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What would you guys say in terms of like body parts of the body, right? What would you say is probably the most universally seeked out body part in terms of focus of development? Like, you know, we could say both guys and girls. Yeah. So just across the board, what is the body part that universally contributes the most to aesthetics to both men and women and and is most commonly searched for by everybody? So I don't know if it's the most commonly searched for but unisex muscle. The stupid dude. It was made of mine. I don't know if it's the most searched, but I do think that so I almost always both male and female when I when I'm coaching like competitors and, you know, a lot of times obviously I use the protocol from maps aesthetic, which has like focus sessions and the ideas that between shows. We pick one or two muscle groups that we're going to build and develop and as we then present it on stage and then get judged. Always one of the muscles that I always focus on both male or female is shoulders. Now, I don't know if that is something that is the most widely searched or what people think are one of the most important muscles for them to develop for aesthetics. Well, you know what, based on our guides. So we have, you know, for people who don't know, we have a lot of free guides that we offer on training different body parts on alleviating pain, fat loss, muscle gain, just as a way to provide more information for people. They're very valuable. And the one that is downloaded the most by both men and women, because we can look, we have a build your butt guide, right? More women download that by far than men. Build your arms guide. More men download that. Yeah, I was going to say arms, but yeah, I could see shoulders taking that for sure. Shoulders is by men and women and it makes sense because I'm going to go back to what you're saying, Adam, and let me know if this is, you know, because I never was in the competing world, although I did admire the competing space. But men develop shoulders, gives them the V taper, looks masculine. Women are attracted to it. Women, when they develop shoulders, it's what makes the arms look good. A lot of women think it's the biceps and triceps that make it, the arm looks sculpted for the shoulders. Shoulder separates those. Yes, makes a huge difference. No, I, so I've told the story on here before, when I had a female competitor, when I was in my early 20s, she worked for me and she was like, I don't know, good 10, 15 years older than I am and incredible physique. She competed and I asked her to take a look at my physique and critique it and like she'd like just. She's honest. Oh yeah, she was too honest. I think, you know, I think I was looking for, I think it was actually be searching for compliments actually at that time. Like, tell me, tell me what you think about my physique. There's actually nothing you can do differently. Here, I'm going to take my shirt off. Look at my body real quick. Tell me what you think. Yeah, so I think I was like, I will. I think I was searching for compliments because I had been on like a kick for a while and I think I was being consistent and felt good about my physique and she just totally fucking just let the air out. Well, she just, she said that my shoulders were terrible. She said that. Those are words. Yeah, right. Oh wow. Yeah, yeah. So she said, well, she said it in her real thick German accent too. It was funny. And even worse. Yeah. Your shoulders are terrible. Yeah, it was just, yeah, just like that. And she said specifically in my rear delts, she says, you know, you have, you have great arms. So your biceps and triceps, you can tell that you train a lot and you've developed them, but they're overdeveloped in comparison to your delts. And so then it gives you this like sloping arm look and then your physique would be far more impressive if you have shoulders. Now, the truth is, the way my training looked back then, this is what I was guilty of. I didn't put a lot of focus on shoulders. I figured I do a lot of, you know, rows and back stuff and I do a lot of pressing things like chest exercises. So anterior delts, rear delts are getting worked in both those movements. And so every once in a while I threw in lateral raises, you know, like, oh, okay, make sure I throw some lateral raises. But that was the main focus for my shoulders. The rest I figured they are getting work every time I do chest, I'm getting work every time I do a back. So I just didn't focus on them. It was after that comment, I was like, man, okay, well, I've never really tried to program with the intent of building my shoulders and I began to do it. And it completely changed the way my physique looked. Yeah, the irony of this is that as a competitor, your shoulders were probably one of your strongest, not your strongest body part, I would say. Yeah, and that was, and it all stemmed all the way back to this because once I went on this kick of, okay, shoulders need to become a priority. And I began to work on them. And it took a long time. It didn't happen overnight. It wasn't like she said that to me I changed a couple things in my routine and then boom, all of a sudden I had impressive shoulders. It was years of working and training and focusing on that. But I started to notice such a massive difference. And I also realized that I lost a couple inches, maybe a couple inches, more like an inch, right? I lost on the size of my circumference of my arm. But yet I was getting all these arm compliments. Oh my God, your arms look so impressive. And I remember thinking like that's so crazy because measurement-wise, I've lost size because I wasn't putting as much time and energy on building my buys and tries because that's what she told me. They were overdeveloped. My shoulders were underdeveloped. And yet I'm getting more arm compliments that I ever had. So yeah, that set me on this trajectory of really focusing on shoulders as a focal point of my training. And to this day, when I take on a competitor and I'm helping them for competing always, male or female, there's always room I feel like for improving on shoulders. And there's anomalies, right? There's a few people out there that I look at and go, oh man, those shoulders are crazy. But most people