The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - SHOULDERS EDITION!

In today’s video we look at the best dumbbell exercises for shoulders. We’re going to focus on several areas of training: from strength, to power as well as hypertrophy and a few others you’d expect.

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I’m going to make some big choices. I’m going to cover the best shoulder exercises that you can do with just a pair of dumbbells.

Now, I have to qualify a couple of things. There’s no debating here. What I mean by that is, this arose out of a conversation I had with a coach friend of mine of the Oakland Raiders, Rick Slate. Also, with a guy I worked with on the New York Mets. We were having this discussion of what the best exercises would be if you could only use a pair of dumbbells.

Now, a lot of us are training in gyms, we have access to barbells, or even things like this, the jammers. I’m going to make note of when I think these are going to be great choices, just in case you have access to them. But I’m going to stick myself in that corner and force myself to just look at dumbbells. Let’s face it, there are a lot of guys who still only have access to that, and they want to train at home. They don’t have a lot of space and I’ve got to deliver the goods here on why I did that.

But the one thing I said to him was that you’ve got at least give me some context. You can’t just tell me to pick my favorite exercises without context. I’m going to provide context and we decided that we’re going to break it down by strength, power, hypertrophy, corrective, a total body exercise, and even one that’s meant for metabolic training as an additional form of creating hypertrophy. Also, one to hit the rear delts because none of them really fit that category especially well unless you’re trying to do it specifically. So, I’m going to make all those choices and we’re going to start right now with strength.

Right off the bat when going for strength, what is your option here? What are you going to do? I mentioned the barbell exercises in the opening. If I had access to a barbell, then I have the overhead press as my option there. But we don’t have that option, but I don’t think we need to abandon the movement.

The movement is still going to be the basic foundation of all your shoulder strength. That is being able to press something up over your head. However, you’re not going to want to do this. You don’t want to sit down to do the exercise. It’s a fallacy where people think you take the legs out of the exercise by sitting down.

You wind up driving more into your knees and legs to drive your head back into the bench, creating a counterforce, and pushing the dumbbells up awkwardly overhead. That’s interfering with the normal scapula-humeral rhythm of your arm by pressing your shoulder blades back into that bench. It’s not the best option. So, what I always want you to do is get on your feet. To do the exercise of choice, we would do a standing dumbbell press.

The great thing about this exercise is it allows you to get your elbows out in front of your body, more into that scapular plane where we can press overhead more safely without risking impingement of our shoulder. We also know for the barbell if you were to do this exercise with a barbell, all you have to do is take a narrower grip, which is going to bring your elbows out in front of your body. One last caveat, I will say, if you are training with dumbbells – and this is with a goal of progressive overload, trying to build your strength – you’re not necessarily going to be able to make the smaller jumps you can with the barbell. A 5lb increase on a barbell is going to turn into a 10lb increase with dumbbells. If you go up from 50s to 55s it’s a 55 in this hand and a 55 here.

That’s a 10lb overall increase on the double overhead press. So just keep that in mind. If you have the option for the barbell, go for it. But this is about dumbbells. Use that standing press, don’t sit down.

Next up, if we’re going to talk about strength, we’re also going to talk about power. Power is going to rely on your ability to apply some speed to the movement that you’re performing. Right here, guys, this is what I talked about in the open. The jammers are my absolute favorite, but I realize that not a lot of people have access to this piece of machinery. Even if you have a decked-out gym, a lot of times jammers are not part of that.

Even if you have this additional implement here called the Viking Press, I love this too, but the benefit to both of these implements is it gets your shoulders out in front of your body, once again, in that safer position. Especially when you’re going to apply speed to a movement. Secondly, it allows your legs to participate heavily in the activity. If we’re talking about power and the application of maximum force over the shortest period of time, we know our legs could contribute greatly to doing that and allowing us to do it most effectively. However, I’ve got to make a substitution here.

I’ve got to make a choice that’s dumbbell related. Again, we don’t have to really change the movement. All we have to do is swap dumbbells into our hands and perform the push press, as you see me doing here. The benefit of the push press is utilizing your legs to drive from the ground up. It’s an athletic, ground-based movement.

But please do it right. You’ve got to make sure you’re not just bending your knees, but you’re properly loading the hips. If you want to apply force and strength to a movement and speed, you want to utilize the biggest muscles in your body. Those are around your hips. So, stick your ass out.

Hinge at the hips. Utilize those big muscles. Drive up overhead. Keep your reps sub-failure here to make sure you’re maximizing your power output and go for it, guys. A great option here when you’re looking to use dumbbells and developing more power.

So, we know there’s more than one way to skin a cat. We also know in order to create muscle growth it doesn’t always have to rely on adding more weights to the bar. We have more options. When we’re talking about strict hypertrophy you want to attack it in a different way. My best option here, if I could only choose one, is going to be the utilization of a side-lateral raise.

But we’re going to do it in a cheat lateral form. You can see me doing this here. I’m able to overload the weight. I’m able to utilize a bit of a cheat on the concentric portion of the lift by bringing the dumbbell up and really trying to focus on the eccentric lowering of that dumbbell. Slow, in control, really try to fight that descent.

That’s a great stimulus for overall muscle growth in the long term. But I don’t just stop there. Again, I realize I can go to failure on that lift and then take it through failure. Another key aspect of taking a muscle closer toward a hypertrophy response is to apply stress to, and through failure. So, I can drop this, take a lighter weight, and then apply a strict form to it.

Go from my cheat approach to it, to a stricter form here on the straight-lateral raise. You’ll see I don’t abandon the care that I take of my shoulder here. I’m trying to keep my pinky down. No ‘pouring the pitcher’ as we always talk about here. You want to keep your thumb higher than your pinky.

Really go for that good contraction at the top, lower the dumbbell back under tension. There is no momentum, but the key is to take it all the way through until you cannot perform another rep in good form. This is a great combination you can use and all you need is two pair of dumbbells to accomplish what we’re looking to do. Moving on, guys, another option we have when we’re trying to create muscle hypertrophy is to apply a whole different technique. That is metabolic stress.

Metabolic training. What we do here is, this is where we talk about not just trying to seek out the burn, but really revel in that burn. The set doesn’t even start until it starts to burn, and then