A Crazy Shoulder Day

Today was shoulder day. Strictly speaking I only did two exercises, but afterward my shoulders felt more blown up than they ever have.

The whole session was built around supersets: two exercises you can switch between quickly, done back to back, to hit the target muscle as hard as possible. I used to use supersets only for triceps. But when I thought about it, the triceps and the deltoids are both fairly small muscles, so it seemed like the superset approach should work for both.

The first superset was "cable crossover rear-delt fly" + "face pull." The face pull here isn't a real face pull. After the crossover rear-delt flyes, I quickly switch from an overhand grip to an underhand grip and pull. For rear delts, the cable crossover rear-delt fly is the exercise where I feel the muscle working best right now, and I feel the face pull variation built on it more too.

Fifteen reps each. After the overhand crossover rear-delt flyes, I switch straight to an underhand grip and do face pulls. One round of both is one superset. Five sets in total.

Then came the "dumbbell lateral raise" superset. But it's just the one exercise, dumbbell lateral raises. Here the superset means alternating between two different weights, heavy first, then light.

I can actually do sets of lateral raises with 10 kg. But with that weight, I end up rounding my chest without meaning to and using my body to heave the weight up and down. For lateral raises, there's really no need for that.

With 7.5 kg, I can keep my body completely still through the whole set, so I feel my side delts much more. After the 7.5 kg set, I switch straight to 5 kg dumbbells and keep going to failure.

Honestly, before supersets I was basically just training at random.

When I finished the fifth lateral-raise superset, I put down the 5 kg dumbbells, turned around and walked a couple of steps back, looked around, and felt completely lost. A few seconds later I finally realized I'd zoned out. I bent down, picked my water bottle up off the floor, unscrewed it, took a small sip, and sat down on the bench.

I'd trained myself dazed.

Seriously dazed. In a year of working out, I'd only ever felt like this after squats, and now I'd found the same feeling in two small shoulder muscles.

Working out is actually very simple, but you also have to learn and try lots of methods to train yourself better.

When it comes to shoulder training, I've finally found a bit of fun.

Training shoulders with supersets gets wild.