neglect either the shoulder in general or in most cases, I feel, the rear delts. I think the rear delts are overlooked. Well, I honestly feel and I get where we're going in terms of muscle development and the aesthetic of it and everything. But I look at the shoulder as being just as crucial as the glutes in terms of function and athleticism and power. And there's so many different aspects to the shoulder to consider. And it needs a lot of attention that people aren't giving the shoulder. And in turn, that actually helps to then build a more symmetrical, a more filled out shoulder that you'd be more happy with. Well, that's a great point, Justin. I think I started on the aesthetic path first. And then I think as I became more educated, more experienced, I learned just how important it was to have healthy shoulders in general. I mean, when you look at the joint of the shoulder and we see more issues stemming from either the hips or the shoulders than any other place as a trainer. So when people complain of neck pain and shoulder pain and upper back pain, much of that is all related to what's going on with the shoulder, right? The capsule and how it moves and what kind of range of motion that you have or lack of in your shoulder and so like the hips. So as I started to realize how important it was to keep my shoulders mobile, then I started to focus even more on them. So yeah, yeah, I mean, the more complex the joint is, the more challenging it could be for the average person to develop, right? Because when you look at the shoulder joint, it's it's probably of the major joints, I would say it's the most complex, right? You have the humorous, the top of the arm that moves around. You have the scapula. OK, so this is part of the shoulder girdle. That's why they refer to the shoulder girdle. There's so many moving parts. Then you have the scapula that can rotate up or down or retract or protract. You have the clavicle that adds some stability. So it's a pretty complex joint. Part of the reason why it's complex, by the way, is that humans evolved doing something very, very well. It's actually a very important part of our evolution that made us apex predators, predators, excuse me, is it allows us to throw things with tremendous force and accuracy. So if you look at the shoulder joint, very complex, if you don't understand this, or if you don't balance out the shoulder in terms of its function, and then you go work out, you're not going to have developed shoulder muscles. You're not going to be able to train and develop your shoulders properly because they're just not moving properly. So one of the more important aspects of shoulder development that people overlook, because when you look at your typical muscle building routine, they don't include this component, is mobility, priming, stability, in all these different ways that the shoulder works. If you don't have that, then you can do all the overhead presses you want, all the laterals that you want. You're not going to be able to develop good shoulders. In fact, what you'll end up doing is developing upper traps. You might develop your arms a little bit more. Yeah, greater imbalances. But you might, but you're going to end up with shoulders that don't really stand out, or you may think to yourself, man, my shoulders are a stubborn body part. This is a body part that is just a hard gainer when it comes to my shoulders. And the people I've worked with who said that to me about their shoulders, nine out of 10 times, it didn't have anything to do with the fact that their shoulders didn't develop as fast as their biceps and triceps, had everything to do with the fact that they just didn't have great movement patterns in their shoulders. So this is an important thing to really pay attention to. And it needs to be a well rounded approach. So you can keep your posture in good upright position. And that's one of those things like if you're presenting your body just in everyday activities, you're walking around, like people notice how good your posture is. And that in turn, it builds up your own confidence. And one of those factors is like, are you training to promote better posture? Are you training to put yourself in balance, in an imbalanced position? Yeah. Now, as a kid, for me, when I first started working out, a skinny kid really wanted to build muscle. And I got a couple bad, not a couple, quite a few bad comments on my shoulders as a kid. So like you, Adam, I was motivated by negative feedback, right? Now, I have naturally narrow bone structure. So I'm not a wide person, plus I was skinny. And so people would say, you know, you know, how kids are, right? You look like a coat hanger or you're really narrow. And so I'm like, I'm going to develop my shoulders. Luckily for me, I was really, I really valued educating myself on how to train properly. So I had Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia Bodybuilding, which lists every free weight exercise you can think of for every body part. And so the shoulder section in there was huge. I also read books by Vince Garanda. And I read other old publications. And I also looked at athletes who I thought had a great shoulder development. So I looked at boxers. If you notice, boxers always have really nice looking balanced shoulders. Makes sense. They're always throwing punches. Gymnasts tend to have really well-developed shoulders. So at a young age, luckily, I train my shoulders through stability and balance without even knowing what those things meant. And I did a wide variety of exercises, which resulted in, for me, also, my delts tend to be one of my stronger body parts. But it really has to do with the fact that when you talk about training and training different angles and using exercises that train joints through different ranges of motion with different types of tension, it's probably more important for the shoulders than it is for almost any of the muscle, because there's such a complex joint. Now here's the thing. There are some great exercises that people do a lot of, standing overhead presses. Dumbbell overhead presses. Military presses. Military, standing, or side laterals and stuff like that. Yeah, those are great exercises. But there's a lot of forgotten exercises and movement. And I say forgotten because they were popular at one