Shoulder Workout: Wednesday 8th April 2009
I started off my shoulder workout, as usual with shoulder press, a great compound exercise for building mass in the shoulders. I was trying to think about a substitute for shoulder press yesterday, and came to the conclusion that there isn’t really anything that will do the same job as a shoulder press. You can try dumbbell press, but the issue you have there is once you get to the stage that I have in my training, it’s difficult to get dumbbells of the right weight (heavy enough) up to the starting position of a press without potentially injuring yourself.
As such, I prefer to use a machine to do shoulder press, the best ones are the ones where there are two distinct handles that line up with your ears. You can use a smith machine, but you then have to think about pressing in front of your head or behind your head, and each way will place a slightly different level of stress on the muscles.
I started my sholder press workout with a couple of warmup sets and some stretches and so on to warm the shoulder joints up. I think this is important because I’ve injured myself in the past by doing shoulder exercises whilst the muscles and joints were cold and I can tell you that shoulder injuries are a real pain in the arse!
- 20kg x 12 reps (warmup)
- 30kg x 12 reps (warmup)
- 40kg for 1 min 5 seconds, doing the reps slowly (4 secs positive, 2 secs static, 4 secs negative)
- 50kg x 12 reps
- 60kg x 5 reps
- 50kg x 8 reps
- 40kg for 40 seconds, doing the reps slowly (4 secs positive, 2 secs static, 4 secs negative)
That’s a pretty killer shoulder workout and I’m pleased to say that as little as three months ago, I was struggling with 40kg on the shoulder press, now I’m able to do 40kg very slowly for reps, and more impressively lift 60kg for reps (though I would have preferred to get 8 of them). I assume my 1 rep max is probably between 65 and 70kg. I will repeat this workout next time, and hopefully get a few more reps at 60kg!
Next up is the various isolation exercises for the shoulders, which I perservere with, though I do sometimes wonder whether I should just concentrate on doing the compound exercises and not worry too much about these isolation exercises. I’ll be doing some research over the next few weeks and will change my workout for my next period or cycle which starts 2nd week in May.
- 10kg x 10 reps
- 10kg x 10 reps
- 12kg x 10 reps
- 12kg x 10 reps
- 14kg x 12 reps
- 14kg x 12 reps
- 14kg x 12 reps
- 14kg x 12 reps
That was it for my shoulder workout, I was pleased with the progress made, my isolation exercises all felt a bit easier than last week, I may even have to increase the weights on some of them next week.
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