In the latest of his workout videos on YouTube, trainer Eugene Teo demonstrates three exercises which you can incorporate into your next shoulder day session if you want to build your middle delts.
He starts with the cable crucifix raise. Stand facing the cable machine, with the cables crossed in front of the body in a low setup. “This is one position which is quite undertrained,” says Teo. “While we might access this range of motion in an overhead press, the weight isn’t actively pulling you forwards, so it’s not really challenging the mid-delt or stimulating it to grow.” In each of these exercises, he suggests 8 to 10 reps, or a rep range where you’re stopping just short of failure.
Once you start to fatigue and approach failure, Teo recommends a mechanical advantage drop set of kneeling cable raises: change your body position so you are now kneeling and facing away from the cable station. “We’ve already hit our failure points in the first position,” he says, “but by changing position, we put our shoulders into a range of motion where we no longer train them in their fully shortened overhead position, but more so in their lengthened to mid-range positions.”
When you begin to reach failure in the kneeling position, rise up and continue with standing cable raises to finish the workout. “It allows for a little extra momentum and assistance to be generated from other muscles… which at this point is fine as it’s helping us get a few more reps out in a safe and controlled manner,” Teo explains. “Most importantly, it’s manipulating how the cable provides tension to our shoulders.” The upper and lower ends of the movement are de-loaded here slightly, with maximum tension occurring in the middle, where the mid-delt is most capable of producing force.
“Rest as long as you need to, to feel like you’re able to give another honest effort,” he adds. “Probably around one and a half to two minutes… If you’re doing three rounds here, you’re technically doing nine sets. But this allows you to use less overall load whilst getting even more stimulus than you normally would.”
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