time or other athletes did them a lot, or we just haven't really seen them be very popular nowadays and maybe at one point people did them. They're forgotten, but they shouldn't be because they have tremendous value for anybody. And I utilized a lot of the exercises that we're going to talk about today to develop my shoulders and I found them to be very, very valuable. In fact, you'll get more out of your standard military press, dumbbell presses, if you incorporate some of these forgotten movements and get your shoulders to function and move optimally. Then when you do a military press, all of a sudden your shoulders really respond well. Well, we listed off the 10 forgotten or the 10 best forgotten exercises for your shoulders. I think there's also an order of operation. So I do think that the first thing that I want to focus on is mobility. Is the ability to be able to first move your shoulders through its full range of motion. If you're going to maximize the potential of them, and then also for healthy joints like Justin always alludes to, it's important that we prime and we mobilize first. Yes. Now, what priming does is priming essentially encourages better movement patterns and turns on, for lack of a better term, because I know there's trainers and experts who say, oh, muscles aren't turned on or off. OK, I'm using the term turned on or off. But what I'm referring to is the fact that you can feel them more and you're more connected to better movement. That's what priming does. So if you prime properly, you are mentally more connected to the shoulder muscles, to the function of the shoulders. And this studies will show that this priming lasts for about an hour. So when you prime properly, then you get into your workout. What you're essentially doing is unlocking more benefits from all the exercises you're about to do. So if your overhead shoulder press is worth 10 points, proper priming is going to ensure that you get all 10 points, not priming properly and having poor movement patterns might mean that you get six points out of an exercise that could potentially give you 10. And priming doesn't take a long time. You're talking about 10 minutes before your workout to squeeze out 10 more percent out of your workout, which adds up. Adds up big time over time. Yeah, I was just trying to think of an analogy for that. But I was just thinking if you're if you're putting together like, you know, a race or something in your head of time, you're putting all the signs out and like directing where you're going to go. Like priming, for instance, is ahead of time, we're just directing where all this recruitment is going to go. And we're doing this in a way that's more efficient. So that way when you're going into your workouts, you're you're properly stabilized, you're in good position and you're really lighting up and, you know, getting everything to move accordingly. So here's an example of that. So if you've ever practiced balancing on something, maybe back when you were a kid or maybe now with your kids and you're walking on something and you're trying to balance, you'll notice the second time around you have better balance, right? So you practice once, fall off, try it again, second or third time, all of a sudden you have better balance. What's happening is your central nervous system, you're priming it by attempting to do something and the central nervous system now is communicating a little bit more effectively to your muscles. I remember years ago, there was this fad product that was around and there were some professional athletes that actually would promote this product and it was like a bracelet or a necklace and it had some special, you know, The magic magnet. Yeah, it was like some magnet or it was like some plastic that had these properties and what you do is you put on this bracelet and all of a sudden you had better performance and I remember they sell these at the mall and I walked by a kiosk and there was this dude who was selling these bracelets and he was proving how effective this bracelet was and this is what he did. You go up to him and I remember seeing this and I'm like, I'm gonna go have fun with this guy. So he says, okay, stand on your right foot and balance, hold out your left arm and I'm gonna push down on your left arm and so I did and I fell over. He said, now put this bracelet on and try it again and of course my balance is better when I had the bracelet on and now the average person is like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna buy this bracelet. This thing is magic. I understood the central nervous. I'm like, well, yeah, I'm gonna be better the second time around no matter what because the first time tells my CNS what's gonna happen. Right, now take the bracelet off and let me do a third time. That's right. So that's what, until you fatigue, right? That's what priming does. So priming sets you up to get a better workout and it's important for all your muscle groups really important for a complex joint like the shoulder. Well, I have a way, maybe a simple, even simpler way to explain to clients is like the shoulder is floating, right? Essentially. And so you have all these muscles that are around it that are supporting it and we, before we go do a shoulder press a lot of rise any movement we ideally want it to be floating like evenly in the center and what ends up happening if you have these muscles that are dormant that are responsible for helping keeping it neutral like that it leans to the front more or it leans to the back more or it leans to the side more and then it catches and it feels where you hear clicking noises or you hear pain. This is what happens when all those supporting muscles are not woke up. So the very first thing and this is why I love the handcuff with a rotation is like the ultimate priming movement for the shoulder because that entire exercise takes the shoulder through its fullest range of motion both internally and externally rotated and that wakes everything up before I go into any movement I want all those supporting muscles to be awake and keeping that shoulder nice and neutral and balanced. Yes, so when you do handcuff with rotation as the first rep you're doing it through and you're going through slow and connecting it'll feel at some points tight you might feel like