How To Get Dumbbells Into Position for Press Safely

Most people figure out how to press dumbbells long before they figure out how to safely get them into position, which is a problem because the setup and the dismount are where most shoulder injuries actually happen. The press itself is controlled and intentional. But muscling a pair of heavy dumbbells from your lap to your shoulders, or worse, trying to swing them up one arm at a time while seated, puts the shoulder joint through loading angles it was never meant to handle under that kind of weight.

All right, so real quick, I had a couple people asking me how they get their dumbbells up and down when they're doing shoulder presses or dumbbell press. And the answer matters more than people realize, because the techniques for getting into position are not just preferences or style choices. They are injury prevention strategies that become more and more important as the weight gets heavier.

To understand why, you need a quick picture of what is happening at the shoulder when you try to move a heavy dumbbell from a resting position to a pressing position. The shoulder is a ball and socket joint, but unlike the hip, which is a deep and stable socket, the shoulder socket is shallow, more like a golf ball sitting on a tee. That means the joint relies almost entirely on the surrounding muscles, tendons, and ligaments to keep the ball centered in the socket during movement. When you try to lift a heavy dumbbell up and out to the side using just your arm, you create a long lever with a heavy load at the end of it, and the rotator cuff muscles have to work overtime to keep the humeral head from shifting in the socket. Research published in Sports Basel by Schütz and colleagues in 2022 looked at the joint loading patterns during chest pressing movements and found that both the shoulder and elbow joints experience their highest loads during the transition phases of the lift, not during the steady state pressing portion. The moments when the weight is being repositioned or decelerated are the moments of greatest mechanical stress.

This is why the techniques Josh demonstrates are built around one principle: minimize the distance and the lever arm the dumbbell has to travel through before it reaches the pressing position.

For seated shoulder press, the method is what you might call the kick method. You sit on the bench with the dumbbells resting on your thighs, positioned as low onto your knees as possible. That low placement matters because it gives your calf and quadricep more leverage to pop the dumbbell upward. The lower the dumbbell sits on the thigh, the longer the lever arm your leg creates, which means the leg does most of the work getting the weight moving upward so your shoulder does not have to generate force from a dead stop in an awkward position.

You start with the more coordinated hand first, using your calf to pop the dumbbell up to shoulder height. And then we put the dumbbell on the back of your shoulder and rest it there so you can do the same thing with the other side. Resting the first dumbbell on the back of the shoulder is a detail that solves a real problem. If you try to hold the first dumbbell in the pressing position while kicking the second one up, you are doing two things at once, one arm stabilizing overhead while the other arm and leg coordinate a ballistic kick. By parking the first dumbbell on your rear deltoid and just letting it sit there, you free up your full attention and coordination for the second kick. Then both dumbbells are in position and you can press.

Coming down is the reverse. You bring a knee up to meet the dumbbell, set it down, then do the same with the other side. The knee comes up to the weight rather than the weight dropping down to the knee, which keeps you in control the entire time and avoids that dangerous moment where a heavy dumbbell is decelerating through a large range of motion with only your shoulder to slow it down.

The dumbbell bench press setup uses a completely different strategy, and it is arguably easier once you understand the physics of it. Instead of kicking each dumbbell up individually, you use your entire body as a single rigid unit to roll into position.

And what I like to do is same position, except when I'm ready to go down, I'm gonna lean forward and hold these to my chest, and then I'm gonna roll backwards as a single unit. The key phrase is "as a single unit." When you lean forward and pin the dumbbells to your chest, you lock them in place relative to your torso. Then when you roll backward onto the bench, the dumbbells do not move relative to your body. They travel with you. The only thing that changes is your orientation in space, from upright to supine. The dumbbells end up exactly at chest height in the pressing position because that is where they were when you started the roll.

So the idea here is keep everything in place where you want it, and then just roll backwards, and the dumbbells should be exactly where you want them. This works because of something engineers call a rigid body transfer. Research by Ferris and colleagues published in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering in 2013 examined how individuals transfer loads during combined flexion and rotation movements, and found that maintaining the load close to the body's center of mass during the transition dramatically reduced shear forces at the joints involved. When you pin the dumbbells to your chest before rolling back, you are keeping the load as close to your center of mass as physically possible, which means your shoulders experience almost no transitional loading at all. The weight just ends up where it needs to be.

The dismount follows the same logic in reverse. And then when you're done, hold up, bring your knees up, and use the weight from the dumbbells to stand you up. This is the part most people get wrong. They finish their last rep, try to sit up using their abs while holding heavy dumbbells out at arm's length, and either strain their lower back or drop the weights. Instead, you bring your knees up toward your chest, which shifts your center of gravity forward, and then you let the mass of the dumbbells, which are still held at your chest, pull you forward and up into a seated position. The dumbbells are not fighting you on the way up. Their weight is helping you. You are using momentum and gravity rather than muscling against both.

This matters more as the weights get heavier. With 25 pound dumbbells, you can get away with sloppy setups because the forces involved are manageable. But once you are pressing 70, 80, 100 pound dumbbells, the margin for error shrinks dramatically. A study by Evans and Schroeder reviewed in 2026 in the context of distal clavicular osteolysis, which is a repetitive stress injury to the end of the collarbone, found that this condition is strongly associated with heavy pressing movements and is thought to result from repeated microtrauma at the acromioclavicular joint. The transitions into and out of pressing positions, where the shoulder is loaded in unstable configurations, are exactly the kind of repeated microtrauma that drives this condition over time. Cleaning up your setup and dismount is not just about preventing acute injuries. It is about protecting the joint from the cumulative damage that shows up months or years later.

The two techniques map neatly to the two types of press. For shoulder press, you kick each dumbbell up individually using leg drive, because you are already seated upright and the dumbbells need to travel vertically to reach your shoulders. For bench press, you roll backward as a single unit because the dumbbells need to travel horizontally and rotationally to reach the pressing position, and pinning them to your chest lets gravity and momentum do that work for you.

Both techniques share the same underlying principle: the legs and the torso do the heavy lifting during transitions so the shoulders do not have to. The shoulders are saved for the actual press, which is the movement they are designed to handle under load. Every other part of the process, the kick, the roll, the knee assisted dismount, is engineered to keep the shoulder joint out of vulnerable positions while heavy weight is in motion.

The thing that makes these techniques easy to overlook is that they feel unnecessary when the weight is light. Nobody needs a strategy to get 20 pound dumbbells into position. But habits built with light weight are the habits you will use with heavy weight, and by the time the weight is heavy enough to punish a sloppy setup, the sloppy setup is already automatic. Learning these transitions now, with whatever weight you are currently using, means they will be second nature by the time the stakes are high enough to matter.

References:

Evans DC, Schroeder JD. Distal Clavicular Osteolysis. . 2026. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35881753/

Schütz P, Zimmer P, Zeidler F et al.. Chest Exercises: Movement and Loading of Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist Joints. Sports (Basel). 2022. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35202059/

Ferris LA, Denney LM, Maletsky LP. Strategies utilized to transfer weight during knee flexion and extension with rotation for individuals with a total knee replacement. J Biomech Eng. 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23445065/