What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're going to cover the 10 commandments of shoulder training.
10 things that you shalt, and shalt not do if you're looking to develop your biggest,
and healthiest shoulders.
So without further ado, let's get right into the commandments.
First up:
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Skip Rear Delts.
JEFF: Like the man said "Thou shalt not skip rear delts".
Now guys, the rear delt is one of the three heads of the deltoid.
Why do we forget to do it?
It's just as important as the front, and middle delt, and in terms of complete shoulder development
you need to do it.
So you can see me doing it here.
Great exercises for the rear delt.
Like the face pull, or the exercise I covered in a recent video where we emphasized the
key point of hitting the rear delt is making sure that you get that extension of the elbow
back, behind the body.
It's not doing reverse flys that get you to the level of the body, but somehow, some exercise,
some way that puts that elbow back, behind the body.
Regardless of what exercise you choose, don't forget to do it.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Just Do Rear Delts on Shoulder Day.
JEFF: The beauty about the rear delt is, even if you have been ignoring it in your training,
you don’t have to just relegate it to shoulder day.
You can actually add additional volume for the rear delt if you remember to do it on
back day because you can easily incorporate rear delt work into back training, by simply
positioning your elbows differently.
If, on the last set of a lat pull down, you have yet to do any rear delt work this week,
or you want to add additional volume; just lift those elbows up a little bit, lean back,
and get them to travel back, behind your body instead of straight down, or on a one-armed
dumbbell row.
Instead of allowing the dumbbell to stay nice, and tight to your body – which is great
if you're trying to work your lats – you can get the rear delts some additional work
just by letting your elbow drift away from your body a little bit, and pulling up.
As you can see, the rear delt gets a lot of that additional work.
Or maybe even with a high boy row here, instead of doing a row to your belly button, the high
boy row – with lighter weight – allows you to pull up, and back, and work on those
rear delts to make sure they're getting the work they need throughout the course of your
training week.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Perform the "Behind the Neck" Press.
JEFF: You heard the man, and I've said it myself many times on this channel.
Ditch the 'behind the neck' press.
Especially because you have so many better options and what you're doing by doing the
exercise is forcing your anatomy into a position it doesn’t want to press from.
If we don’t believe me, or him; you've got to believe him.
This is our Raymond skeleton and you can look at the direction of this joint.
This shoulder joint angles forward about 30 degrees.
It does not face straight at you, and therefore, you should not be pressing with my elbow pointed
straight at you, doing 'behind the neck' pressing.
.
What you need to do is, you need to obey what your anatomy is trying to tell you, and get
your elbow in front of your body a little bit.
This is the natural position for the arm, and this is the more natural position to press
from.
I don’t care how long you've been doing the exercises and not getting problems, or
having problems with it.
Ultimately, you're fighting your own anatomy.
Fix that by doing what I'm going to tell you next.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Skip Overhead Presses.
JEFF: There is no reason to have to abandon overhead pressing just because you can't press
from behind the neck.
There are so many other ways to load up the exercise, to train your shoulders heavy, but
to do it out of a safer position.
If I were to sit down and use dumbbells, and do a classic Arnold press, I could do that.
Especially if you look at the position of the elbows in that exercise.
Arnold was onto something.
The elbows are positioned in that scapular plane, about 30 degrees away from that midline.
You can see, when I press, they stay there.
As Jessie walks around to the side of me, my elbows are in the forward position, allowing
me to press more safely.
The same thing could be said if I were to go grab a barbell.
The key here is, you grab a more narrow grip on the barbell because by grabbing more narrow
you bring your elbows from this outside position, to more of an inside position.
So now when I press you can see that the elbows are going to be more in front of your body
in that preferred plane.
Next, we could do something even more athletic.
You might not have access to this, but if you've ever seen it in your gym and shied
away because you didn't know what to do with it; the jammer press is a great way to explosively
train your shoulders, and to load up the weight.
But here again, look what it's doing with the position of the elbow.
It's getting you in front of your body.
So whomever said "You can't do behind the neck presses, so you shouldn't press" is getting
it wrong.
You need to press.
Finally, if you want one more option I love the landmine setup for pressing from.
Not only can I train one arm at a time here, but I can eccentrically load my entire core,
and be explosive on my press.
There are a lot of different options, but the key is: find one, load it up, and use
it.
Don't abandon all overhead pressing just because we've told you to forget the 'behind the neck'
pressing.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Forget to Include Light Weight.
JEFF: Just like the old saying 'what goes up, must come down', what gets heavy should
also get light at some point.
Especially when we're training our shoulders.
If you want to get maximum development of your shoulders it's not always necessary to
go so heavy.