you get a little stuck ooh that doesn't, I don't know how that feels you're moving through by the second, third, fourth rep you're now everything's moving the way it's supposed to now the shoulder's functioning more optimally because the CNS is firing things a little better by the third, fourth, fifth rep things feel a lot better and more connected so this is a great way to start your shoulder workout start with handcuffs with rotation and this is unloaded and this kind of leads into the next area where I'm very passionate about and I just want to bring it up because I know I see this in the gym all the time I don't see many people adding in types of especially loaded rotational moves it's and it's hard to come up with because it's not very, you know top of mind for a lot of people and it's not in a lot of programming but now we take that same concept that you guys are talking about with handcuffs of rotation but that's unloaded now we want to apply a reasonable amount of weight to also actually work those muscles work those rotator muscles and muscles, yeah it's like bubbles it's like muscles yeah and so we're working those now to add strength and have that be active also when you're going into your overhead presses so it's a lot of times it's too similar to like sleepy butt syndrome as we call it right so a lot of times you're going through squats you don't feel it in your glutes as much your quad dominant you may be a little bit dominant let's say in your anterior delts where if I'm pressing that's all I'm feeling it but if I now apply movements like in Indian clubs I call it the heart swing so it takes your arm and your shoulder through the entire rotational movements that your shoulder is capable of but now it's loaded so if I'm going through that process I'm more likely to feel those muscles contribute in my standard overhead press yeah Indian clubs were very popular among Indian wrestlers who at one point were quite dominant in the world and wrestlers require they need incredible mobility I mean in the truest sense right not just flexibility but strength in wide ranges of motion especially in the hips and the shoulders if you ever watch a wrestling match you see some of the positions that they get in and they used Indian clubs quite a bit along with may spells which is another movement that kind of works that area and it's great exactly for what you said loads kind of that full range of motion and I think too to make it because I know these are both things that are unconventional and you don't have a lot of access to this in your gym so if you do have kettlebells another good exercise for this is a kettlebell halo and that just rotates it behind your head and you express all those different rotational movements through that also with a dumbbell so there's options for that but it's definitely one I wouldn't skip over well what I love about this too is that if you've done your due diligence and you've done a lot of priming and you've done a lot of work on keeping your shoulders mobile a lot of times you can skip handcuff with rotation and go right into Indian clubs may spells or like halos which is how I typically warm my shoulders up now so I put a lot of work in with mobility to make sure that I can express my shoulder and its full range of motion and the ability to rotate it like Justin's talking about so now I can just go grab some light Indian clubs or mace ball and kind of swing it and kind of wake it all up together but if you're somebody who has limited range of motion or has shoulder issues you definitely want to start with something unloaded right just your body and do that intrinsically first get good at that to kind of wake everything up and then you load it with something like Indian clubs mace or the halo right now the next movement which would be I think it makes sense to kind of do it after you would do your handcuffs with rotation or your halo for example is an overhead carry an overhead carry literally just like it sounds you would take a pair of dumbbells or kettle bells press them straight up out for your head straighten your arms stay tight walk for maybe 50 yards or 25 yards but stay tight and controlled embrace your core now what this is doing is it's really stabilizing your shoulder joint it's turning everything on you're not supposed to use a ridiculous amount of weight you want to use some weight that's challenging but really the idea is to brace and express your strength in that fully extended position this turns things on like nothing else I didn't do these as part of a routine until I met Justin this alone I probably added about 10 pounds to my overhead presses just because when I lifted after I did overhead carries just pressing a barbell overhead I just felt more stable you know it felt like I could just I could push harder because things were more like more acclimated to having weight over your head and you know how to navigate with that and be able to brace and your body responds once you start doing that when you go back to overhead presses you're just stronger in that lockout position one thing I like to add to this is they call it sort of shoulder packing and I know that there's different ideas about this about letting your shoulder elevate up as you bring your arm up versus just packing your shoulder and creating an anchor with your shoulder blade I prefer the anchoring so that way when we're pressing to it you have your shoulder nicely secure and stabilized while you're locking your arm all the way over your head I also love this as an opportunity to address other cues of the rest of the body so when someone's doing a continuous movement like a shoulder press it's really hard to get them to focus on other parts of their body while they're also pressing at the same time they're focused so much on just getting the weight over their head that they're thinking about their arms their shoulders their upper body where there is a big part of like standing overhead pressing that is also related to like your core and your hips that people neglect and also see a lot of issues with like low back because what you see is you see a press over the head the natural tendencies for a lot of people is to get like a rib cage flare so the rib cage will flare out and the low back will arch it's like they're leaning back