Saturday boulder shoulders.

You ever have one of those workouts where you feel like Superman? The weights are moving, you feel every muscle hitting hypertrophy the way it should, and you feel like a balloon you’re filled with so much blood. That was my quickie shoulder workout today.

I rode my bike to the gym as a little warm-up, but mostly because it was just a gorgeous day out.  Only about three miles, and I usually don’t condone pre-workout cardio, but it felt good to step into the gym with warm muscles and joints. I think it was just enough where I was warmed up but didn’t really tap into my energy stores enough to impact my lift.

Lately I’ve been training shoulders with very high volume, with light weight. 40-45 sets, usually staying in the 15-25 rep range. When I was coming back from my shoulder injury, I thought it would be best to ease in. In addition, I had never really trained like this before, so I was hoping my body would react well to the change.

Today, I wanted to go more traditional. Back to normal rep ranges for size and strength, back to humanlike volume.

Standing Military Press, Barbell – 15, 15, 12, 8, 6

Shoulder-width grip here will cause your poundages to go down, but it’s a healthier way to execute the movement. Powerlifters would frown on my form here, but I go down to just below my chin, then press the bar above my head to lockout, passing my body under the bar during the movement, so by the end the bar is directly over my skull. A pitfall to avoid on these is leaning your upper back away from the bar.

So much about shoulder training is really thinking. Thinking about using your delts to press this weight overhead. It’s very easy to use a lot of triceps or even chest in this exercise, but if you use good form and really think about recruiting your deltoids to push the weight, you will get better results. Years ago, I would do military presses and barely get a pump in my delts. That should never happen.

I did two warmup sets before the work sets.

Seated Facepull – 15, 15, 12, 8, 6

I went over to the seated row machine for this exercise this week. I’ve advocated doing it standing up at the pulleys before, which works well when doing super light weight for high reps. However, now that I was going to be going a little heavier today, I didn’t want to be standing there and having my body move back and forth from the momentum. Sitting down and having my legs against a plate would stabilize me a bit. I’ve written about the form on these guys before, I just went a little heavier today.

Standing Lateral Raises – 15, 12, 10, 10, 8

Simple, standard shoulder-building movement. I usually go very slow and controlled on these, with my arms returning to my sides and slow negatives. Due to my theme of heavier weights today, I brought the weights to the front instead, but really tried  to keep the exercise true to form.

Wide-grip upright row – 15, 15, 12, 10, 8

I recently read an article in FLEX advocating the classic upright row exercise to be done with a wider grip. Normally I take everything I read in that magazine with a grain of salt, however these felt really good. I gripped it at not quite double shoulder width, but, almost. I’d recommend doing whatever’s comfortable for you. I let the bar go all the way down to a dead hang between each rep in order to stretch my traps. From there, I pulled the bar using my traps and delts, really squeezing the delts at the top of the movement, with the bar ending up within a few inches of my chin.

Front Raises – 15, 15, 12, 8, 8

Another classic, I took front delt work out of my shoulder routine for the last few months, as I figured I was getting enough with my chest workouts. I’d like to get back into these, probably once every other week. I like to do them with dumbbells, both hands at a time, with my arms going about 15 degrees above parallel with the floor. Really focusing and actively thinking about lifting the weight with your deltoid is imperative here.

Bent over rear delt neutral grip raises – 5x15

Form: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i45WpmWmCrI&t=0m40s

Now, there are a million other shoulder exercises I could have worked in. You’ll notice it’s light on presses- I used to swear by 3 or 4 different pressing exercises every shoulder day. Standing barbell, behind the head, dumbbell, machine… now, I focus on other types of movements and it’s been working well. Ideally I’d like to do another press, but again, always cognizant of the bum shoulder. I always enjoyed behind the head pulldowns for my delts, but I have cut out all behind the head movements as well. I skipped the heavy shrugs as well due to the facepulls and upright nows hitting my traps.

Overall, this was a quick and effective workout that had every head of my delts, as well as my traps, absolutely smoked.