The bench press is an open kinetic chain exercise. Your hands move freely through space as you push the barbell away from your chest, which is the defining feature of an open chain movement. This surprises many people because the bench press feels stable and works multiple joints simultaneously, traits often associated with closed chain exercises. But the classification comes down to one thing: whether your hands (or feet) are fixed against an immovable surface or free to move.
What Makes a Movement Open or Closed Chain
The concept comes from engineering, where a series of connected links is “closed” if both ends are fixed and “open” if one end moves freely. Applied to exercise, the idea was popularized by orthopedic surgeon Arthur Steindler in the 1950s. He described an open kinetic chain as one where “the terminal joint is free” and a closed kinetic chain as one where the terminal joint meets considerable external resistance that prevents free movement. In practice, this is usually interpreted as whether your hand or foot is fixed against a stationary surface.
During a bench press, your hands grip a barbell that travels through space. Nothing stops your hands from moving in any direction. That makes it open chain. During a push-up, your hands are planted on the floor, which doesn’t move. That makes it closed chain. Both exercises involve the same joints (shoulder and elbow) performing the same motions (horizontal pressing), but the relationship between your body and the resistance is reversed. In the push-up, your body moves around fixed hands. In the bench press, the weight moves while your body stays on the bench.
There’s also a functional way to think about the distinction. In a closed chain movement, bending one joint forces the other joints in the chain to move in a predictable way. Push your hands into the floor during a push-up and your elbows, shoulders, and torso all respond together as a unit. In an open chain movement, individual joints can act more independently of each other.
Why the Bench Press Confuses People
The bench press checks a lot of boxes that people associate with closed chain exercises. It’s a compound, multi-joint movement. It loads the chest, shoulders, and triceps simultaneously. It even looks similar to a push-up performed upside down. The confusion is understandable, but the classification doesn’t depend on how many muscles work or how heavy the load is. It depends strictly on whether the end of the limb is fixed.
Adding to the confusion, the NSCA notes that muscle activation patterns are largely the same between the bench press and the push-up. Research published in Sports Medicine International Open found no significant differences in kinematics or muscle activation between the two exercises when the external load was matched, concluding that weighted push-ups can be used interchangeably with the bench press for building upper body strength. So the open versus closed distinction doesn’t mean the exercises train different muscles. It means the forces acting on your joints behave differently.
How the Chain Type Affects Your Shoulders
This is where the open versus closed chain distinction matters most for your training. Closed chain pressing movements like push-ups create a compressive load that pushes the upper arm bone into the shoulder socket. That compression is stabilizing. The joint capsule, surrounding ligaments, and the biceps tendon do much of the work holding the shoulder in place, which means the muscles around the shoulder blade don’t have to work as hard.
During the bench press, the stabilization picture changes. Because the barbell is free-moving and unstable, the muscles surrounding the shoulder blade and shoulder joint take on a much larger stabilizing role. Research in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine found that the deltoids, serratus anterior, and upper trapezius all show higher activation during the bench press compared to push-ups. That extra stabilization demand increases energy expenditure and can contribute to earlier fatigue.
The open chain nature of the bench press also produces shearing forces at the shoulder that closed chain pressing does not. Wider grip widths significantly increase both the total force on the shoulder joint and the posterior shear force, which may raise the risk of shoulder instability and rotator cuff problems. Retracting (squeezing together) the shoulder blades throughout the lift reduces both compression and shear at the shoulder joint. This is why coaching cues about keeping your shoulder blades pinched together on the bench aren’t just about performance; they’re a direct countermeasure to the open chain forces acting on the joint.
Closed Chain Alternatives for Pressing
If you’re working around a shoulder issue or simply want to include closed chain pressing in your program, the two main options are push-ups and dips. Both fix your hands against a stationary surface and create the joint-stabilizing compression that characterizes closed chain movement. Weighted push-ups using a vest or plates on your back can replicate the loading of a moderate bench press. Dips allow for heavier relative loading since you’re pressing your full bodyweight plus any added weight.
That said, the classification alone shouldn’t dictate your exercise selection. Dips can be aggressive on the shoulder in their own way, particularly at the bottom of the range of motion. And the bench press, despite being open chain, remains one of the most effective upper body exercises available. Technique adjustments like keeping your shoulder blades retracted, using a grip width around 1.5 times your shoulder width, and avoiding excessively flared elbows at 90 degrees can significantly reduce the shearing forces that make open chain pressing riskier for the shoulder. A shoulder abduction angle around 70 degrees produced lower superior shear forces at the shoulder compared to tucking the elbows to 45 degrees, which actually increased upward shear on the joint.
Open Chain Does Not Mean Isolation
One common misconception is that open chain exercises are isolation movements. Open chain simply means the hand or foot isn’t fixed. A biceps curl is open chain and single-joint. A bench press is open chain and multi-joint. The two categories overlap but aren’t the same thing. The bench press recruits the pectorals, anterior deltoids, triceps, serratus anterior, and upper trapezius in a coordinated pattern. It is a compound movement by any definition.
Where the open chain label does hold practical meaning is in proprioception and coordination. Closed chain exercises generate more sensory feedback from the contact point (your hands against the ground, for instance) and require more joint-to-joint coordination because all the links in the chain must move together. Open chain movements allow more freedom at each joint, which can be an advantage for isolating a specific range of motion or a disadvantage if you’re trying to train integrated, full-body stability. For most people building general strength, including both types in a program covers all the bases.