Best Shoulder Exercises

Well-built shoulders give your body balance and proportion by giving your upper body width making the waistline look smaller.  Creating well-built shoulders is intimidating. But, there’s no reason you can’t build superior shoulders to improve your overall physique and enter a female bodybuilding contest or a figure competition.

Shoulder exercises for size and strength can be difficult and most people give up way too soon in their endeavor. The delt is composed of many fibers, and many slow twitch fibers. With this in mind, be sure to focus on endurance deltoid exercises in the beginning months of your delt development.

To build jaw-dropping deltoids start your delt training with a compound movement.  The mass constructor shoulder exercise is any over-head pressing movement incorporating a barbell, dumbbells, a machine, or cables.  Overhead presses target all of the heads of the deltoid at the same time.    

To give your shoulders a nice cap, toss in some side deltoid work.  Lat raises develop delt proportion and help sculpt your upper frame. When implementing side raises don’t go too heavy.  The lateral raise is a fragile exercise and can cause trauma if you lift too heavy.  

To provide front deltoid muscle growth, add in front deltoid raises.  Front shoulder raises can be done with a barbell, DBs, a plate, or cables.  You can add specifics to this movement with a dumbbell using a hammer grip, where the thumbs are facing up. 

An additional excellent anterior shoulder exercise is the Arnold Press.  It allows a large range of motion giving maximum stretch other shoulder exercises lack.

Working your posterior delts is crucial, as well.  To add some muscle size on your posterior delts implement rear deltoid rows.  To perform this movement, just grab a barbell with a palms facing down grip. Be sure your arms are a little wider than shoulder-width apart, however avoid over-exaggeration. Pull the bar toward your collar bone and contract your shoulder blades together. When you release, make sure to get the entire stretch at the bottom of the exercise.

One more rear delt exercise a lot of athletes use is the formal bent-over lateral raises, and are powerfully effective. This is where you bend over with a DB in each hand, lifting each one from the side and contract your shoulder blades together. If you want to shake things up and genuinely bring those posterior deltoid muscles into action, try rotating your hand grip on the DBs. Rather than having a palms facing down grip use a supinated grip. You can really feel the effects using this small hand rotation.

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