You’re only as strong as your weakest link. By now, you must be sick of hearing that phrase! We all know that the big prime movers are at the mercy of the small stabilizer muscles. Sure, prioritize the compound, multi-joint movements like squats, deadlifts, presses, chin-ups, and rows that typically make up the “A” series…
Correcting muscle imbalances should be a primary goal when designing strength training programs. With most individuals, a significant discrepancy exists between the shoulder internal rotators and external rotators. Simply put, we do far too much internal rotation during our daily activities and certainly during exercise and not nearly enough external rotation. You should address that…
If you constantly scratch the scab, you’ll never heal. That goes with any injury, but it’s especially true for shoulder injuries. You see, the shoulder joint is the most mobile joint in the body. It can move the arm into thousands of positions, 16,000 to be exact! If you don’t set the scapula and stabilize…
Take a look at the two exercise machines above – one is for your upper body, the other for your lower body. They’re two completely different machines, yet you can do the same exercise on both: a lateral raise. That’s right, if you have access to a reverse hyper machine with an adjustable roller pad…
If you’ve been doing lateral raises for years but your shoulders haven’t budged, then science may be able to help. You see, muscle growth requires a sufficient amount of tension and time under tension. During a lateral raise, the maximum amount of tension occurs when the arm is straight out to the side, parallel to…
For more information, check out Muscle Devices And Weight Room Alternatives.
For more information, check out Muscle Devices And Weight Room Alternatives.
If your goal is to build “barn door” wide shoulders, lean-away dumbbell laterals allow you to overload the top range of the movement where greater activity of the medial deltoid occurs.
The typical side-lying dumbbell external rotation overloads the middle of the range. If you use a resistance tube, it overloads the end range. But there’s a way to overload the start range. I learned this from shoulder specialist Dr. Dale Buchberger, so I coined it the Buchberger External Rotation. Simply lean back while performing a…