8 Reasons Your Shoulders Are NOT Growing (Science Based)

Three-dimensional caplike shoulders help form a v-shaped appearance for your upper body, making you appear leaner, more attractive and more athletic. It also helps your arms look significantly more muscular when you have pronounced shoulders that appear to separate from the rest of the muscles in your arms. Unfortunately, many guys make the same common mistakes that prevent them from adding any meaningful mass to their shoulders at all. So today I want to go over eight of the most common mistakes that are holding you back in terms of bulking up those shoulders and the first one that I see all the time is that most people don’t train through a full range of motion, especially when Doing exercises like overhead presses if you’re someone that actually does go all the way down when you do overhead presses next time, you go to the gym, take a look at how most people perform their barbell, dumbbell and machine overhead presses you’ll see that most people don’t Lower the weight further than the point where their upper arms are parallel to the floor before pressing the weight back up.

What you want to do instead is lower the weight all the way down until your hands are at least at ear level, and you can go even lower than that until the dumbbells are about the same height as your shoulders. This is beneficial because it’s specifically the lower part of the exercise that stimulates the delts the most the upper part, on the other hand, is largely a function of the triceps. If we divide the motion of an overhead press into a lower middle and upper portion, we can see that the triceps are heavily involved in locking out the weight during that upper portion.

Not so much your shoulders. Your shoulders fire fully in the lower and middle portions of this exercise, on top of the fact that your shoulders are more active in the lower and the middle section. Research also indicates that, in general, training through a greater range of motion is better for muscle growth. For example, studies show that full squats cause more glue and adductor growth than partial squats and full range of motion.

Curls produce more bicep growth when compared to partial curls. Another common mistake is that you’re focusing too much on the front delts, but not enough on the side and the rear delts. This is usually done unintentionally, and this issue can even affect advanced bodybuilders, forming a disproportionate amount of volume. For your front, delts is common for two reasons.

First, one of the most staple shoulder exercises in everyone’s routine is the overhead press. Unfortunately, the overhead press as great of an exercise as it is focuses primarily on the front delts. Meanwhile, the side, and especially the rear, delts, get much less activation. The second, and also the bigger issue, is the fact that you already train your front delts quite a bit during all your horizontal pressing exercises like the dumbbell and barbell bench press.

So when you train your chest, you inadvertently also train the front part of your shoulders a lot even your rear delts will get recruited to a decent extent when you perform different, pulling exercises like pull-ups rows and especially bent over high rows. But that’s not the case for the side delts, which are especially important for giving your shoulders that wide look with the exception of upright rows, which can actually lead to shoulder impingement. Your side, delts, are not activated to a very significant extent from most other compound exercises, including the bench press, pull-ups and rows.

That’s why you want to put extra emphasis on training your side delts during your shoulder workouts. There are pretty much no lifters that need to do. Isolation exercises for their front delts, like dumbbell frontal, raises, for example, however, pretty much every lifter can benefit by adding more side and rear.

Delt exercises like a dumbbell, lateral raises and cable reverse flies. Now, on top of the aesthetic benefits focusing on the side and rear delts is also beneficial from a posture and shoulder health perspective. A study published in the journal of clinical biomechanics found that strengthening the posterior head of the deltoid helps to ensure shoulder joint integrity and reduces the likelihood of a shoulder injury.

Next is the mistake of saving your shoulder exercises till the end of your workout or simply hitting shoulders too late in your workout. Many studies, including a randomized, controlled trial, show that exercises and muscle groups that you train first in a workout are the ones that you’ll see the most gains from. However, a lot of people that are trying to grow their shoulders don’t train their shoulders. First, if your split training routine, combines chest shoulders and triceps, for example, into one push: workout you’re most likely starting your workout with exercises like bench presses and dumbbell presses, which means you’ll exhaust your shoulders quite a bit before you finally get to your shoulder exercises that Works just fine if your primary goal is to grow your chest, but if you primarily want to grow your shoulders, it would be much better to hit them at the beginning of your workout.

This is why I like to combine shoulders biceps and triceps into one arm. Workout, on a separate day from my chest and back workout having an arm specific day where you can start fresh with shoulder exercises that target your mid and rear deltoids like bent arm lateral, raises and dumbbell reverse flies, can wind up being extremely beneficial for balancing out The shape of your shoulders, even if you start the workout with overhead presses, which target more of your front delt starting off with shoulder exercises, can help you lift significantly more weight than if you were to finish with shoulder exercises, and that in turn, will benefit muscle Growth, another mistake is allowing your traps to take over for your deal else. This definitely isn’t the case for everyone, but some people feel shoulder exercises and especially side dealt exercises more in their traps than they do on their shoulders.

Due to this increased level of trap activation, their traps grow like crazy, while their shoulders get left behind. This can be a tricky situation because, unfortunately, it’s impossible to stimulate your delts without also having your traps involved in the movement, but the good news is that there are a couple things you can do to reduce trap recruitment. First, you can static stretcher traps before you do your shoulder. Workout various studies show that stretching a muscle for 60 seconds or longer decreases subsequent muscle activation during exercise.

