Well-developed shoulders make any girl look great. However, the benefits of training shoulders go beyond aesthetics. A balanced program should increase strength, enhance mobility, promote stability, and improve posture. Today I am sharing my personal shoulder routine.
I start with Smith shoulder presses which is a great warm-up exercise because it doesn’t require a lot of stability from the shoulder girdle. Besides because the bar is fixed, you may choose to use a heavier load without compromising your form.
Next, I go for seated dumbbell presses which recruit more muscle fibers (especially the muscles in charge of stabilizing the shoulder blades) and has a wider range of motion. These first two exercises are compound movements which recruit all heads of the deltoid muscle (the main shoulder muscle) as well as smaller auxiliary muscles.
The third exercise is an isolation move targeting the mid deltoids – lateral raises with dumbbells. This exercise will further recruit the already exhausted muscle fibers which is fundamental for muscle growth.
Then, I move to the back of the shoulders to target the rear deltoids. Here I used a cable reverse fly and finished with a cable external rotation to improve strength of the tiny but important rotator cuff muscles (they work on stabilizing the shoulder joint).
Perform 10 to 12 repetitions of each exercise for 2 to 4 sets. I usually do four sets of the first two compound exercises and two or three sets of the three isolation ones. Remember to choose a load challenging enough to keep the repetitions within the prescribed range. Choose something too light and you will be under-exercising which won’t bring you the expected results. However, if you load is too heavy, you won’t be able to complete the set.