Joint Range Of Motion Chart: Fill & Download for Free

There are a lot of benefits to the decline bench press over the flat bench press.The default regurgitated answer is“the decline bench press works more lower pec than the flat bench press”.I’ll…address that later, so keep reading.It was actually the go-to chest movement of 6x Mr. Olympic Dorian Yates for many years.Most people get less impingement at the shoulder when decline bench pressing due to the angle of pressing. If you have a hooked acromion joint, flat bench will probably rip your shoulders to pieces, not to mention incline or overhead work.In fact, when a powerlifter arches, they are trying to turn a flat bench press into a decline bench press at the shoulder joint-because it is safer, and you are stronger that way.If you aren’t a powerlifter, why not just do decline in the first place? You won’t have to contort your spine into a ridiculous position. This works best if you have a partner to help unrack it-and start light as it feels different.So, is the decline bench really an effective movement?Deciding Between the Flat, Decline, and Incline Bench Press for Your Goals - BarBendEach different group of columns is a different part of the range of motion, divided up into eccentric (lowering) and concentric (lifting).So, 0–25 on the far left of the chart is starting the lowering, 26–50 is continuing to lower until halfway down, 51–75 and 76–100 are the rest of the lowering phase, with 100 resting on the chest.In the concentric, it’s reversed, with 0–25 being just off the chest, 26–50 and 51–75 being mid-range and 76–100 being the lockout at the end of the lift.From left to right within each group of columns is15% decline benchFlat bench30% incline45% inclineAs you might have guessed, the decline bench press elicits more lower pec activity the majority of the time, with the flat a little less, shallow incline even less, with high incline the least. No surprises there.Look at the upper pec, though.During the entire eccentric, the decline bench press beats the high incline press! It even beats the low incline most of the eccentric, and it’s pretty comparable to the flat bench.During the concentric, the incline presses win off the chest and through the mid-range, but the decline actually beats them near lockout.This makes sense-if you mime a decline bench press near lockout, you can get a sick upper pec contraction-not so with a incline.So, I’d argue that the decline is not only a MUCH better lower pec movement, it’s a better upper pec movement than incline as well-due to higher activation during the eccentric and at peak concentric contraction.That combined with the fact that it’s easier on the shoulder joint AND most people are stronger makes it a pretty clear winner.Incline presses still came out on top for triceps and front delt, but for chest, decline is king for most people.Don’t have a decline bench?Assuming that it’s not bolted to the floor, stick a plate or two or three under one end of a flat bench. Make sure it’s stable.You now have a decline bench.Check out my new Space, follow me on Instagram for daily diet and training tips! Subscribe to my YouTube channel for longer form, informative content.

Sometimes I think about buying heroin to manage my pain. In the current environment, I’m not sure I’m going to get help any other way.Before I had health insurance, I meticulously charted my pain. I wanted to know what was going on, and if there was anything I could do to solve the problem.Back then, I was reaching the point of being unable to speak almost nightly. Some nights, I couldn’t follow the plots of movies or understand what people were saying to me. The pain was that bad.But the charting revealed an unexpected result. Yes, I had sources of constant, baseline pain. But that pain wasn’t terrible.The real pain, the pain that struck me dumb and made me fear my vacuum cleaner, was the result of my joints hyperextending, subluxing, and dislocating repeatedly.That looked like a problem I could solve.I researched normal human range of motion, and on days when I adhered as strictly as possible to this knowledge, I experienced less pain. A lot less pain.But many, many tasks cannot be performed without subluxations, no matter how much attention I pay to my movements. Others, like vacuuming, always involved taking breaks to put my shoulders back in place.And there was another, unexpected downside: When focusing that much on how to walk, type, sit, and hug, it became very difficult for me to experience or engage with the world.I could be in excruciating pain and live a rich life, or I could be in mild pain and contemplate nothing but how I should be moving my body.As dilemmas go, it was a humdinger.I’ve seen doctors in the meantime, but so far, little has changed.Physical therapy was great. It increased the amount and number of painful activities I can perform, though it caused a net increase in pain. I was excited about being more functional, even as my pain levels rose.But my insurance only pays for a few weeks of physical therapy a year. The amount I can learn from them is limited severely by this restriction. And, well, it didn’t exactly help with the pain.The drugs the doctors have recommended since then have helped less than Tylenol.Mind you, Tylenol helps if I take it early in the day, before my pain becomes serious. If I am already in notable pain, I feel no relief. I’m not saying their drugs were useless to me, just on par with Tylenol.I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t frustrated.Every year that my pain is written off as a side effect of anxiety, or not severe enough to warrant narcotics, or too chronic to be treated well by narcotics, I can’t work.I want to work.If I truly can’t work, I’d like to be reliably present in my interpersonal relationships, rather than routinely being rendered incoherent by pain.I’m not asking for zero pain. I just want to be able to think straight. I’d like to be able to clean my house without needing to lie down for hours in an attempt to recover.So sometimes I think, “Opiates work. I know opiates work. Maybe I should skip the doctors and figure out where to buy some. Surely a friend of a friend of a friend would know someone who could help me out.”It would risk addiction. With the variable mixing of fentanyl into modern batches of heroin, it would risk death.But it would treat the pain, and if those side effects could be avoided, it might let me live an ordinary life.I want that desperately.I don’t know anyone who deals heroin, but I do know my story isn’t unique.We like to think of legitimate pain patients and opioid addicts as different groups of people. Addicts don’t need pills, and ruin it for the legitimate patients. That’s what they say.But the fact is that opioid use will trigger addiction in a certain proportion of the population, whether those individuals seek opioids for legitimate pain, the high, or both.Many addicts use more than is required to treat their pain, but legitimately need opioids to manage their pain, as nothing weaker accomplishes that goal.These people are both addicts and legitimate patients.If I form an addiction when on opioids, whether I get them from a doctor or the street, it will be the same story.If I’m unlucky, I’ll have both problems.Do I want to take that risk?No, not really.But I want to live, and the extent of pain I routinely experience makes that almost impossible.Everyone’s a real victim here. Addicts, whether they have a mental illness or a physical illness as well, are being stigmatized and underserved. Pain patients, in these glorious times, are being cast into that lot, and treated the same despicable way we treat addicts.And all of this is happening while the drugs on the street are stronger and less predictable than ever before.It’s horrifying.

