Muscle Fitness Muscle & Fitness UK - April 2018 | Page 83

SHOU L DE R S FOR SH A PE
at! And going hard creates a positive
stress stimulus to your entire system.
It’s this stress on the system that
makes your body rise to the challenge
of adapting for the next session. Makes
Warm-up and Activation:
sense right? But it also means perform-
Once you’ve warmed up (increased
ing them fatigued is not ideal, which is
heart rate, core temperature and
mobilisation), it’s important to activate why it’s best to do them before
the patterns of movement you are
isolation work.
going to need to reap maximum
When it comes to picking your
benefit from your session. When it
multi-joint exercises for developing
comes to shoulders and back you have shoulders the most common one
to be able to depress your scapular,
people choose is an over head press or
otherwise your upper traps will take
similar variant: barbell shoulder press,
over, switching off your rear delts and
push press for example. Makes sense
making your shoulder unstable. Try
when you think these presses will
this drill before your session. This can
target front and middle deltoids to
be done every day, even if you’re not
differing degrees (dependent on grip
training upper body.
and how far in front or behind your
Multi-joint
head the bar travels). But what these
When building any muscle group you’ll lifts don’t do much for is the rear delts.
likely have heard that it’s best to hit the To ensure these ‘oh so important’
components of the bikini body are not
compound lifts before you isolate a
neglected I like to make sure I start
muscle group. Also known as multi-
with them: I like to pick multi-joint
joint, these exercises work muscles
exercises that target REAR delts and
across more than one joint. These
upper lats to set me up for my session.
exercises are often described as ‘mass
builders’. They are lifts you can go hard Rows, rows and more rows. The key for
the chances of injury, but could be
the difference between taking your
physique to the next level or having
the posture of a caveman.
the bikini v-taper is a wide grip
because this puts more emphasis on
the upper lats vs the lower.
I’ve included a typical shoulder
workout you can try below. The
multi-joint lifts I’ve chosen mean all
three heads of the deltoids are worked
(front, middle and rear), but by starting
with the rows first you can make sure
you are not neglecting the areas you
can’t see so well in the mirror.
For the ultimate bikini body,
where possible we want to avoid
inadvertently overusing the upper
traps and biceps to perform these
lifts, because this will take the
emphasis off our target muscles: the
rear delts and upper lats. Here are
some tips to help achieve this when
executing your pulls:
a) Drop your ego: reduce the weight
until you can feel the target
muscles working. Remember,
practice doesn’t make perfect…
only PERFECT practice makes
perfect. Bad habits can follow
you for a long time and hinder
progress. Even worse, they can
result in injury.
APRIL 2018 / MUSCLE & FITNESS
81