With just one exercise, you will build big, beautiful shoulders. And I'm talking exactly about that side part of the shoulder that will appear when you look in the mirror or when someone sees you from the front. It's a very interesting region for you to pay attention to.
And there are only two exercises that specifically work this region and I'll show you in this video which is the main one. The one you're going to make and you're going to decide to trim. And when we look at the shoulder, there are actually three portions.
It has the front part, the middle part and the back part. The big question here is, many of the exercises you do for your back already work the back of your shoulder. Many of the exercises you do for your chest already work the front of your shoulder.
Leaving out this side part. And we come with those two exercises that are the only ones that will effectively work this lateral part. One of them is called the upright row, but the big problem with the upright row is that it works the lateral part of the shoulder.
Many people even use it to work their trapezius, but it takes a toll on your shoulders. The upright row ends up providing a reduction in what we call the subacromial space. It's basically the bony structures of your shoulder, causing you to pinch the entire structure that's inside.
That is, if it doesn't cause a problem for your shoulder now, it will cause one in the future. Take this exercise off your list if you have it. Its cost-benefit is very bad.
And now we move on to the exercise that works the lateral part of the shoulder and not only that, it works on joint health. Before I even tell you what exercise it is, there are some details that are very important, which will differentiate whether your shoulder will grow, develop, look beautiful or not. And this exercise is the lateral raise.
Many people do the lateral raise, the one with dumbbells and only that. And how many sets do you do of this lateral raise? We are already starting to enter a point that is decisive for hypertrophy, for muscle growth, which is the training volume.
If you do lateral raises 3, 4 sets and that's it, I have some really bad news for you. The stimulus you are delivering to this muscle is very small. Not enough to provide all the growth we are talking about here.
The minimum number of sets you need to do for this muscle is 9, 10. If you only do 3, 4, you are basically giving half the stimulus that this muscle needs. Lalá, then, I get it.
I'm going to do 10 sets of lateral raises and this is the solution. Problem solved. More or less.
The dumbbell lateral raise will give you some mechanical advantages and some mechanical disadvantages. When you pick up a free weight, its force vector, the direction in which it exerts force, is always downward. So let's imagine, here's your shoulder, and here you have your arm, then comes your elbow, your forearm, and then your hand will come here.
And your hand is holding that weight. This weight here, where will it be exerting force? Down.
And now you will begin to understand why this exercise is good, but at the same time it is not good. All this distance here between your shoulder and your hand, we call it leverage. And at that point, you have a big lever.
What happens is, with a large lever, the demand on this muscle is high. The exercise is not just up here. The exercise, you will lower this arm.
And where will the weight be pulling? Down. You can see that there is an alignment here between the shoulder, elbow and hand.
And with that, you have a zero lever. If you only do dumbbell lateral raises, you have a big problem. You are stimulating this muscle in a very poor way.
We can't just rely on the lateral raise with dumbbells. We will do a lateral raise with dumbbells and another lateral raise, at least with a cable. Whenever you do a cable exercise, the force vector is not equal here to the free weight pulling down.
It is exactly in the direction of the cable. Look what's going to happen. The force vector is in that direction.
We lose a bit of leverage, because at that moment, leverage is exactly the distance between the cable and its joint up there on the shoulder. You'll notice that it gets a little smaller at this point, but when you get to the starting position of the movement, you still have leverage. So, at the starting point of the exercise there is effort, at the end point of the exercise there is effort.
We are actually putting in an exercise that kind of complements this lateral raise with weights that you were doing with a lot of effort at the end. And this is a way of looking at a workout, at an exercise in a more intelligent way. The big question here is that we need to include a variation of this exercise exactly so that you can reach this muscle in two ways that will complement each other.
Now let's understand what is the best way to do each of these variations. The dumbbell lateral raise, you will be there with your body erect. I need you to keep your torso stable.
