Written by Ron Harris
08 July 2020

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Build Ultimate Shoulders in 8 Weeks!

Best Exercises to Pack on Delt Mass Fast

 

By Ron Harris

 

 

Ultimate shoulders in 8 Weeks? You betcha!

The first thing that might have caught your eye in the title was the implied claim that you can build cannonball deltoids in eight weeks. Obviously, to build an exceptional degree of shoulder mass as seen on the top pros requires both gifted genetics and many years of dedicated training. But this is not to say that you can’t make a significant improvement in as short a time span as two months. You would be amazed at what can be accomplished when you focus completely on reaching a specific goal by a certain day. It’s how competitive bodybuilders manage to go from smooth and uncut diamonds in the rough to shredded gods of ripped, powerful muscle in only two to three months of dieting and cardio. The key to rapid improvement in a body part lies in both concentrating totally on the task at hand and reducing workload on other muscle groups temporarily in order to specialize. We will get into that later on. Right now, it’s time to talk about how your particular DNA can influence the potential development of your shoulders.

 

Delts and genetics

As with any muscle group on the human body, various genetic traits play a role in determining the eventual size and shape of your shoulders. The first factor to look at is clavicle width, or how wide your shoulders are across. The men in bodybuilding with the widest shoulder spans didn’t necessarily start out with much mass, but their bone structure gave them the advantage of extraordinary width even before the first ounce of deltoid muscle was built. This group would include Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, Paul Dillett, Chris Cormier, Nasser El Sonbaty, Dennis James, Mike Matarazzo, Dennis Newman, Markus Rühl, Kevin Levrone, Lee Haney and Dorian Yates.  If you have ever stood next to, or especially behind, any of these giants in their prime as I have, the total width of the underlying clavicles with the additional thick, round shoulder caps is almost impossible to comprehend. However, there have also been many champion bodybuilders that have managed to build awe-inspiring shoulder mass to the point where many assumed that they had wide clavicles to begin with. Our first Mr. Olympia, Larry Scott, is the example most often cited, but others include Phil Heath, Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, Lee Priest and Dexter Jackson. This should serve to illustrate that though preternaturally wide clavicles are a plus when it comes to building melon delts, they are by no means absolutely necessary. One note I do feel implored to add is that all of the aforementioned athletes were or are among the greatest bodybuilders ever to walk the earth, and as such, all were born with the rare ability to build more muscle mass than the average person. This should not discourage you from trying to improve your own physique. To do so would be like someone who enjoys bicycle racing giving it up just because they can’t race at the level of Lance Armstrong, or a golfer quitting because he can’t hope to equal Tiger Woods. As I often point out, bodybuilding is about self-improvement, and the only person you should be comparing yourself to is you. As long as you are bigger and shapelier than the you of the past, you have succeeded, and you are a champion.

 

Delts and overtraining

Overtraining is a valid concern with any muscle group, but the shoulders are particularly susceptible to this gain-stopping condition. That’s because no other muscle group is used so often to assist other muscles. Think about it this way – you have to use your arms to get to your torso muscles. And any time your arms move, your shoulders move. Therefore, whenever you work your back, chest or even arms, your deltoids are pitching in to make the movement possible. The heaviest degree of overlap occurs during chest training. If you ever knew a man who could bench press a ton of weight, I would bet you anything that he possessed some serious front delts to match his beefy pecs. The anterior or front deltoids are intensely recruited during any type of press for the chest, including dips, decline, flat and incline presses – and especially incline presses because the angle is closer to that of an overhead press. When a muscle is worked more frequently than it is capable of recovering from, it’s a struggle just to maintain existing mass, much less add any new muscle tissue. Therefore, in the case of the shoulders, special caution must be taken that the chest is worked neither the day before or the day after you train your delts. There are many possible ways to arrange your training schedule to accommodate this. Here are just a couple of options:

 

Monday: Delts

Tuesday: Legs

Thursday: Back and biceps

Friday:  Chest and triceps

 

Normally I don’t recommend training biceps with back, or triceps with chest, particularly if the arms are a weak body part. But we are leaning here toward giving preferential treatment to the shoulders. Not only are they trained in the above schedule on their own day, but this day occurs after two full days of rest from weight training, when you should be fully recuperated and ready to rock and roll. And, nothing else is touched on the upper body for a full 72 hours, with chest training stretched out to a full four days later. This is all carefully planned to maximize the recovery of the shoulders and provide you with the maximum amount of energy to apply toward intense delt thrashing that will have those caps growing by the week.