Especially if you want to direct the load specifically to the delts.
A lot of times when we press we get a lot of extra help from our legs, or our triceps,
or muscles around the area that are helping.
And that's a good thing to developing overall strength, but when you want to go for that
ultimate hypertrophy of a muscle, you're ultimately going to want to be able to isolate, and target
that muscle with as much tension as you can.
The side lateral raise done in one-and-a-half rep style allows you to get command of the
weights.
And yes, they're going to be a lot lighter than you're used to, but you're going to feel
the impact of this immediately.
Do the rep, come down halfway, and go back up again.
There's no more momentum swinging these weights around.
That is all contraction of the delt, and whatever strength you have in that delt that is responsible
for getting that weight back up.
And doing just a few sets of these is going to have a great impact, ultimately, on how
much bigger your shoulders can become because maybe for the first time ever they're feeling
the actual brunt of the load that you've been handing off to other muscles in the first
place.
Make sure you're including some light weights with your heavier training if you want maximum
development.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Honor the Eccentric.
.
JEFF: This one answers one of the more common questions.
That is: how come my shoulders never seem to get sore after I train them?
Probably because you're never putting them in an eccentrically overloaded position, or
delivering tension to that muscle when it's stretched because the exercises we do for
shoulders don't really ever take us into a stretched position.
Unless, that is, we plan for it.
We can do that and we can take advantage of one of the three main stimulants for muscle
growth.
So here's how you do it.
If you're doing a side lateral raise you can do it with a cable.
What we do is, we want to allow the muscle to be stretched by allowing the arm to cross
over the midline of your body.
Now, it can either happen in front of your body, or as I'm showing you, it could be behind
my body.
The idea is that in the bottom position, when the muscle is actually getting stretched for
the first time, we have tension delivered to that muscle.
We can do the same thing here with a front raise, but we know that to stretch the front
delt you're going to have to get that arm back, behind the body.
So if you stride out, and allow the arm to travel back, behind the body you can see that
the tension is still there.
We have the stretch.
We have the tension.
We finally have available to us that stimulus for added growth that we've been overlooking,
or missing to this point.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Ignore Bodyweight Exercises for Bigger Shoulders.
JEFF: Once again, the bodyweight exercises get relegated to the 'not-so-effective for
building muscle' category.
However, it's simply not the case.
Especially when we're talking about the shoulders, and especially when you realize that we have
options like this for building them.
This handstand-wall pushup is a tremendous over-loader for your shoulders.
You're basically lifting about 20% less than your bodyweight as you press up every, single
rep.
That's a heavy load for those that are used to pressing weight with barbells.
But you can do it here with your own bodyweight without needing any equipment at all.
The same could be said here with different variations of pushups.
This modified, feet down plants pushup here places a tremendous stress on the front delt
and you can do that, too.
Again, without any equipment.
Then finally, we have this push away press.
Which, again, we're manipulating our bodyweight and controlling how we're pressing, and we're
trying to turn this into a horizontal version of a shoulder press.
But try a few of them.
Do not discount the benefit of bodyweight training when it comes to building your shoulders.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Skip My Favorite Shoulder Exercise.
JEFF: I didn't know he had a favorite shoulder exercise.
But I will say, this is one of my favorite, too.
It's definitely one of my favorite, lesser performed exercises.
But what you want to do here is, you don’t always want to isolate the shoulder.
We talked about the benefits of pressing.
The muscles that lie next to each other prefer to, usually, work together anatomically.
So when we realize that we can take the upper chest, and the front delt, and tie it in together,
and get them to work together in the one exercise; we're going to want to do that.
With this UCV raise we have the option to do that.
you take a dumbbell, you hold it upside down, and you're basically – not just lifting
up, which would be a pure, front delt exercise – but we're going to follow the fibers,
as I always like to say, of the upper chest, and bring it up, and across our body.
You can see, literally, every, single muscle in that area is working to lift this dumbbell
up.
You don’t need heavy weights here either.
You're going for the focused contraction, and trying to make sure that these two muscles
are working to lift that dumbbell up, to give you another option in your shoulder building
arsenal.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Ignore Popping Shoulders.
JEFF: Now, this one could have come earlier in this video, but I am not about to argue
with the order of the commandments.
The fact is, if something popping, clicking in your shoulder – grinding – is getting
in the way of you getting through your workout, or getting the most out of your shoulder workout;
then you've got to try what I'm going to show you right here.
It's going to fix it, at least temporarily.
You want to try to fix, what we call 'postural impingement'.
All the time our shoulders are in this position because we strengthen the muscle here, and
we do very little to activate, or work on any of the muscles that can counteract this
internal rotation that leads to impingement.
