Rounder delts can make you look wider and your waist look narrower. That’s two aesthetic reasons to get shoulder training right, especially the side head that’s most responsible for those two effects.
The go-to move for most trainees is standing or seated lateral raises…
But from an ideal-exercise standpoint, those kind of blow. If you’re honest, you know they don’t feel right, especially at the top…
Why? For one, the resistance curve is horrible—actually backward…
At the bottom, where the muscle is strongest, you get zero resistance because your arms are hanging straight down…
And as you raise the dumbbells, the resistance increases exponentially—way too heavy at the top…
That’s a bad deal because you can involve the most muscle fibers in the range where the muscle is strongest—the bottom third of the arc. Again, that’s where the resistance is least on standing or seated laterals…
On top of that hideous flaw, most people tend to lean back as they raise the dumbbells—primarily because of increasing stress on the muscle where it is weakest…
That backward lean takes stress off of the medial head and throws it onto the front.
But even if you keep your form perfect, as Jonathan is doing in the above photo, it’s still a fairly shitty exercise—unless you use it correctly…
By correctly I mean putting it AFTER your ideal medial-head move, either incline one-arm laterals or one-arm cable laterals with the pulley set at waist level…
Even Arnold knew those were excellent exercises…
While the line of force isn’t quite right on Arnold’s seated cable laterals above, it is almost there—much better than doing it standing with the pulley near the floor.
So why do regular laterals at all? Maybe it’s not necessary; however…
As I mention in Old Man Young Muscle, with the ideal exercise you’ve pre-exhausted the most important stretch range, which is strongest. Why not now train the weakest range with a set or two for unique fiber activation?
As Ph.D. researchers Fleck and Kraemer conclude, “The variation in recruitment order provides evidence that to completely develop a particular muscle, it must be [trained] with several different movements or exercises.”
And as explained above, standard laterals and incline one-arm laterals are very different: shitty vs. ideal. But as an add-on, even the less-effective move can have unique mass-building value.
New: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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