How to Get Big, Strong, Athletic Shoulders and Visual Impact


Shoulder Exercises for Mass

  • Besides the obvious visual appeal of having six-pack abs- big, strong shoulders are a close second in terms of visual impact from your physique.
  • A set of broad shoulders project that you are a powerful person, and that comes through in all facets of life- whether you are on the beach, in a t-shirt, or in the boardroom.
  • A wide set of muscular shoulders can also give you that great v-taper to your body, which makes your waist seem slimmer.
  • Shoulder workouts should vary between higher volume with lower weight to bring out striations, and lower reps with more weight to overload the muscle and hypertrophy.
  • Training the traps with heavy weight will give density to the shoulder area.
  • Training the triceps, chest and back properly will give you a balanced overall physique.
  • Don’t neglect the rear delts as they are responsible for the majority of the visual appeal.

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Video Transcript

It’s all about the deltoids today we’re going to break down the anatomy of the front the side and the rear delt to help you to decode and understand any exercise that you’re doing which area of the shoulder that you’re actually targeting and guess what we’re going to do with dumbbells to make that a lot easier that’s right we’re gonna break out Jeff Cavaliere marker not the YouTube account thank you for that by the way but we’re actually going to break out Jeff Cavaliere marker to show you exactly how this works okay so we’re gonna do what we’ve been doing here lately because you guys have been finding it helpful to understand how the muscle Anatomy works so when you look at the shoulder you see if I put my arm here behind my back that what you can see pop out is this front delt so the front delt has an attachment to the outer third here of our clavicle okay so you can see the bone right in here so it starts here and it comes down and follows this line right here and it follows this line right here and then it all attaches down into the tuberosity here on our arm so you can see how the delt all kind of pops in through this one spot so it kind of feeds down into that area so there’s your front delt so right away when we look at that you know that by the direction of these fibers if we want to make something contract you really want to try to bring these two points close to each other so we know that if we actually have some sort of sort of exercise that brings this towards this this towards this then we can do that so check out some of the things I’m showing you here obviously a dumbbell front raise is going to do exactly that it’s going to bring the dumbbell towards the front one thing you may not realize though is sort of this this may be better version of the front raise where I actually bring it up and across because as you can see if I have my arm here down at my side it’s out here and we need to kind of get it in at this angle so instead of just bringing a front raise up that way we’d actually bring it up and across our body and I can do that here as you see with a cable or even with a dumbbell I’m getting that sort of adoption component going on at the same time we also can do just this standard because you can see right here as I do the bench press how this action is still happening here we’re actually bringing out our elbow in front of our body and it’s coming across a little bit to see as I demonstrate here you got this motion going on and that’s obviously going to favor a lot of the front delt lastly if you’re doing your shoulder presses correctly your shoulder press should be done more out of scapular plain meaning your elbow should be a little bit in front of your body so again now when we press up you’re going to preferentially have more active involvement of the front delt okay now we’re going to move a little bit off to the side and again the direction of the muscle the anatomy the muscle is going to tell the whole story on how to activate it and we’re going to here to the side delt so at the side it’s got a little bit of a different orientation here we’re actually going to break out another Jeff Cavaliere marker here to make this a little easier to see the acromion process which is the bump here on your shoulder you should probably be able to feel right towards the outside of your shoulder a bump that’s where the middle delt or the the side delt here is going to originate and again it’s going to kind of feed in and down just to the inside here down the arm again same spot down through here and the same thing it’s going to come around you can see where the rear delt actually has it’s we’re going to get to that one in a second down and in through here so now when we fill that muscle in you can see that the angle here is a little bit more favoring this outside our side direction the raising of the arm more out to the side as opposed to as I showed you here at the front delt towards the front so what’s going to do this well obviously a side lateral raise you can see me doing that here but you can actually do a bodyweight version of this that I’ve covered it’s actually in our athlean xero program where relatively the motion is the same we’re bringing our arm out to the side where I’m ducting our arm to the side except I’m moving my body away from my arm here more than I am my arm away from my body same things happening though the side delt is actually getting a lot of the work you can also activate this with our dumbbell high pull now be careful when you’re doing the hi pool I’ve gone over this a lot of times too when you elevate your arm you’re a much better off having some external rotation in your arm while you do that so you have your arm a little bit with your elbow down below your hand but you can see that yes we’re going to protect the shoulder by having that external rotation but you can see that the motion here is the same right it’s getting a raise of the humerus as we come up so as we’re doing that yes the arm is in this position here but the upper arm is doing the same thing you can kind of break it down very simply it’s that what is going on with the upper arm is it coming forward is it going to the side or lastly I’m going to show you here is it going behind you back in that direction and so in a record Jeff Cavaliere marker appearance we now have our third and this is the green this was really going to put me into the realm of ink poisoning but that’s okay because you guys deserve it here what we have is our rear delt and the rear delt actually starts here on the spine of our scapula okay the outer spine of our snapper or at least the outer third it’s right on this kind of Ridge that you can feel here through your scapula it’s going to start there you can actually see it right here and it’ll be a little harder for me to draw but then I come in and around and down and the same thing around the back down it feeds in to the same spot and through here so we got this action not as good as my other drawings was a little hard to reach so now what we’re looking for is the moves that bring our arm behind our body as we raise it so we can do a lot of things here to do that we can start off with a very easy reverse plate race okay we’re going to see that by changing the orientation from our body it’s actually the very same move it’s a reverse fly it’s the same move as over side lateral raise except by changing the orientation of our body now against gravity this muscles working a lot more than posterior delts working a lot more so we use that exercise another exercise that people don’t always understand works the rear delt a lot is a seated row when you get to the seated row position you’re still taking the arm here as I showed you you’re bringing it back behind the body you can see as I do with you in here you’re bringing it back behind the body it’s extension but it’s still taking the arm the upper arm in this direction because these fibers are going to go and pull like that as they can track they’re going to pull back so you can do that as well and then finally another great way to do this is with a face pull so you can see as I’m demonstrating the face pull here it’s a great way to get the upper arm again back behind the body taking the orientation of fibers in working with them so as I pull here look you can see the action of the rear delt posterior delt I’m pulling in and it’s activating to pull me back so there’s a lot of options and the more you understand the anatomy of the shoulder the easier it is for you to understand what the hell it is you’re targeting in the first place and if you have to draw on yourself to figure it out then draw on yourself to figure it out but it kind of is this I’ll do that if you want me to I’m happy to do it here to make it more simplified for you to understand how your body’s working because when you know how your body is working you get so much more out of what the hell you’re doing I promise you you will if you’re looking for a training program that allows you to understand push the science back in strength and helps you to understand how your body’s training in the first place so you get a better appreciation for that and then therefore can make much faster gains and results then head to athleanx.com and get the athleanx training system the meantime three markers guys if you found this video helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below and let me know if you want I see to cover here on this channel I’ll do my best to do that I’ll be back here again in just a few days see you you