almost exactly and it's very natural for that to happen if you just tell someone to press over their head where if I have them put dumbbells or kettle bells above their head they're in that shoulder pack position they're stabilizing there now I can cue below I can say, okay, activate your core so tighten your abs up tuck the, let the ribs come down don't let them flare out to where you're arching activate your glutes, squeeze your butt so just like if we do like on a glute bridge I want you to squeeze your butt so you don't have this excessive arching low back now walk forward so that's I love to do teach a client this and I'll get them holy and I'll start lighter, right? I know I could probably challenge them with a heavier weight because I'm looking at all these cues I don't want it to be so hard it's hard for them to hold over their head for a while so I'll do light dumbbells or kettle bells get them in that complete full extension over their head make sure their arms are lined up with their ears so they're completely extended then I'll look down at their ribs make sure their ribs are tucked in the core is tight, abs are tight and then squeeze your glutes and then start to walk you're emphasizing adding intensity to the stabilizing muscles and that's really the focus so that way they do what they're supposed to do once you're doing the gross motor movement right, now the first exercise that I think some people do but it's definitely not common has a tremendous amount of value for shoulder development is a kettle bell bottoms up press so typically with a kettle bell when you press a kettle bell overhead what you'll see most of the time is the kettle bell is resting on the forearm and the handle is on the top so they press up with the kettle bell in that position at bottoms up press literally is upside down you take the kettle bell you flip it so that the handle is at the bottom and the weight is at the top now you think what's the difference it's the same amount of weight huge difference in order to press with the weight at the top I have to really balance my arm and my hand underneath the weight of the kettle bell if I move it too far forward or back the weight is gonna flop forward or flop back I have to balance it also slows me down a lot bottoms up press is not fast it's very slow and very, very controlled it also requires a very full tight grip now one problem a lot of people make when they press is their grip gets loose like they're resting the barbell or the dumbbell in the palm of their hand tightening your grip turns on the central nervous system even more the CNS the central nervous system is more powerful the more you turn it on in your whole body in fact if you were to exert yourself right now if you were just to squeeze your hand as hard as you possibly could with every bit of strength you would naturally tense up your entire body including your face that's because when you turn on the whole body the CNS turns on more for every part of your body rather than just turning on for one part of my body so you're squeezing the handle you have to balance your elbow and your hand underneath it and it slows the rep down it's like you can't do a bottoms up press without really good control perfect form yeah and to make a nice tight fist is something that is so protective it's so supportive on the wrist elbows the shoulder if you can emulate that too in your barbell lifts as much as possible making that nice tight wrist but not having that break when you're doing other exercises as well that's gonna be massively beneficial so this is one of those types of exercises that really has a lot of carryover and a lot of other exercises so I told you originally that I was focused heavily on the aesthetics and then it was later on like the control and the movement of the shoulder and mobility and all that came to play and once that came into play for me was when I actually got to express like power movements and to see how that and what that did for my shoulders oh boy yeah and this was another pivotal moment in my shoulder training journey was starting to incorporate power exercises because I didn't identify with power lifters or Olympic lifters I neglected a lot of these exercises I trained much like a bodybuilder a lot of hypertrophy, pumping type of exercises super sets I didn't spend a lot of time doing explosive type stuff especially for my shoulders and I remember when I started to introduce these next two exercises into my routine my shoulders blew up and so that first one is the high pulls it's something that I never practiced before something I never did in my routine but couldn't believe especially how much my lateral delt and rear delt blew up doing these movements it blew me away yeah and you know what's funny is the old time lifters they did almost all their shoulder exercises exclusively I wouldn't want to say all but almost all were exclusively power it was about explosive movements pushing things up overhead bringing things up off the ground well they had to bring everything off the ground first they didn't have racks they didn't have racks so anything that went overhead they had to start on the ground and so they needed these elements like this type of a clean movement or a high pull for instance for here just to get it up into the rack position to press yes there's two ways to turn on to really activate what are called the fast twitch muscle fibers now I'm going to simplify because it's a little bit more complex than this but generally speaking there are two general categories of muscle fibers in the body you have your slow twitch and your fast twitch the fast twitch ones are the ones that build they're the ones that add size the slow twitch ones they are good for endurance they become more efficient and they don't add a lot of size because bigger muscle fibers use more energy and if you want lots of endurance you don't want to you want to become more efficient with energy less efficient this is why long distance runners have skinny legs with very little muscle versus sprinters who have big muscular legs so it's the fast twitch muscle fibers that grow there's two ways to really activate fast twitch muscle fibers one is through heavy weight where you're maximally exerting yourself whether it's for three reps or 10 reps you'll turn