Shoulder padding (part 1 of 2)
The shoulder-joints are extremely flexible, as opposed to, for example, the hip-joints. The shoulders must be flexible because of all the movements we want to perform with our arms, but the downside is lack of stability. It's fairly easy to pop a shoulder-joint out of place, while the hips make up for the lost flexibility by being stable.
Because of the extreme flexibility of the shoulder, the only thing keeping the upper-arm bone, the Humerus, in place is some weak ligaments and plenty of small muscles, collectively known as the Rotator cuff. Those can be trained, which is good for avoiding future injuries, but this week I'm going to focus more on the outmost layer of muscle, the Deltoids. If you look in the mirror and see something shaped like a 12 oz. bottle over the shoulders, the Delts are your no.1 target for getting a good V-shape.
Now, the reason for all the babble about flexibility is that the Delts is one of the few muscles designed for such extreme variety of movement that it's even its own antagonist! If you turn your head and look down on your shoulder, it starts off almost like a horse shoe around the claviculae and spina scapulae, the edge pointing out almost an inch out from the scapulae and stretching out to the side where it attaches to the claviculae. Then the whole muscle goes down to one point on the outer-mid humerus bone, tuberositas deltoidea. Now, flexing the muscle from different areas of the horse shoe, you can see that different areas will cause the arm to be lifted upwards in different directions. This is a great statement of the obvious, isn't it? And it's a total given that if you want to make a specific part of the Delt to grow, you have to TRAIN that part, i.e. making sure that you flex that part of the horse shoe with a weight resistance on it?
Yeah, one would think so. So isn't it sad when big-name magazines go out and publish big-name bodybuilders claiming nonsense such as, and I'm quoting a specific athlete now: "Behind-the-neck press is an excellent all-round shoulder exercise, especially for the posterior Delts." (posterior=back)
Like always when we analyze an exercise, we must start by focusing on the specific movement of the joint. The shoulder joint, in this case, is all we care about. If the arms are straight or bent or whatever, that is not important right now - all we want to know is what exactly is going on at the joint with the muscle we intend to train? In this case, we need to know the criteria for posterior Delt-training. The movement we're looking for is a rowing-kind of motion, where the elbow is traveling backwards.
Latest Articles