We Tested 17 Shoulder Exercises, These Are Best For Growth

Betty and I are back. She's a $12,000 science machine that'll help us determine which of these 17 shoulder exercises are the best and which are the worst for building muscle. I tested these exercises on three subjects, averaged the data, and found some very interesting insights that aligns with other research out there. With the results from this experiment, you'll be able to save literally years of wasted time doing the wrong movements for your body. How does this all work? Betty measures the electrical activity from our muscles as they contract. Researchers use this to estimate muscle activation. A couple weeks ago, we used her magic to help us determine what chest exercises best activated the upper, middle, and lower chest. This time, we're testing shoulders.

Let's explain what and then who we'll be measuring.

The shoulders, also known as the delts, are made up of three regions. There's the front of the shoulder, which most people over develop. There's the side, which helps widen your shoulders. And finally, there's a commonly underdeveloped rear or back region of the shoulder, which helps balance out your shoulders and provide that 3D look. We're putting sensors on each of these three regions, but we're also putting one sensor on the upper traps. You'll find out why exactly we did this later on. As for who we'll be testing, just like in the last video, I wanted at least three subjects. Although I wanted to introduce a female subject this time. Time, unfortunately, my girlfriend and Ride or die homie. For the past seven years, Tawny had a shoulder injury preventing her from doing many of the exercises. But we will bring her in next video. As for this one, I of course wanted to see what exercises worked best for my body, so I signed up right away. Alex, our master built with science coach, had no problem being a guinea pig. Again, the last subject. However, I wanted to be a beginner to see how the results might differ based on level of experience. Raza, our operations manager, would be the perfect fit. Unfortunately, in the last episode, he faced the wrath of the ice bath after losing the wager, so I was pretty hesitant about asking him again. To my surprise, he was actually pretty open to it.

As for what that wager is this time? This is a Scoville scale that ranks the heat of a food. We've ordered extremely hot noodles, which comes in around here. We also got the world's hottest chip made with the hottest chili pepper on the planet, the Carolina Reaper. But we also got a gummy bear. This bad boy goes way off the chart at 9 million Scoville. And according to the description on Amazon is 900 times hotter than a jalapeno. Each of us is going to write down on a piece of paper what we think the top two exercises will end up being for the front and side and rear parts of the shoulder. The person who gets the most exercises correct still suffers, but just not as much. They get to choose who has to eat what. Now, I've seen what these have done to people online and honestly, I'm pretty terrified. But let the games begin. Now, before we get to testing, there's just a few things we need to prep.

First, we had to figure out how much weight we'd be using on each shoulder exercise to ensure they were all equally as challenging. So a few days before testing, we all spent a whole day in our gym and figured out our estimated 1 rep max for each exercise. This is the maximum amount of weight we could lift on each exercise. On test day, we'd use 70% of this weight. Next, electrode placement. As some of you know from last video, we need a clean shave to make sure the electrodes stick. Alex and I were blessed with Asian genetics, so we were ready to go. Raza, on the other hand.

Oh my God.

This time he didn't actually have much hair on his shoulders, so a quick shave and an alcohol swab was all that was needed.

Oh, yeah.

With that out of the way, let's check if she's working.

Here's the front delt. You can see that spike. Here's the side delt, the rear delt, upper trap. So you can see every time I shrug, shrugs up just like that. Seems like we're ready to go.

Finally, before we could start the first exercise, we had to take a crucial measurement known as mvc, or Maximum voluntary contraction. This represents the maximum activation your muscle can reach, but this value will be slightly different for everyone. So by gathering this value before we start testing, we're able to then accurately compare the shoulder exercises we do against each of our own maximum values to see how well the exercise works for our individual shoulder muscles. With that out of the way, we're ready to test. We're sticking to a similar design as our chest experiment by doing one set of five reps and then taking at least a five minute rest before moving to the next exercise. We also rotated between front, side and rear delt exercises to avoid overly fatiguing one region. Form is also extremely important to activate the right muscles in the first place. So I closely monitored and tweaked form if needed. In fact, this is Raz's Side delt and upper trap activate. Using his original form, when corrected, his side delta activation increased by over 55% and his upper trap activation decreased because he was now using more of the right muscles. It's the little details that make all the difference for a step by step program that guides you every single week towards your dream body. After this video, head to our website, take our analysis quiz and it'll tell you which science based program is best for you and your body. Now, all was going well until I realized something.