 

Free weights or machines and cables?

The next issue to contemplate is what tools to use in the construction of your ultimate shoulders. I believe that machines and cables are quite valuable for variety, as well as in allowing lifters with certain injuries to continue training. But when it comes to the rapid accumulation of muscle mass, and particularly when shoulders are the muscle group in question, barbells and dumbbells simply can’t be beat. This may not seem like conclusive evidence, but my observations of thousands of men in dozens of gyms in America and beyond that I have visited and trained at bear my assertion out. I have seen a fair amount of men who could handle entire stacks on various machines and cable units in good form that did not necessarily have outstanding shoulder development. However, I have never seen a man that could use substantial weights in good form on movements like dumbbell presses or laterals without round, meaty deltoids. Free weights are just plain harder to use. Many trainers avoid them for this exact reason. Barbells and dumbbells require you to balance them, and they are far more cumbersome to handle in general than merely sliding into a machine and performing an exercise within a predetermined movement track. Machines are also “safer,” since slipping out of the groove on an exercise like heavy seated dumbbell presses or behind-neck barbell presses can have disastrous consequences for the shoulder joint and the delicate network of small supporting muscles collectively known as the rotator cuff. With this increased risk comes increased reward. You must work much harder to handle heavy free weights than you do heavy resistance on a machine, but this translates to faster and greater muscle growth. As I said, I do feel that there is a time and place for machines and cables in shoulder training, but when the goal is rapid muscle growth, stick with the raw, cold iron. With that in mind, here are the absolute most effective exercises for your delts.

 

Seated dumbbell press

If I were forced to narrow it down to the one best shoulder exercise to build them up, I would have to go with seated dumbbell presses. These are without question the toughest of them all. Using heavy dumbbells requires more than mere pressing power, it demands balance and coordination as well. You can’t just start pressing heavy dumbbells after a couple of months of lifting weights – you need to “earn” that right over the course of many months and even years. But show me a man that can press a pair of dumbbells in the range of 120-150 pounds for a set of eight to 10 reps in good form, and I know that’s a man who owns a seriously jacked, round set of delts that give the illusion of padding under shirts and jackets. There are some who support doing dumbbell presses while standing, but I am not one of them. When seated, you have your back supported, and don’t have to be concerned with toppling backward should you lose your balance. This allows you to direct more of your attention to the actual press.

 

Performance pointers:

Begin the movement with the arms forming a perfect “bottom of a square,” that is, the upper arm bones should be parallel to the ground, and your forearms should be perpendicular, or at a right angle to the upper arms. Press straight up but do not lock out the elbow joints. This would take stress off the shoulders and transfer it to the joints and connective tissues, inviting injury. Bringing the dumbbells together at the top, while not entirely incorrect does tend to take work away from the shoulders and shift it to the triceps. Finally, be sure to keep your back flat up against the seat back in this and any type of seated press. The more your butt slides forward and your back tilts backward, the more you start turning your overhead press into an incline press for the upper chest.

 

Seated barbell press to front/military press

Here’s another classic mass-builder, known for decades as the military press, since soldiers around the world used it as part of physical training to strengthen the shoulders for a variety of practical applications, such as tossing weapons and gear over walls and bunkers or loading bombs, missiles and torpedoes. Many lifters tend to favor the barbell press over dumbbells because the bar is simply easier to balance. Thus, if you can press a pair of 70s, you can probably press closer to 200 pounds loaded up on a bar. The seated press to the front is a great basic exercise, but I still tend to favor the dumbbell version simply because it does a better job of recruiting the side or medial heads of the delts. But for sheer, brute pressing power, you will probably never be able to push as much total pounds of iron overhead as in the seated front press.

