The perfect shoulder workout should consist of exercises for your front delts, middle delts and rear delts (not necessarily in that order!). That said, even that doesn’t make the shoulder workout complete. In order to round out your shoulders with a well rounded workout you need to fill in the gaps of what is lacking on those popular shoulder exercises. That is what we do in this video.
If you look at the four main exercises that people do in their shoulders workout you will see barbell or dumbbell overhead press, side lateral raises, front delt raises and maybe even dips. Take a close look into each of these classic movements and you will see one thing in common. That is, each of these exercises is lacking either a stretch position of the shoulder or doesn’t take the muscle through it’s full available range of motion.
This is a problem when it comes to developing a complete set of impressive shoulders. Just because you are going through a full range of motion on the exercises that you are doing it does not mean that you are taking a muscle through its full range of motion. For instance, all shoulder exercises are performed by changing the angle of the arm at the shoulder. Because the shoulder is a three dimensional ball and socket joint, you have a great deal of motion available to you on your shoulder exercises.
That said, we often overlook the fact that the shoulder joint is not just this ball and socket. Because the socket is technically the shoulder blade, you have to consider all of the other muscles that are connected to these bones that then play an important role in shoulder training. Not just that, but hypertophy should never be the only goal of your shoulder workouts. In order to be complete like an athlete you are going to have to incorporate some movements that train the explosiveness of the entire shoulder girdle and let you train all of these muscles together.
The solution to this problem is to not forego the popular mass building shoulder exercises or even the lighter ones geared at mass but add to them, and overlook no element of complete training. Here is how to construct the perfect shoulder workout with that in mind.
Warmup with Overhead Banded Press – 2 sets of 15 with 3 second holds each rep.
OHP or Handstand pushups – 4 sets of 12,8,6,6 reps
Finish with one set of dumbbell and band overhead presses for neuromuscular re-education x 15 reps
Delt Stretch Tri-Set (21’s) – 2-3 sets of 7 reps in each direction for rear, middle and front delts
Make sure you perform these in the order of rear to front to account for fatigue.
DB Cheat Laterals – 3 sets to failure on each arm
Immediately into a DB Push Press to failure on each arm
Cable or Banded Face Pulls – 3 sets of 15
Perform these with a mindset of 15 sets of 1 to ensure highest quality of every rep.
When you put this together in the format as I’m suggesting here, you not only now hit the shoulders through their full range of motion but you hit every area of the shoulders as well. The drop down allows for the lesser intense exercise to be more taxing since it was just preceded by a more difficult compound lift.
This is just one example of how to apply science to your shoulder workouts. If you want to train like an athlete you want to put science back in every workout you do. You can do that with the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs available at the link below and get started right away on building a ripped, muscular, athletic body.
For more shoulder workout videos for the front deltoids, middle delts and rear delts, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at and don’t forget to turn on notifications so you never miss one.
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25 comments
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I bet Jeff breaks out his markers when he's drunk a sloppily draws on people while telling them how there losing gains
Jeff = 110% muscles, Raymond = 100% bone mass
How often would this workout should be done?
i have a question- since i divide my workout into push pull, and my shoulder workout is in the push day- does the face pull belong in that day? or does it fit better into a pull day when i work my back and biceps?
i got a huge shoulder pump just watching that
How much reps of what weight would I do, I’ve got a bad shoulder and lat on my left side and was wondering what I would do, I’m 6’0 and weight 66 but I’m skinny
What’s the rest times ?
you speak alot then shows action
yeah these videos are all nice theory based and explained excercises, but as a beginner what i am missing is a step by step instruction to make sure my form is correctly. it gets frustrating watching 20 minutes of video all the time and still dont knowing what to do.
I know you're bigger than I am, but did you have to call my arms humerus?
Tried this today and its awesome…..a good break from the regular barbell shoulder workouts. Thanks Jeff. From Nairobi, Kenya.
How old is Jeff
Good way to call it Perfect Shoulder Workout
This is amzing thank you for all your videos
Jeff needs to tattoo these marker lines so he doesn't have to do it ever again
I START with a big THANK YOU! You are my recovering blessing! I start to recover after a bear attack and these are "The PERFECT Shoulder Workout" for my missing deltoids! 🙂
and of course, thank you for all of your tips and videos!!!
Francisc, ROMANIA
We need to talk about the Panterior Bi-sosceles quadri-string shrug exercise. Pretty important.
i dont have a cable at home fuck go next video
I got a question. For the delt stretch he says to go from the weakest to the strongest but isn’t the front delt the weakest, then mid delt and rear delt being the strongest?
Thankyou
Great job very intense and thorough like all your teaching. Many thanks.
I’ve had shoulder surgery and I’m looking to strengthen my shoulder
And people look at me like I am crazy when I asked for the muscle markers in the store
DUDE, LESS FLAPPING YOUR LIPS AND MORE WORKING OUT