All right, guys, so I just realized we're at our built with science gym and the one rear delt machine that we don't have is a reverse pec deck. So we're gonna have to head back to the same public gym and see if they don't mind us borrowing their pec deck machine. Once again, your friends are here. They are your science buddies. You hear that? We all called their science budd. Oh, it just wax me. Of course, man. Evan. Nice to meet you, man. What's up? Kaden. Nice to meet you, brother. Bryson. Bryson, nice to meet you, bro. Thank you. Videos are awesome. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. See you. Hey guys, I have all the data. I'm going to spend the next few days processing it, but if you haven't seen yet, for every muscle group we test, we put a poll up on our site to give you the opportunity to see if you can guess what exercises will come out on top of all entries. Get a discount code for our built with Science fitness programs. And anyone who guesses at least five out of the six correct, they get enrolled into a program of their choice free of charge to vote. Just head over to builtwithscience.com vote and I'll also leave a link in the description box down below. Good luck. Okay, so before we dive into the winners, just keep in mind that Betty isn't the end all be all. I invested in her because I always had unanswered questions when it came to studies and and I wanted to test things for myself. But as you'll see, she has her limitations. Not to mention, we only tested three subjects. That said, after averaging the data across the three of us, I did find some very interesting insights that aligns with other research out there. Let's start with the front delts. So most of you guys actually voted. Front raises to come out on top. It's not a bad guess, but it did end up performing quite poorly. Now, there's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, you're not able to use very much weight during this exercise. When compared to other big shoulder exercises, less weight tends to lead to less activation. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to be aware of when measuring muscle activation. Second of all, the tension during the exercise doesn't actually line up very well with the front delts. If we look at the top of my shoulder during the race, some of the front delt but also some of the side delta is working, so it hits a bit of both without being great at hitting either one. Now, although we didn't test it with the thumbs facing up, which would theoretically better line up the tension with the front delts, a past EMG study did. The researchers found front raises activated the front delts just as much as the barbell bench press and 40% less than the shoulder press. So while it may be a half decent option to work the front delts without having to use very heavy weight, let's take a look at the winners. So both winners were overhead shoulder presses, just different variations of them. We tested the seated dumbbell press, standing dumbbell press, seated barbell press, and the standing barbell press. But for the seated variations, we were actually able to use slightly heavier weight than the standing versions because of the extra stability provided by the bench, likely as a result of this for all three of us. Although not by much, the seated versions performed the best. But the standing versions, they do have their benefits as well since they get the core and the whole body involved. And as you'll learn later on, the standard versions also provided a different kind of demand on the shoulders. One more thing for the front delts. Although the overhead presses we just talked about will provide significantly more activation on the front delts, it's likely that you're already working this muscle quite a bit whenever you perform chest exercises. In fact, when we look at data from the chest exercises we tested a couple weeks back during the barbell bench press, my front delts average 44% activation. This is why many people have overdeveloped front delts relative to their side and rear delts. So my recommendation would be to do overhead presses once, maybe twice a week, depending on your goals. But to balance out your shoulder development, spend more time working on the side and rear delts using the exercises we're about to cover now, the side delts. So this took me by complete surprise. The winners ended up being the two standing shoulder presses we tested. At first glance, I had no idea how these managed to outrank the lateral raise variations we tested, since those are widely known as the best side Delt exercises. But after taking a deeper look into the data, I noticed a couple things. So if you take a look at the real time graph of the dumbbell lateral raise, you can see there's no activation at the bottom position when your arms are held straight down, which makes sense. Your side delts are just chilling. However, if you look at the standing shoulder press, you don't see this. At the bottom position of each rep, the side delts are still helping stabilize the weight up at your chest. In addition to this, the standing versions of the shoulder press have a greater stability demand. In our experiment as well as in past studies, this has been shown to lead to higher side delts activation. But this isn't a very powerful stimulus for growth. For example, if I put sensors on my glutes as I perform the exercise which are contracting hard to stabilize my body, and you'd see quite high activation. But you wouldn't do standing shoulder presses.

To grow your glutes.

In reality, the front delts are the main muscle helping you actually move the weight and experience the most of the growth. It's a case where more activation doesn't necessarily lead to more growth. One of the limitations of Betty. Taking this into consideration, I'd remove shoulder presses from the top, which would now bring the lateral raises to the top of the list. In this experiment, the standing dumbbell lateral raise and the line inclined lateral raise came out on top of with cable lateral raises following closely behind. All of those are great options. Last but not least, the rear delts. So most of you guys actually voted the reverse pec deck to come out on top. While it did perform quite well, the top exercise was instead one of my personal favorites and something we use a lot in our built with science programs. It's the double arm reverse cable flat. But the setup and form is what seemed to make all the difference. If you look at the anatomy of the rear delts, they travel at roughly a 45 degree angle away from the body. The reverse pec deck, since the arms are held up at shoulder height, doesn't line up the tension very well with this. But with this exercise, by setting the cables high and pulling the arms down and back at a 45 degree angle from the body, it lines up the constant tension from the cable almost perfectly with the rear delts, which is probably why it performs so well. Before I show the other winner, let's talk about face pulls. This was the second most voted for exercise to win for rear delts activation. However, it didn't perform very well at all. Part of it is due to what we just talked about. Face pulls keep the arms up, yet the 45 degree arm angle seems to be optimal for the rear delts. But another big part of it is stability. It's very hard to use heavy weight with proper form on face pulls, as it often causes you to tip over or use other muscles instead. In fact, I tried to go relatively heavy on face pulls during this experiment to make them equal to least challenging as the other exercises. And as a result, my body compensated by activating my upper traps even more.

Than my rear delts.

That said, face pulls are great for strengthening the rotator cuffs and various other important muscles for shoulder health and posture. But to properly do that, you have to use lightweight. Don't treat face pulls as a big muscle building movement for the rear delts. As you'll see, there's far better options for that. As for the other rear delt winner, this ended up once again being the reverse cable fly, but with one arm and the body positioned sideways to the cable. Now, although these two exercises look very similar, they actually both challenge the rear delts in a different way. The double arm challenges your rear delts most in the middle of the movement, whereas the single arm challenges your rear delts most in the beginning of the movement, which recent research has shown to be arguably the most important part of the movement for growth. So I definitely recommend doing both. If you don't have access to cables though, another exercise to perform perform quite well is the chest supported rear delt dumbbell row with your elbows kept at a 45 degree angle away from the body. The results are in. Alex Raza, you did not win. Jeremy is the winner. Hanging out with my lovely girlfriend. You're sitting on the toilet tonight. You are sitting on the toilet. Cheers.

Cheers.

Wait, how. How long until milk?

All day. It gets worse.

Yo.

Shout out to the 10 people who.

Got five out of the six correct. You guys are champs. So we're texting back next. If you Want to Vote BillWithScience.com Vote. Good luck and see you next time.