These Optimized Exercises BLOW UP Your Shoulders

Chapters:

00:00 Start

01:26 Focussing on the Lateral Heads

03:34 How to Optimize Overhead Presses

06:26 Using Cable Lateral Raises to Focus on the Side Delts

08:27 Tip for doing shrugs to train your upper-traps

Transcript:

Here are some simple evidence based tips to get bigger shoulders. Let’s start with the rear delts because many people have underdeveloped rear delts and overdeveloped front delts. The reason for that is that they don’t do as much rear-down volume as they do for the front delts. The front delts. They get hammered every time you do chest work, every time you do shoulder work. If you do a lateral raise, especially if your arms are a little bit forward, if you keep it in the scapular plane like this, this will significantly train the front delts, practically fully.

Any type of fly chest press movement, it will all train the front delts. therefore I almost never program exercises like front raises. I do them sometimes for women that don’t train chest, but generally for men, the front delts get enough work from the overhead pressing, the lateral raises, the chest work, push ups, all that stuff that you do for your chest and your shoulders. It will train the front delts, so no need to do isolation work for the front delts. Second, the chest work I do. I really like to focus on the chest, not on the delts or the triceps. Make your chest work really chest focused. Make your triceps work really triceps focused.

In my other video, I gave more tips on how to train your triceps. You can check that out, but for here, make your chest training chest focused. Make your delt training focused on the rear and the lateral delts and the front delts will take care of themselves, if anything, they will usually be more on the verge of being overtraining, which might even explain the high prevalence of shoulder injuries and lifters. So don’t worry about front delt isolation work. Make sure that your shoulder work is focused on the lateral head, which is the middle part of the deltoids. How do you do that? Well, what many people do is they do the reverse flys like this, standing or maybe on a bench, maybe incline movements that are a lot like this. Also rows, shoulder pulls, face pulls, high rows, all these types of exercises.

What they have in common is that they don’t train the rear delts at long muscle lengths, Even if you don’t put any stock in the stretch-mediated hypertrophy literature, or a multitude of studies that have found, with some conflicting data, that muscles generally grow more when they are exposed to high tension, at long muscle lengths. Even if you don’t care about that, the rear delts specifically likely grow more when you include at least some eexercises that train them at very long lengths, because, based on the operating lengths of the sarcomeres, the rear delts produce the most active tension, and active tension drives muscle growth when they are trained at long muscle lengths. Almost all the popular exercises for the rear delts neglect tension at long muscle lengths, so one exercise that you can do is to do your reverse slides with a cable.

Another exercise you can do with a dumbbell is to do side lying reverse flys, so you lie on a bench completely flat. If you go up more, it becomes more side-delt focused, and if you go all the way up, it becomes essentially a front raise. So lie completely at your side and you do the exercise like this. You can do full range motion going all the way up, but it’s a bit awkward. In this position. You have to kind of balance yourself, and most of the tension occurs here because at this point, the moment arm, which is literally my arm in this case is maximal. So in this position you’ll see that you get really long muscle length. And there’s still tension on the rear and else in this position.

The nice thing about that is that most exercises they ask you stop here if you do a row For example, if you think about it, that’s like this movement. If you do a reverse fly standing, it’s like this movement. So with the side lying reverse fly, you have this movement, The arm completely crosses over to the side. You can also do this if you’re doing cable lateral raises where you don’t just do the lateral raise like this, but you let it across all the way over to the side. When you’re using a cable, you can do this. And then it’s cross all the way over. And you really get a nice stretch in the side delts. So that’s a way that you can still get high tension at long muscle lengths for side delts and the rear delts.

Many people do overhead presses, either with a barbell or seated with dumbbells. based on the research we have, that is suboptimal on both fronts. If you’re doing an overhead press like this, you are effectively doing a very incline press right? I’m not fully upright. almost any level of inclination of the bench. You’re not going to be 100% upright. And research has found that if you do overhead presses with a dumbbell, and if you do them standing instead of seated, you get more muscle activity in the side delts. that’s probably because it’s easier to get your arms all the way out to the sides. Remember that with our delt work for bodybuilding purposes, we want to focus on the side delts. To do that, you want to decide delts to be in line with the line of force. So you basically want the side delts to be as far out to the side as possible. You don’t want this position. This is how many people do it. And this can be nice for shoulder.

