How to Grow Your Rear Delts FAST (3 Simple Techniques)

Today I'm going to show you how to grow your rear delts fast with three simple tips that you can apply right away. Let's first break down what exactly the rear delts are and why yours are probably lagging behind. So as the name implies, the rear delts are the rear head or back muscle of the three headed shoulder muscle. They're the key to rounding out the shoulders by adding an impressive cap to the back of them. Most people's rear delts, however, look like this. Underdeveloped, with the front delts being disproportionately over developed in comparison. And this happens because we do a a ton of pressing work that develops the front delts, but very little work for the back side of our shoulders. And the exercises we do choose, when we decide to work them like reverse flies, they just aren't very effective. Why is this the case and what exercises should you do instead? Let's figure that out with tip number one. So if you're like most lifters, then you probably rely on reverse flies, the reverse fly machine and face pulls to grow your rear delts. But while these will train the rear delts to some extent, they just aren't the best options. This is because during these movements, your arm is held straight out to the sides, which creates two problems. The first problem is that this horizontal arm position lines up much better with the upper back muscle fibers like the mid traps than it does the rear delts, which run more diagonally. Second of all, the further the elbow can move behind the body, the better the rear delts can be activated. With a horizontal arm position, your elbow can't get very far back. So to maximally activate the rear delts, we need to find an arm position that lines up perfectly with the rear delts, butts and allows the elbows to travel furthest behind the body. Anatomically, this is where your upper arm is perpendicular to the spine of your scapula, which will be slightly different for everyone. An easy way to find this position, though, without dissecting your insides, is to use a quick test I learned from coach Kessim. Pull your elbows back as if you were doing a row and then do a chicken dance until you find the sweet spot where your elbows feel like they can travel furthest behind your body. And for most people, this is going to be an angle of about 45 degrees away from your body. And the beauty about this is that once you've found this arm position, you can apply it to pretty much any pulling exercise to instantly make it more rear delts. Focused. I will be showing you a couple of my personal favorites later on in this video, but some quick examples are to apply this to one arm dumbbell rows, barbell rows, cable pulls, and more. Okay, so we got arm positioned down. The next two tips will show you how to apply it into your routine to instantly speed up your rear delt gains. Now, most people don't train the rear delts with enough volume nor with enough effort, often leaving them as an afterthought towards the end of a workout when they're already quite fatigued. To see quick improvements in your rear delt development, here's my recommendation. So chances are you're doing some kind of upper body workout pull day or back day in your routine. During these workouts we can tweak your programming to add some more volume to your rear delt to do so, whenever you do some kind of rowing movement, you take the last one to two sets and replace them with a rear delt focus row. But if you're using a cable machine, ditch the narrow V bar attachment. Trying to use this to hit your rear delts will limit how much you can open up your elbows and how far back they could travel behind the body. Instead, find a wider handle attachment like the lat pulldown one, and wrapping two handles on top of the bar can help make it even better and comfortable. Next, grip the bar wide and pull your elbows back behind the body while keeping keeping them at the roughly 45 degree angle you found earlier. Pause at the end of each rep briefly where you should feel a very strong contraction in your rear delts and repeat. If you don't have a suitable bar, using a single cable can work as well, and the same can be done on many back machines by just using a wider grip and using that sweet spot arm angle. And if you don't have access to cables or machines, then you can always replicate the same movement using bats. Now while this simple tweak in your programming will help ensure that you're working your rear delts while you're fresh and training them with relatively heavy weights. In addition to this, you'll want to also work them with lighter weights that are focused more so on quality reps rather than weight, this is where the next tip comes in. What other muscles or areas do you struggle with? Growing comment down below and I'm going to look for the most liked comments to see what area I should cover next. So part of the reason your rear delts may not be growing very well is because of suboptimal exercise selection, but it's also also because other muscles are taking over as a result of you using too much weight when you train them. To avoid this, we're now going to use a more isolation type of rear delt exercise and focus on quality reps. The exercise I'm about to show you I call the Better Reverse Fly. And by the way, it's just one of several great shoulder exercises that I'll be including in an upcoming shoulder video that I'm working on. To perform this exercise, set up a bench to a 30 degree incline. Grab a pair of dumbbells and lay your chest on the bench. Then pull your elbows back as far as you can while keeping them in that roughly 45 degree angle that you found earlier. If, however, you're unable to pull your elbow back behind the body very far, you can't maintain that roughly 45 degree arm angle or you're forced to use momentum, then these are all signs that the weight is just too heavy. If so, lighten the weight and focus on quality form and really feeling that mind to muscle connection with your rear delts every single repetition. Then once you have this down to progress this exercise over time, we want to avoid increasing the weight too quickly. We can prevent this by choosing a light enough weight that allows you to do about 15 reps each set with good form. Then as you get stronger, focus on increasing your reps up to about 25 reps. Only once you reach that should you then move on to the next heaviest weight and repeat the process. Implement these three tips into your routine and you'll not only feel the difference, but you'll see the growth very quickly. But chances are you're making similar mistakes with other muscle groups as well. To prevent this from holding you back, just head on over to built with science.com and take my free Analysis quiz which will determine which of my step by step programs will best help you build a body you're proud of, just like thousands of our members have done. To watch more of my stuff, you can click here to grow your back or you can click here to grow wider shoulders. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.