Lee Hayward: Hey how is it going? It's Lee Hayward here from leehayward.com. Today I am going to take you through a shoulder workout. One of the keys to getting a shoulder workout is to work all hits to the delts. Now you have the front hit, shoulder head, and the rear head, the delt works. And you need to hit all these muscle heads in order to get a good shoulder workout. So I am just going to take you right now, down the dumbbell.
Alright, our first exercise of the workout is the seated dumbbell shoulder press. Now I like using dumbbells for a lot of my pressing exercises because it forces both the left and the right sides to handle a need for workload and fine to get a better range of motion. You notice when you are doing the dumbbells, you can bring the weights down exactly to the sides of your head versus if you have a barbell, you either have to press into the front or to the back and this can kind of place an extra strain on the shoulder joint. For this exercise, we'll start with a couple of progressively heavier warm ups sets and then move into three working sets of 8-10 reps.
The next exercise in our workout is the side dumbbell lateral raises. This is a great movement, it really targets the side delts. When you do this, you want to keep a slight bend in your elbows at all times. This will help to take some of the stress off the tendons and allow you to work the muscles harder. Again, we're going to start off with 1-2 progressively heavier warm sets and then move into a working sets and bang out probably three sets of 10-12 reps.
Now we're going to move onto doing bent-over dumbbell flyes. This is a great movement to work through rear delts and the entire upper back. When I do this exercise, I like to keep my back flat and look down at the floor. I find that this position is the most comfortable and allows me to get a deep muscle contraction throughout the upper back.
Now we are going to move onto doing plate raises for the front delts. This is one of my favorite front raise variations. I just like the whole hand position of holding onto a weight plate as I do this movement. But you could use a barbell, you can use dumbbells, you know, it doesn't matter, each variation is going to hit the front delts in a similar fashion. But again, I like to use the weight plate for this exercise and 45 pounds just happens to be a good working weight for me. When I get to this point in my workout, my shoulders are already fully warmed up. So I just jump into my working weight to form three sets of 10-12 reps.
To finish things off, I like to do the Bradford press. Now this is a unique shoulder press variation where you simple press the bar high enough to clear your head and you alternate pressing it to the front and to the back. Now for this, I just like to use the empty barbell and go for high reps, like I'll probably shoot for four sets of 25 reps to get 100 total reps at the end of my shoulder workout and just really burnout the delts. This doesn't look like much but trust me, at the end of your workout, when you are really fatigue, this burns like crazy.
So there you have a complete shoulder workout. We started off with the seated dumbbell press, which works the entire delt, then we're moving onto the side lateral raises, really oscillates the side delts. The bent-over dumbbell flyes hit the real delts. Then we did the plate raises for the front delts and finished things off with a Bradford presses to really pump up the shoulders.
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