3 MUST READ Tips To Get Boulder Shoulders
1. Lift Heavy and Focus on Strength Gains
Many athletes over-complicate their training. One of, if not the best time-tested and proven strategies is to simply lift heavy on the most important exercises and focus on making small incremental improvements each workout.
What this means is carefully tracking your workouts and focusing on improvement in each and every session.
Shoulders are a stubborn muscle group, especially for naturally skinny people (ectomorphs), so it’s necessary to emphasize progressive overload principles.
Take for instance the dumbbell shoulder press – one of the best mass building shoulder exercises used by athletes at every level.
If you performed the dumbbell shoulder press with 55 lbs for 7 reps in your last workout, push yourself to do 8 reps with the same weight the following workout, or move up to 60 lbs and do 7 reps again.
This simple principle forces the muscles to respond and grow bigger and stronger.
This may sound extremely basic, but too many people in the gym don’t follow this simple, effective principle. It’s the little things that make a huge difference, there are no secrets.
2. Train all three heads of the deltoid muscles
As we mentioned earlier, deltoids actually have three sections. Unfortunately, many people fail to realize this, which is why you rarely see a shoulder with the front, middle and rear portion fully developed.
Without adequate development in all three sections, it’s nearly impossible to form those powerful looking boulders.
The difference between the average guy who is fairly lean and muscular with some ab definitionand the ripped fitness model is all in the V-taper, and for many people, developing the anterior and posterior deltoid muscles is the missing link for achieving that sought-after shape.
The wider and thicker your shoulders are, the better your V-taper ratio will be.
3. .Mix up your exercises, rep ranges and rest times
As with any muscle group, changing up your workout routine can be a great way to unleash powerful gains.
When changing up your routine always try to perform the best shoulder workouts for maximum muscle gains.
Try to follow these three principles when planning your training regimen:
Vary the exercises used to target each section of the shoulders. Aim to have 4-5 solid exercises that work the anterior, main, and posterior deltoid, and change these up every so often.
Make sure to vary your repetition ranges. This means performing heavy sets with the maximum amount of overload on your delts some days, and performing high rep sets on other days.
Varying rest time between sets. One of the best ways to stimulate growth is a combination of heavy sets with short rest times.
