One of the foundations of a well rounded physique are big, round boulder shoulders. However, beside the aesthetically pleasing benefits, the way it indicates immense strength and masculinity, having strong shoulders is also extremely crucial for overall functionality.
If you are set on developing your shoulder area, you will immediately find that you can do your everyday tasks with a newfound ease, whether those tasks are playing sports or throwing heavy objects around at work, or even carrying your kids around the house!
But the question is – can you work out your shoulders at home ? The fortunate, short answer to that question is yes, yes you can.
At Home Shoulder Workout
Here we’ll have a look at three simple and yet effective shoulder exercises you can most definitely do in the comfort of your own home. When you see the excellent results, you might just want to continue doing this at-home shoulder workout even when you get back on the grind at your local gym.
First and foremost, you must begin with a warmup, as with any well rounded workout regimen. To warm up your shoulders you can begin by doing some regular push ups. While push ups mainly work out your chest and biceps, the shoulders are intricately involved as well.
The point of this isn’t to do push ups until you ultimately can’t do them anymore, but you just want to do enough to get some blood pumping, up your heart rate and get those shoulder muscles activated! And if you can, you could also go for a swift jog around your block, or even at the neighborhood park.
The entire point of any warm up in general is to get your body ready for the main workout.
At-Home Shoulder Workout – The Exercises
Pike Push Ups
We begin with explaining pike push ups. This exercise is mainly taught as a foundational calisthenics movement for those of us that are looking to learn how to do a free standing handstand or free standing handstand push ups. They are also an incredible exercise when it comes to developing your overall shoulder strength, not only for your shoulder area, but your entire upper body functional strength as well!
You might as well think of them as a kind of elevated push up.
As for how to do this exercise, here we have it detailed:
- You begin by going into the downward dog position, for those familiar with yoga. Basically you start in a plank position, then walk your hands and feet closer to each other in order to form an inverted V form. Then, while keeping the V form, you need to lower your nose to the ground and press back up. Now, we know this may confuse some of you, but there are many informational tutorials online that may help you to do this exercise.
- If you’re a beginner, the optimal amount of sets and reps you should do are 2 – 3 and 5 – 8 respectively.
- If you have the strength, you can do 4 sets of 10-12 reps.
- However if you don’t have the ideal shoulder mobility to do this exercise, you may consider picking up yoga to increase and improve overall shoulder mobility. Coincidentally, by practicing yoga you have another fantastic way to build shoulder and overall body strength from home!
Lateral Raises
Now, if all you do is push ups and pike push ups and yoga a couple of times a week, you will notice that increased shoulder strength and definition over the course of time. Although if you want to take this to the next proficient level, ESPECIALLY from the aesthetic point of view, you might want to add lateral raises to your workout plan.
Lateral raises work the entire side of the shoulders, so when you develop this muscle clearly, it really adds to the boulder shoulder look that we strive for here. But for the lateral raises you’ll need to invest some money in getting some dumbbells, though you can also easily get the job done with a backpack full of water bottles. However, spare yourself the added annoyance of doing that, and get yourself some dumbbells.
Now, as to how you do them, you might already be fairly acquainted with this exercise if you spent a bit of time at the gym.
- You start out by grabbing a pair of dumbbells and raise them laterally, as the name of the exercise suggests, though many people do them incorrectly. Some of them try and go too heavy on the weights, and in turn end up having to activate additional muscles besides the shoulders to do this exercise to compensate for the extra load.
- Now, for most people the ideal weight is around 5 to 20 pounds. You need to keep your shoulders down; your lats and your core engaged and think of extending your arms away laterally towards the sides of the room you’re in. So, rather than raising them up from your torso, you are raising them away from it.
- Do 4 sets of 12 reps.
Reverse Flye
Last but certainly not least, we have the reverse flye. This particular exercise is made to target your rear deltoids to ultimately round out your shoulders and give them and your entire upper body a well balanced aesthetic look.
So same as the lateral raises, you need to keep the weights low enough so you can focus on your form, and again, you should be focusing on extending your arms away from your body rather than raising them as high as you can possibly raise them.
- Do 4 sets of 10-12 reps
One last thing we have yet to mention is nutrition and dieting.
As you finish the exercises, you simply can not forget about nutrition. Yes, correct exercise stimulates the recovery process of the muscles, but when you add the support with the right nutrition, you will begin to see your muscles get bigger and stronger quicker!
We recommend consuming a whey protein shake as a post workout snack to support the optimal recovery of your muscles.
Although, if you’re on a plant based diet, you can easily switch out the whey protein shake with a vegan protein shake to make sure you get all of the nine essential amino acids that are needed for the best muscle recovery and muscle growth.
This home shoulder workout may not look like much, but be sure that it’s just enough to support your shoulder muscle mass if you don’t have an access to a gym.