4 tips to SKLPT those shoulders
I’m back! I apologize for cutting down my newsletter to every 2 weeks now as my schedule has gotten busier. I have been SKLPTing my clients ;). But no need to fear, i’ve got some good tips for this week. The topic is all about shoulders. Why are they so important to train? Well, Let’s just say that a head turning physique is built from the shoulders down. Strong and well rounded shoulders not only make your waist look smaller but they are also essential for performing better on your lifts and daily movements.
The shoulder are a unique muscle to work because it requires a lot of heavy lifts as well as isolation work in order to get those boulder shoulders that we all want. If your a female or a male, it doesn’t matter, there is nothing more appealing than a nice set of delts. Whether you are training your shoulders for aesthetics or performance reasons, how you train them and how often is crucial in order for you to successfully SKLPT them.
Here is 4 tips to grow fully capped delts
Add in variety – It’s important to continue to challenge your muscles in order to avoid hitting a plateau. If you’re always using free weights and performing the same amount of sets and rep ranges, you muscles will stagnate. Mixing up your workouts using dumbbells, cables and resistance bands and changing the order as well as reps will force your muscles to respond. Incorporating techniques such as supersets, drop sets, giant sets and rest-pauses will also take your muscles past failure.
Slow down your reps – Often time’s people tend to throw the weights around and begin to rely on momentum for performing shoulder exercises. It’s not unusual to see people doing lateral raises by swinging the weight around as opposed to doing it slow and controlled. By doing your legs and traps start to do the work instead of focusing solely on the shoulders. By slowing it down, you will be keeping your muscles under tension for longer therefore making it more efficient to build those delts.
Train your delts one head at a time– The best way to approach a shoulder workout is to begin with exercises that target all heads of the delts followed by exercises that will isolate each part. By starting with a heavier and bigger lifts such as the dumbbell shoulder press or military press you will fatigue your shoulders. This means by the time you reach the isolated exercises you will have to recruit more muscle fibers. Make sure to hit each head evenly when performing the isolation work in order to avoid imbalances. If you already know your rear delts are weaker than your anterior and lateral delts then you should be adding more volume and weight to your weaker area until everything balances out.
Use drop sets in your training- drop sets are a good way to add more volume to your shoulder routine. The way to perform this is to do the prescribed amount of reps on the last set (15 reps) then grab a lighter weight and go till failure. Keep grabbing lighter weights until you can no longer perform the exercises. Example – perform 15 reps of lateral raises with 15lb, then grab 12 lb and go to failure, then 10lbs and so on. It is a good idea to target the lateral delts using drop sets since they are under worked compared to the anterior and rear delts which help assist in other exercises.