s a great exercise! I thank you for taking the time to read this article, as always, if you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to leave them below and I will be sure to reply!

Until Next Time,

Kohl Johnson

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