Transform Your Shoulders: 6 Shoulder Day Exercises to Build Mass

Feeling stuck in a rut with your shoulder day workouts? You’re in luck, IFBB Pro Sadik Hadzovic and Dr. Michael Camp gave us VIP access to an epic shoulder day workout. They shared key pointers to maximize growth on some of their favorite shoulder exercises.

Sadik on the Importance of Variety in Shoulder Workouts

A big secret to bodybuilding workouts is varying your workouts. One week you may see us doing standing shoulder presses and then the next seated shoulder presses. Somedays we may isolate the muscles using machines. These are all different tools you can use, this way you keep your body guessing. Most importantly it keeps things fun so that you stay consistent and keep making progress. Another way we vary our workouts is by adding drop sets. Drop sets are a great way to train, especially when you’re strapped for time, or you want extra blood flow into that muscle.

Sadik had this to say about the workout: If you want cannon ball delts, rounded big deltoids, follow this workout.

The Shoulder Workout Plan

Leaning Dumbbell Side Laterals Exercise

We’re hanging on the bar, keeping our bodies at a 45-degree angle. What this does is it takes the supraspinatus muscle out of the picture and puts the primary emphasis on the side deltoid muscle. The supraspinatus muscle is involved in the first 30-degrees of abduction, so by leaning to our sides, we take the emphasis off this muscle and place it primarily on the deltoids.

Dead-Stop Overhead Press Exercise

This is a solid compound movement. We add a pause to it where we hold the barbell for a brief second when we come down and then we explode up. If you get bored doing nothing but shoulder presses, this is a fun alternative because there’s so much explosive energy going on in this movement. It’s very important to keep your core engaged and very tight on this exercise so that your body doesn’t teeter from one side to the next.

Seated Dumbbell Press Exercise

The cool thing about going from a compound exercise like a dead-stop overhead press to this one is that your nervous system is ramped up now so these weights should feel easier. Each week we alternate the position on the angle, some weeks we incline it back to isolate the chest more, today we have the bench at a perpendicular 90-degree angle to emphasize the shoulders.

Chest Supported Lateral Raise (Drop Set) Exercise

The important part of chest supported lateral raises is that it takes the bottom momentum out of the picture. Keep your feet firmly planted on the ground and bring the dumbbells up to shoulder height. It’s important to have your feet placed in a position where you have good stability, try not to place them too far forward. You’ll want to bring your shoulder blades back on this exercise so that your chest sticks out as you lift the dumbbells up to parallel. We like to do drop sets on this exercise where we’ll keep dropping the weight of the dumbbells as we do more sets until we hit failure. If you do these right, 15 pounds will feel like 45 pounds at the end of your drop set.

Plate Raise & Steering Wheel Exercise

This motion, it’s like you’re standing and driving a truck steering wheel. You want to really focus on full rotation. Pause the weight as your hands come to 12 and 6 o’clock positions on the steering wheel. This motion takes a lot of core stability and deltoids, it just burns. As you raise the plate, try to keep your wrists straight and in line with your shoulders. It’s important on this exercise that you don’t raise the plate higher than your head.

Upright Cable Row Exercise

Do this movement immediately after the plate raise steering wheel exercise as a superset. You want to move from one exercise to the next with as little rest as possible to increase the overall volume of your workout. One of the major keys to deltoids is volume, volume, volume, and blood flow. That’s the secret to my delts.

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