This is the second part in a two-part series about shoulder muscle development. If you have not read part I, you can read it by CLICKING HERE.
Well-developed shoulders create a V-shaped upper body making you appear leaner, more attractive, and more athletic. If you’re training your shoulders and they just don’t seem to want to grow you’re probably making one (or more) of eight very common mistakes.
Part I of this series identified mistakes one through four (and how to counter them). This continuation goes over mistakes five through eight.
You can apply the knowledge contained in this post without reading the first part, but we think that it’s best to get the whole story by checking out part I. Knowledge is power!!
Here are the next four common mistakes that could be stifling the growth of your shoulders.
Mistake Five: 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. This is a good thing because increasing the amount of stress you place on your muscles like this stimulates growth. Curiously, 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 increments will add up to large increments over time. 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 used during your last couple of workouts and how many reps you were able to do with that weight. This way you always have a precise number that you can try to beat over time.
Mistake Six: Insufficient Training Volume (not working out enough)
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.
There is a dose-response relationship between training volume and muscle growth in experienced lifters. The more sets you do (within reason), the more muscle you gain. Higher training volumes lead to more muscle growth.
So, if your shoulders aren’t growing, consider doing more sets for that muscle every week. If you’re currently doing nine sets for shoulders per week, try 12 or 15 sets per week and see if that helps you break through your plateau.
Mistake Seven: Not Consuming Enough Calories
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.
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 harm than good.
A recent study compared muscle growth and fat gain in individuals that consume different calorie surpluses. While one group consumed 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!
I recommend that you consume a calorie surplus target of around five to eight percent above maintenance calories per day. That’ll be enough to maximize muscle growth while minimizing fat gain.
Mistake Eight: Skimping On the Protein
Rounding out our list is not ingesting enough protein. Not only is getting enough calories important for muscle growth, but you also must consume enough protein. 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. Just like with the calorie surplus, more is not necessarily better. A 2018 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of sports medicine found that you only need 0.73 grams per pound of body weight 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.
A Parting Thought From DigEnet
That about wraps it up. I really hope you guys enjoyed this two-part series on building better delts. If you have, I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to CLICK HERE to join our DigEnet VIP list to get the latest tips and tricks for better workouts and healthier nutrition. CLICK HERE if you need to catch up on what you read in PART I. Please also take the time to browse our latest posts that will help you build up all the muscles in your body including your chest, shoulders, arms, and legs by CLICKING HERE to head over to our LATEST & GREATEST. I’ll see you guys soon!!