5 Best Bodyweight Shoulder Exercises for Women

Bodyweight push-ups are a great way to strengthen shoulders and improve posture. (Image via Pexels/ Andrea Piacquadio)

For women, bodyweight shoulder exercises are invaluable for maintaining the strength and fitness of the shoulders to improve their posture, stay fit, and maintain independence.

Whether you’re a working professional or a stay-at-home mom — it’s worth finding some time during your busy schedule every day to strengthen your shoulders. That being said, these bodyweight shoulder exercises can bring the gym to your home, instead of forcing you to go out and exercise, in case you're too busy or uninspired to hit the gym.

Essential Bodyweight Shoulder Exercises

Here's a look at the five most effective bodyweight shoulder exercises and bodyweight routines you can use to tone your upper body using only your body and a bit of floor space. Let's get started:

1) Incline Push-up

Great bodyweight shoulder exercises include incline push-ups. They hit the chest, triceps, and shoulders in slightly different amounts.

Incline push-ups are challenging if done with the hands closer together. However, if that's too challenging to begin with, use a low platform, and do them with your knees on the ground.

To do an incline push-up:

Start in a plank position with your hands on a box or bench and your body elevated so that your shoulders are above your hands.
Lower your chest toward the bench, and use your chest muscles to push yourself back up to the starting position.

2) Crab Walk

You can activate your shoulders by doing bodyweight shoulder exercises. This is a total bodyweight exercise that can be slowed down or speeded up depending on how intense you want your workout to be.

To do this move:

Kneel on the floor, with your knees bent and feet shoulder-width apart.
Place your palms on the floor behind you with your fingers pointing forward, and rise up onto your hands and toes, making a table-like shape with your body.
Walk forward with one hand and a foot at a time, and walk backwards by stepping with the other hand and foot.
Repeat this movement (forward and backward) for the specified number of steps.

3) Push-back push-up

This is a great bodyweight shoulder exercise to build pushing strength. It challenges core control as you transition from the push-back to the push-up position. It's also great for improving shoulder mobility and stability.

Here's how you do this exercise:

From a push-up position, place your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
Brace your core, and lower your body towards the floor, leading with your chest.
Instead of pushing straight up from the floor, as you would in a regular push-up, push your upper body back towards your heels.
As you go back and bend your legs, let your hips rise as well; your body will form an upside-down 'V' shape.
Make sure you keep your spine long as you lower and raise yourself back up.

4) Plank to Downward Dog

The plank is a great bodyweight shoulder exercise. Adding the transition to downward dog works the shoulders and chest even more. This move targets the abdominal muscles, quadriceps, and gluteus maximus.

To do this movement:

Start in a high plank position with your hands stacked underneath your shoulders, and keep your body in a straight line from head to heel.
Your feet should be about shoulder-width apart.
Push into the downward dog by lifting your hips up towards the ceiling while keeping your heels on the ground.
Your legs should stay straight, and arms should stay straight as you move into this position.
Take a moment to pause, and return to the starting position in a fluid motion.

5) Elbow to Hand Plank

In moving from an elbow plank to a high plank, you support your entire upper body with only one arm momentarily. That means your shoulders work hard during this move. You can also do this bodyweight shoulder exercise on your knees if being up on your toes impacts your form.

Here's how you do this exercise:

In an elbow plank, rest your forearms on the ground, and stack your elbows directly under your shoulders.
Keep your body in a straight line from head to heels as you inhale, bringing one palm to the ground and the other, and push up into a high plank.
Hold for one second. Return to a forearm plank.

Takeaway

The aforementioned bodyweight shoulder exercises can strengthen, tighten, and tone your shoulders simultaneously.

Remember to keep your abdominal muscles contracted throughout these shoulder workouts (as with any other exercise). Keep all your body parts, including your rotator cuff muscles, in proper alignment as you perform these movements.

These bodyweight shoulder exercises - providing you a total body workout - will help you develop lean, toned shoulders and arms. They'll also help improve endurance, flexibility, balance and coordination.

What’s more: they require nothing more than you and your bodyweight as resistance. So it’s easy to build muscles without any bulky equipment or gym memberships.