WIDER SHOULDERS: 4 Mistakes Keeping You Small

If you want wider, thicker shoulders, then there's a specific part of the shoulder that you need to focus on developing. I'll show you how to fix the four things limiting your growth in this area. Apply this to your next workout and you'll feel your shoulders working like never before. So the shoulders, also known as the delts, can be divided into three regions, the front, the side and the rear. The front delt is heavily involved in many pressing movements like the bench press and shoulder press, and often becomes over developed as a result. The rear delt is important for rounding out the back of the shoulder, but won't be the focus of this video. But the side delts, these are what's responsible for creating broad wide shoulders and are what you need to focus on building up. As for what the best exercise is to build up this region, multiple studies like this 2013 paper have compared the muscle activation of the side delts during several shoulder exercises. What comes out on top? A popular exercise that you're probably already doing, the dumbbell lateral raise. However, while it is a great must do exercise to build up your side delts, if you look beyond just muscle activation, you'll find that there are four major flaws that people overlook with this exercise and their side delt training in general that slows down growth and likelihood of injury. First, reason every exercise has what's known as a resistance profile. This is simply how an exercise challenges your muscle as you perform it. To maximally grow a muscle, you need to use exercises that have different resistance profiles. In the case of the side delts, most unknowingly, use just one by relying on the traditional lateral raise. Pay attention the next time you perform the movement and you can actually feel the resistance profile. When your arms are down by your side, you'll notice there's no tension on your delts. Then as you begin to raise, more and more tension is being placed on the delts until it reaches maximal tension and becomes most challenging at the top. To stimulate more growth though, you'll want to also perform an exercise that has the opposite resistance profile where it's most difficult. Difficult at the bottom and easiest at the top. If you have the equipment handy, One way to do this is by grabbing a cable. Set up the height so that it's at the level of your wrist and perform a one handed lateral raise. The tension from the cable makes this movement most challenging at the bottom and drops off as you raise. If you only have dumbbells, however, there are two exercises that we can do that will create the same effect of making the move most difficult during the bottom half. The first exercise accomplishes this by manipulating your body position. To perform it, grab a dumbbell with one hand, use the other arm to hold onto a fixture and slowly step away to the side until you're leaned in with your torso angled at about 30 degrees. From here, perform your raise, stopping at your torso on the way down. The second exercise changes the resistance profile by using momentum. Although in most cases momentum is a bad thing, it can be helpful if you know how to properly use it. And in this case, we'll apply it by performing a standard lateral raise, but raising your arms out explosively, using a bit of momentum at the bottom, and then letting that momentum swing your arms to the top. This allows you to challenge the delts the most at the bottom, whereas the top now becomes the easiest because you're reaching that position not by using your delts, but by relying on momentum. So what you want to do is make sure to include both of these resistance profiles in your routine, which I'll show you how to properly do later on in this video. But these exercises will only be effective if you apply the next tip, which has to do with technique. Lateral raises seem like a simple exercise, but there's three mistakes in particular that are most common. First mistake, despite the name of the exercise, your arms shouldn't actually be directly out to your sides when you perform it. This position not only fails to maximize the tension placed on the side delt by getting other muscles involved, but but it's also a riskier position for your shoulder to be in, especially if you have pre existing shoulder injuries. Instead, research suggests that for both a safer position for your shoulder and a stronger position for your side delts, move into what's known as the scapular plane. It's a very subtle tweak, but you're going to notice the difference right away. And it involves moving your arms just 20 to 30 degrees in front of you and maintaining the angle as you raise the weight. Applying a slight lean forward as you do this will also help boost side delta activation. The second mistake has to do with your hands. Many people believe that turning your hands inwards so that your pinkies end up higher than your thumbs at the end position will help better activate the side delts. This actually leads to the opposite effect, though by engaging more of your rotated cuff muscles while also planting your shoulder at a greater risk for injury. Instead, keep your hand flat or with your thumbs just slightly higher than your pinkies at the top position. The last mistake has to do with how you actually think about the raise. Rather than thinking about raising the weight up, which tends to activate more of your traps, you can engage the side delts much more by instead thinking about pushing your hands out to the sides towards the walls. So to put it together simply, it'll look like this. Lean forward slightly raising the scapula plane, and think about pushing your hands out, not up. Try it out and you'll be pleasantly surprised with how much better it feels. So now you've got the right exercises and the right technique. But even with all that, you may be compromising your gains in the way you progress the exercise as you get stronger. I'm sure many of you can relate to the following scenario. You've just finished a set of lateral raises with 20 pounds and it actually felt pretty easy. So you try to jump to the next heaviest pair of dumbbells, 25 pounds. Even though it was just a five pound jump, it now seems way harder than it should be and the number of reps you could do drops significantly. So you either start cheating with more momentum to try to do more reps, or maybe you move back down to £20 and stay there indefinitely. Sound familiar? Well, the reason for this is because lateral raises are not like most other exercises with proper form, even the most jacked and strongest of lifters will only be using at most around 30£40. This means that because the amount of weight that you'll be using is relatively light compared to your other exercises, for most people, an increase of just five pounds to your lateral raise will feel incredibly difficult, like trying to add 40 pounds more weight to your bench press. So to avoid making the jump too soon and getting stuck, we can actually take advantage of the following scientific finding, which is as long as you're still pushing hard, instead of adding more weight to an exercise, you can use the same weight and increase the reps you do per set up to 30 reps, and you'll experience the same amount of muscle growth. You can apply this to lighter raises by sticking with the same weight and focus on doing more and more reps instead, only increasing to the next heaviest pair of dumbbells once you can do about 2030 reps in a set with good form. When you do eventually make that jump, though, expect the number of reps you'll be able to do with the heavier weight to decrease by about half. Instead of cheating or getting discouraged when this happens though, realize that it's completely normal and just focus on slowly building it up again and repeating that process. Alright, so the last reason has to do with how often you're actually training your side delts. Most people aren't training them enough, often just once a week. But the side delts, they recover quickly and with the right programming can be trained two to three times a week to stimulate more growth. What I recommend is start out by picking two days in your current routine to train them. For example, this can be within an upper body workout or even after a leg day workout, as long as there's at least one day of rest between the two days. Then, for each of the days that you train them, add in three sets of the standard lateral raise and three sets of one of the variations I showed earlier to vary the resistance profile. This can be used as a starting point. Be mindful of how you're recovering the growth you're experiencing and increase or decrease the volume accordingly. Implement these four things and you'll quickly start to notice the difference in your shoulder development. But chances are you're also making subtle mistakes with the rest of your training as well. To avoid letting these mistakes hold you back, you can take my free quiz@builtwithscience.com to find out which of my step by step programs will be best to guide you every step of the way to transforming your body. That's it for today guys. You can click here if you need some help with growing your chest or click here for a muscle building meal plan. Thank you so much for watching and see you next time.