Shoulder Exercises Ranked (BEST TO WORST!)

There are so many shoulder exercises, but which ones should you be focusing your efforts on if you want to build bigger shoulders and increase your strength? In this video, I’m going to give you the most popular shoulder exercises ranked from worst to best and help you to determine which you should

And so the irony of all ironies, the  exercise with the word upright in its name, it’s the one most likely to  leave you on your back.

What up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. What  you see behind me is a bunch of different shoulder exercises. Many of them you probably recognize  because you’ve either done them in the past or you’re still doing them today. However, after  today’s video, you’re going to want to get rid of a few of them.

You see, I m going to rank them  from the worst to the best to leave you with only the best shoulder exercises that are going to  deliver you the gains that you’re after. And so as we begin the ranking process here, it’s  important to define the criteria upon which the exercises are ranked. And while progressively  overloading an exercise to develop strength is an important element of all the exercises, it’s  not the main criteria for how we select these. We’re looking for hypertrophy, we’re looking for  muscle growth. And the ability of these exercises to do that is going to be the main reason  for why we rank them in the order we do.

That being said, we always have to rely on the  safer options and when it comes to the shoulder, the most mobile joint in the body, unfortunately,  along with that mobility comes some sacrifices to our stability. With the lack of stability comes  some poor exercise choices, especially if going to repeat them for years to come. We’re not  talking about being able to get away with one rep or even a few workouts. I’m talking about year  after year after year of doing these exercises, that has to be part of the equation. We’re going  to want to mitigate those injury risk and leave you with the better options that are still  going to be able to produce the gains.

However, unlike anything else we’ve done in the  series before, we’re talking about a different setup here when it comes to the shoulder. We have  three distinct heads the front head, the middle and the rear delt. We want to give you the best  rankings for each of those heads. And of course, I’m not going to overlook the fact that we want  just overall shoulder development. I’m going to give you give you some bonus rankings for those  too.

But that being said, let’s just start off where we always do with this series and that’s at  the bottom and just work our way up because it can only get better from there. And I’m going to start  with the worst of the worst, the Upright Row. There’s a saying out there that says  there’s no such thing as a bad kid, just bad parents. But luckily, when it comes to  exercises, there’s no family tree that we have to worry about, and the Upright Row is just a  bad exercise. Now I know a lot of people will defend that and say there’s no such thing as a bad  exercise either, but I disagree.

Every single rep of an Upright Row places your shoulder into an  internally rotated position with elevation. Yes, the exact position that you would test somebody  in if you were looking for impingement. When the biomechanics of the exercise itself  are literally fighting your own body’s anatomy, I just can’t wrap my arms around the exercise  and love it. I don’t care if you get away with it in a single workout or even a training block  or even 15 years of training with the exercise, over time you’re likely going to run into  a problem. And while yes, the exercise can be improved slightly by lowering the height of  the barbell or dumbbells when you lift them up, the fact is, there’s better exercise options  that can achieve the same thing and do a better job at it with lower risk.

For that reason,  the Upright Row gets the first red X. All right, so I mentioned that there’s no family  tree when it comes to exercises. But if there was the Cuban Press would be the evil twin brother  of the Upright Row. As a matter of fact, maybe even more evil and that’s because  we’re adding another element to an already bad biomechanical exercise. You see when we lift  this up, we’re getting external rotation, which some would argue makes this a good exercise.

But  it really isn’t because you’re lifting yourself up there from an internally rotated position. Not  to mention, the best part about this exercise is probably the press because you’ve got your elbows,  at least in a somewhat forward position. However, the real dangers happen when you start  to lower the dumbbells. You’re getting into this eccentric internal rotation again. But even  worse, you’ve got to increase momentum with those dumbbells further away from the chest,  making this just more harmful to the shoulders than even the Upright Row.

For that reason, this  also gets the next big red X in this category. Speaking about the press, can we talk about  the version we all started out doing the first time we ever trained shoulders, the Behind the  Neck Press. Look, I did it too and for no other reason that I saw it in Arnold’s Encyclopedia  of Bodybuilding, and it looked pretty damn good. Once again, doing this variation of the press  just puts our shoulders in a position where we’re fighting our own anatomy. There’s something  called the scapular plain, which is a 45-degree angle or so in front of our body so that the  elbow doesn’t have to track back behind our body like it does in a Behind the Neck Press.

There is nothing wrong with an overhead press, as you’re going to see here later on this video. But when we do it from this position, you’re placing yourself in an unnecessary injury risk  that we could do from a better position without sacrificing any of the gains that we should be  getting from the exercise. So for that reason, as always, the details matter, and in this  case, the positioning of the shoulder is too far back makes this one one that I would also  throw in the bottom of the barrel category. So if you haven’t picked up on this by now as a  physical therapist, I don’t like internal rotation of the shoulder from an elevated arm position  for obvious reasons. That being said, there’s one exercise that can make me go from loving it  to hating it just like that.

It s this exercise right here, it’s the Side Lateral Raise, but done  from the pour the pitcher position. You might have heard this tip before that when you get to the  top of the lateral raise, you want to act like you’re pouring pitchers of water and have your  thumb pointing down your pinky pointing up. If you notice what’s going on right there, yes,  you’ve got internal rotation from an elevated arm position. That being said, when you realize  you can get the same activation and benefits to the middle delt by simply leaning forward a  little bit and keeping your thumb higher than the pinky to ensure that you have external  rotation at the shoulder, you’re still going to place that middle delt and that direct line  of the downward force of gravity still making it do all the work without sacrificing anything  from the exercise, just increasing the safety of it, and save the pitcher pouring for something  you do down here, maybe a table level and save your shoulders in the process by putting the PTP  side lateral raise in the big red X category. And with that, I now get to break out my blue  marker as we work our way up the rankings, this time to the Better Category.

where we’re talking  about good, solid exercises and specifically hitting the front, middle and rear delt in that  order. We start with the front and the exercise, here is the Press Out. And while this is a  good exercise for targeting the front delt, there are definitely some built in limitations  here, namely the lack of range of motion. We’re not taking the weight from our thighs