#009 Everything You Need to Know About Training Shoulders

Today’s read: 1,303 Words (5 min.)

Welcome to the Boats & Logs Lifting Club - and welcome back to all loyal members! I truly appreciate your strong support and how quickly we could form a fast-growing community that understands that building muscle is not rocket science. It only takes intense workouts, a good diet, and proper sleep.

Today, we continue our series that’s dedicated to training specific body parts most efficiently. Over the last few weeks, we have already looked at the three big body parts: Chest, Back, and Legs.

Today, we are having a deeper look into how to train shoulders best. As the shoulders play a crucial role in moving your arms, they are one of the most important body parts, and you should, under all circumstances, avoid injuring your shoulder.

But before we get into how to train shoulders best, I would like to reach out to you with a personal message: Since starting this newsletter roughly 2 months ago, we have grown to a community of around 1,000 subscribers, and I would like to get to know you better. I’m already in regular contact with a bunch of you via Instagram, but would like to get to know more of you. If you have found my newsletter to be helpful to you, please consider sending me a DM on Instagram and tell me which newsletter was most helpful to you, ask me a question, or recommend a topic for the next newsletter.

But now, let’s get started.

Anatomy

Before we look into how we train shoulders to get “boulder shoulders” or the “3D Look” of the shoulders most aim for, let’s take a brief moment to take a look at the anatomy of the shoulder.

As you can see in the picture above, the shoulder has three heads, and you need to train all of them to have good-looking and healthy shoulders.

Front Deltoid/Anterior Deltoid: The front delts are probably your dominant shoulder muscle. They are in front of your shoulder and are used especially when you are raising your arm in front of your body or above your shoulders. The front delts assist with all push exercises and most shoulder movements.

Medial Deltoid/Lateral Deltoid: The lateral delts are on the side of your shoulder. The main function is supporting the lateral movement of the shoulder, like moving the arm up and down on your side.

Posterior Deltoid/Rear Deltoid: The rear delts are on the back of your shoulder and are often undertrained. The muscle assists with shoulder extension and bringing your arm back behind your body.

Front Delts

Chances are, you are greatly underestimating how much you are already training your front delts. Yet, most people program more exercises for front delts than for lateral or rear delts, often leading to overdeveloped front delts and a shoulder imbalance.

The front delts are assisting with all chest-related push exercises. From a chest press to an incline bench press. Generally, the steeper the incline, the stronger the involvement of the front delts.

The picture above shows why the Overhead Press (Shoulder Press) is one of the most popular exercises to activate the front delts. Besides being a great front delts activator, the Overhead Press is, for most people, quite a fun exercise, as it’s the easiest exercise to load the shoulders with heavier weights.

And while you should take advantage of the fact that we can load the shoulder with the Overhead Press, you should still be careful of keeping the correct form to avoid injuring the shoulder.

I like to take advantage of having some form of Overhead Press as a strength builder for shoulders and found good success in doing 1-2 load sets for 5-8 reps of Overhead Press and then doing 1-2 back-off sets in the range of 10-15 reps. By combining both rep ranges, I can work the shoulders heavily while they are not too tired yet and then get 1-2 additional sets in with more reps but a lower risk of injury due to the lower load.

To isolate the front delts, front raises are a great exercise. To improve the resistance curve, you can do them at a cable tower instead of dumbbells, which should lead to an even greater activation. But also, more chest-focused exercises like Push-ups and Dips are a reasonable way to train the front delts.

Lateral Delts

While we could focus a bit more on strength with the front delts, for lateral delts, it is often a good approach to drop the ego and go lighter on the weights to really target the muscle and prevent injuries.

As we can see in the muscle activation study, the 45° Incline Row is a great exercise to activate the lateral delts. However, this is primarily a back exercise, so it may be a good exercise to use during a full body split to save time.

If you really want to target the lateral delts, I believe the best exercise is a lateral raise version. My personal favorite is the cable lateral raise, as it keeps the tension high during all parts of the exercise.

However, for all the different lateral raise versions, it is important to really control the movement for both the eccentric and concentric parts of the exercise. This means that you should move up your arms slowly and not just “throw up” the arms, as you may have seen in workout videos of some bodybuilders. Additionally, you should keep the tension when you are moving the arms down and not give in to the force and let the arms drop.

To really control the movement, I like to work in the range of 10-15 reps for lateral delts. Moving up in weight too quickly can come with the risk that you start to cheat on reps and “throw the weight around”.

What many people don’t know but is still important to point out is that the Overhead Press also has quite a good activation of the lateral delts.

Rear Delts

The rear delts are an often undertrained muscle. While the front delts benefit from all push exercises, the rear delts need isolation work to grow and balance out the front delts.

Shoulder pain and injuries are often caused by an imbalance between the front and rear delts. Growing stronger rear delts can decrease the injury risk and improve posture, as people with overdeveloped front delts tend to round towards their chest.

Again, 45° Incline Rows are not only great for lateral delts but also rear delts. A true compound exercise you can use to work a lot of muscles at once.

If you, however, want to focus more on isolating the rear delts, Cable Face Pulls are a great way to do this. Unfortunately, they weren’t tested during this study, but I believe they would place the highest in terms of muscle activation.

Also not tested, but a worthy option is the rear delt fly (reverse butterfly) machine.

Even more than lateral delts, I found the rear delts to respond very well to higher rep ranges. I like to finish up my workouts with 2-3 sets of 15-20 reps of Face Pulls to “counter” all the work I have done for the front delts directly and indirectly.

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Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.