What's up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. So, I talked about the Side Lateral Raise before. I
said never pour the pitchers when you're doing it. Why? Because you're wasting a good bottle
of water. But also, you might be damaging your shoulder because we don't like this internal
rotation with elevation that we get from the exercise, especially when we can do it a different
way. But maybe you're asking another question, Is that the best way to do a lateral raise? Because
I see people do a whole bunch of different ways. Bent arm, straight arm. Let's cover
the side range first with the straight arm. The first thing that's going to happen is you're
going to have to use a lighter weight. Why? Because as the moment arm increases,
the length of the arm increases than the weight in your hand is going to have to decrease in order to
be able to handle it. But don't be discouraged because your shoulders can't read what this
number is on the side of the dumbbell. They only feel the tension in the muscle that's working,
and as long as the tension is high enough, you're going to grow even if you're using something
towards the lighter end of the rack. However, you can do something that makes
this exercise even more effective, and it starts with understanding how the dumbbell variation of
it actually affects the shoulder. Because we know that when you do it with a dumbbell, the easiest
part of the exercise is going to be the bottom part here because we're not subjected to gravity
fully like we are at the top. Well, if we had to choose a weight for the exercise that's something
we can handle up here. We know it's going to be far too light and not challenging enough
in the bottom part of the range of motion. But this is where people confuse the range of
motion of an exercise that's effective versus the range of motion of a joint. And sometimes
the motion should be abbreviated to remain in the effective range. So, I've talked about if
you were going to do the straight arm raise, limit the range of motion to the top half because this
is going to remain challenging no matter where or what light type of weight you put in your hand.
You can go all the way down if you want, come up and do it in a one- and one-half style. But again,
try to perform the majority of the work in that abbreviated range.
Now, if you're going to do the bent arm lateral raise, first thing you want to do is increase the
weight. Because we know mathematically through physics that if that moment arm is shortened,
you're going to effectively be able to handle a heavier weight to make that tension feel the
same in the working muscle. And in this case, you're only going to want to take about half
the weight of the weight you were using and add that to that weight, to get the weight,
you should be able to handle with a bent arm. So, if I was eating a 20-pound dumbbell to perform
a straight raise, add half of that 10 additional pounds, it's going to give you about 30 pounds.
So now I should be able to feel about the same tension in the muscle with a 30-pound dumbbell
done with the arm in this bent position. But a couple of things happen here that
you need to be aware of. First of all, you're introducing another lever arm. This time is not
just the arm length from here to here, but not even introduce a lever arm from here to
here that goes in this direction anteriorly. And two things happen because of that. When I have
a weight in my hand here, it's going to want to pull me down in this direction. And that's
something you want to be careful of, because if we pull down, this is still internal rotation,
the same way it was when I was doing the pour of the pitcher from the top. So,
I want to make sure I always have my wrist in hand above my elbow. Meaning I don't want
to have the pinkies high and thumbs down, but the thumbs high and the pinkies down and again,
wrist above elbow. That's the first thing. The second thing is when you have that anterior
displacement through a bent arm lateral raise, it can tend to not only push this down but make
the front delts want to do more of the work to get that weight back up, which is defeating the
purpose of trying to build that middle delt. So, if you're going to do that Bent Arm Lateral Raise,
you're going to want to have the weight staying relatively in line with your torso, so not out
in front of you. So, when you do that, you just let the elbow drift back behind you and keep that
dumbbell pretty much in line with the body. And again, tension wise, it should feel pretty
similar because the adaptation was made by increasing the dumbbell weight to just keep
that tension high inside of the delt. But it still has the same issues as the dumbbell did
in terms of the resistance curve and strength curve. So how can we maybe fix that? Well,
that's where you have to look at something like a Cable Lateral Raise, because the cable now becomes
a line of resistance. And if the cable can remain perpendicular to in the straight arm version here,
the forearm, then we're going to have tension right from the very beginning exercise where
it's pretty much absent in the other version of the lateral raise, the dumbbell.
Right off the bat we've got tension here because it's perpendicular to that forearm. So, we're
going to have a really nicely loaded exercise when the shoulders are at their strongest and even at
the top when they're not so strong, there's still some tension here, but it's less right, because
we've got this less degree of perpendicular of this line of force to the forearm. So,
this is a great way to do the exercise. However, I think you have to look at that one last variation
and that is, what if I was going to take the arm and bend it again and still do it with the cable?
And this is where I think you get the best of all worlds, because now I can not only bring
it across my body to get more of a stretch at the beginning. But now when I come up to the top, I've
got more perpendicularly still remaining because the arm, the lever arm is now existing in this
plane that was not there when we were straight. Right now, I'm still in this position, so there's
more tension even at the top. So, I'm down across my body, I get that stretch and it can come up and
it crossed. So, I kind of have the best of all worlds here. And what I like to do is take the
opportunity again to load this heavier because we know we can because of the bent arm position to
allow me to cheat it up, still have to control it and then control that eccentric on the way down.
So, introducing another stimulus for growth with the controlled eccentric across your body. So, if
I had to give one the title of the best, I would say it's the Cable Bent Arm Lateral Raise. But
every single version of the exercise can be done to your benefit and can certainly be done to grow
bigger shoulders if you know how to use them. Guys, if you're looking for programs where we put
them all together at different points of times when they're most appropriate, you can find them
in Athleanx.com. If you're looking for a complete shoulder workout, check out the perfect shoulder
workout over here. And also, guys, make sure you click Subscribe, turn on your notification
so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right guys, see you soon.