Focus: Shoulders
Hey everyone! Sorry for the delayed post, April was a crazy month. So this post is about how to build shoulders large enough to take over for Atlas (I love Greek mythology lol). Before I go into my workout, I want to preface this with by saying that my shoulders and back are really developed from swimming. Fourteen years and four hours a day of swimming built a massive upper back, big traps, and obviously big-ass shoulders. Now, I am not saying that you cannot build muscle to be like that, of course you can. But I must give credit where its due—thank you test sets. I love shoulders because they make your arms look jacked even if they aren’t that strong. And when you have strong shoulders and back, they improve your posture significantly. However, I must emphasize, it is IMPERATIVE that you keep your shoulders rolled down and back when you are doing any shoulder exercise. If your shoulders aren’t contracted to roll back and down into your lats, then they are doing work that is not only inefficient but can injure your neck because you are not maintaining an open flow of circulation between your neck, traps, and shoulders. Furthermore, if your shoulders aren’t rotated back, your traps begin to do a lot of extra work, and then become more developed that your shoulders. At some point, if your traps almost sit on top of your shoulders and then your shoulder development begins, that is going to be bad for your posture in the future. With my shoulders, I like to switch up what I am doing every two weeks because they have so much muscle memory and are developed to the point where if I do the same routine for too long nothing happens—no fatigue, soreness, nada. That being said I am also extremely careful with my shoulders because they tend to pop out a little if I do not stretch them out enough and that cause a noticeable imbalance in my upper body. Therefore, I do a lot of isolation work and single hand reps of my exercises. And then I go see my chiropractor who helps but my shoulder back in place. Here is my current shoulder workout and you can do most of the exercise in single-hand sets. Hope you enjoy!
3×6 shoulder press (1 min tiny arm circles in between each set. 30 sec forward 30 sec backwards)
3×8 shoulder raises (8 on each arm)
Superset:
3×6 low cable fly
3×6 shoulder raise with 25 plate
3×8 shoulder raise machine, 3-2-1 pause while going down, explosive power going up
Get Your Gainz 