I often see people doing a side raise and doing this movement here. You are also taking the work out of your muscles by creating a swing to send that weight upwards. And now I want you to bring your arm up to shoulder height, just there.
If you cross that line, you create that understanding within your articulation, which we talked about in the upright row, that it is not interesting. So raise your arm to shoulder height, great, bring it down. When you are descending, I don't want you to reach the end point of the exercise, so we can have an attenuation of this worst part of the exercise.
Let's imagine you're going down, you could get to this dashed line, this elbow, hand and the weight is here. You will stop a little early. We can have exactly this small lever here which is enough to keep your body in contraction.
That's why I keep telling you here on the channel, on Instagram, etc. , that when you do a lateral raise, don't let your arm reach your thigh. Because if it reaches your thigh, then you reach that point of zero leverage.
And that's terrible, you lose the very important variable for hypertrophy, which is time under tension. Done this way, the exercise is perfect. When you get to the cable, we're going to change some things here that are interesting.
If the cable is pulling you diagonally to the side, you don't need to do what we said here. You can go down to the end. You can even let that arm reach the front of your thigh.
Why? Since the vector will be pulling you diagonally to the side, everything is fine. You don't lose tension and muscle work continues.
When it comes to climbing, it's the same thing. You go up to the shoulder line because you preserve the joint that way. When you go to cable, you will do it unilaterally.
When you do it with dumbbells, you can do both together. And a very important point about the unilateral cable is that you have to be very aware, pay close attention to how you are doing the exercise. Because otherwise you may start to compensate laterally with your body.
Didn't we talk about torso compensation here, for lateral raises with dumbbells? So, I even prefer that you do it looking at the mirror, straight ahead, to correct these points. If you do this, the exercises, both lateral raise with dumbbells and with cable, will be perfect.
But there is one thing you can do during this exercise that will make the shoulder muscle work much less and the trapezius will end up stealing the show, which is exactly the shoulder elevation. It's very common to see this. People start doing lateral raises and soon they're doing it like this, look.
They're raising the shoulder, but I want you to keep it as low as you can, so that way you're isolating the work to just the lateral part of your shoulder. And there is one more point that many people do in the lateral raise, regardless of whether it is a cable or a dumbbell, which makes the exercise much weaker, which is exactly flexing the elbow. So, look, if I'm standing right here and I raise my arm here, The distance between my shoulder and my hand is exactly what I call leverage.
So always remember this. The greater the lever, the greater the demand on these muscles. If I start flexing my elbow, the lever gets smaller.
If the lever becomes smaller, what will the muscular demand be? Smaller too. So, when you're doing it, it's important to always control yourself and police yourself to keep your elbow slightly flexed, because then we protect the joint as well.
If you leave it fully extended, you will put unnecessary strain on that elbow. So, flex it a little there, you will have a high leverage, a high muscular demand and your elbow and shoulder will also be preserved so you don't have problems with these joints. For you to have a great shoulder press of that shoulder, you have these two exercises and you can simply do five sets of each one within a workout.
This will give you extremely powerful muscle development that you won't regret. And everything I'm telling you is based on training intelligently, using all these scientific aspects, when I tell you about nine sets, ten sets, I'm basing myself on some studies that analyzed a minimum volume of sets for hypertrophy. And when I show you all these graphs, I'm taking into account the laws of physics to be able to demand more from this muscle.
This is smart training. And what I do throughout the Muscle 60D periodization is to take all these points into consideration to put together a workout, an entire eight-week periodization that provides a year's worth of progress in just two months. I am inviting you at this moment to become our student, to have access to all this knowledge applied within a training session and also to have personal trainers, nutritionists and physiotherapists from my team helping you, monitoring you there via WhatsApp.
There is a link below so you can learn more about the work we do and be amazed by it all. And for you to continue building beautiful shoulders, I want you to watch this video here, because here are the only back exercises. Click here and you will understand how to compose this shoulder.
