Body And Fitness Blog

Thursday - shoulders

My shoulder workout is probably my favourite workout day at the moment. That’s because I think my shoulders are a weak area of my physique, and are lagging behind the rest of my body. As such, I’m concentrating on doing some heavy duty workouts to stimulate some results on my shoulders. Here’s the exercises and weights that I used for my shoulder workout this week.

Shoulder Press

I use the gym’s shoulder press machine rather than doing this exercise with free weights (either dumbbells or barbell). This is principally because I train alone, and therefore don’t have someone to help me with lifting the dumbbells into place, and also because my gym doesn’t have the equipment to allow me to train with barbells. I actually would also advocate using a machine for this exercise as it can help to isolate the muscles.

I perform this exercise heavy duty style, so I aim to take 9 seconds over each rep. I never achieve this, but I do count 1, 2, 3 for each element of the rep, so in theory it should be 9 seconds, but I’m clearly not counting slow enough…

• 35kg x 10 reps (60 seconds)
• 35kg x 10 reps (60 seconds)
• 35kg x 10 reps (1:15 - I made an extra effort to go slow on this set)

My shoulder press felt good, what made me feel even better was knowing that I’d done this same routine last week using only 30kg. I’ll aim to put it up by 2.5kg next time, and each subsequent workout. Afterwards, I can feel my shoulders are pumped up, even just looking in the mirror I can see that they are bulging, which is clearly a good sign!

After shoulder press, I move onto some dumbbell work for each individual muscle, just a couple of sets for each, except for lateral deltoids which I am striving to improve on.

Lateral deltoid raises

I do the lateral deltoid raises slowly, ensuring that I’m not swinging the dumbbell up as this can lead to injuries. What you want is a slow lift, hold then relax back to the starting position in a controlled manner. As such, I don’t use very heavy dumbbells for this exercise, instead I concentrate on doing the exercise slowly, leaning forward just slightly to isolate the lateral deltoid.

• 8kg x 10 reps
• 8kg x 10 reps

Standing upright rows

I do standing upright rowing with dumbbells, mainly because of the lackof barbells, but even with barbells, I have in the past found this exercise causes a niggle in the shoulder. I’m aiming to do this exercise slowly, ensuring that I can feel the muscle working, and not putting too much stress on the shoulder joint.

• 12kg dumbbells for 12 reps
• 12kg dumbbells for 12 reps

Anterior deltoid raises

For anterior deltoid raises my aim is to lift with good technique, but I also want to be upping the weight. It’s a tricky one for me, as I always feel my front delts are a bit puny, and could do with being bigger, so I tend to go heavier than I should. Today’s workout was no exception…

• 12kg dumbbells x 10 reps (very sloppy form)
• 10kg dumbbells x 10 reps (much better form)

Rear deltoid raises

My favourite deltoid raise, it always feels it’s the strongest and most comfortable deltoid raise. I think what’s good about posterior deltoid raises is that you can lock the elbows and hold the dumbbells in such a way that they don’t feel like a weak link in the exercise, which is how I sometimes feel with front or side raises.

• 12kg dumbbells x 12 reps
• 12kg dumbbells x 12 reps

That was it for my shoulder workout, I felt good afterwards, and my shoulders felt pumped pretty much all day! I can’t wait until my next shoulder workout to do a good heavy duty session and lift more weight than this session.