The PERFECT Shoulder Workout (2025 EDITION)

With the return of the perfect workout series, I am updating the perfect shoulder workout to give you the best shoulder workout you can do. The biggest difference is that I am giving you not just one, but two perfect shoulder workouts for you to try that are not just randomly thrown together, but ar

so you want to build perfect shoulders well you’re going to need a perfect shoulder workout and to do that you’re going to want to make sure you’re training your entire shoulder that means your front Dell and yes in this Perfect Workout you’re going to actually directly train your front Del you’re also going to want to add size and width Your Shoulders by training the all important middle Dell and I’m going to show you some ways that are really effective at doing that you may never have tried before then finally the rear Del or the redheaded stepchild of dults sorry to the redheaded step children out there but you just can’t afford to keep overlooking them I’m going to show you the best way to train those to put them all together and you’re not just going to have the perfect shoulders but you’re going to do it with the perfect shoulder workout but when I say the perfect shoulder workout what I actually mean is not just one workout but really two we do tend to disagree a lot when it comes to science of training but one thing we do tend to agree on is two workouts a week for a muscle group seems to be better than one and that’s because we have the opportunity to restimulate that muscle a second time in the week that being said you wouldn’t take the same workout you used to do in one workout and do it twice you’d want to cut the volume and equate it over the two workouts meaning shorter workouts and the nice thing about The Perfect Workout series is you can actually train another muscle group on the same day that you train the shoulders in this case it would be legs now if you’re following The Perfect Workout Series in its entirety here then you’re going to want to split it up this way if you want to do these as Standalone shoulder workouts though you have that option too without compromise what do the workouts look like though let’s start breaking them down and so now the first Perfect Workout looks like this just three exercises that you can see and it starts with a dumbbell single arm overhead press or as an alternative a barbell overhead press so the key concept here is that you’re going to press and I understand that people that have Orthopedic issues and I’m one of them this can be somewhat challenging but I don’t believe that the solution is to avoid overhead pressing the solution is finding a version that you can actually still do and for me it’s going to be the single arm overhead press because as you can see here it allows me to focus on one arm at a time but most importantly orthopedically as I press up I can focus more on stacking those joints the wrist over the elbow over the shoulder which immediately helps you to feel better if you have any type of impingement issue in your shoulder or concerns that make overhead pressing difficult the other thing that it does though is when we take the two dumbbells out of our hands we’re able to actually lift more one at a time because our core doesn’t have to stabilize two dumbbells going up at once you just do one you’ll find that you can increase the weight when you increase the weight we’re getting that tension overload that we’re looking for in this heavier rep range 6 to 8 to form failure two to three sets now again if you don’t have dumbbells and the opportunity to do that don’t stop overhead pressing just do a barbell overhead press and work on progressively overloading the next one though we have to focus where on that middle delt because we know that the middle delt just needs more work and what we’re going to do is actually raise the set volume on this to three to four okay so a little bit more work directed at middle delt and you don’t have to get all that complicated because we know that the lateral Rays is really effective for building out that middle Del and I’ve talked about all the different variations we can do like a cable lateral raise but honestly if you just want to keep it simple and still get really good results the lateral raise done with dumbbells is great but do this for me go from a straight arm to the bent arm so you do a mechanical drop set and again when we do this typical lateral raise lean the Torso forward a little bit more keep the thumbs higher than the pinkies we don’t want those pouring of the pitches because that could lead to the shoulder problems we just talked about and you’ll feel it really effectively in the middle belt but you take it all the way to failure in this 10 to 12 rep range and you don’t stop instead from there what you do is just bend the elbows right shorten the moment arm bring the weight closer to your body and you’ll find you can continue to go because you’ve effectively you know decreased the feel of the weight in your hands even though you actually didn’t change the weight out get to the end of that we still have the option as we have in the other perfect workouts to keep going a little bit more with some partial repetitions until you really can’t move the weight anymore in this case again you go three to four sets starting with that 10 to 12 rep weight and then we have of course something targeted at the rear delts and for me it’s the dumbbell rear delt row now keep in mind we’ve already hit the rear delts if you’re following the entire Perfect Workout series on back day with that heavy wide elbowed C the cable row but here what we’re focusing on as two sets but done with an exercise that more effectively targets the rear delt you see a lot of us will do the traditional reverse dumbbell fly and I don’t like the exercise because I don’t feel like it effectively hits the rear Delta as much as it can can be with the rear delt row you can see here the focus is getting the elbow back behind the body with a bent arm because the real driver of the rear Delta activity is going to be the extension of the elbow back behind the body like we did on that c cable row if you haven’t tried this exercise guys it’s going to be your new favorite mostly because it’s actually going to finally give you the gains you’re looking for in the rear delts two sets of 10 to 12 when you look at the total volume here you total it up on the low end you’re talking about seven sets and then the the high end you’re talking about nine sets but do remember we’re going to hit this with another workout which we can cover right now and of course not to make you wait let’s go right through that second shoulder workout this one is going to start this time with the middle delt and focus but we can still have that main focus of overloaded tension my favorite way always to do this is the dumbbell cheat lateral and what we’re doing here is actually cheating the repetition you can see loading up the weight much heavier than I typically would and the idea is to get the lateral Rays as clean as you possibly can but understanding you’re going to use a little momentum but where you don’t want to have momentum is on the way down so eccentrically trying to control the weight trying to slow it down utilizing that other driver of Ecentric overload to help to continue to grow those middle delts the idea is you’re doing again those higher set totals here three to four for each arm with again that heavier weight six to eight reps form failure so what I like there is the complement of this with that strict lateral that we did in the first workout is really a good way for a good one two punch to sort of get those middle Dells growing next exercise though is the front raise okay we’re doing a stretch front raise though done on an incline bench and a lot of people don’t think you need to Target your front Els I am not one of those people I think if you want t