Body And Fitness Blog

Thursday – shoulders

My first exercise for shoulders is the shoulder press. This time, I was using a lighter weight and using the heavy duty principles, performing each rep much slower, and emphasizing each aspect of the rep. I did a couple of warmup sets, 10kg and 20kg, just to get the blood flowing, followed by some windmills to loosen the joints. My aim was to do three good, heavy duty sets, not going to failure, but pushing out ten reps per set, ensuring that each rep was slow and controlled.

• 30kg x 10 reps (set took 1 minute to complete, 6 seconds per rep)
• 30kg x 10 reps (set took 1:10 to complete, 7 seconds per rep)
• 30kg x 10 reps (set took 1:15 to complete, 7.5 seconds per rep)

My aim is to get each rep up to about 10 seconds, so in theory, a 10 rep set, would take 1:40 (100 seconds). Mike Mentzer’s principles extol the virtues of one set, to failure, taking four seconds for each element of the rep. At this stage, I’m not quite ready to do this, but it’s something I will be working towards. Next week, I aim to do the same weight, but take longer over each rep, aim to make each rep 10 seconds, and do two sets of 10, followed by the last set to failure.

After shoulder press, I move onto isolation exercises for each muscle in the shoulder. I start with what I consider to be my weakest shoulder muscle, the lateral deltoids. For this I do two exercises, the lateral deltoid dumbbell raises and standing upright rows.

• 6kg x 10 reps lateral dumbbell raises
• 10kg x 10 standing upright dumbbell rows
• 6kg x 10 reps lateral dumbbell raises
• 10kg x 10 standing upright dumbbell rows

After lateral deltoids I moved onto rear deltoids, one of my favourite exercises and muscles to work. For this I do rear deltoid raises, the reps and weight are as follows:

• 12kg x 10 reps
• 12kg x 10 reps

To finish off the shoulder workout, I work the anterior (front) deltoids with some raises, here’s the weight and reps:

• 10kg x 10 reps
• 10kg x 10 reps

I also managed to squeeze in some leg raises in between sets of raises, this was out of guilt for not having done any this week. I managed 2 sets of 10 reps, though I did them slower than normally, and lifted my hips off the bench when my legs were vertical just to give the abs a bit more of a workout.