Muscle Building Shoulder Exercises

This article will take you through the anatomy of the deltoids and how to train them for full growth. Building boulder shoulders will create the width on your frame.

The shoulders are made up of three ‘heads’, or different muscles that allow the shoulder to move as it does.

The Anterior Head
The anterior head is, as the name suggests is at the front of the shoulders.

This anterior head can be trained directly with exercises such as the military press and standing lateral barbell raises.

This head is also trained heavily during the bench press (any version), so compared to the other two heads of the shoulders the anterior needs the least amount of direct work to stimulate growth (as long as you are performing bench presses in your workout regime).

The Medial, or Lateral Head
The medial (middle head) of the delts is responsible for the width in your shoulders and can be trained with lateral raises. To perform a lateral raise, hold a pair of dumbbells by your sides, palms facing inwards. Then raise you arms upwards, until they are parallel to the floor and then back down to your sides, this is one repetition.

The medial head needs to be trained with very strict form as there are many ways to cheat on this exercise for example swinging the weight up with your body. This will not stimulate your medial delt for full development.

Train your medial deltoid muscle with a rep range of 10 – 15 reps. This will enable you to control the movement through all of its stages and really concentrate on fatiguing the muscle. Most people also agree that a higher rep range is best to stimulate growth in this head of the delts.

The Posterior Head
The muscle at the back of the shoulders can be trained with reverse dumbbell flyes. You can sit on a bench, lean over your knees, then raise the dumbbells out, much like a lateral raise. Or, even better, position a bench as if you were going to perform a incline bench press, but lie your chest on the bench instead of your back. This may feel slightly awkward initially, but really stretches the posterior head. Think of this exercise as a ‘reverse flye’ movement.

Now we know the different deltoid heads and what exercises stimulate them, we can discuss different types workout regime.

As the heads of the shoulders are relatively small and you want to isolate them there are intensity techniques you can use to train your shoulders in the least amount of time to produce the biggest growth response.

Most people advocate a ‘superset’ or ‘triset’. Basically this means performing two or three exercises, one after another. An example of this would be

Military press x 5 - 7
Dumbbell side lateral x 10 – 12
Dumbbell rear delt flye x 10 – 12

Perform these one after another with basically no rest between the exercises, beginners may want to start with two instead of three exercises. Take a few minutes rest and repeat.

If you are performing a separate shoulder workout then simple sets of 3 x 10 – 12 will work fine. However most people add them on to a chest routine, or a push movement routine (a workout with only push movements). Therefore moving quickly throughout the exercises will be best for overall growth.