To widen your shoulders with jaw-dropping roundness, you want the ultimate exercise for your medial-delt heads…
Building that bundle of middle fibers not only broadens your torso, it creates the illusion of a smaller waist.
So what is the ideal exercise to pack your shoulders with serious size? Top of the list is one-arm cable lateral raises, pulley at waist height…
If you don’t have cables available, a one-arm incline lateral raise is a good runner-up—although it takes time to get the groove…
What about standard standing or seated two-arm lateral raises? The resistance curve is terrible on both of those—it’s backward, as they are top-end loaded with zero resistance at stretch when your arms are straight down.
Ideal exercises should be hardest at stretch with resistance tailing off at contraction; however…
Standing DB laterals are a good add-on after your ideal to train the contracted torque curve.
Overhead presses? Again, not ideal and can eventually wreck your shoulder joints if you do them improperly. Follow these tips.…
1) Use dumbbells for freedom of movement
2) Angle your palms slightly inward to reduce possible joint impingement
3) Avoid the top quarter of the stroke—do not lock out
As for your shoulders’ front and rear heads, both get indirect work via chest presses/flyes and back rows/retractions/pull-ins, respectively…
If you want to add direct work for either of those heads…
Front: Flat-bench dumbbell presses, your palms facing, arms moving close to your torso
Rear: Cross-pulley rear laterals or lying one-arm rear-delt raises
Warning: Proper use of these exercises may cause you to be accused of smuggling cantaloupes under your shirt sleeves at grocery stores.
NOTE: The ideal exercise identified and described in the past few newsletters—and ones coming up—are NOT the result of my genius. They come from Mr. America and biomechanics expert Doug Brignole…
His analytic brilliance helped me understand how these exercises are the best of the best for getting the most mass bang for your effort buck…
To prove it, he won the 2019 AAU Drug-Free Mr. Universe at age 59, using only ONE IDEAL EXERCISE for each muscle group…
For more on his training and how it evolved—including sets, reps, ideal exercises, and more—see Never Stop Growing.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
X-Rep.com
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