on more fast twitch muscle fibers the other way is speed power like you're if you're throwing a baseball a baseball weighs I don't know how much it weighs but it's definitely less than a pound but if you're throwing a baseball as fast as you can you are turning on as many fast twitch muscle fibers as if you're doing a heavy bench press for example speed does this as well power movements turn on fast twitch muscle fibers and it's really effective getting fast twitch muscle fibers that might not be getting super activated a high pull definitely does this it requires explosive movement you're not using a super heavy weight in fact the weight should be low to moderate the idea is speed and explosivity it turns those muscle fibers on for the shoulders and if you do do this exercise you have to have good control of course good form do this at the beginning of the workout you don't want to have you don't want to do a power movement at the end when you're super fatigued or super pumped you want to do it when you've got good energy well on the benefit too with power movements like that where it really stretches your capacity now to generate even more force from your central nervous system and that's beneficial going back into like a strength phase where now I can start in a bottom position but now I can recruit an even more amount of muscle fibers so I feel stronger I feel more powerful to get more weight up and it just sort of bleeds all the way into that yeah now the next one very similar is a hang clean to a press so hang clean literally is this you imagine standing with the barbell with your hands holding the barbell but it's down past your hips so it's like you finish the dead left or whatever you're just holding a barbell a clean is bringing the barbell up to your shoulders and then the press part is pushing it overhead there is a technique to this so it's not just a slow reverse curl up to the shoulders in a press there is speed involved in that cleaning part and then you do an explosive press back in the day this is how people shoulder pressed in fact if you didn't clean the weight it wasn't considered a full rep it wasn't until later that people ended stopped the clean aspect and just did the press this is unfortunate because although it is technical and requires a little bit more skill the clean part works the shoulders just like the press part does so hang clean to press for power this is an excellent exercise for developing the shoulder well there's pull rotation and then press in there that's why I mean that's it's one of those movements that kind of incorporates a lot of what the shoulder can do and expresses it all in one movement and you're doing it in a power way explosive so that was a massive one for me I love that the next one is the z-press the z-press wasn't something I found until way later in fact I'm trying to remember I think it was when Justin and I started hanging out again I think it was yeah I think he came to my gym and we started doing it there together yeah I know there were so many of the guys that you were working with it's funny too because when you look at a z-press you think what's the difference yeah you know you do think it's silly and I wish I would have found it earlier in my career because it became a staple move that I used on clients going forward because I realized that in order to do a z-press properly it forces those things that I talked about earlier about like the rib cage flare and keeping your glutes tucked and then good core stability and then also being able to fully extend over your head so when I think of all the things where clients cheat a wrap or they struggle with the movement when it comes to a shoulder press I think of the arching of the low back I think of the rib flare I think of the lack of full range of motion and locking out it hits all three of those really really well you can't do a z-press and not go full range of motion the only way you stay balanced is to fully extend it over your head so then you've got the stability portion and the full extension portion there the only way that you're gonna stay standing up or seated upright is also if you have great trunk and core stability too so I love this move it really does require you to you know what lifters will say put your head through the window right when you press a barbell up as it passes your head you gotta bring the head through and really get your arms up next to your head this will work your shoulders like nothing else the irony of a z-press is it's I in my opinion it should be the bodybuilder press this is what bodybuilder should do more of because it forces you to squeeze your shoulders how often do you feel a shoulder squeeze at the top of a military press and the reason why you don't is because you're not getting that full extension and you're not really straight with your body the z-press forces that you're literally forced to have that kind of an overhead press and you actually get a squeeze in the shoulders at the top of a press and you get this crazy pump yeah it's one of my favorites for addressing all those stability points that you mentioned I mean if you did a bottoms up press and you're focused on that for just your rest and then basically the z-press covers everything else and it's so beneficial as a teaching tool but also just to sort of reassess what's going right and what's going wrong in your own overhead press yes now the next one this one was popular in the 70s and 80s in fact if you know again I used to love reading training publications and I would even go to there was this comic book store that I used to go to that sold old magazines and old comic books and rarely did they have old muscle building magazines but when they did I mean every dollar of my allowance was spent on that and I remember seeing shoulder presses in bodybuilding and muscle building magazines from the 80s and oftentimes say I have the time they showed shoulder presses they were alternating shoulder presses to me this was weird because in the 90s in the magazines that I was reading that were current shoulder presses with dumbbells both shoulders both dumbbells excuse me went up at the same time so it's both at the same time but when I'd see these ones in the 80s you'd see bodybuilders and people teaching alternating where one is