Name: 5 Popular Exercises That Are Destroying You ($15,000 Surgery Risk)
Uploaded: 2025-03-08T20:28:55.000Z
Duration: 8 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you lift weights, there's a 1 in 3 chance you'll end up needing medical help in the next 5 years.

In most cases, it starts with a small pain you ignored, until it became an injury you couldn't fix.

And most of these injuries come from this.

Every single day, millions of people are unknowingly destroying their shoulders, rep after rep.

What's even worse, they won't feel the real damage until it's too late.

One of the most popular exercises for shoulders is the upright row.

Seems simple, grab a barbell or dumbbells and pull them up to your chin.

Now, as we all know, it's supposed to build your shoulders and traps.

But what if I told you that every single rep is like dragging a rope over a sharp edge?

But after a while, the fibers start to fray and weaken, until one day, it completely snaps.

That's exactly what's happening inside your shoulders.

It's the most mobile joint in your entire body.

That's why shoulder injuries account for nearly 36% of all weightlifting-related injuries.

It forces your shoulders into an unnatural position, squishing the tendons against your bones until one day, they wear out and you feel the pain.

And by the time you feel it, it's already too late.

To make things even worse, shoulder injuries take the longest to heal compared to almost any other joint injury.

Rotator cuff tears and impingements don't just go away overnight.

Some require months of rehab, and in serious cases, surgery.

Shoulder injuries have ended dozens of careers in the NFL, NBA, and Olympic weightlifting.

Every rep of the upright row is like rolling the dice with your shoulder health.

The next one is even more dangerous, because it tricks you into thinking you're getting stronger, while silently tearing your joints apart.

It's one of the most damaging movements you can do.

People swinging their bodies, cranking out rep after rep, making pull-ups look effortless.

If you can't do a strict pull-up, why are you swinging into one?

Would you deadlift without learning how to brace?

Would you max out a bench press without building control first?

It lets you cheat your way into an exercise your body isn't prepared for.

Instead of using strength, they rely on momentum, throwing the body into the air and slamming joints into unnatural positions.

And just like a car speeding over potholes every day, the damage adds up over time, until something finally breaks.

That's exactly what's happening to your spine, elbows, wrists, and shoulders during kipping pull-ups.

The extreme motion breaks down your joints, leading to injuries that can take months to heal.

And once the damage is done, there's no quick fix.

Herniated discs can take years to recover.

Tendonitis in your elbows can make even simple movements painful.

And even if you heal, your body will never be the same.

Now, the next exercise seems like it's really safe.

You walk into the gym, ready for leg day, and you see a squat rack with a bar attached to a sliding track.

It looks safe because the bar moves in a straight line, helping you stay balanced.

And that's why the Smith machine squat is one of the worst things you can do to your knees, back, and hips.

A real squat lets your body move naturally, shifting weight and adjusting your balance.

The Smith machine forces you into a fixed position, making your joints absorb all the stress instead of your muscles.

There are countless videos of lifters snapping their knees backward because the machine made them overextend.

One bad lockout, and your knee could bend the wrong way, permanently.

Many lifters walk away from a Smith machine squat feeling fine, only to wake up the next morning with a locked up lower back, a slipped disc, or even sciatica.

Or worse.  Here's something to think about.

No Olympic athlete squats on a Smith machine.

No professional powerlifter trains on one.

No strength coach in the world recommends it.

Because they know strength isn't just about moving weight.

And the Smith machine takes that away from you.

So before you step into the Smith machine, always remember that.

You're one rep away from a mistake you can't undo.

It's simple, requires no equipment, and makes your arms burn.

But what you don't feel, at least not yet, is the damage building up inside your shoulders.

That's exactly why bench dips are a terrible choice for you.

Imagine pulling your arm too far back and adding weight to it.

Your shoulder isn't designed to move that way.

The deeper you go, the more pressure you put on your joints, tendons, and ligaments.

Anyway, if you still decide to do this, you should have in mind that shoulder surgery has one of the worst recovery rates ever.

If you tear your rotator cuff, 40% of people never fully recover, even after surgery.

And if you tear it twice, the chances of full recovery drop to nearly 0%.

To make things even worse, the average cost of rotator cuff surgery in the US is between $10,000 and $15,000, and that's before months of rehab.

There are actual viral videos of people snapping their humerus in half doing dips.

Because when the arm is locked behind the body, all the stress gets loaded onto the weakest points of the bone and ligaments.

You might think, that won't happen to me.

But neither did the thousands of people who ended up in rehab, in surgery, or with lifelong shoulder pain from one bad rep.

So before you drop into another set, ask yourself, is a small triceps pump worth the risk of permanent damage?

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5 Popular Exercises That Are Destroying You ($15,000 Surgery Risk)

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