If you want to know how to get bigger shoulders, you better get ready to leave your ego at the door. In this video, I’m going to show you how to make your fastest shoulder growth gains ever by opting for lighter weights rather than the heavy ones that you might be heaving around right now. Of course, heavy training should remain a part of your shoulder workout routine, but choosing to exclude what you might feel are very light weights, is what is likely holding back the size of your delts right now.
Let me explain. The delts are one of those muscle groups that get a tremendous amount of assistance from other muscles in the upper body during their lifts. Take the push press or overhead press for example. Here you are not just training your deltoids but the triceps, chest, core and even legs. In an effort to move as much weight as possible, you likely use a large amount of momentum to move the weight as well.
While this is an effective way to build your overall functional strength, it tends to not work so well when you move along to other (less compound) movements like the side lateral raise for instance. But even here, we usually opt for the heaviest weight that we can move from point a to point b and feel that we are working our shoulders properly. That is, until you do a rep as I show you here and realize for the first time in your life perhaps that all along you may never have been training your delt specifically.
In order to place all of the work onto the shoulders, you need to eliminate the momentum generating muscles like the arms, traps and lower back. These muscle groups want so badly to kick in to generate the lift especially during the first few degrees of the movement. This is just like the front delts desire to take over the first part of the biceps curl that I covered in depth in another video.
You can’t allow it to happen. If you want to get bigger shoulders you have to figure out how you are going to be able to make the deltoids do virtually all of the work during any ancillary shoulder exercise like the side delt raise. Once you get the dumbbells half way up you are going to pause. This demands that you are in control of the weights and that they are not controlling you!
From here, reinitiate the lift and squeeze the shoulders as hard as you can to get the dumbbell to the top with your arm parallel to the ground. Now, lower the dumbbell half way down and repeat one more contraction to the top. Your shoulders will be on fire and you will instantly see how difficult it can be if you let your shoulders do the work rather than letting all the other muscles help as they normally do.
This can be humbling but the gains in muscularity are phenomenal. Use this technique every time you train your shoulders and you not only will see better shoulder development but your top end strength on your bigger compound shoulder exercises like the push press are going to improve as well. Increase the strength on the component muscles that make up the muscles relied upon in the compound lift and that lift will go up as well.
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