Bodyweight Shoulder Workout (NO GYM…NO PROBLEM!!)

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Sometimes, whether it be by preference or by the circumstances you find yourself in, you may or may not have access to equipment. And in those cases, what is your decision? Are you going to give up on your workout entirely or are you going to find a way to get the job done given the situation you find yourself in. Well today I wanted to go to one of the requests that you guys have been making, a Shoulder Workout, Bodyweight only, that showed you how you can overload. How you can create change in your body by doing the right kinds of bodyweight exercises to substitute for the things that we more typically do in the gym.

So with that being said lets break it down exercise by exercise, you see what you classically do, you see what you can be doing if you find yourself in a situation where you just don’t have the equipment with you. Alright so lets kick this workout off with our compound move, our Dumbbell or Barbell Shoulder Press. Guys you know it doesn’t matter what type of equipment you’re using here, the focus of this exercise is to push that weight, push some heavy weight and start building those shoulders up. But if you don’t have access to either one, are you left with nothing? Absolutely not, guys you know we have other options.

Here you can see me doing a Handstand Pushup against the wall. Even if you’re big and strong, I can tell you, this exercise becomes really challenging really quickly, and especially the heavier your bodyweight is at the moment. Right, you’ve got to push more the more you weigh. But even if that’s not a challenge for you, you can add in our Wall Walk Pushup variation, where you’re going to do a Wall Walk out all the way to a Flat Plank position, then walk yourself back up. And you can see with every push of my hand, I’m using more and more of my shoulders to get back into the position just to have to do pushups again.

So we can definitely overload this exercise and get you working right off the bat in this workout. Next up, one of the most classic exercises that you can do for your shoulders, a Dumbbell Side Lateral Raise. Of course, this is the one that targets the medial head. This is the one that we all know and have relied on for years but does that mean that there’s no equivalent here either? No there is, actually.

I’ve shown this before, we feature it in our ATHLEAN XERO Program, the Bodyweight Side Lateral. And the key here, as you watch me doing this move, is the relative motion. Remember relative motion means that as long as the motion that’s occurring at the joint is the same, we’re good. And you can see that, yeah in a typical Side Lateral Raise, my trunk is staying fixed and my arm is traveling away from my body. But in a Bodyweight Side Lateral Raise, we fix our arm and we let our body rotate away but the end result is that our shoulder is in that abductive position.

So we’re getting a loaded abduction here for our shoulders that will help us to still target this medial head, even when we just don’t even have equipment at our disposal. Ok, now lets work our way around to the back, we’ve got the rear delts to worry about. And again, classically the Dumbbell Rear Delt Raise. We do this all the time, when we’re trying to get and target that back side of the shoulders. But again we’ve got an option guys.

And again in ATHLEAN XERO, the Reverse Iron Cross Pushup. This is a very intense way to create an overload. Again just try the exercise and I promise you’re going to feel a contraction you probably haven’t even felt from doing the dumbbells. A lot of times guys will rely on the dumbbells to try to heave the weights up and not get a good enough contraction in the posterior delt, try this and I’ll tell you, you’re going to see the difference and feel it right off the bat very first rep. Next it’s time to get a little bit more functional.

As a trainer for professional athletes guys, you’ve got to be able to also recreate a little bit more functional carryover into the things that we do. So that we can become more explosive but we can do it in a way that’s going to translate to what we do. So on our Shoulder Tap Presses, you may have tried these before. Some people like to use a dumbbell, some like to use a kettlebell, some could use a landline set up in the corner. The essence of it is that you’re pressing shoulder to shoulder, ok as you see me doing here.

And what’s great about this is there is a high functional carryover to sports. Whether I’m an offensive lineman that finds myself down here and I have to, you know, press in a different direction. I can’t always direct my force straight ahead. Ok, we know that the other guy on the other side of you is going to move. So we have to adapt to that.

An MMA fighter is going to have to grab somebody and have to control them from above. We also have basketball players having to go up for rebounds and we need to have to strength to go in asymmetrical directions, that’s a great way to do it with a Shoulder Tap. But again if we don’t have the equipment does that mean that we’re screwed? Not at all, we’ve got Pike Circles. So we could take our bodyweight, position ourselves in a Pike position as you see me here, come down to the ground, lower myself to one side, so I’m overloading let’s say the right arm, I’m sliding around, sliding that weight across to overload the left arm, then pushing back off there, back up to the top.

And I can work these circles, both in a clockwise and a counterclockwise direction so that the loading arm on the descent is changing if we keep going back and forth. So what I would do here, is just do say, if you’re doing to whatever your failure reps are, divide half of them to the clockwise and half of them to the counterclockwise direction. And finally for those that think that bodyweight training can be an inferior way to train, compared to weighted training, we’ve got certain issues that actually are able to be more easily addressed with bodyweight exercises than they might be able to with weights. You guys say a video, I hope, that I did the other day on a Spontaneous Eccentric. Of what it was and how we could apply it to our shoulder training with a Dumbbell Side Lateral Raise.

And if you haven’t seen that video, I’ll link it up right over here, because it is definitely worth the watch. But that being said, some would feel that maybe even that is a little bit too risky for them. I called it an Advanced Shoulder Exercise for a reason. But maybe bodyweight allows us to actually do the Spontaneous Eccentric concept and do it in a more controlled safe manner and that’s exactly what I’m going to show you here. We’re able to do this in a much more secure way because we’re controlling our own bodyweight here.

And we get the explosivity we’re looking for in the exercise. And we’re getting that Spontaneous Eccentric contraction that we’re looking for every single time that my hands hit the floor here. And then of course, I’ve got to reverse direction and get myself back up. And you can start the way I’m showing you here just by leaning forward with one arm, hitting the ground, kicking the leg up, going to a Handstand Kickout and then from there getting back up. I’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter which leg you kick up in the air, the bottom line is ,it’s the overload you’re creating on the shoulder and this is a great way to really push yourself even when you have not a single piece of equipment at your disposal.

So there you go guys, a complete shoulder workout whether or not you have equipment or if you don’t. As a matter of fact, sometimes you’re going to find that your hand will be forced. Whether you’re traveling or you’re just in a location that doesn’t have the equipment that you need to get a great workout, you really have no excuses anymore. Because you do have an option and you can start doing these workouts right away and start