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

If you want to build wider shoulders fast you need to narrow your shoulder exercise selection and broaden the weight selection you use when performing them. In this video, I show you how a simple side lateral shoulder raise can do everything you need it to do to create extra width in your delts. You just need to be willing to perform the shoulder exercise with both heavy and light weights.

First, let’s start with a little shoulder anatomy. The middle head of the delt is the one that is most visible when looked at from the front. It is the one that is going to create the most lateral width in the delts. That said, both the front delt and rear delt has overlap anatomically with the middle delt and doing exercises to improve them will only benefit the way your shoulders look from any angle.

That said, when it comes to building up the middle head of the delts your best exercise option is the side lateral raise with a dumbbell. First of all, it is a good idea to do these only one arm at a time instead of two arms at the same time. This will give you a better chance to concentrate on doing the exercise correctly and limiting the amount of muscle substitution that occurs when you do your lateral raises.

The second benefit here is that when you have to lift two dumbbells at once, you are asking that your core be able to stabilize the combined weight of the dumbbells. This is twice as hard than if you were to introduce just a single dumbbell at a time, thereby putting the focus more on the delts than on the core and helping you to get more from it.

When you are ready to perform the exercise you have two major options; both of which need to be performed if you want to maximally build up your shoulders. The first is to grab a light dumbbell and do the lateral raise with a focus more on muscle recruitment and metabolic overload. The light dumbbell should give you a chance to isolate the middle delt as much as possible and make it do the lion’s share of the work.

The increased workload will go a long way towards improving your muscle growth while helping you to establish a better mind muscle connection with a muscle that often times sorely lacks this. When performed with the lighter weights, you are able to crank out more repetitions and get a metabolic stress reaction. The accumulation of both lactic acid and hydrogen ions in the muscle (the things that cause your muscle to burn when you are performing the exercise) provides a chemical stimulus for growth that cannot and should not be ignored.

That said, lifting light weights alone would rob you of a chance to provide muscle growth and width in the shoulders from an alternative stimulus - heavy weights and progressive overload. This is where the cheat lateral raise comes in. Here you want to swap out the light dumbbell for a heavy one. The initiation of the movement is less about isolated muscle contraction and more about getting more weight to the top of the exercise.

From here, you do your best to eccentrically contract the middle delts to slowly lower the dumbbells back to the starting position. The acceleration of the weight on the concentric part of the lift takes advantage of another growth stimulus - compensatory acceleration - that helps to recruit more type II muscle fibers which are more capable of growing faster than slow twitch fibers.

Either way, my best recommendation for getting wider shoulders fast is that you not only be sure that you lift both heavy and light weights when you perform you shoulder lateral raises but that you immediately start prioritizing whichever you aren’t doing enough of right now. For example, if you lift mostly heavy weights for your shoulders then introducing the lighter dumbbells is going to have a fast impact on the response you see from t