Feel the Boulder Burn! | Brutal Shoulder Workout Routine

Here is a brutal workout that is high intensity shoulder annihilation, and it will push you beyond your limits. This workout is not for beginners - there’s another awesome workout available on The Zone you can follow if you're just starting out.

Anatomy of the Shoulder

2. Medial Delts: Usually referred as middle delts (green). Exercises like seated side laterals, standing side laterals, Arnold presses as well as shoulder presses help bringing up the medial delts.

3. Posterior Delts: Usually referred as rear delts (blue). Exercises like face pull, bent over lateral raises, barbell rows help in bringing up the rear delts

The workout chart below trains each shoulder muscle group along with the traps & hits them really hard. Its been observed that rear delts lag as they are often neglected. To make the rear delts grow, we would do a superset, which will help to bring them up very well.

Points To Remember

1. Warm up, stretch, then stretch some more

2. Start with compound exercises

3. Lift heavy in presses

4. Go for the kill – feel the burn!

5. Maintain proper posture

6. Do controlled reps

7. Minimize the rest in between sets

8. Recover

The following workout chart aims at pushing hard at all the three deltoid muscles. For the sake of simplicity, I have divided the workouts in categories as stated below.

A. For Overall Deltoid Development

The first thing is to go with presses - in this case it's standing barbell press/overhead press/military press. The exercise targets front and middle delts and involves the rear delt too. Overhead presses are a great mass adding exercise which can be performed with a set of dumbbells.

The idea of performing front presses in the start of the workout is to utilize the energy in the lifts and to increase the blood flow in the muscles.

Exercise 1: Standing Barbell Front Press

Barbell front press is a compound exercise as it involves more than one joint. Compound lifts should be done first in the workout, as they require strength. This exercise involves all the three delts but it’s more about front and middle delts.

How to do Standing Barbell Front Press

1. Grab a long bar, put it in a squat rack keeping it around your head level for ease in lifting. Add some light weight by which you can manage some 15 reps.

2. Lock the bar for added protection

3. Take shoulder width grip on the bar.

4. Slowly push the bar up, try to keep elbows locked. This will be your starting position.

5. Try not to fully extend the elbows. Keep them a bit bent for more tension.

6. Lower the barbell slowly. Lower it till you reach your nose height. This will be your finishing position.

7. Repeat the moment for the prescribed set of reps.