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Hey there guys, Brian Kramer here for MuscleLibraryTV.com, helping to bring a muscle friendly lifestyle
to you. Today we'll be taking you back into the gym to show you a great pressing movement
for your shoulders. One that should become one of your primary exercises for putting
some serious mass onto your delts. What we're going to be doing is performing the shoulder
press with dumbbells today. Now there are three great things about using dumbbells for
this movement.
The first thing is that dumbbells recruit more muscle fibers in and around the shoulders
because you have to stabilize and balance each dumbbell individually, therefore providing
more stress on the intended muscles. Now the second thing is that dumbbells provide for
the greatest range of motion and then finally, you can do this exercise until you reach complete
failure safely. Because when you are fully fatigued, you can just lower the dumbbells
to drop down onto your thighs.
So just like most of the other exercises that we're going to show you, we're going to show
you how to perform this movement while keeping constant tension on your shoulder muscles
throughout the entire range of motion. This is going to allow us to achieve maximum stimulation
in your shoulders. So let's head on down to the gym guys, and pound some shoulders.
All right there guys, to begin this exercise, we position the back of the bench in a fully
upright position. From here we're going to bring the dumbbells up onto our thighs and
then forcefully kick them up into our bottom starting position. Here the dumbbells are
going to be just above our shoulders and next to our heads.
So next we want to make sure my feet our positioned in the nice wide stance, when I bring them
back down after the kick up. Now this is going to ensure that we have a nice, firm stable
base for our body. Then we're going to raise the dumbbells up to the top starting position,
take a breath, and get our body set physically and mentally to pound out some meaningful,
controlled reps.
Now let's examine the starting point and ending point for this movement. At the top part of
this movement, you can see that we never lockout the elbows. There's virtually no benefit to
our shoulder muscles or elbow joints for that matter if we do this. So we're not going to.
And at the bottom position of this movement we're only going to lower the dumbbells until
their about a height even with our ears. We don't need to bring the dumbbells any lower
than ear level because we not goint to gain any additional benefits by doing so.
Plus, by bringing them below ear level, this seems to take some fluidity out of the movement.
How I try to picture this movement in my mind is that my arms are like powerful hydrolic
pistons that lower and raise the weight in a constant powerful base straight up and down.
Now one thing to note is that you want to keep your arms flared out nice and wide throughout
the entire movement. Almost to the point that if you had your back up against the wall,
your elbows would be out wide enough that they would touch the wall as well.
So if you observe the path that the dumbbells follow, you can see that we have the inside
portion of the dumbbell positioned respectively over each shoulder, at the bottom part of
the movement as well as the top part of the movement. When you're using a seriously challenging
amount of weight, like you should be when you're trying to gain muscle mass, you just
want to press the weight up and down. What I mean by this, is that you don't want to
bring the dumbbells together over your head in an arching motion and allow them to touch.
You just want to bring them straight up and down.
Just as we spoke about earlier, this dumbbell shoulder press is going to be one of your
best mass building exercises to help you in your shoulder development. Now this movement
is going to hit more of the front and side delt portions of the shoulders. The shoulder
muscle is the muscle that has three distinct portions or heads that we call delts.
So let's take a look at the side view of the shoulder with our arm raised out to the side,
which will help us see the three heads more distinctively.
So what we are looking at right here are front, side and rear delts. Now your front, or anterior
delts are responsible for bring your arms out in front of your body. And then with your
side or media delts, they're going to help you when you need to bring your arms out to
the side of your body and lastly your rear or your posterior delts are going to assist
your arms when you are bringing them to the rear portion of your body.
So when you perform the dumbbell shoulder press, like we're showing you today we're
distributing most of the stress onto the front and side delts. So let's make a mental note
that the rear delt is getting very little work from this exercise compared to the other
two heads. And later on we're going to be showing you other supplemental exercises that's
going to really focus on the rear delts.
So then the next time you're in the gym, take note, that average person in the gym has virtually
no rear delts if you look closely. So keep in mind that we're going to be performing
additional shoulder exercises later on to help us sculpt a well-developed cannon ball
sized set of shoulders that others are going to become envious of.
So thanks for hanging out with us today. Feel free to drop by MuscleLibraryTV.com for more
information about living a Muscle Friendly Lifestyle.