So what we want to do is do that now.
We could ignite them.
We can awaken them by getting ourselves up, against a wall, putting the back of our hands
and elbows in contact with the wall, and then just simply trying to raise our arms up, keeping
contact with the back of the hands, and the elbow.
What you'll find is, you'll maybe only be able to get up a little way the first time.
Then on the second rep you'll be able to get up a little higher.
And on the third rep, maybe a little higher.
Shoot for about six, to eight reps of this.
When you walk away from the wall I promise you, if you had pinching, clicking, popping
that come from a postural impingement it's going to be gone.
You're going to be able to do a pain-free workout now with your shoulders.
Keeping in mind that, long term, this is an indicator that you're going to have to do
something else – like, more regular rotator cuff work – to fix this once, and for all.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Skip a Workout Due to Injury.
JEFF: The last point.
If you're dealing with a shoulder injury right now, and your option has been to skip shoulder
training altogether; likely you're doing more damage than good.
The weaker a shoulder joint becomes, and the weaker the muscles around that shoulder joint
become, usually the problem gets exacerbated, and things get worse.
There are always things that you can do on shoulder day, even making some of the modifications
I showed you on pressing, that allow you to keep training the joint, and delivering blood
to that area to help the overall process of healing.
What happens is we ignore the fact that we're tending to hurt the joint a lot more on other
days of our training.
For example: if you have a torn labrum – which is something I've dealt with – doing pullups
and not realizing that every, single pull is having a bad impact on that shoulder joint
is likely going to lead you to continuing to have a bad shoulder, even though you think
you're doing the right things by avoiding your shoulder workouts.
Same thing could be said about bench pressing.
If you have an AC joint injury, and you continue to bench, allowing your shoulders to pop up
every, single time you do; you're aggravating that AC joint every, single rep.
Again, you may be thinking "Well, at least I'm not training my shoulders.
So I'm doing what I need to, to help this thing get better."
No, you're not.
You're still doing the wrong things on those other days.
The key is finding a way to train around the injuries that you have to keep your progress
and your strength there.
In the meantime, look elsewhere to what you could be doing wrong on the other days you're
training, that aren't so obvious.
MALE VOICE: Thou Shalt Not Perform the Upright Row.
JEFF: Wait a second.
That's 11.
Well, he's right.
I'm going to include this, too.
You've heard me say it many times on this channel, and I'm going to say it one more
time for good measure.
Do not do the upright row.
The upright row is not an exercise that can be modified, made better, improved – "Oh,
I've been doing it so long it doesn't matter".
The exercise sucks if you're trying to keep healthy shoulders for the long term.
Especially when you realize there are other, healthy options out there.
If you look at the upright row here, I've talked about it so many times, you're putting
yourself into position for an impingement.
You're internally rotating your arms, weighting it down with the dumbbell, and lifting up,
overhead.
That is the position that we, as physical therapists, put a patient in to test, to see
how much impingement there is in the shoulder.
It's not good.
But what we can do is a high pull instead because we're flipping the script.
Instead of allowing the elbows to lead the way with hands and wrists down, below we want
to let it go the other way.
We want to let the hands and wrists lead the way with the elbows down, below.
This externally rotates the shoulder more, creating more space inside that joint, allowing
you to pull, and get the delts involved without having to have the impingement likelihood
that comes from being internally rotated when you elevate.
There are so many ways to train your shoulders, to force yourself to do this one exercise
when you have all those other options available to you.
It's not a good idea.
So there you have it, guys.
The 10 commandments of shoulder training.
I guess a bonus 11th.
The fact is: if you want to develop your shoulders to the maximum, and you want to make sure
that you're keeping them healthy in the process, there are things that you're going to want
to do, and there are things that you shall not do in order to get there.
What I try to do here, as both a physical therapist and a strength coach, is blend those
worlds together so I can get you the right information to allow you to do just that.
In the meantime, if you've found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
If you have any other questions-
MALE VOICE: Excuse me.
Jeff, hold on.
Wait.
Stop.
Hold on.
Excuse me.
JEFF: Sure.
MALE VOICE: I have a question.
How did you know I was going to train shoulders tomorrow?
I mean, you always do that.
It never fails.
I have to train something, the day before, boom!
There's a video.
I want to train legs; there's a leg video.
I need to train bis; there's a bicep video.
JEFF: I don’t know.
I guess I just have a knack for it.
What I will do is, I'll promise to keep trying to do that for you, and for everybody else
out here watching.
If you want more of these videos make sure you let me know.
I'll make more commandment videos.
In the meantime, guys, have a great workout.
I'll see you here next time.