Workout and Exercises for Building Big Shoulder Muscles - Part 8

Your shoulders (deltoid) has three heads: anterior (front), lateral (side), and posterior (back). The main function of shoulder muscle is to move your arms. The anterior deltoid raises your arm in front, lateral head moves your arm up to the side, and the posterior head moves your arm to the rear.

Basically, there are two kinds of exercises to train the delts: straight arm raises, and presses. The best mass builders for shoulders are pressing exercises like military press, and dumbbell press, while straight arm raises work better to isolate the individual heads.

I trained my shoulders on thursdays each week, and during weeks 2 to 5, I had added some calf training in after my delts. See it mentioned in part 5 - leg workouts. So I won't talk about calves here.

As with my other days, I had a slightly different routine for the odd and even weeks, see charts below:

Week 1, 3, 5

Week 2, 4, 6

Shoulder Muscle (Deltoids) Workout

There is a great variety of pressing exercises you can perform to train your delts such as military press, clean and press, dumbbell presses, behind the neck press, arnold presses and standing presses. The main pressing exercises I used were dumbbell presses, military presses (both machine and free weight), and arnold presses.

There are also many arm raise exercises such as standing or seated side lateral raises, cable front or lateral raises, standing or seated front raises, standing or seated bent over dumbbell lateral, lying side laterals, and reverse pec. The main arm raise exercises I used are side laterals, reverse pec dec, bent over lateral raises.

Warmup The Deltoid Muscle

I always start off by warming up the shoulders and the rotator cuffs. I grab a set of 5lb dumbbells, and do 8 to 10 reps of side laterals, front raises, and then standing presses. Then I slowly make large circles with my arm, 6 reps rotating forward, and 6 reps rotating backward - this is done with both arms.

After this preliminary warmup, I'll then warmup with the exercise I plan on doing 1st that day, and that would be seated dumbbell press for odd weeks, and military press for even weeks.

Seated Dumbbell Press (odd weeks)

1. Start off with 40's, and do 10 reps
2. Next set is done with 60's for 6 reps
3. After the first 2 warmup sets with lighter weights, I go on with the regular weight (85lbs for 3 sets).

The shoulder day is then finished off with machine military press, reverse pec dec, and then side lateral raises.

Military Press (even weeks)

1. Start off with doing 10 to 12 reps with just the bar itself
2. Load a 25lb plate each side, and do 8 reps
3. Remove the 25lb plate and load a 45lb plate and do 6 reps
4. Finally, add on the remaining weight (to 185lbs) and perform 3 sets

The even week shoulder workout is then finished off with arnold presses, bent over flies, and side lateral raises.

>> Continue to part 9 (arms)

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