What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I’m going to light up your shoulders like a Christmas tree.
We’re going to use just a couple of dumbbells to do it.
Probably, here’s the irony: some exercises that you’ve done many, many times before
but not in this way.
Look, you’ve probably done a lot of front shoulder raises, side shoulder raises, and
rear delt raises in your life.
The idea was that you were going to hit your front delts, your middle delts, and your rear
delts.
But have you ever thought about changing the position of your body?
Because if you did, you’d work a hell of a lot more than just your delts in isolation,
and you’d change the entire impact those exercises have on your delts in the process.
Why is that?
Well, I’m down on the ground for a reason, guys.
We call this the kneeling lateral series.
All you have to do is alternate these movements for three minutes straight and see if you
can last.
My bet is, you may not.
It’s because the muscles around these bigger muscles – the delts – are actually probably
pretty weak and not used to working alongside those muscles.
We need to make sure they are.
When we get down in this position here, this is a closed chain position.
Meaning, we have some biofeedback.
We have our arm in contact with the ground.
Closed chain, meaning just like our feet couple be on the ground in a closed chain exercise
of a squat.
But what’s interesting about this is, this is where we evolved from.
We used to get around on four limbs with our arms in contact with the ground.
So, the muscles of our scapula have always been wired to work better with our delts as
we move our arms around when they’re in contact with the ground.
So how does it play out in real life?
Well, if we get down in this position and start with this first exercises, it’s a
front shoulder raise – a little bit of a wide raise because we’re not going straight
out in front, but a little bit of an angle.
Why is it so interesting?
Well, take a look.
If I’m in this position here and I raise my arm up in front of me, at the top here
I have gravity acting fully down on my arm – on a lever arm – making my front shoulder
and front delt work a lot.
I haven’t sacrificed that.
What have I done?
Relative motion.
If I have my arm up here like this, now if I sit up where’s the position of the arm?
It’s higher than it was, just because I had that lean forward.
Well, if it’s higher we have elevation.
The thing that instantly likes to kick in are the lower traps, to assist in that.
That’s what they’re meant to do.
They’re meant to assist in stabilizing the shoulder as it gets up in front of your body,
and elevated.
So, we get that extra benefit by doing it down here on the ground that we don’t get
by just raising them out to here.
Next movement, you can see me here doing the side lateral raises.
Alternating right and left.
We’ll get into how you do the exact series here in a second.
What’s the benefit doing it kneeling?
Once again, we’re in this closed chain position here.
When I lift one arm up I have all my weight going through one arm, which is a better position
for stability through this arm and the shoulder joint.
But now when I raise up to the side, once again I haven’t compromised the effect that
this has on the middle delt.
What have I done?
I’ve incorporated the rhomboids.
You can see them firing up here.
You can see all the muscles on the back firing up.
Again, the way they’re meant to.
All these muscles attach to the shoulder blade.
You can’t move your arm without moving your shoulder blade.
Your shoulder blade has a lot of different muscles attaching to it that are influencing
its movement.
So, if we can incorporate more of them together to do the job together, we’ve got a better
exercise.
All we had to do was alter the position of our body when we performed that exercise.
Next, we move onto the rear delt raise.
Now here, you guys know that we normally do this bent over.
So, there’s really not anything beneficial being added here, other than the fact that
you don’t need to transition.
There’s no transition time.
You don’t have to rest.
You can go right into the exercise.
Of course, I’m doing it the way I always show you how to do it, and that is to get
the arm into extension behind the body and get external rotation.
Finally, we throw an additional exercise in here because we know how important the rotator
cuff is in activation into external rotation.
We do that just by doing the W raise.
Which is where we’re trying to actively throw the dumbbell back behind us, form a
“W” here with our arm, which will instantly activate those muscles really, really well.
So now here’s the sequence.
What you want to do is see if you can go from alternating front shoulder raises done down
here, kneeling on the ground, to alternating side lateral raises, to the alternating rear
delt raises, and then finally to the alternating W raise.
Then you go back and repeat it and go through the entire circuit.
And you go back and repeat it.
Try to let a running clock of three minutes go by and see if you can complete the entire
sequence, however many times you do, in three minutes.
Now, it’s brutal, and there’s a reason for it.
Because your muscles are not used to firing in this way.
But they should be.
Guys, you have to allow your bodies to work the way they’re supposed to or you’re
leaving gains on the table.
I promise you.
Once you start to get more stability here you’re going to improve performance in other
exercises.
Look, I love the overhead shoulder press.
In order to perform an overhead shoulder press you need upward scapular rotation.
You do.
However, that exercise does not train upward shoulder rotation.
What do I mean by that?
It means you can perform upward rotation but get it in a lot of unhealthy ways.
You can compromise the hell out of your shoulder to get upward rotation, but are you getting
co-stabilization and activation of the lower traps in order to do that?
If you’re not, you’re in trouble.
When you do exercises like this, they help you build that necessary strength, so you
perform better when you go back to that raise, and go back to any of the other exercises
you perform.
Guys, try this out.
I know it’s going to be helpful for you.
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Finally, if you’re looking for a program, step by step that puts the science back in
strength, that cares about all these little things because they matter – it doesn’t
always require the heaviest weights in the world.
Just doing these things is what counts the most.
We have them all step by step in our ATHLEANX program over at ATHLEANX.com.
All right, guys.
I’ll be back here again in just a few days with another video.
See you.