We were on our third day of family vacation in Ireland. My parents had paid someone to help carry out luggage upstairs in the little B&B we were staying in and I (having just gotten out of a long term hospital four days prior) offered to carry it down to make a little extra spending money. The last suitcase was one of those little roll along ones that can fit under the plane seat and it sent me flying down the stairs. I’ve worked with horses my entire life so I instinctively went into a tuck and roll which saved my neck but not my arm. I went to push myself up on the arm I landed on and searing pain shot through it. We went to the emergency department where they discovered I had fractured the radial head in my left arm and there was something wrong with my wrist but they weren’t sure what so they referred me to a hand specialist in Waterford, our next stop. He actually did part of his medical schooling in a university about 20mins from where we lived in NC which was both ironic and reassuring. He agreed that something was wrong in my wrist, but wasn’t sure what and he didn’t want to ruin the rest of our trip so he personally put me in custom a airplane-safe cast to handle swelling and sent my records with me to see someone when we got back stateside.And that’s where the problems began. The first ortho I saw ordered an MRI. His conclusion was “it’s still swollen and it looks a little fuzzy on the Scans but I’m not sure. We have a resident starting on Monday who is thinking about specializing in arms though so we can ask him”. Both of my parents have medical backgrounds (physical therapy and medical social worker) and they weren’t thrilled with that answer so we asked for an out of clinic referral. I was sent to a hand and wrist practice renowned for their surgeons. We thought we might finally get some answers.The first doc I saw there was the one with first availability. He looked at the records I brought in, felt around on my hand for less than a minute, then turned to my PARENTS- completely ignoring me- and told them “well she’s a teenage girl, sometimes they get ‘pains’ (complete with air quotes) but they get over it”. This didn’t sit well with them and my former social worker mom went into full advocate mode and somehow convinced him to send me to the in-office occupational therapy department.After six weeks of twice weekly OT, my hand was still swollen and my range of motion was almost non-existent. My OT called my mom in one day and said we needed to try to get a referral to the head of the practice because something was definitely wrong and the doc I was seeing has treated lots of teenage patients the same way. She flat out said he was the last one there anyone between 12–20 should see because he was so hardheaded about teens. Again my mom went into social worker mode and got him to send me to the head of the practice for a second opinion.He was PHENOMENAL. He took time to look at everything in my chart, including the notes from OT. He spent over an hour talking with me during the first appointment. He spent three months ordering every imaginable test and scan to try to figure out what was happening. Finally he said the best option was to open me up. Seven months after the initial injury, he went in surgically and found the problem. I had torn a ligament that had folded over on itself (like the collar of a polo shirt). I have a connective tissue disorder and the ligament had folded at such an angle it didn’t stand out as a problem with any imaging. The problem was that since the last doc sat around doing nothing for so long, the entire joint was shot. It took over six hours to trim out the ligament (was no saving it and with the connective tissue disorder, it wasn’t serving much purpose anyway). If he had listened instead of writing me off, if he had listened to the OT who was telling him something was wrong, if he had done any type of imaging when I presented to him, the tear would have been visible because it had been enough time between then and the initial injury for the major internal swelling to have subsided.Thanks to him, I’ve had to have four other surgeries on my wrist (with the head of practice doc), including a wrist fusion. We had to take the entire ligament out, shave off calcium deposits in the joint, cut out scar tissue from in between the joint, and graft muscle in to give me some grip strength after the fusion. It’s been almost 12yrs since my fall. I have CRPS now. I live with severe pain daily. There are days I can’t use my hand at all and even brushing against something is excruciating. I can’t play handbells anymore. I can barely play my violin and viola. I have to be extremely cautious of which hand I’m using at the barn with different horses because I can’t grip a lunge line tight enough in my left hand if a horse tries to run out of the circle or spooks. And for a time, I honestly started to wonder if it really was all in my head because he didn’t believe me. Thanks to his negligence, I’m terrified of going to new doctors because there’s that little voice saying that they’re just going to write me off too or argue about the connective tissue disorder or even just refuse to see me. And for someone with as many health problems as I have, having that distrust and fear is dangerous. Two years ago, I developed sepsis so severe I coded three times when I finally went to the hospital because I had refused to go for so long. I only went because my mom tricked me and said we were just going to urgent care. They asked why had I not come in earlier and when I told them I hadn’t even agreed to come in this time and, they were shocked. And in a strange way, that just solidified my distrust even more- they were so surprised that a doctor had written me off as just a ‘teen girl with pains’. It was like they couldn’t believe any doctor would do that when doctors blow off patients every. Single. Day. I know I’m not the only one to experience it and I know I won’t be the last to deal with it. What started as a wrist injury ended up almost costing me my life because of what one doctor said and how he treated me.