being held at the bottom staying tight and the other one is pressing all the way up and then coming back down and then alternating to the other hand or they would alternate at the top or one would stay at the top one would come down come up and then you'd switch and I thought to myself what's the difference you're pressing them or you're not pressing them it doesn't make a big difference then I tried them out makes a huge difference the arm that's staying at the bottom is required to stabilize you're doing an isometric tension movement on the shoulder either at the bottom or the top the other arm is moving and then you switch arms and now you're doing an isometric movement on the other arm the pump and the burn I get from this is tremendous in fact even today I'd say 30% of the time I'll do alternating shoulder presses I can't use as much weight as I do when I don't do them alternating which shows me that it's definitely harder it's definitely a more difficult type of shoulder press it helps to eliminate a bit of body English in momentum based lifting I think it's a good tool especially for those points you mentioned with creating more tension but really it's the control aspect so can I control one side of my body while the other one's doing the work and then do that in a very controlled efficient way or is the weight having control over me and so it's sort of one of those things that it's a great tool but also it creates a great strength and hypertrophy pump out of it as well now do you guys prefer to teach this seated or standing I'd like to do them standing but seated is great also yeah I like to teach seated because you're alternating back and forth you're focused on the there's a lot of things to think about yeah there's a lot of things to think about and then that just kind of takes the bottom portion up because this is probably one of the and you're gonna hear me keep talking about this because I think with most clients that struggle with the overhead press especially when you talk about extending it all the way up most of them lack that shoulder mobility and then the rest of the body starts to break down below and that's what I don't like so if you do some of these exercises keep that in mind that's why things like the Z-Press I think are so important is because there's so much breakdown below that people don't pay attention to because you're thinking in the shoulders everyone's watching the shoulder heels raise as they're pressing it up and yeah things like that to look out for yeah, you do make a very good case for that and now that I think back it is now that I'm thinking about I did take a lot of clients from standing to see it so I watched their forum be like why don't we do this sitting down? Yeah, I love standing that's how I do it it's more functional if you're an advanced lifter and you're listening to all these tips like by all means go for it standing but if I'm teaching this and I'm teaching these principles yeah, I like people sitting down at first so I can teach them the mechanics and what we're trying to accomplish once they understand how to tighten their core light up their glutes while they're also pressing and they can do those things together then it's okay and then I like things like the circus press I know Doug highlighted that up on the notes it's like, you know, similar it's not an alternating press because you're not holding one dumbbell on the opposite side but it is a one-arm press yeah, you know, circus press might fall in a category closer to being like the hang-clean to press like that it incorporates that internal rotation and you also get the external rotation and then you get the pressing you get a whole lot going on yeah, right I love that movement too so that belongs somewhere in here whether you do it in alternating if you're doing unilateral work or if you're doing it up somewhere like where the hang-clean press that belongs in there too now the next one, you know I can see why all these exercises or a lot of these exercises are forgotten like a Z-Press you sit on the floor it looks kind of funny you know, power movements require a lot of skill and people who think they just want to sculpt their body sometimes think power is something that's important you know, a bottoms-up press is counter-intuitive if you press the kettlebell why the hell would I press it? you know, upside down Indian clubs and you know, not that popular I can get why a lot of these are forgotten it's definitely not because they're not effective but it's because they look different from traditional exercises but the next one I do not understand it baffles me why this movement is not more popular and it's the inclined lateral raise lateral raises in general are very popular, right? It's one of the most common shoulder exercises that you see done in gyms everywhere it works the side of the shoulder which gives you that nice width that can give you a great pump typically it's done standing or seated but one of the drawbacks I would say of the lateral raise is the fact that the tension is typically due to gravity so at the top of the lateral raise is where you're gonna have the most tension because that's where I'm fighting gravity the most at the bottom there's not much like to swing a dumbbell from the bottom up a little bit it doesn't take that much strength it requires more strength as I come up to the top not a bad thing, again lateral raises are phenomenal but what if we took a lateral raise and rather than making the top of the movement the hardest part make it more at the bottom where you're kind of stretching the side of the shoulder that's what an inclined lateral raise does I didn't learn about these early on because of course Arnold Schwarzenegger was somebody I looked up to and again I read his book and then there was another body builder by the name of Serge Nubray this was a, I believe he was a French body builder till this day, I mean he passed away I think a couple of years ago he competed in the 60s and 70s till this day he's considered one of the most aesthetic body builders of all time he had this incredible physique very, very balanced round looking muscles and he loved doing inclined lateral raises so I tried them out myself and essentially you land on an inclined bench on your side you do your lateral raise now