Video Blog: Shoulder Training Tips!

Hey guys!

I'm back with another video for this week's blog post! I keep getting some great feedback from these videos, so you might actually see more of them in the near future.

This week I'd like to talk about some shoulder training tips you can use during your next workout. Below is the video, but I'll once again describe a lot of the key points below the video as well.

Shoulders are.....so important. But for whatever reason, a lot of people tend to neglect them. This is a poor choice not only because it doesn't maximize the aesthetic of your upper body, but also because the shoulders have so much mobility and flexibility that they remain especially vulnerable to injury. And injuring an area of your body so crucial in many aspects of mobility that gets activated in almost every upper body exercise you do can severely set you back in your progression towards accomplishing your fitness goals. Just ask anybody who has injured their shoulder how much it hindered their workouts and completely ruined their gains.

So workout your shoulders guys. And work them out FULLY. The front of your deltoid is not the only part of the shoulder that matters. In fact, overdeveloping only one of the three sets of fibers that make up your deltoid (anterior, medial, posterior) can cause it to pull on or what I call "bully" the other deltoids and cause chronic strain and pain that you don't want.

In other words, get a complete shoulder workout. workout the front, middle, and back of your shoulders.

Also, make the line of drive for your shoulder workouts BEHIND your head. Often times people will go straight up without noticing that their elbows or arms are situated in a way that activates just the front of the shoulder and other muscle groups that you may or may not be trying to focus that day. This results in the shoulders not fully being activated. When doing this backwards motion during your lifting motion, aim to also get your shoulder blades to touch.

Be sure to also make sure that you're not moving your body in a way that gets you to "cheat" in your lifting movement. Often times I'll see people move their legs upwards or sway their body to gain power and momentum that are not optimal for a complete shoulder workout.

Most importantly of all however, is to make sure you are never putting your shoulder in an awkward position. They can be SUPER fragile. It's important to strengthen them, but it's also very important to listen to them and pump the brakes a little on the intensity if they feel like they're really starting to hurt. It's better to rest such an important muscle group for a week rather than have to be out of the gym for months because you've injured them. Be smart when lifting shoulders.

And those are some shoulder training tips for you to experiment with during your next workout! I hope they help you out!

-Jtrain

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