Patriot Health Digest
The Y raise helps your shoulders and upper-back muscles while also improving your posture.
If you are getting bored with pull-downs and rows in your upper-back workout, you should add the Y raise to your routine.
What is the Y raise?​
It is an upper-body workout that strengthens your shoulders and upper back. You can do it with only your body weight or you can use dumbbells.
​Is the Y raise a good exercise?​ The exercise targets your upper back muscles and shoulder muscles that many routines usually miss. You can add a load to make it even more challenging as you get stronger.
How to Do the Y Raise With Perfect Form
4 Y Raise Benefits
1. It Helps Your Shoulders and Back
Your shoulders and upper body muscles — especially the stabilizing ones — get more love with this move. Strengthening your muscles is crucial to increasing your depth when you do push-ups and boosting up to more difficult exercises, such as pull-ups.
2. It Helps With Posture
For desk jockeys out there: Sitting hunched at a computer can weaken your back muscles, but the Y raise exercise can aid in stopping this imbalance by bringing your shoulders back so you sit up taller. Y raises are very helpful for adding strength to your lower traps and helping your posture.
By strengthening your rotator cuffs (which are the muscles that surround the shoulder blades), you can avoid muscle imbalances that lead to injuries.
And thanks to this strengthening of your shoulder muscles, the Y raise exercise can also help the stability of your shoulder joint. This can also protect you from getting hurt, especially when moving stuff overhead, like when you push a suitcase into an overhead compartment on a plane.
4. Help Muscle Imbalances
Doing moves such as the Y raise helps to offset any muscle imbalances you have in your upper body by helping your pull muscles (the ones that usually get weak from having a bad hunched-over posture). Push exercises, such as push-ups, work your front upper body, while pull exercises like pull-ups work your back upper body. You want both of these muscle groups to be equally strong.
Author: Blake Ambrose
