These Optimized Exercises BLOW UP Your Shoulders — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Here are some simple evidence based tips to get bigger shoulders.
2. 0:03Let's start with the rear delts
3. 0:04because many people have underdeveloped rear delts and overdeveloped front delts.
4. 0:09The reason for that is that they don't do as much rear-down volume
5. 0:12as they do for the front delts.
6. 0:13The front delts.
7. 0:14They get hammered every time you do chest work, every time you do shoulder work.
8. 0:17If you do a lateral raise,
9. 0:18especially if your arms are a little bit forward,
10. 0:20if you keep it in the scapular plane like this,
11. 0:22this will significantly train the front delts, practically fully.
12. 0:26Any type of fly chest press movement, it will all train the front delts.
13. 0:30therefore I almost never program exercises like front raises.
14. 0:35I do them sometimes for women that don't train chest,
15. 0:37but generally for men, the front delts get enough work from the overhead
16. 0:40pressing, the lateral raises, the chest work, push ups, all that stuff
17. 0:43that you do for your chest and your shoulders.
18. 0:45It will train the front delts, so no need to do isolation work for the front delts.
19. 0:50Second, the chest work I do.
20. 0:52I really like to focus on the chest, not on the delts or the triceps.
21. 0:56Make your chest work really chest focused.
22. 0:58Make your triceps work really triceps focused.
23. 1:00In my other video, I gave more tips on how to train your triceps.
24. 1:03You can check that out, but for here, make your chest training chest focused.
25. 1:06Make your delt training focused on the rear and the lateral delts
26. 1:09and the front delts will take care of themselves, if anything,
27. 1:12they will usually be more on the verge
28. 1:14of being overtraining, which might even explain
29. 1:15the high prevalence of shoulder injuries and lifters.
30. 1:17So don't worry about front delt isolation work.
31. 1:20Make sure that your shoulder work is focused on the
32. 1:23lateral head, which is the middle part of the deltoids.
33. 1:26How do you do that?
34. 1:27Well, what many people do is they do the reverse flys like this, standing or
35. 1:31maybe on a bench, maybe incline movements that are a lot like this.
36. 1:35Also rows, shoulder pulls, face pulls, high rows, all these types of exercises.
37. 1:39What they have in common
38. 1:41is that they don't train the rear delts at long muscle lengths,
39. 1:44Even if you don't put any stock in the stretch-mediated hypertrophy literature,
40. 1:47or a multitude of studies that have found, with some conflicting data,
41. 1:50that muscles generally grow more when they are exposed to high tension,
42. 1:53at long muscle lengths.
43. 1:55Even if you don't care about that, the rear delts specifically
44. 1:59likely grow more when you include at least some eexercises
45. 2:02that train them at very long lengths, because, based on the operating lengths
46. 2:05of the sarcomeres,
47. 2:07the rear delts produce the most active tension, and active tension drives
48. 2:10muscle growth when they are trained at long muscle lengths.
49. 2:15Almost all the popular exercises for the rear delts neglect tension at long
50. 2:19muscle lengths,
51. 2:20so one exercise that you can do is to do your reverse slides with a cable.
52. 2:24Another exercise you can do with a dumbbell is to do side
53. 2:27lying reverse flys, so you lie on a bench completely flat.
54. 2:30If you go up more, it becomes more side-delt focused,
55. 2:33and if you go all the way up, it becomes essentially a front raise.
56. 2:36So lie completely at your side and you do the exercise like this.
57. 2:40You can do full range motion going all the way up, but it's a bit awkward.
58. 2:43In this position.
59. 2:43You have to kind of balance yourself, and most of the tension occurs here
60. 2:47because at this point,
61. 2:48the moment arm, which is literally my arm in this case is maximal.
62. 2:52So in this position you'll see that you get really long muscle length.
63. 2:56And there's still tension on the rear and else in this position.
64. 2:59The nice thing about that
65. 3:00is that most exercises they ask you stop here if you do a row
66. 3:03For example, if you think about it, that's like this movement.
67. 3:06If you do a reverse fly standing, it's like this movement.
