Focus On All 3 Delts
Jim Stoppani talks about importance of rear delt exercises
If you want to build well-rounded shoulders, then you need to focus on your rear delts… not just your front and middle delts.
So in addition to doing shoulder presses, lateral raises and upright rows, you need to do some rear delt exercises as well. But if you’ve found that you are doing plenty of rear delt moves, such as bent-over lateral raises, yet aren’t getting making any gains, I know why that may be. Most rear delt exercises, like the bent-over lateral raise, are single joint exercises, which severely limit the amount of weight you can use.
But an exercise known as the face-pull, is a multijoint exercise that you can do with some real weight to pack on some serious mass on your rear delts, as well as your middle traps.
To do the face pull, attach a rope attachment to the pulley of a lat pulldown station. Grab the ends of the rope with an overhand grip so that your palms are facing each other. Place your foot up on the seat or knee pad post of the pulldown station. This will help to anchor your stance better and allow you to use more weight to place some serious overload on the rear delts. With your arms extended directly in front of you, lean back so that your upper body forms a 45 degree angle with the floor. Using your rear delts and middle traps, pull your arms back and out to your sides, bringing the rope to the sides of your ears. Then return your arms to the start position and repeat for reps.
Because this exercise involves movement at both the shoulder joint and the elbow joint, it’s considered a multi joint exercise.
That means that you can really load up on the weight. And the more weight you can use, the more overload you place on the rear delts, and that helps to create greater muscle growth in the rear delts and the middle traps. Since this exercise hits both the rear delts and middle traps, I like to do it at the end of my delt work as a segue exercise between shoulders and traps. I usually follow this exercise with some form of shrugs, such as dumbbell or barbell shrugs, or my one-arm, or hand-free Smith machine shrug.
To see the face pull in action, watch my video, M&F Raw! #70 – Face Time: The Face Pull by clicking here.
