Train Like an Athlete by ATHLEAN-X (Video Podcast)

If you are trying to build big shoulders and have shied away from using light dumbbells, you may want to rethink your shoulder workouts starting today. In this video, I’m going to show you how using light weights is not only helpful but necessary to building your biggest delts possible. It has to do with your ability to create a mind muscle connection with your shoulders (all three heads of the delts) in order to get them to respond maximally to your training.

This is part of the Size in 6 Minutes series that I started with biceps a short time ago. In the case of the arms however, the key to developing a better mind muscle control of the muscle was your ability or lack thereof to contract the muscle forcefully. Here however, there is a different way to elicit a strong shoulder muscle involvement. This is where you want to focus on the tempo of the reps you are performing. I will explain.

Most of the time, when you are performing reps of either a dumbbell front raise, side lateral raise or rear delt fly, you likely don’t focus much on how quickly you are moving the weights. I am not even talking about using bad form and swinging the weights on every rep. I am simply saying that you start the weights in motion and then look to ride that into every rep instead of forcing the muscles to have to contract the weight up in every set.

In the case of the front delts, this can be seen and felt immediately if you were to slow the motion of the dumbbells down considerably. For instance, if it normally takes you about 1 to 2 seconds to raise the weight in a front raise, try slowing that down to almost double that time. At the same time, forcefully try and keep everything else on your body grounded, allowing only the contraction of the delts to lift the weights up against gravity.

You will immediately feel the front delts working so much harder but even more so, you will feel a contraction in them that you likely have not felt before. The same can be carried over to the middle and rear delts as well. When you are performing your side lateral raises you want to use the same slow motion speed that you did on the front raises. The key here as always is to keep the pinky lower than the thumbs in order to externally rotate the shoulders and keep the shoulder joint healthy in the process.

Finally you will want to move onto the rear delts as well. The key here is to get your upper arm back behind the body into extension while lifting the dumbbells up. Beyond that however is the length of time that you want to hold the contraction. Many people don’t realize the the rear delts respond the best when they have had a chance to sit in the contracted state for a few seconds almost as if allowing them to build the contraction over time. Try this and you will feel the difference in your shoudlers immediately.

In between a one minute round on each of these three delt head techniques you will want to speed up what you slowed down. We can accomplish that by doing 30 seconds of an explosive push press in rest pause fashion. The goal is not to choose a weight that is too heavy so that it negatively impacts your abilty to move the weights quickly. For me, I used the 45lb dumbbells at most to ensure speed of contraction.

Try this shoulder workout routine and you will build bigger delts by enhancing your mind muscle connection. If you are looking for an entire step by step workout plan that will help you to build not just big huge shoulders but an entire athletic physique, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System.

For more videos on how to grow bigger shoulders and the best delt exercises