 

Performance pointers:

One way to get the bar in a better, more purely vertical plane is to tilt the head back slightly to get it out of the way of the bar. Otherwise, you are forced to ever so slightly tilt your arms forward to navigate around your own nose – which for some of us is more difficult than others! Regarding how far to lower the bar, chin level is just about right. Anything lower than that, and you are going beyond a normal range of motion and again asking for an injury. And as always with any press, do not fully lock out the elbows at the top, but rather maintain a slight bend.

 

Seated behind-neck press

Next up we have the behind-neck press, which has mostly fallen out of favor due to its reputation as a wrecker of rotator cuffs the world over. The fundamental issue here is something called “external rotation.” Picture an overhead press in profile. The only safe plane to push up in with free weights is the vertical plane. If your arms are tilted backward at all, the perfect 90-degree angle changes, and the stress that your rotator cuff muscles have to endure to maintain balance and stability is greatly magnified.  Our shoulders just weren’t designed for much external rotation. The kicker, however, is that the behind-neck press does a much better job in involving both the medial and anterior heads of the deltoids. So, how can the exercise’s risks be minimized? One way is to tilt your head forward to get it out of your way, in order to get a better vertical pressing plane. Another idea is to perform behind-neck presses toward the end of your shoulder workout, so that much less weight is needed. 150 pounds can feel just as heavy as 200 pounds if you have pre-exhausted the shoulders with a couple of other exercises first.

 

Performance pointers:

Take extra time to warm up on this movement, and be absolutely sure to use slow, controlled form. And with any overhead barbell press a spotter is highly recommended, but in the case of pressing behind the neck, I would even go so far as to say you shouldn’t even attempt to do these heavy without one. Re-racking the weight in this position is far too difficult, particularly when your strength is temporarily diminished at the end of a set.

 

Lateral raise

So far, we have discussed presses. Make no mistake, overhead presses make the most valuable contribution toward shoulder mass of any movement. You simply will never get huge delts without hard work on presses. But for that nice round, “capped” look to the shoulders, you also have to include lateral raises. Laterals are the only way to isolate the side heads of the deltoids, and hard work on isolation movements is key in developing a “pretty” physique. There are plenty of powerlifters and plain old hardcore weight trainers who lift heavy on the basic movements and get big, but their bodies are typically bulky and without much shape. For instance, I have seen plenty of college and pro football players with big shoulders, but none that had the full, round type of delts you see on top bodybuilders. Laterals are the only way to achieve that sculpted look.

 

Performance pointers:

Lateral raises are perhaps the most incorrectly performed exercise of all, or at least in the top three. The major error most lifters make is attempting to use too much weight, which makes good form impossible. You should never heave or jerk the weight up, using a little jump and hip thrust, as is so often seen. The weight should be raised up smoothly and with a pause at the top to squeeze the side heads, then lowered under control rather than dropped. There are a couple of technique variations you can try involving how much you bend the elbows. You can do anything from a totally straight arm to an L-bend, and you can also choose to keep your wrists locked, or instead tip the dumbbells downward at the end as if you were pouring water out of two pitchers. Bob Cicherillo used to talk about his own twist on the movement, which is to hold the dumbbells in four fingers with a loose wrist, as if holding paint cans by their wire handles. Try a few different versions out, and don’t be afraid to switch them up every so often. Just remember to go only as heavy as you can while still isolating the side heads and getting them pumped and burned.

 

Rear lateral raise

No set of perfectly round, “3-D” delts would be complete without attention to the posterior or rear heads of the muscle. Such truly balanced development is rare, because unfortunately, most people give short shrift to the rear delts. If only everyone would include a few good sets of rear laterals in every shoulder workout, there would be a lot more balanced shoulders out there in the world. You can do them sitting at the end of a flat bench and bending over, or squatting down without a bench, but lately more and more bodybuilders are choosing to do their rear laterals face down on an incline bench. This keeps the torso motionless and makes cheating much tougher.

