Unlock your Serratus Anterior with these 3 easy exercises

What if I told you that by activating the serratus anterior, all your shoulder problems would go away forever.

Shoulder pain when doing push-ups? Activate the serratus. Difficulty getting your arms over your head? Activate the serratus. Want to break the world marathon record? Activate the serratus.

Did I go too far?

I do this right from the beginning to make an important disclosure before you read the rest of this article.

It’s a sort of PSA that goes contrary to most of the other content you’ll find on the inter-webs. There is no one muscle that will fix all your shoulder and/or movement problems.

How do I know this? Well, I thought this myself for a long time when I first started on this path.

If it wasn’t the serratus anterior, it was the rhomboids I had to activate. Or the lower traps. Or the hip flexors. etc. etc.

The message that activating a certain muscle group will fix and bulletproof your movement is a great title for a blog article or YouTube video, though. It's a good hook. 

Hey, I get it. I have to play the game myself otherwise I would never get anyone to read or watch my content (except my mom, love you mom!).

Isolating individual muscles with exercise has a purpose sometimes for some people.

For example, if you cannot feel your serratus anterior working in your push-up then it might be wise to do a few reps of a corrective exercise to help you build that mind-muscle connection.

But if you don’t have problems recruiting your serratus in a push-up then you’re just wasting your time with all those activation drills.

If you want your serratus to get stronger, you should just do more pushing exercises.

I see too many people start this process in the reverse, however.

They’ll work on activation drills first – for far too long– and then eventually get to the pushing exercises. But because they didn’t do the pushing movements along with the activation drills, they might not fully understand what the point of the activation drills even is.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the more logical way to strengthen your serratus anterior so you can quickly integrate what you learn into more full-body dynamic movements.

But first, let’s examine what this sneaky little armpit muscle even is.

What is the Serratus Anterior Muscle? 

The serratus anterior is located right underneath the armpits. It connects the ribs to the scapulae.

The main function of the serratus anterior is to protract the scapula or push the shoulder blades away from each other. Its main action is to support pushing movements.

If you want to build a stronger serratus anterior, you’ll need to get stronger in pushing. And if you don’t feel your serratus engaged in your pushing movements, then it would be wise to incorporate some accessory exercises to help you build that mind-muscle connection.

But before you do, let’s test if that’s even the case for you.

Serratus Anterior Exercises 

I don’t like doing things that I don’t need to do. I’m a minimalist at heart and I encourage readers to do the same.

If someone tells me that they’re concerned about their serratus anterior muscle not activating properly, I would first tell them to stop watching so many fitness videos on YouTube.

I would then ask them to do a push-up and pay attention to whether they feel their serratus muscles contract.

I recommend you try this yourself now with the cues I mention in the below video.

Did you feel your serratus activate? Great! That’s it.

Your serratus anterior muscles are doing what they should be. Just keep doing push-ups or other types of pushing movements and it will continue to get stronger, along with all your other pushing muscles.

If you didn’t feel the serratus anterior muscles during the above exercise or if things felt a bit wonky, then try the corrective exercises below.

Serratus anterior strengthening exercises 

Continuing with the less-is-more philosophy, I want you to try a very simple activation drill against the wall.

The key with this exercise is to go slow and pay attention – we’re not building strength here, just awareness.

If that helped you start feeling your serratus, do a few of the serratus push-ups to see if you can integrate this new awareness into a push-up. If things still aren’t clicking, try the protracted wall slides below.

The reason I am giving you this one last is because it’s the most unnatural to an actual pushing movement.

Although the wall slides are a popular way to engage the serratus anterior, it is useless if you can’t bring this awareness into more functional movements.

If this one helped you finally feel your serratus, that’s of course a good thing.

The challenge now is to slowly incorporate what you learned into a push up. It might be helpful to do the wall slides for a few days and then move on to the serratus wall push.

Once that feels good, see if you can add a set of push-ups to test your serratus activation. To give you an idea on how to apply this to a workout, check out the examples below.

Serratus Anterior Workout Examples

Here is how I would program a workout with the above principles in mind. 

The Best Serratus Anterior stretch 

This is completely optional but a nice way to end any strength workout is to stretch out the muscles you trained. It will also lengthen the serratus anterior which is another way to make it even more resilient.

The side bend is one of my favorite stretches for the serratus anterior. It also has the additional benefit of exposing you to a movement you likely don’t practice that often – lateral bending.

Closing Thoughts

Do less, better. Get really good at push-ups rather than focusing too much on what the serratus anterior is doing. 

I create content about corrective exercise because this is what people want but that does not mean it is what YOU need. If you get better at push-ups and other pushing movements, you can trust that your body is getting stronger and doing everything right. 

We get bombarded with so much fitness information these days that it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. 

I learned this the hard way myself and is why I always make it a point to emphasize it in my content. The sooner you master the basics, the sooner you'll get stronger and move better.