The Kettlebell Overhead Press

What is it good for?

The kettlebell overhead press is the most straight-forward of all the overhead lifts and is great for the following:

• Establishing good overhead lockout position
• Establishing shoulder and core stability in overhead lockout
• Developing shoulder and triceps strength/strength endurance
• Getting the kettlebell overhead for a range of other exercises such as overhead lunges
• Establishing the correct bell path for push presses and jerks
• Providing an overhead pushing component in balanced training programming

Where to begin?

Just like with the clean, you first want to understand your two “targets” – the beginning and end points of the movement.  The targets for the overhead press are rack position and overhead lockout.

Rack position

This post on the clean goes through how to find your rack position in detail, and the videos below will guide you through the process.

For both safety and effective overhead pressing, it’s really important to get your rack position right.  A stable rack position provides for a stable base for overhead pressing, a stable base will make for a strong press whereas an unstable press will set you up for a shaky press.

Things like getting the handle position correct on your hand become especially important for overhead lifts because any instability in the hand or wrist overhead will travel down the rest of the body affecting shoulders and back.  Due to its shape, the way you hold the kettlebell (excluding things like holding it bottoms up) means it is effectively stuck on your hand.  So, if something goes wrong overhead you’re attached to the kettlebell (it’s not like holding a dumbbell or barbell overhead where you can drop it if you have to) and what happens next will largely be dictated by the kettlebell, not you.  Therefore, correct handle position on your hand to maximise stability is crucial for safe overhead pressing.

Overhead lockout – screening for mobility

Once you’ve got your rack position sorted you can start looking at your overhead lockout position.

Before getting a kettlebell overhead, you want to make sure you have the requisite range of motion.  You need good shoulder and thoracic mobility to lock out a kettlebell properly, and a good number of people will need to work on this before pressing a kettlebell overhead.  Lower back mobility can also limit your ability to get into a good overhead lockout position with the kettlebell so if your lower back or glutes are tight they'll need some work before getting the kettlebell overhead.

To test whether or not you have the mobility to get a kettlebell overhead safely, start by extending your arm overhead with your arm locked out completely, your arm vertical (so not drifting off to one side) and your biceps roughly in line with your ear.  With this arm position you want to be able to get a slight anterior pelvic tilt (so you want to be able to rotate the pelvis forward slightly), but you don’t want to over exaggerate the arch in your lower back.

If you find that you can’t straighten your arm overhead in this position, or that to get a straight arm you have to keep a neutral or posteriorly tilted pelvis or that you just find it quite uncomfortable and a lot of work to hold, this is an indication that you could do with some mobility work in the shoulders and thoracic spine before commencing any kettlebell overhead lifts including pressing.

Here are some videos to help with shoulder and thoracic mobility:

Overhead lockout – specific position for locking out a kettlebell

You will lock out a kettlebell overhead a bit differently to how you lock out a dumbbell or barbell, simply because the kettlebell is a completely different shape.  However, the aim of any overhead lockout position is stability and safety so there are also some universals.

• Lock your arm: As with any overhead lockout, you want your arm to be completely locked out so that the elbow is fully extended.  The exception to this is if you have hypermobile elbow joints, in which case you want to stop your arm at anatomical lockout, which is roughly where your arm is straight.  If you have any concerns with this make sure you consult a physio.  A locked arm is strong and stable (just look at how Olympic lifters lock their arms and they get more weight overhead than any other athlete).
• Externally rotate your shoulder a fraction:  With the kettlebell you can’t have the palm of your hand parallel to your body overhead like you do with a dumbbell or a barbell as this will position the kettlebell directly over your head (which is of course unsafe) and as you fatigue there is a tendency for the kettlebell to pull you further in that direction resulting in stress on the shoulder joint and a danger of dropping the bell on your head.  So, with the kettlebell turn your little finger in slightly towards your body (externally rotating the shoulder) so that your hand is roughly on a 45 degree angle.
• Pack your shoulder down: use your upper back muscles to pull the shoulder down into its socket (rather than shrugging the shoulder up) to get into a more stable position and avoid too much tension in the neck and upper traps.  It is much easier to pack your shoulder down properly if you’ve slightly externally rotated your shoulder overhead.
• Make sure your arm is vertical: you want your arm to be vertical for stability, if it is leaning out to one side or forward or backward there is too much pressure on the shoulder joint and back.
• Use your lower body: you want the weight of the kettlebell to sit over your hip and your heel in overhead lockout, this way your lower body is helping to support the weight and will make your overhead lockout position more stable.  This position will require a slight anterior tilt of the pelvis and good thoracic extension.  For many people, getting the weight into this position will mean that their biceps is roughly in line with their ear, but for some people the arm will be slightly forward of the ear.

