The Proper Weight Training For Your Shoulders By Jimmy Smith
When most people start training to build muscle and look better they focus on certain specific bodyparts like their arms and chest. After all, those are two very important “show” muscles on the beach. While it is completely fine to try to build those two areas, we have to remember that physique building is all about your look, at certain times it is an illusion. By illusion, I’m talking about looking bigger, tighter and harder than you actually are.
There’s only one area on the body that can make you look better and leaner and that is your shoulders. If more people focused on building shoulders, more people would be happy with their physique. After all, who likes dieting for weeks on end trying to get a smaller waist when a set of shoulders can make you tighter than anything?
First, we have to get into a quick anatomy discussion about the shoulder. The shoulder is made up of three distinct areas. The front, medial (side) and rear deltoids. Here’s a pop quiz for you. Which of the three shoulder muscles is most visual from the side? Most people would answer “side delt” since after all that is what we have focused on for so long.
Good or bad, our poor postural habits due to too much time at the computer and too much bench pressing have caused us to adopt this rounded shoulder, “cave man” like posture. Due to this, our rear delt is actually more visible from the side. This should now become a priority in our training
The most effective way to train the rear delts is with heavy; compound movements like deadlifts, chin-ups and dumbbell rows. While that s the best way to add size to the rear delts we will need to directly hit them as well. The problem with the advice of heavy compound movements all the time is that the muscles will fatigue since they are smaller than some other back muscles and as a result won’t get hit as hard.
The solution here is to use a pre-fatigue method where we would use a movement like a bent over dumbbell fly before we did a bent over row. The purpose behind this is to fully work the rear delts before we perform the heavy movement so we know that our rear delts are getting hit.
The important thing about the rear delts that I keep trying to emphasize is that they are the only muscles that give us the wide shoulder look from the side. Most people want to look wide when viewed from the sides and rear delt development is our fastest way to get there.
This simple trick is both effective and time saving since it is done in a superset fashion. Now the question turns to the absolute best exercise to build big shoulders. In reality, presses are good but only really stimulate one head of the shoulder, the front delt. Now pressing with various grips and forms such as neutral grip shoulder presses or side presses are both excellent methods to use to build big shoulders. At the end of the day, it comes to how many angles that you’ve used to hit your shoulders.
Jimmy Smith is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men's Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness , and Best Body magazines.
His "The Muscle Bible" workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines and all over the Internet on t-nation.com and bodybuilding.com and his workouts have help thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, and gain muscle. For information on the The Muscle Bible visit www.ineedmuscle.com
