Saturdays Shoulder Training

I reserve Saturday for my shoulder training day. My main lift on this day is behind the neck over head press. This lift places a tremendous amount of stress on the shoulder muscles primarily and a secondary emphasis on the triceps muscle. A standard overhead press done in front places almost all the stress on the anterior (front) head on the deltoid (shoulder) muscle.   Doing the press behind the neck transfer some of the stress from the anterior head onto the lateral head. The lateral head is the side portion of the deltoids, which helps with the shoulder width.

For press behind the necks I generally perform 5 warm up sets then two working sets. The working sets are the same scheme that I use for the bench press so this week it would be 2 sets of 3 reps. This week on my second set I performed 5 reps which was 1 more rep than I did last week with the same weight. While it is only a 1 rep improvement that is still an improvement and that is what matters. You cannot always go up in weight every week. Even a 5 pound weight improvement a week would mean that if you started with a 200 pound bench press and added 5 pounds every week then in three years that would mean you would be bench pressing 980 pounds which is almost 300 pounds more than the world record! Obviously it is not realistic at all. But the only way to get stronger or bigger muscles is to improve the amount you can lift. That might be just one extra rep. The little improvements add up over time. Powerlifting and bodybuilding are a marathon and not a sprint!

The next exercise I perform is a dumbell shoulder press. This movement works the shoulders in the same way as the behind the neck press but focuses more on development of the shoulder muscle rather than just overall strength. I performed 4 sets of 10 reps. This was the same weight that last week I did 4 sets of 10, 10, 8, and 7 reps. So again an improvement in the amount of reps I could do with the same amount of weight.

The next exercise I performed was side dumbell raises. These place most the stress on the lateral head of the deltoids. I performed 2 sets of 12 reps.

The next was bent over reverse dumbell flyes which stresses the rear deltoids muscle.

The final shoulder exercise would be laying shoulder raises. These stress the lateral and rear deltoid muscles.

I then perform two exercises that work the trap muscles. I superset them which means I perform one set of one lift then without rest perform a set of the next lift. Then I will rest around 90 seconds then do another set of each lift and so on.

The two lifts I did were behind the back shrugs with a barbell followed by dumbell shoulder shrugs. Each of these I did for 15 reps for a total of 4 sets of each lift.

That was the end of my workout.