68. 3:10So with the side lying reverse fly, you have this movement,
69. 3:13The arm completely crosses over to the side.
70. 3:16You can also do this if you're doing cable lateral raises
71. 3:18where you don't just do the lateral raise like this,
72. 3:21but you let it across all the way over to the side.
73. 3:23When you're using a cable, you can do this.
74. 3:25And then it's cross all the way over.
75. 3:26And you really get a nice stretch in the side delts.
76. 3:29So that's a way that you can still get high tension
77. 3:31at long muscle lengths for side delts and the rear delts.
78. 3:36Many people do overhead presses, either with a barbell or seated with dumbbells.
79. 3:40based on the research we have, that is suboptimal on both fronts.
80. 3:44If you're doing an overhead press like this,
81. 3:46you are effectively doing a very incline press right?
82. 3:50I'm not fully upright.
83. 3:52almost any level of inclination of the bench.
84. 3:54You're not going to be 100% upright.
85. 3:56And research has found that if you do overhead presses with a dumbbell,
86. 4:00and if you do them standing instead of seated,
87. 4:02you get more muscle activity in the side delts.
88. 4:05that's probably because it's easier to get your arms all the way out to the sides.
89. 4:09Remember that with our delt work
90. 4:11for bodybuilding purposes, we want to focus on the side delts.
91. 4:14To do that, you want to decide delts to be in line with the line of force.
92. 4:18So you basically want the side delts to be as far out to the side as possible.
93. 4:23You don't want this position.
94. 4:25This is how many people do it.
95. 4:27And this can be nice for shoulder.
96. 4:29You can even do Arnold presses if needed for shoulder health.
97. 4:32But if you want to focus on the side delts,
98. 4:34you really want the elbow all the way out to the side.
99. 4:37And with a seated press, you cannot do this
100. 4:40very well because you're essentially doing a very, very incline press.
101. 4:44You would have to come forward and then you can no longer use a backrest.
102. 4:48Therefore, it's ideal to do your overall pressing for a side with dumbbells
103. 4:52instead of a barbell and standing to really make sure you can get the elbows
104. 4:57all the way out to the side, fully over as pressing and bringing them back down.
105. 5:01And by all the way down, I mean
106. 5:05The range of motion doesn't stop when the dumbbell touches your shoulders.
107. 5:08It doesn't stop when your elbow is horizontal
108. 5:10and it stops when the elbow can no longer go further down.
109. 5:14So many people do it like this.
110. 5:16Or they have the dumbbells to delts and they do it like this.
111. 5:19But you can get more range of motion
112. 5:21by rotating the dumbbells out to the sides, especially with bigger dumbbells
113. 5:25and letting the dumbbells come
114. 5:29You get substantially more range of motion.
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131. 6:24Okay, back to the video.
132. 6:26So for cable lateral raises if you want to focus on the side delts
133. 6:30If you're doing it like most people which is like this.
134. 6:32There are a few ways that you can improve on that,
135. 6:34but one move the elbow out straight to the side.
136. 6:37if your shoulders are not okay with this,
137. 6:39then stay in scapular plane which is about 30 degrees to the front.
138. 6:42That's fine,
139. 6:43but if you want to focus on the side delts, your shoulders are okay with it.
140. 6:46Go all the way out to the side.
141. 6:48Not only that, but during the movements You can see
142. 6:50which of the fibers are active, which is the ones that are on the top.
143. 6:54If you externally rotate the shoulder like this, you are training primarily
144. 6:57the front delt fibers.
145. 6:59If you go like this you'll see it's the lateral fibers.
146. 7:01If you go like this and internally rotate it,
147. 7:03you'll be actually training a lot of the rearmost fibers.
148. 7:06and you will be training the rear delts; a large part.
149. 7:09That means that if you want to focus on the side delts and exclude the front delts,
150. 7:14you want to actually bend over a little bit
151. 7:15because you'll see that it's more the side fibers
152. 7:17This way you take out the front delts, or at least the front
153. 7:20most fibers of the front delts, and you focus more on the side delt.
