Every man craves for amazing shoulders to complete their physique. They give you width and also compliments that coveted V-taper. You may have a small waist or even a six pack abs, however, it wouldn’t look right if you don’t have a “killer pair” of delts. Unfortunately, we rarely find great shoulders nowadays, and it is not due to lack of effort. If you try to take a look around the gym, you will see that most of the people there will have an injured shoulder or perhaps sloped shoulders. But, a unique pair of cannonball delts is very rare to find. The primary reason for not achieving good shoulders is because they are not entirely balanced and consequently likely to get injured.
Here are ten tips to make your shoulders healthy and big at the same time.
Keep them healthy
Everyone knows this right? Who doesn’t want to be healthy? However, this is an important point and is often neglected by many people. Those who hit the gym regularly will be knowing the fact that most of the exercises involved in the gym are connected to the shoulders and if at all you injure your shoulder or get an inflamed shoulder, then you would not be able to do most of the exercises. You wouldn’t be able to do even the barbell squats because it is hard to hold the bar with a set of inflamed delts.
The structural imbalance is the main reason for most of the shoulder injuries, which also means that most of the trainers are weak in the rear and overdeveloped in the front part of the shoulders. This, in turn, gives an inflamed bicep tendon and a weird hunchback look. If you want to conduct a test for balanced shoulders, you can do wall slides.
To do the wall slides, you may need to stand with your back against the wall and bring your arms to shoulder height, with your elbows bend about 90 degrees. You should feel the shoulder blades moving downward. If your arms are coming forward and you are not able to perform the wall slides correctly, you can conclude that you are too stiff.
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Keep it flexible
Your first line of defence against a shoulder impingement will be working on your flexibility in regards to chest and front delts. The simplest way to improve your ROM is the towel stretch. For doing this, you need to grab a towel with both hands and try to bring it above your head and behind your body, while having the arms extended. At first, you might be grappling with this exercise, however, over time you should be able to bring your hands’ closer together. You can do this exercise 3×20 every night.
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Train the CuffDo you even know that rotator cuffs exist? Most of the people come to know about rotator cuffs only when they injure it. So, we need to give it some special attention. If you want to measure the strength of the cuff, you need to lay sidewards on the floor or on a bench and then rotate a dumbbell upward against your hip. You should be able to move nearly 8% of your incline bench weight, therefore if you bench 200 lbs., 16-20 lbs must be your range of strength.
If you are considerably weaker, you are on the ‘grease wheels’ for an injury. You should train your rotator cuffs once a week with outwards and inwards rotations. It takes 5 minutes, and will protect you from a lot of injuries down the road.
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Don’t do front raises
Though it is not a complete “NO”, you can still try to avoid it. If you are working with an expert instructor who has already evaluated your strengths and weaknesses, and you are pretty confident that your shoulders are not too imbalanced, then the front raise is seemingly okay to do.
However, for most of the people who hit the gym regularly, need not add more direct work for the anterior deltoid because it already gets lots of stimulation through every pull and press you do. If you are already doing composite upper-body exercises, then it is apparently safe to skip this one. You may only need to focus on your posterior deltoid instead.
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Start from the back
This goes side by side with the point number one, but as many trainees woefully underdevelop the posterior delt, we cannot overemphasise this point. Always begin your shoulder workout with rear delt exercises, such as crossovers, j-pulls, rear delt flyes, etc. Setting up your workout in such a way will produce symmetry and keep you strong and healthy. Some of the magnificent physiques in the sport received their exclamation mark by having rear delts that topped off their shoulders and also gave them a ‘3-D’ look.
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Learn the clean and press
The clean and press is a great tool to stimulate the nervous system, if you have a superb trainer to teach you. Doing a couple of sets at the beginning of your shoulder workout will significantly improve the effectiveness of the original hypertrophy work.
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Sit down
If you are doing overhead presses, do them seated on the floor in the power rack, with the pins set at the lowest level. The combined balancing effort will help you make your delts work so much harder that you may have to decrease the weight by atleast 40%.
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Do Superman presses
If you want to develop roundness in the delts, then this one is the best. To do this, you need to fix the incline bench at 30 to 45 degrees and with your chest on the bench, lay down. Now clutch a pair of very light dumbbells and press them perpendicular.
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Watch your elbows
Whenever you are performing an overhead press, you always want to have your elbows straight under the bar so you can build tension on the delt from the beginning.However, you should not bend your wrists backwards. Always try to keep them in a neutral manner. Furthermore, when you do side raises, always concentrate on moving the elbows before the wrist or else you will be doing shrugs.
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Train them often
Shoulders can deal with a lot of volumes, so if yours are lagging, then you may need to hit them twice a week. Although, do not forget that increased volume puts a strain on your connective tissue and muscle, so never try to nuke them into subjection continually.
