What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
The rear delts: the most unloved of the three heads of the delts.
We just don’t show them the attention that they need if we want your shoulders to look
better.
Not just that, if we want our shoulders to be healthier.
As you'll see today, the rear delt plays a very important role in maintaining the proper
balance of the shoulder to keep your shoulders healthy.
However, it still doesn't change our mind.
We still love to ignore it every opportunity we can.
I'm going to show you why you don’t want to.
First of all, when you look at the rear delts you can probably determine whether or not
you have a weak rear delt just by looking at your own posture from the side.
If your shoulders tend to round forward – I'm not saying that's causing the shoulders to
round forward, the weakness in the delt – what I'm saying is the rounded shoulder is actually
causing you to have weak delts because you get an overstretched position here of the
rear delt that leads to weakness over time.
That imbalance is caused by tightening and shortening of the muscles on the front side
of our chest here, from overworking that front side.
The next thing you're going to notice is you'll probably have soreness that you can touch
in through the back of your shoulder here.
Palpable trigger points that you can actually feel in through here.
And that's actually occurring because the weakness that develops in the rear delt is
replaced by artificial stability of trigger points and spasms, that try to make your shoulder
feel more stable because it lacks the actual strength that needs to be there in the first
place.
Now what is the real function of the rear delt?
There's three things that this muscle does.
The first thing it does is, it extends our arm back behind our body.
Now keep this in mind as I start to show you some of the ways you're going to want to attack
this muscle.
The next thing it does is it assists in external rotation of the shoulder.
Remember, the external rotation could occur down here, it could occur up here, it could
occur at an angle over here; all three of those are different variations and angles
on it, but it's the same movement.
That is part of what the rear delt will effect.
Lastly, it does something – horizontal abduction.
That's where it takes our arm here from the front of our body and it moves it back behind
our body.
Now this is the direct opposite of horizontal adduction, which is this movement.
We certainly get a lot of this when we're pressing.
We do a lot of that.
We're never going to suffer from too little of that, but we always suffer from too little
of this, going back in the opposite direction.
So our plan of attack is going to be two pronged.
First of all, you want to hit it head on.
That means going right at the muscle as effectively as we can.
I'll show you and exercise that I like to call the W-raise.
In the W-raise you can see here I'm actually trying to create a W with my arms.
So as I go back and do this reverse fly in the shape of a W with my arms, we're getting
all three of those components.
You can see that we're getting the extension of the arm back behind the body.
You can see that we're getting the horizontal abduction of the arm back behind the body.
You can also see that as my hands go back they're trying to actually win the race between
my elbows and my hands.
So as I go back here you can see that my hands are going to beat my elbows to the back.
By doing that I'm externally rotating that muscle.
So we know that we're getting all three functions.
The only thing is, we're not going to be able to go really heavy here.
That could limit the amount of size gains that you get here.
You're going to get a better mind-muscle connection, but the big mistake is limiting yourself to
just those smaller exercises.
So that's when you want to take step two and go to the next phase here.
That is including more heavy horizontal pulling movements.
A lot of us will fall into the trap of doing pullups and lat pulldowns and things that
do a lot of pulling, but only here in this vertical plane.
If you want to get a more complete back, especially balanced upper back development, you're going
to have to do a lot of horizontal pulling.
But there's a difference in how you do them that's going to make all the difference on
how your rear delts will respond.
If you're going to do a horizontal pulling exercise the angle of your elbows will make
all the difference.
So my three favorite exercises for you to start incorporating to get better rear delt
development and much stronger, are going to be a seated row – as I'm showing you here.
A one armed dumbbell row.
If you don’t actually happen to have access to seated rowing machine.
And even a bent row done in what we call a "high boy fashion" to get a little more of
the upper back.
Why is that?
Well, if you look at the anatomy here of this muscle you can see that we have the three
heads here.
Here's the front head, here's the middle head, and then here's the rear head, back here.
Okay, now the rear head is going to want to do that.
If we keep our elbow in here and we start doing extension, we're limiting the amount
of that horizontal abduction that we can get because we just can't really get our arm back
behind us much more because it's pinned to our side.
So the more we can get our arm elevated out to the side, we free ourselves up to do a
lot more of that horizontal abduction.
So think about what that means when you sit down at a seated row machine.
You don’t want to have your elbows in tight having a V-handle because we're actually limiting
the amount that we could actually engage the rear delt.
But if you've got a straight bar and you were able to go back, now I could really engage
the rear delt because my elbows have been kept higher.
The same thing could be done here on a one-armed dumbbell row.
If I kept my elbow tucked into my side I'm getting good lat engagement.
But if I allow it to drift higher, and higher, and higher; now you can see that I actually
engage the back portion of my shoulder a lot better, and more effectively.
Maybe I have to decrease the weight a little bit, but you can obviously understand that
it's going to get more of the posterior delt.
Likewise, if we do a high boy row by bringing the arms up a little bit higher – again,
we're doing that same thing.
We're keeping our elbow away from our sides directly, which is going to target more of
the lats and get ourselves up, and to allow the backside of our shoulders to do more of
the work.
Here's the key point and the key benefit: the fact of the matter is that you're able
to overload these exercises much more than you can of those direct exercises.
Why?
Because there are smarter choices to do it on.
If you think about it, an exercise that has a heavy involvement of the rotator cuff – like
the W-raise – is not going to respond well to a heavily loaded exercise.
It's just not the right time for it.
but an exercise like a seated row, or a bent row, or a one-armed dumbbell row are going
to allow you to load up a lot more and of course, eccentrically load that muscle a lot
more safely to allow that growth, and stimulation for growth that you're looking for.
So that one-two combination is always important and the selection of exercises that you make
within that combination is always going to be extremely important.
Guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
The rear delt.
Do not ignore it.
It really is going to help you to balance out the shoulder both aesthetically and then
functionally because it's going to keep that shoulder in the right position and help maintain
a safe shoulder that will keep you in the gym training hard now, and for a long time
to come.
If you're looking for a training program that's going to train you hard, but at the same time
put the science back in strength, and allow you to understand why you're doing what you're
doing so you can get a lot more out of what you're doing; then head to ATHLEANX.com and
get our ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below and I'll do my best to cover and hit the areas that you want me to hit in the future
videos.
All right, guys.
I'll be back again here really soon.
See ya!