3 Effective Shoulder Exercises To Build Big Round Deltoids

This shoulder workout is going to consist of three different deltoid exercises. The first one is going to be the seated dumbbell press, then we are going to move into the dumbbell side laterals and we are going to finish off with one arm dumbbell front raises, so let’s get started building some massive shoulders!

Seated Dumbbell Press
The first exercise in our shoulder workout is the seated dumbbell press which is a great overall mass building movement for adding size and thickness to your deltoids. You want to make sure you choose very light dumbbells for your first warm-up set of about 12 or 15 reps in order to get some blood into your muscles and get nice and warmed up before you move into heavier weights.

One of the keys when doing the shoulder press is that you always want to protect your shoulders at all costs and one of the main things is to avoid going too low at the bottom of the movement. Lower the dumbbells down to about eye level where your arms are parallel and then pause for a moment and press the weight back up to the top. You don’t want to go all the way down at the bottom because it’s going to put too much stress on your rotator cuffs.

Slowly lower the weight down to about a 90 degree angle with your elbows at the bottom of the exercise and doing these in front of a mirror really helps out because you can actually see what you are doing and this allows you to make sure you don’t go too low. It’s critical that you always perform the exercises with correct form and technique to ensure you target the muscle correctly and avoid injury.

Dumbbell Side Lateral Raises
The second exercise in this shoulder workout is dumbbell side laterals which targets your middle deltoids. Once again, you want use light weight on your first set to get the movement down before moving to heavier weights. On this exercise, weight is not extremely important and you will most likely be using lighter dumbbells since its more of a shaping exercise versus a mass builder. When you raise the dumbbells up you want to go ahead and try to act like you are tipping and pouring a glass of milk, so you want to twist up and really get a good contraction with your shoulders. Basically imagine that you’re pouring a bottle of water into a glass to get the proper form down for this exercise.

One Arm Front Dumbbell Raises
The last exercise in this shoulder workout is the standing one arm front dumbbell deltoid raise which really hits the front area of the deltoids muscle very well. To start, position your feet shoulder width apart and raise one arm at a time up to about eye level. Avoid raising the weight too high since you want to put all the emphasis on your front deltoids versus your rotator cuff. So, bring the weight to about eye level and this will be the highest you want to go at the top of the movement. Make sure you don’t swing the weight with your upper body. This exercise is not a mass builder so if you’re swinging and using jerky movements, the weight you’re using is probably too heavy and you need to decrease it and use lighter dumbbells. It’s very important to use a slow a controlled tempo when doing this exercise to really hit the front deltoid muscles and avoid injury to the rotator cuffs.