- What's up Elite ThenX athletes.
It's Chris Heria. Welcome to another video.
Today, I'm gonna be showing you
the five best shoulder exercises that you can do from home.
(soul music)
The shoulders are a very important muscle group
that's involved with pretty much every upper body exercise,
whether you're pulling or you're pushing,
you're engaging your shoulders.
That's why it's critical to working out
and developing strong shoulders.
The strength gained in your shoulders will be used
to help build other muscle groups
like on your back day and chest day,
by allowing you to lift heavier,
not just on your shoulder day,
but also helping you to build the rest of your physique.
Your shoulders have the biggest range of motion
out of any other joint in your body
and you'll be engaging your shoulders
any time you do an abduction, a duction,
flexion, extension, or internal or external rotations
of your shoulder joints.
The most important factor to building strength
and muscle in your shoulders,
is creating tension with any of these movement paths,
whether it be isometric holds or repetitions.
So I'm gonna be showing you my five best exercises
that are most effective for creating the most tension
without the use of weights or equipment
to develop your shoulders from home or anywhere.
In the process of doing these five shoulder exercises,
you're gonna get a super-effective shoulder workout.
So to properly follow along
and get this routine on your phone,
make sure you download the ThenX app
in the App store or Google Play store.
Open up to the YouTube workout section.
You're gonna find this routine
and you're ready to get started.
The first exercise on the list,
just to get it out the way,
'cause you guys know I always say
my favorite body weight exercise for shoulders
is gonna be handstand push-ups.
I'm gonna go for 10 reps.
For everyone watching, I want you to choose
a handstand push-up progression that challenges you,
but allows you to complete 10 repetitions.
That can be handstand push-ups against the wall,
elevated pike push-ups,
or pike push-ups.
Choose a progression that works best for you.
We're goin' for 10 reps.
(new age instrumental music)
There we have handstand push-ups.
Like I always say, that's one of my favorite exercises
for shoulders because it applies the most amount of overload
and tension that you can, on your shoulders
without any equipment or weights.
And because you have to balance and stabilize
while doing this exercise,
you're gonna be engaging your fast twitch muscle fibers
which is gonna help you develop
stronger and thicker muscles.
Handstand push-ups emphasizes mainly
on your frontal and medial delt.
Now of course, you wanna work your way up
to handstand push-ups
and with the progressions that I recommended you to do,
you're gonna slowly be able to increase the overload
on your shoulders while pressing.
Over time, mastering each progression
from the easiest to the hardest,
you're gonna develop the strength to be able to do
handstand push-ups, free-standing.
For a complete breakdown on how to do this move
from the very beginning, check out my video,
"Five Steps to Master Handstand Push-ups."
Now moving on to number two,
we have wall walks.
I'm gonna go for five repetitions.
For everyone else watching,
I want you to just walk up the wall as high as you can
while still challenging yourself.
Eventually, the more you do this exercise,
you'll develop more strength in your shoulders
and be able to go up higher.
Let's go for five reps.
I'm gonna take small steps.
Keep your body straight.
Come as close to the wall as you can.
(instrumental soul music)
Then you can walk back down, touch the ground.
Go back up.
If you wanna challenge yourself,
don't touch the ground at all.
(instrumental soul music)
There we have wall walks.
This is gonna be a super-effective exercise
regardless of your fitness level.
If you're a beginner, like I said,
just walk as high as you can
and come back down.
Eventually you're gonna be able to go up higher and higher.
The more shoulder strength you'll get by doing this.
If you're already advanced, I want you to walk up
as high as you can.
That's gonna put your entire body weight
on top of your shoulders,
giving you the most overload and tension.
That's key to making it on this list
is being able to overload as much weight as you can
without equipment or external weights
effectively onto your shoulders.
When you're doing wall walks, for a second,
you're actually putting your entire body weight
onto one single arm
and nearly doubling your overload
with each delt, individually within a large range of motion
as you walk up and walk back down.
Just like handstand push-ups, wall walks
emphasize on your frontal and medial delts.
Now for the third exercise,
we're right about to get into,
this one's gonna emphasize on our rear delts.
We're gonna be doing reverse plank holds.
Let's get down to the ground
into a reverse plank position.
You're gonna lift your hips up,
keep your legs straight,
push your shoulders down.
You really wanna be emphasizing on tryin'
to bring your arms back and behind you.
Squeeze your core.
We're gonna hold this for 30 seconds.
(instrumental soul music)
You really wanna make sure your hips aren't drooping down
and you're bringing them up.
Trying to emphasize majority of your body weight
onto your shoulders, your rear delts, specifically.
You can also try different hand placements as well.
We're gonna go for the last couple seconds now.
Five, four,
three, two,
and one.
Now, for some of you out there that have never
tried this exercise before,
you may have felt your rear delts burning by the end
of those 30 seconds.
This may look like a simple exercise,
but when it comes to effectively engaging your shoulders,
you wanna put as much tension on them as possible.
