This YouTube tutorial explains why many trainees fail to develop their side (lateral) deltoids: during lateral raises the upper trapezius commonly compensates by elevating the shoulder, stealing tension from the side delts. The presenter prescribes a progressive, mindful correction (seated/light-weight drill with hand on the trap to keep it relaxed, then progress to standard raises) and alternative positions (incline and lying cable lateral raises) to minimize trap involvement and maximize side-delt activation. The video ends with an action plan to practice the drill, use lighter loads, add variations, and a promotion for builtwithscience.com.
The delts, for many, are an extremely stubborn muscle group to develop. More specifically, though, most of us have no problem developing our front delts from all the pressing we do. The side delts, however, is where we struggle, which is frustrating because this is the region of the delts that gives us that wide, tapered look most of us are after. But in theory, training the side delts is actually quite simple. Lateral raises have been shown time and time again to generally be the most effective option to develop this area. In fact, most of you watching likely already do some form of a lateral raise in your routines. But the reason you're still not seeing the growth you're after has to do with your execution of the seemingly simple movement. Very rarely do we see lifters in the gym actually execute this movement properly, and instead they end up training other muscle groups instead of the target, the side delts. Now, aside from using too much momentum and swinging front, back and side to side during the movement, one of the lesser known culprits that we don't even realize is taking over is the upper traps. Based on the anatomy and function of this muscle, and the fact that many of us already have overactive upper traps from being in this hunched over position most of the day, it makes it very easy for it to steal tension away from the side delts whenever you perform a lateral raise. To better illustrate this, as shown here, the upper traps function to elevate the shoulder, whereas the side delts function to raise the arm out to the side. So what a lot of us will do during our lateral raises, especially during the initial and very last part of the rep, is we'll shrug our traps up to assist the weaker side delts with raising that weight up. When this happens, while, yes, you're still moving the dumbbell from the same point A to point B, the side delts now become far less involved and are never really put in their fully shortened position like they should be in this movement. And the problem is that many of us now just do this subconsciously and over time have developed this pattern of automatically firing the upper traps whenever we raise our arms out to the sides. Now, yes, the traps will inevitably be involved to some extent during your lateral raises. But if your main goal is to grow your side delts with this exercise, which it is, then you need to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. So how exactly can we do this? Well, to start, we want to use a mindful exercise that'll help teach your body to get out of the habit of recruiting the upper traps whenever you Raise your arms out to the side to perform it. Take a seat and hold the five pound double in one hand or even just use no weight at all. To start out, place your other hand on your upper trap. All I want you to do now is very slowly raise the weight up at about a 45 degree angle in front of you. But as you do so, feel your upper traps to make sure they remain soft and relaxed and don't tense up. As soon as they start to tense up, get back to the starting position and try again. So as you raise, think about actively pushing your shoulder down and depressing your traps as you raise the weight up. If you stand up and place a band around your traps and feet like so, this can help you know what this should feel like, since the band will help actively press your traps down as you raise. The main goal of this exercise is to be able to do a full rep up to parallel successfully without tensing up the upper traps. And many of you, even with very light weights, will only be able to do a quarter of the raise in this fashion before your traps really start kicking in, which is perfectly fine. Just keep practicing and focus on gradually increasing this range and eventually increasing the load in small increments. Then only once you're ready, move to the standard dumbbell lateral raise with two arms raising out simultaneously while still applying the same tips and mindfulness as we just practiced. And as you do so, there's a few additional helpful tips and cues that you can experiment with to further maximize side delts activation while minimizing the involvement of the upper traps. First, imagine that you had a level bar sitting on top of your delt, right where the delt meets the trap. So try not to let that bar push up as you raise your arm up. So the higher your hand gets throughout the raise, the more you'll want to consciously push your shoulder down to prevent it from raising that invisible bar. Second, instead of thinking about raising the weight up, which tends to get the traps involved, think about pushing the dumbbell out to your side as much as possible. The weight should only go up as a result of you actively pushing sideways. And lastly, just some general tips are to grip the dumbbell lightly, experiment with a thumbless grip and raise the weight in the scapular plane, which is around 45 degrees in front of your body, as these will all tend to help you maximize your side delts recruitment. What many of you will now find after implementing all of this is that by involving the traps considerably less, your weaker side delts will be much more involved and will start to fatigue very easily. And as a result you wont be able to do nearly as much weight as you could do before, which is a good thing and expected since we're now actually providing tension to the target muscle rather than compensating with other muscles. So take your ego out of the door, use lighter weights and avoid falling back to the old patterns that we just worked very hard on correcting. Now, in addition to this, there are other lateral raise variations that you can experiment with that manipulate your body position to help minimize the involvement of the upper traps. The first one is something I've shown in past videos and is an incline lateral raise where you lay on an incline bench and raise your arms up at about a 45 degree angle. The bench helps provide you with a little bit more stability and the resulting body position you're in puts the upper traps in a less favorable position, which both result in more side delts involvement and less upper traps. Again though, go light on these. Many of you will find that even just 5 or 10 pounds when executed properly is more than enough weight. The second exercise you can try out is the lying cable lateral raise, as shown in a study assessing the activation of the upper traps in different body positions. Lying down during upper body movements helps decrease the upper traps activation as a posture muscle, since it doesn't have to work against gravity like it has to do during the standing lateral raise. So by performing this lateral raise lying down with cables, we're able to favor the side delts a little more while providing a constant resistance through the whole range of motion of the side delts. But even here, just as we did earlier, focus on actively depressing your traps as you raise your arms out to the side every rep. So to sum this all up into an action plan for you, what I'd suggest is start with the first mindful exercise that we did and replace your lateral raises in your routine with that drill. For the time being, master that while increasing the load very gradually over time. And then once you're ready, you can transition to the standard lateral raise, given that you're able to successfully perform your reps with minimal compensation of the upper traps. And then from here you can experiment with some of the other exercises I mentioned and take a look at some of my other delts videos to implement some more variation and add more volume to your delts once you're ready to do so. The main thing we want to avoid though, is getting back into your old pattern of excessively recruiting the upper traps where you whenever you raise your arms out, so take it slow and use lighter weights. Yes, there is a time and place where cheating can be useful with your lateral raises, but we need to first get you to a point where you can actually perform the movement with minimal compensations elsewhere. But all in all, you need to realize that if you're struggling to grow certain muscle groups, then odds are it's a result of the various compensations that you're unknowingly making whenever you attempt to train that muscle. And for a step by step program that addresses this by using science to not only show you what to work out week after week, but then shows you exactly how to perform each and every exercise for maximal activation and growth while pairing this with a nutrition plan to support your recovery. Then simply head on over to builtwithscience.com to determine which of our science based programs is best for you and where your body is currently at. Anyways, that's it for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. Please, please do me a favor and show your support by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next, subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help me out. Thank you so much everyone and I'll see you next time.