Practise this position without a weight to get started and use a mirror if need be to make sure you understand exactly where your arm should be before trying it with a weight.

Start light

When you’ve established your rack position and understand where your overhead lockout should be you can get on with actually doing some overhead pressing.

Starting a new movement with a light weight is of course common sense, however as many people have done some sort of overhead pressing before it’s easy to make assumptions about the kettlebell weight you’ll be able to press.

For most people, the kettlebell weight they’ll be able to press is less than what they can dumbbell press due to the straight up and down path of the kettlebell press and the odd shape of the kettlebell.  So if you can comfortably dumbbell military press 15kg your comfortable kettlebell pressing weight will be more like 12kg.

Regardless of what you can overhead press with other implements, it pays to start with a kettlebell that you can very easily press  so that you can get technique spot on and establish the correct bell path from rack to overhead lockout.

Starting the kettlebell overhead press

The hard work with the overhead press is really getting rack and overhead lockout position right, once that’s done the press itself is actually very simple.

As with the kettlebell clean, you have two targets and you want to move between the two as directly and efficiently as possible.

The most direct path between rack and overhead lockout is straight up, so your hand should travel up in a straight line from where it rests in rack to your overhead lockout position.  For most people, this will mean that there is very little rotation of the hand on the way up (and depending on your rack position there may be none at all).

Breathing for the kettlebell overhead press

As with all kettlebell lifting you have a choice between methods of breathing and it’s a matter of using the appropriate breathing pattern to the type of lifting that you’re doing.

The press is a grinding movement (a movement you can do slowly) so is a bit different from the ballistic lifts such as swings and cleans.  With the ballistic kettlebell lifts very heavy lifting usually isn’t safe so higher repetition work and the accompanying anatomical breathing are usually going to be most appropriate.  With the press, however, heavy lifting can be done safely (I would still recommend not going for 1 rep maxes with the kettlebell though just because it is stuck on your hand, stick to 5RM lifts or higher just to be on the safe side).

For heavy pressing, you can apply high tension techniques and power breathing just as you would with a heavy barbell military press.  The first step is to tense up your body as much as possible, starting from the ground and tensing muscle groups all the way up, pull your shoulder down using your lat and crush the handle.  Then the breathing pattern is this:

• Take a deep breath through your nose into your diaphragm to pressurise your abdomen and brace your spine
• Hold your breath as you start pressing the kettlebell up
• Breathe out through pursed lips when you hit the sticking point (usually around the last third of the movement)
• Take a breath in overhead
• Hold your breath until the last third of the lower, then breath out as you’re returning to rack

For higher repetition overhead pressing you can use anatomical breathing.  The anatomical breathing for the press is very simple:

• Breathe in through both mouth and nose as you press the kettlebell overhead
• Breath out as you bring the kettlebell back to rack

Anatomical lifting can also be used for heavy kettlebell lifts, and instead of creating a high amount of tension throughout the body during the entire press, you can use some stored rotational energy by twisting the torso (twist the lifting side back) and quickly reversing this to begin the press.  This is how Fedorenko presses the 60kg kettlebell (go to about 4:50).

Technique tips for the kettlebell overhead press

If you’ve got the basics right, the overhead press is pretty simple, however there are some common mistakes that people make with this movement.  The following technique tips should help you avoid these mistakes and ensure you’re performing this lift safely.

• Be careful to not over rotate as you reach the top of the press, make sure you get directly to the overhead lockout position where your little finger is turned slightly in towards your body.
• Make sure you go through a full range of motion, ie. all the way from rack to overhead lockout, don’t bring the bell back down to your shoulder and start pressing from there.
• The elbow shouldn’t move laterally at all during the kettlebell overhead press – this puts the shoulder in a very compromised position.  Make sure the elbow moves straight up and down If you feel you need to move laterally for leverage the weight is probably too heavy.
• Really work on making sure the handle is sitting in the correct position in your hand, this will make for much better (and much safer) overhead pressing.

Getting some pressing into your training

The kettlebell overhead press is a great way of getting an overhead pressing movement into your training (which is great for core and shoulder strength and stability).

Kettlebell overhead presses are great for balancing out upper body pulling movements such as cleans and swings.

The overhead press can be simply used as a way to get the kettlebell overhead for exercises that require that position such as overhead lunges, or can be incorporated into the exercise to add an upper body strength/strength endurance component (repeating the overhead press before each overhead lunge).

This lift is also good for complexes, again it is great when used to balance out upper body pulling exercises for example the clean and press combination is a great one, or you might want to try a swing, clean and press.

Pressing is a great precursor to push pressing, jerking and snatching to begin building shoulder stability and good overhead lockout position for these more technical lifts.

Light overhead presses can be used to warm the shoulders up for other over overhead lifts such as jerks and snatches.

To shop Iron Edge Kettlebells, click here.