When you're trying to do that without equipment
or external weights, this is gonna be the best way
to engage and activate your rear delts.
Because your rear delts are mainly engaged
when your arms go behind you,
you're very limited to what exercises you can do,
even when using body weight exercises
if you don't have access to hang from somewhere.
Regardless, the rear delts are a part of your shoulders
and the stronger your rear delts are,
the stronger your shoulder as a whole is gonna be
and it's gonna help you avoid injury.
From the reverse plank position,
you're pretty much at the peak of how much tension
and overload you can effectively apply
onto your rear delts.
Moving onto the fourth exercise on our list,
we're gonna be doing the opposite of this
with planche leans which is a progression
to the full planche that anybody can do
that's gonna be highly effective
for overloading your shoulders.
Let's get down to the ground.
Specifically your frontal delts.
This exercise is gonna be very similar to anterior raises
that you would do with dumbbells or barbells in the gym.
You'll be applying a lot more weight
using a portion of your body weight.
Let's go ahead and go for 10 reps.
Keep your arms straight.
Now you wanna keep your body straight,
from a push-up position as well.
You wanna lean forward
until your hands reach your waistline.
Then you wanna push back up,
keeping your arms straight and then come back.
(instrumental soul music)
Over time from doing this, you'll be able to develop
your strength to eventually raise your entire body weight.
(instrumental soul music)
There we have the planche leans
and the harder variation, planche raises.
Of course, there are even harder variations,
like full planche raises to a 90 degree hold.
Full planche push-ups, even full planche hold.
The reason why I chose full planche leans
is specifically because everybody can get into it,
everybody can do it, and it's still super-effective
regardless of your fitness level.
I still use them to this day
and of course, doing full planche leans
will unlock all the harder progressions
that I've previously mentioned.
It uses more body weight and requires more shoulder strength
that you can eventually progress to.
The most important thing for executing
and mastering this exercise and to be able to progress on
is using perfect form, always.
Keeping your arms straight and locked out,
having your hands at least by your waistline.
Over time, you can develop that.
Leaning as far as you can
and keeping your core tight and your body in a straight line
as well, from your shoulders to your toes.
To check out how far these progressions go,
you can always check out my video,
"How to Full Planche in 10 Steps,"
or "How to Full Planche Push-up in 7 Steps."
Now we're moving onto the fifth and last exercise
on our list.
That's gonna be 90 degree plus push-ups.
I'm gonna go ahead and go for 10 repetitions.
We're gonna get down into a push-up position.
We're gonna get to the bottom of a push-up
with our hands by our waistline
and from here, we're gonna lean forward,
get our legs off the ground,
then come right back up.
That's gonna be a repetition.
It also helps if your hands are slightly turned out.
For everyone watching, that can't do that,
you wanna come down, bring your hands to 90,
and just lift up one leg, then the other one,
then come back right up.
Eventually, you'll develop the strength to lift both feet up
and if you can't do that, then just come down
and hold this position, hands by the waistline.
We're gonna go for 10 reps.
Here we go.
(instrumental soul music)
There we have the 90 plus push-ups.
With this exercise and their variations,
we're mainly engaging our medial and frontal delts.
Just like the previous exercise,
this is actually a progression to a harder exercise
and as many harder variations.
The reason why I chose this one,
anyone can pretty much get right into it
and it's very effective
whether you're a beginner or advanced.
It's a great introduction exercise
that if you master, will open the doors
to all harder progressions as I mentioned before
like full planche push-ups, 90 degree handstand push-ups,
and much more.
If the only weight we have to work out
is our body weight, we're using all of it with this exercise
which is the most tension that can be applied
onto your shoulders when you don't have equipment
or external weight.
Once you've mastered all these exercises
and their harder progressions with your own body weight,
you'll definitely have developed some solid strength
and a superior physique,
but to continue on, making crazy gains fast
and building solid muscle and strength,
you wanna start adding extra weight
onto these body weight exercises
by using a weight belt which you can find at thenx.com/shop
or using my personal Heria weight vest
which you can find at chrisheria.com.
We just restocked on all the weight vests,
but they sell out quick,
so get one while you still can.
When you start training with the weight vest
you're gonna see how fast, you're gonna build
solid muscle and crazy strength.
It's a total game changer
and you're gonna be wondering why you never bought one
and started training with it before.
With that said, those are my five best shoulder exercises
that you can do from home
that require absolutely no equipment.
If you were able to complete all five exercises
that's actually gonna be a solid workout routine
for your shoulders and doing one round is a great start
to building solid shoulder strength,
but to get the most benefits you wanna continue
to do this over time, so eventually, you'll be able to do
four solid rounds consecutively
to benefit the most out of this routine.
Remember to get this workout and more workouts
just like this, getting in the best shape of your life
and go to thenx.com and become a member.
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That's all for today.
I'll see you next Sunday, 8 p.m. U.S.A., Eastern time.
Mad love. Peace out.
(instrumental soul music)