What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
The sore in six minute series is back and this time we're hitting the shoulders.
The shoulders are definitely one of those muscle groups that you likely have a hard
time experiencing delayed onset muscle soreness, or soreness a day or two after you train them.
Simply because it's very difficult to elongate the shoulder muscles when you train them.
If you think about the most popular exercises that we do – a side lateral raise here – you're
basically coming down to your side and never allowing the muscle to actually stretch.
If you haven't seen our stretching video on the delts.
I'll actually link that one here.
We talk about the range of motion that you have to go through to stretch each head of
the deltoid, and you can see that in our normal performance of any of our exercises in our
shoulder workout we don’t do that.
But you know that I'm going to fix that for you here, today.
So let's take a look at the little, six minute routine that will do that.
we're going to put the science back in strength and at the same time, the safety as well because
when you start talking about the shoulder joint it's one of the ones that could be hurt
the most easily because it's one of the most mobile joints in your body.
So if we can get the soreness in the muscle, and not the soreness in the joint then we've
accomplished what we've set out to do.
So let's take a look at that first exercise.
We start off with a light set of dumbbells and a heavier set of dumbbells.
The whole thing – this whole six minute routine – can be done with just two sets
of dumbbells.
For me, I'm picking 15s.
You're going to see why in a second.
Then I'm going to pick 40s here for my last exercise.
What we do is, we use the 15s for the first three, and then we're going to target, first
and foremost, the front head of the delt.
If I setup an incline bench like I do here, and now I sit back, now when my arms go down
at the sides just in my resting position, you can see that the front delt is actually
getting a lot of stretch because my arms are in extension behind my body.
Now you don’t want to let your shoulders round in this bottom position.
You should always be conscious of letting them sit back in the glenoid humeral joint
so they're in a good, safe position.
But you're still going to get that nice stretch on the front delt and we perform our front
delt raises here.
Again, we eccentrically control the weight all the way down, past neutral, into extension
to get that tension with stretch.
That's what's going to create those micro-tears.
That's going to create that eccentric damage that's going to be necessary for sparking
our new growth.
Well, one of the methods that we've talked about for sparking new growth.
So now we go through a minute of that exercise.
Then immediately we position ourselves in this way.
We sort of set the incline up, now we invert our body.
We put one hand planted on the back of the seat, and then we stagger our feet so that
we create this angle of our body into the bench.
Now we let the dumbbell drop down in front of us.
Now we're targeting the middle delt.
In the middle delt here you can see that just by, again, allowing the dumbbell to rest when
you put the middle delt on stretch – because we've allowed the arm to cross here, in front
of the body.
So what we do now is, we actually take it up at a 45 degree angle from our body.
One of the safest positions you could put your shoulder in.
It's called scaption.
This plane here.
It's not all the way out here.
You guys know I don’t like that all the way out there, frontal plane for the shoulder.
I like it more 45 degrees so we can do that here, and at the top, what we want to try
to do is externally rotate the arm.
So we're not pouring pitchers.
I've talked about that many times, too.
We're actually trying to lift the thumb higher than the pinky.
On the bottom you can actually do the opposite.
You can let the thumb come downward into a pouring position because the arm isn't elevated.
You're not getting that increased likelihood of impingement.
If you come down to increase the stretch, and then you come back up, and you come back
down, and you do this again.
Now this is a minute on each arm.
So when you get done with each arm here, as you can see me working the other side, you're
going to be at three minutes total.
Now we have to go and hit the rear delt.
So now for the rear delt we go to the backside of the bench.
We never have to change position of the bench here.
We go to the backside of the bench, and now we sort of lean directly down on top of it.
Now the angle is going to be this horizontal adduction here.
Back, behind our body.
Like the reverse fly.
When we do this we want to get a little bit of a twist here, as you can see me doing here,
twist my torso so that I'm allowing more of a stretch across my body.
So I'm leaving this part as square as I can.
I'm moving my lower body and naval in the opposite direction.
So we're right here.
Now we come up, and again we try to externally rotate the hand, and then we allow it to come
back down.
Internal rotation, a little bit of a stretch on that posterior delt.
We have the eccentric tension in place more than we would if we just did a bent over lateral
raise like this.
Where the arms are stopping right here at my side without ever getting across my body.
So now we do the right arm, and again we do the left arm.
So we've got a total of five minutes.
So how do we wrap this thing up?
Well, we wrap it up by going to the old, classic shoulder press because there's no better way
to create growth in the shoulders, but by going after those fast twitch fibers using
a little bit heavier weight.
Now this isn't the top-end weight that you're used to because we just did it after doing
five minutes of individual front delt, middle delt, and rear delt work.
The 40s here are going to feel like 70s to me.
So now I get up here and the tweak that you're going to do is, you're going to keep it positioned,
and keep your arm above 90 degrees and try to press straight up.
I always give this tip: if you want to really work the delt and concentrate the work on
the delt, just focus on taking this portion of the shoulder and lifting it straight up
to the ceiling.
Straight up.
Forget what the hands are doing.
Forget what the elbows are doing, necessarily.
For me, it's very easy to focus on what this part of the shoulder's doing.
If I can go straight up, obviously it's going to want to come in at an angle, but if I can
go straight up here I really can contract the delt, that we know runs right through
here.
So I do that, and I try to withstand this tension now for at least that final one minute.
That's it.
I promise you, because of the combination of the lighter work to work the slower twitch
fibers in the shoulders – which, there's actually more of those in the delts than there
are fast-twitch – we're going to work on that, and we're also going to finish it with
the heavier stuff.
That whole combination combined with the eccentric overload is going to make you sore.
Now again, as I said, if this is not something you've done before, ease yourself into it.
But if you're experienced, this is one of those routines where you'll go "Holy shit!
I finally got sore in my shoulders.
Jeff delivered again."
I know you're going to feel this if you try this out.
So if you like this, make sure you check out the other sore in six minute videos that we
did.
If you're looking for a program that doesn’t just tell you what to do, but tells you why
things are working that way; head to ATHLEANX.com.
Put the science back in strength.
Start seeing better results by following our ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, if you like this video, if you want me to continue this series – you
know I will – let me know below and I will do that for you.
All right, guys.
I'll see you back here in just a couple days.