the bottom part of the lateral raise is difficult and let me tell you if you always do lateral raises standing and you never do them on an inclined try them on an inclined watch what happens to the side of your shoulders it'll fry them and you'll get a pump like you've never had before I think that's the main reason why though, right? I mean wouldn't you agree it's just because it's not normal like you rarely ever see somebody doing that exercise and you're manipulating the strength curve and you have most people think of lateral raise and they just think of your basic standing lateral raise or a seated lateral raise machine and that's how you do it like maybe there's some debates on people bending their elbow or completely extended or how heavy they go but it's all pretty basic everybody does it nobody really manipulates the strength curve that much with especially with free weights because we do with cables, right? Cables are just, yeah, you pull these in cables right cables changes that which I think are also a great tool when doing laterals but to manipulate that with a dumbbell I think is very unique and it's also one arm at a time and this is really good when you're doing a kind of a sculpting isolation exercise like a lateral raise because it allows you to really cause here's the value of these kind of single joint sculpting exercises the value is connecting really connecting to a particular part of the muscle much harder to do with a compound movement and it's even, you can connect even more when you do one arm at a time so you do a one arm cause you can't do two arm inclined lateral raise, right? It's impossible you're laying on one side so it forces you to really focus on feeling the side of the shoulder very hard part of the shoulder to feel and in my opinion the inclined lateral raise one of the best ways to do it now the last exercise is a reverse fly done with either cables or bands probably one of the most underutilized exercises I can think about, you can tell by looking at people's shoulders they don't work the rear delts very much Well a lot of, I think a lot of that is because it's less that everybody doesn't exercise or work this muscle it's that it's a harder muscle to target and I think most people that do reverse flies or do rear delt movements tend to allow their back muscles to engage and do the work It's like a rear row or a shrug Yeah, so we did a good video Jordan shallow and I did a good video a few years back on our YouTube channel so you can look up on Mind Pump TV and we discussed this right and it's really kind of counterintuitive the way you do a reverse fly you actually want to promote the shoulders being rounded forward when you're flying you're not thinking about flying back you're thinking of flying out and you're keeping that forward shoulder position while you do that in order to really target the rear delts the moment you allow the back to retract and you fly back which by the way is natural so if you sat in a peck deck reverse and do a reverse fly if you're doing the cable machine you're doing that it is natural for you to use momentum and allow your upper or your lower traps your rhomboids to all kick in and squeeze they're bigger stronger more dominant muscles so they're going to want to take over the movement unless you know how to keep them out of the movement which most people just don't understand the biomechanics of that so first I think is understanding that so if you haven't watched that video that's important it's important to know how to do the movement properly then after that it's just purely incorporating it into your routine and you're right Sal it's probably one of the most neglected and I think it looks like it's the most neglected because even the people that are doing it aren't doing it properly and so you have a lot of people with underdeveloped rear delts yeah if you want really round shoulders it's really about the rear delts more than anything I mean when you look at someone from the side what gives the shoulder a round look is the rear delt even when you look at them from the front everybody thinks it's the side head of the deltoid and that does play a role but if you have no rear delt muscles or if you have rear delt muscles that are underdeveloped even with well-developed side delt muscles you'll still get a forward sloping shoulder look it's that rear delt that gives that really round bubbly look to the shoulders and like we talked about earlier in the episode it's what creates that illusion of definition throughout the whole arm so definitely do not neglect this part of your body now we went through a lot of exercises and movements there's ten of them here you may be wondering how do I incorporate these into my routine I'll tell you what, easy way to do this take three or four of the movements that we talked about today put them in your routine consistently for five to six weeks don't just throw them in once, try them out and then go back to your normal routine you're not going to see the benefits of them if you do it that way get good at them, pick three or four that's all three or four of all the ones we talked about and then put them in your shoulder routine regularly, every time you work out shoulders get good at them for the next five, six, seven, eight weeks and then watch what happens to the development of your shoulders and if you want more information and more detailed written information you can go to mindpumpfree.com there is a shoulder guide on there there's a guide on how to develop nice looking shoulders or massive shoulders I remember the wordage that was on there you can download it's totally free and it goes through other aspects of shoulder development in detail, in writing and again it costs absolutely nothing look, Mind Pump is recorded on videos as well as audio come find us on YouTube Mind Pump podcast you can also find all of us on Instagram including the producer, Doug you can find Doug at Mind Pump, Doug Justin at Mind Pump, Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump, Adam this is like my fourth cup you know, like, wow I mean, not Nitro but it's definitely number three for Nitro wow, what was the it's a heavy hand this morning what was the first one, just at home the brew, the drive over here don't count, dude okay, do you have a cup?