You can even do Arnold presses if needed for shoulder health. But if you want to focus on the side delts, you really want the elbow all the way out to the side. And with a seated press, you cannot do this very well because you’re essentially doing a very, very incline press. You would have to come forward and then you can no longer use a backrest. Therefore, it’s ideal to do your overall pressing for a side with dumbbells instead of a barbell and standing to really make sure you can get the elbows all the way out to the side, fully over as pressing and bringing them back down. And by all the way down, I mean The range of motion doesn’t stop when the dumbbell touches your shoulders. It doesn’t stop when your elbow is horizontal and it stops when the elbow can no longer go further down. So many people do it like this. Or they have the dumbbells to delts and they do it like this. But you can get more range of motion by rotating the dumbbells out to the sides, especially with bigger dumbbells and letting the dumbbells come You get substantially more range of motion.

So for cable lateral raises if you want to focus on the side delts If you’re doing it like most people which is like this. There are a few ways that you can improve on that, but one move the elbow out straight to the side. if your shoulders are not okay with this, then stay in scapular plane which is about 30 degrees to the front. That’s fine, but if you want to focus on the side delts, your shoulders are okay with it. Go all the way out to the side. Not only that, but during the movements You can see which of the fibers are active, which is the ones that are on the top. If you externally rotate the shoulder like this, you are training primarily the front delt fibers. If you go like this you’ll see it’s the lateral fibers. If you go like this and internally rotate it, you’ll be actually training a lot of the rearmost fibers. and you will be training the rear delts; a large part. That means that if you want to focus on the side delts and exclude the front delts, you want to actually bend over a little bit because you’ll see that it’s more the side fibers This way you take out the front delts, or at least the front most fibers of the front delts, and you focus more on the side delt. So here’s how that would look This and all the way out to the side. Notice I am crossing the arm all the way over into the body. That’s a nice advantage of using a cable compared to using a dumbbell. Not only do you get tension in the leg for position in this position, because the cable is pulling this way and I still have to produce force with the lateral delt moving this way, with a dumbbell. gravity goes straight down, so there’s no tension on the lateral delts. I will say that a recent study found that you get approximately the same growth with dumbbell and cable lateral raises, but in that study, they stopped here and it didn’t go all the way here.

Moreover, in absolute terms, growth was a little bit greater with the cable version than with the dumbbell version. So it’s not going to make or break your program. You can do it with dumbbells. All of the things that I’m talking about here are absolutely fine tuning, but based on the current best research, there might be a small advantage to using a cable instead of a dumbbell and letting the arm cross over all the way, and probably now also using one arm itself, two arms to get high tension as a long muscle length over a greater range of motion. I would note also that this isn’t just about getting tension at long muscle lengths. You are actually increasing the total range of motion and for the total range of motion. Research is a lot more compelling than simply doing length in partials. Length in partials I think are a bit overrated at the moment, but doing exercises that train muscles over the largest possible muscle lengths has been established for a long period of time. final tip for those to do shrugs and train their upper traps. Most people do shrugs with dumbbells or a barbell. However, it’s probably a little bit better to do them with cables with a wide alignment. You can also grab a barbell and use a very wide grip. It will have a similar effect and do exercise like this.

If you look at the alignment of the upper trap fibers, research finds that it’s almost horizontal for many of the fibers. which means that if you get the shoulder to shrug into the body, it’s easier to activate the upper fibers of the traps. of the upper traps. The upper traps are almost certainly still activated by doing standard shrugs, but you’ll probably get a bit higher muscle activity with wide shrugs. With standard shrugs, the upper traps are not directly elevating the shoulder blades doing this. That’s the levator scapulae that are doing that, but the upper traps are instead pulling on the clavicle, lifting the shoulder complex like a drawbridge. So it’s a more indirect stimulus which might be inferior for muscle growth. and you’ll feel when you do the exercise, it’s quite intuitive to not just pull the shoulder blades up, but pull them inside as well. because the alignment of the upper trap fibers. Moreover, when you’re doing your shrugs, you probably want to look a little bit down because it lengthens the upper traps.

If you do it the way that many physiotherapists will tell you was perfectly upright and looking back to protect the neck or the shoulder or something, then you are shortening the traps and you are weaker. if you look at strongman doing farmer’s walks and the like, they’re almost always like this because that’s the position you are strongest. And it’s exceptionally rare to hear of anyone injuring themselves during shrugs. So I wouldn’t worry about that. So just look a little bit forward like this when you’re doing your shrugs. And if you’re using a barbell, use a wide grip instead of a narrow grip. If you’re using cables, try to get them far apart. Technically what you want, is you want the shoulders to be abducted when you’re elevating the scapula.

All right, I hope that helps you get bigger shoulders. If you like this type of content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.