 

Performance pointers:

The standard grip for rear laterals is with palms facing each other and knuckles facing away from the body. A slightly more effective way of isolating the rear delts is to have the thumbs facing inward and the heels of the hands facing away. One extremely important guideline is to be very conscious to contract the rear delts, or else this can very easily turn into a movement for the traps and upper back. If you feel your shoulder blades pinching together at the top of the rep, you have effectively bypassed the rear delts. Use very light weights until you have mastered this critical nuance.

 

Front raise

Normally I don’t recommend any direct work for the anterior or front delts, the reason being that between all the pressing movements performed for the shoulders and the chest, they normally get more than enough stimulation. And it shows, since a great many men have more development in the front heads by far than they do the side or rear heads. But there are rare examples of those who seem to require isolation work for the front delts in order for them to grow in proportion to the rest of the shoulders. You can do front raises with a barbell or dumbbells, and with dumbbells you have the option of using one or two at a time, as well as doing them seated or standing.

 

Performance pointers:

Some bodybuilders like to raise the arm completely overhead, but I feel that anything beyond the point where your arm is slightly above parallel to the ground is wasted effort. You can face your palms downward, or instead use a hammer grip with the thumb aimed to the ceiling.

 

Specialization – the key to fast gains

Earlier I gave an example of a training split that gave special emphasis to the shoulders. If you really want to witness extreme results in eight weeks, extreme measures are called for, in the form of specialization. When you specialize on a particular muscle group for a limited time, you either increase the training volume or frequency for it, while at the same time reducing the volume for all other muscle groups. You must understand that your body only has a finite amount of energy available for muscle training and recovery. Simply doing more for the shoulders while maintaining the regular workload for the rest of your body would not be a wise tactic. Far superior results can be seen if you instead do more for the shoulders while doing less for everything else. The following split has you hitting shoulders twice a week, while doubling up the other training days. I recommend that you cut the amount of sets you normally do for all other body parts during this period by 50 percent. If you fail to do this, I assure you that your gains in shoulder mass will fall short of what you could have experienced. Here is the schedule:

 

Training split: twice per week

 

Monday:

Shoulders

 

Tuesday:

Legs and back

 

Thursday:

Shoulders

 

Saturday:

Chest and arms

 

Should you choose to train shoulders once a week for whatever reason, you can simply follow the split given earlier on in the article and increase the amount of work sets in the routines to follow from three per exercise to five. Now it’s time to detail the exact workouts you will follow over the eight weeks. Not that no warm-ups are listed. I do advise you to precede all work sets, particularly on pressing movements, with at least three sets of gradually increasing weight. The reps on these warm-ups could look something like 15, 12 and 8. As for whether to increase or decrease the weights as you proceed through the work sets, I tend to lean in favor of starting out as heavy as possible and naturally reducing the weight as your strength fades. Thus, warming up adequately would take on an even more critical role. Finally, you will notice that the exercises change slightly every two weeks. This is so that the shoulders are constantly forced to adapt. Ready, then? Here’s what you’ll be doing:

 

Routine A – Weeks 1 and 2

 

Seated dumbbell press

3 x 8-12

 

Standing lateral raise

3 x 10-12

 

Rear laterals

3 x 12-15

 

Front raise

3 x 10-12

 

Routine B – Weeks 3 and 4

 

Seated military press

3 x 10-12

 

Seated lateral raise

3 x 10-12

 

Rear laterals

3 x 12-15

 

Routine C – Weeks 5 and 6

 

Upright row

3 x 10-12

 

Standing lateral raise

3 x 10-12

 

Rear laterals

3 x 12-15

 

Seated behind-neck press

3 x 10-12

 

Routine D – Weeks 7 and 8

 

Seated dumbbell press

3 x 6-8

 

Standing lateral raise

3 x 6-8

 

Seated military press

3 x 6-8

 

Upright row

3 x 8-10

 

Follow this diligently for eight weeks, get enough sleep and plenty of quality protein, complex carbs, and essential fats, and you will see bigger and rounder shoulders in the mirror by the end.

 

Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area.

 

Follow Ron on Instagram @ronharrismuscle

 

 

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