Sculpted shoulders — the best exercise for the rear delts
Building from the V shaped physique concept, you need to also have depth from the side view. This is achieved by building the ‘rear delts’, and here’s the most efficient exercise for quickly doing that.
The rear delts are often ignored in many workout routines — and they are hard to target in general. The result is people have over-developed front delts, but more of a hunched forward and skinny look from the side view as the front delts get worked easily, while the side and rear delts lag. Beyond aesthetics, making sure you have balanced shoulder development ensures a healthy shoulder to enjoy.
In order to build up the rear delt, we want to accomplish two goals — directly focus on the rear delt as the ‘prime mover’, and do so in a manner that allows for heavier weights to be safely used. Many of the usual dumbbell fly type exercises only allow for light weights to be safely used, and thus are unable to provide enough total stimulus to gain the desired size.
Focusing on the rear delt muscle…
ACE (American Council on Exercise) conducted a study with EMG to try and determine what exercises targeted the various shoulder muscles optimally. For the rear delt, they found that the seated rear lateral raise (a dumbbell fly movement) and the 45 degree incline row were the top two…