You can effectively stretch your traps by simply bending one arm and putting it behind your back. As you take your opposite hand and pull your head down to the side towards your shoulder, you’ll want to hold that position for 60 seconds on each side, for one to two sets before training your shoulders. Another great way to train your side delts, while reducing trap involvement is to focus on pushing your dumbbells as far away to your sides as possible possible, as you bring them up during a lateral raise, rather than just focusing on lifting them straight up.

Moving on to the next one, we have the common problem of not applying progressive overload. It’s very interesting when it comes to the bench press. Many lifters try to beat the amount of weight that they lifted the week beforehand or the month beforehand, which is a good thing, because increasing the amount of stress you place on your muscles, like this stimulates growth.

But I find very few people that are focused on trying to increase the amount of weight that they can use on compound shoulder exercises like overhead presses and especially on isolation exercises like lateral raises. That’s a big mistake when doing shoulder exercises or any other exercise for that matter. You want to focus on progressive overload. This means that you have to gradually increase the amount of workload that you put on a muscle.

It doesn’t have to be a huge increase. Small little increments will add up to large increments over time, so focus on just increasing the amount of weight you can lift by even two and a half pounds in one month, if you’re doing a weight load for 10 reps and not hitting fan failure increase that Weight load until you’re doing like six or seven reps before hitting failure, then work on getting your rep count back up to 9 or 10 reps before upping the weight load again and repeating that entire process. This is also why it could be highly beneficial for you to keep track of your workouts so that you know how much weight you use during your last couple workouts and how many reps you were able to do with that weight.

This way, you always have a tangible number that you can try to beat over time. Another issue you might be running into aside from just not upping your weight load is you’re not doing enough overall training volume. If you only train your shoulders once per week – or you only do a couple of sets here and there that’s likely the reason why your shoulders aren’t growing to maximize muscle growth, you absolutely have to do enough training volume. In fact, the metaanalysis found a dose response, relationship between training volume and muscle growth in train lifters.

The more sets the participants did, the more muscle they gained also looking closely at another eight week study where participants did either one three or five sets per x exercise. The results once again show that there was a dose response relationship where higher training volumes led to more muscle growth. So if your shoulders aren’t growing, consider doing more sets for that muscle every week.

So if you’re currently doing, let’s say nine sets for shoulders per week, try 12 or 15 sets per week and see if that helps you break through your plateau. Now, even though I’ve just been talking about your shoulder workouts, one of the main reasons you might be struggling to add mass to your shoulders is that you’re not consuming enough calories consuming enough calories is crucial if you want to maximize muscle growth. So if your shoulders aren’t growing make sure to check whether you are in fact in a calorie surplus, if not, that could be the fix that you need to get your shoulders growing again.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to go crazy, stuffing yourself with as much food as possible to maximize muscle growth. You don’t need that big of a calorie surplus. In fact, a huge surplus can do more bad than good. This was proven in a study where a scientist compared muscle growth and fat gain in individuals that consume different calorie surpluses.

While one group consume a regular calorie surplus. The other group went 600 calories above the regular calorie surplus group. After 12 weeks, both groups gained a statistically similar amount of muscle, but the group that consumed an additional 600 calories gained more than five times the amount of fat. So if you want to keep it stupid simple, I recommend that you consume a calorie surplus target of around five to eight percent above maintenance per day.

That’ll be enough to maximize muscle growth while minimizing fat gain. Finally, last but not least, you may not be eating enough protein, so not only is getting enough calories important for muscle growth, but you also want to consume enough protein. That’s because the amino acids found in protein form the foundation of our muscle mass, in fact, muscle growth is all about building up more protein in a muscle compared to what gets broken down on a daily basis. If you can accomplish that, your muscles will grow now.

Just like with the calorie surplus, more is not necessarily more a 2018 metaanalysis published in the british journal of sports medicine found that you only need 073 grams per pound of body weight per per day that equals about 131 grams of protein for a 180 pound person. You can, of course, eat more protein than that amount, but based on the scientific evidence, it won’t have much more of an effect on your muscle building progress. Instead, I recommend saving those additional calories for fats and carbs that can make your diet more enjoyable, so that about wraps it up. I really hope you guys enjoyed this video and, if you have make sure you subscribe to the channel if you’re someone that wants any extra help and you want a doneforyou system that’ll help.

You build up all the muscles in your body, including your chest, shoulders, arms and legs then, head on over to my website, where you can get my entire lean muscle. Building system for free you’ll get a customized diet plan a six week. Progressive workout plan a recipe book and a coach to answer any questions and make any adjustments whenever you need to find out more, you can click the link below in the description or you can head straight on over to my website at gravitytransformationcom I’ll see you guys Soon, foreign.