154. 7:24So here's how that would look
155. 7:28This and all the way out to the side.
156. 7:32Notice I am crossing the arm all the way over into the body.
157. 7:35That's a nice advantage of using a cable compared to using a dumbbell.
158. 7:39Not only do you get tension in the leg for position in this position,
159. 7:42because the cable is pulling this way and I still have to produce force
160. 7:45with the lateral delt moving this way, with a dumbbell.
161. 7:48gravity goes straight down, so there's no tension on the lateral delts.
162. 7:51I will say that a recent study found that you get approximately the same growth
163. 7:55with dumbbell and cable lateral raises, but in that study, they stopped here
164. 7:59and it didn't go all the way here.
165. 8:01Moreover, in absolute terms, growth was a little bit greater with the cable version
166. 8:05than with the dumbbell version.
167. 8:06So it's not going to make or break your program.
168. 8:08You can do it with dumbbells.
169. 8:09All of the things that I'm talking about here are absolutely fine tuning,
170. 8:12but based on the current best research, there might be a small advantage
171. 8:15to using a cable instead of a dumbbell and letting the arm cross over all the way,
172. 8:19and probably now also using one arm itself, two arms
173. 8:22to get high tension as a long muscle length over a greater range of motion.
174. 8:27I would note also
175. 8:28that this isn't just about getting tension at long muscle lengths.
176. 8:30You are actually
177. 8:31increasing the total range of motion and for the total range of motion.
178. 8:34Research is a lot more compelling than simply doing length in partials.
179. 8:38Length in partials I think are a bit overrated at the moment,
180. 8:40but doing exercises that train muscles over the largest possible
181. 8:44muscle lengths has been established for a long period of time.
182. 8:47final tip for those to do shrugs and train their upper traps.
183. 8:51Most people do shrugs with dumbbells or a barbell.
184. 8:53However, it's probably a little bit better to do them with cables
185. 8:56with a wide alignment.
186. 8:58You can also grab a barbell and use a very wide grip.
187. 9:01It will have a similar effect and do exercise like this.
188. 9:05If you look at the alignment of the upper trap fibers, research finds that it's
189. 9:09almost horizontal for many of the fibers.
190. 9:11which means that if you get the shoulder to shrug into the body,
191. 9:15it's easier to activate the upper fibers of the traps.
192. 9:18of the upper traps.
193. 9:19The upper traps are almost certainly still activated by doing standard shrugs,
194. 9:23but you'll probably get a bit higher muscle activity with
195. 9:26wide shrugs. With standard shrugs,
196. 9:28the upper traps are not directly elevating the shoulder blades doing this.
197. 9:32That's the levator scapulae that are doing that, but the upper traps are
198. 9:35instead pulling on the clavicle, lifting the shoulder complex like a drawbridge.
199. 9:40So it's a more indirect stimulus which might be inferior for muscle growth.
200. 9:44and you'll feel when you do the exercise, it's quite intuitive to not just
201. 9:47pull the shoulder blades up, but pull them inside as well.
202. 9:50because the alignment of the upper trap fibers.
203. 9:52Moreover, when you're doing your shrugs, you probably want to look a little bit down
204. 9:55because it lengthens the upper traps.
205. 9:57If you do it the way that many physiotherapists will tell you
206. 10:00was perfectly upright
207. 10:01and looking back to protect the neck or the shoulder or something,
208. 10:04then you are shortening the traps and you are weaker.
209. 10:06if you look at strongman doing farmer's
210. 10:08walks and the like, they're almost always like this
211. 10:10because that's the position you are strongest.
212. 10:12And it's exceptionally rare to hear of anyone injuring themselves during shrugs.
213. 10:15So I wouldn't worry about that.
214. 10:16So just look a little bit forward like this when you're doing your shrugs.
215. 10:20And if you're using a barbell, use a wide grip instead of a narrow grip.
216. 10:23If you're using cables, try to get them far apart.
217. 10:26Technically what you want, is you want the shoulders to be abducted
218. 10:29when you're elevating the scapula.
219. 10:31All right, I hope that helps you get bigger shoulders.
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