The rear delts (one of the three muscle heads of the shoulder) are among the hardest muscles groups to properly target. They are not glamorous and they aren’t a showpiece muscle so they are often ignored or neglected. Big mistake!

The rear delts play an extremely important role not only in physique development but in strength and stabilization of the shoulder joint, which is CRITICAL for exercises like the bench press, as well for maintaining proper posture throughout the day. The rear delts help keep those shoulders back!

Strong rear delts that are in balance with the rest of the shoulder muscle heads (front and side) are VERY important. Well-developed rear delts will also really set you apart in terms of physique development.

The gold standard rear delt lateral raise (and variations of it) is commonly accepted as the best way to isolate and develop the rear delts. But, as good as it is, the rear delt lateral raise has several problems…

[Please note when I make these points, I’m not saying the rear delt lateral raise is a bad exercise and shouldn’t be done. When properly done, it is an excellent rear delt exercise that works very well. However, as with any exercise, it does have its problems.]

1. The bent-over body position (which is the typical form for the exercise) places continuous stress on the lower back and can lead to torso bouncing to help get the weight moving, not to mention blood pressure issues from exercising in that position.

If you’ve got lower back pain, this eliminates the exercise for you right away. If you don’t have lower back pain, doing the exercise with a short bounce to get the weight started can actually lead to lower back pain. The back is simply not in a good position to be bouncing.

This problem with the bent-over position can be removed by laying face down on an incline or flat bench, but this leads us to the second problem with the exercise.

2. The exercise offers very little resistance at the start of the movement leading up to maximum resistance at the top. While this results in a good contraction at the top, your rear delts don’t really get that much meaningful work until you’re at or near that top point. They don’t get worked fully and therefore won’t develop fully.

If you use a lot of weight with this exercise to try and get more out of it, the muscles of the upper back will take over. If you use a very light weight to go for feel, you may not be stimulating the rear delts with enough resistance to actually get results. It’s a Catch-22 situation and neither option is ideal.

3. When the rear delts get tired, the upper back muscles take over. If you’ve been training regularly, you know the most productive part of a set is the last few reps when the muscles are really getting pushed to their limits. This is the stimulus that produces results. With bent-over rear laterals, when the small rear delt muscles become fatigued, the larger upper back muscles immediately kick in and take over the exercise, reducing the tension on the rear delts at the exact time when they should be getting the most out of the exercise.

So what do "Lying Rolling Floor Laterals" do to fix this problem?

First, I’m going to explain exactly how to do the exercise, then I’ll tell you exactly why it’s so effective and why it eliminates the problems found in the standard rear delt lateral.

HOW TO DO IT:

For this exercise, you will need one dumbell. Start with a light to moderate weight (similar to what you’d use for a rear lateral raise) until you get the hang of the movement.

Lie flat on your back on the floor with your legs perfectly stiff and completely straight. The soles of your feet should NOT be touching the floor. Hold the dumbell directly above your chest in your left hand (arm straight and stiff) and lay your right arm flat on the floor directly to the side with your palm facing up.

Now, keeping your left arm stiff and straight, lower the dumbell down towards your right hand, rolling your entire body onto your right side as you do so. To start the roll onto your side, all you need to do is start bringing the dumbell over and around a little. The weight of the dumbell will start your body rolling over.

DO NOT LET IT DROP! This should be a very controlled movement all the way down. If you had to, you should be able to stop at any given point along the way. Push your entire right arm hard against the floor to help control the descent of the left arm.

At the bottom of the movement, you should be laying completely on your side (legs still stiff and straight) with the dumbell laying on top of your bottom hand as though clapping.

Now you’re going to go the other way. Do a rear delt lateral raise with the left hand (that’s holding the dumbell), raising your arm back to vertical.

CRITICAL POINT - As you do this lateral raise with the left arm, push down hard against the floor with your entire right arm. It should feel as though you are trying to open both of your arms out wide as you raise the dumbell and roll your body towards your back. This means you’ll be not only working the rear delt of the left side with a dumbell lateral raise, you’ll be working the rear delt of the right side while you push against the floor and rotate your body.

This push and roll makes the exercise into a bodyweight exercise for the rear delts…exercises that move your body through space activate more muscle fibers than exercises that simply move the resistance. This exercise accomplishes both types of movements at the same time!

When your left arm is vertical, you should be laying flat on your back again. Carefully switch the dumbell over to your right hand then lay your left arm flat on the ground, palm facing up. As before, lower the dumbell down and around and roll onto your left side, pushing down against the ground with your entire left arm, using the left arm to control the descent.

Be absolutely sure to keep your legs stiff and perfectly straight through the entire exercise. If your knees are bent or your feet are on the floor, you will be more likely to push against the ground with your feet, removing tension from the arm that’s pushing against the floor. ALL the pushing should be done at the shoulder.

Keep repeating this maneuver for a full set of 6 to 8 reps. It will take a few sets through to get an idea of how much weight you can use so don’t be afraid to experiment. If you use too much weight, you won’t be able to control the descent of the dumbell and it will drop down into your other hand. If you use too light a weight, you won’t feel the exercise as strongly, so be sure to add weight if and when you can.

WHY THIS EXERCISE IS SO EFFECTIVE:

This exercise is extremely effective for a number of reasons:

1. No lower back stress. Since you’re lying flat on your back with your legs straight, it puts zero pressure on the lower back. There is some cross-tension in the back due to the opposing movements of the arms, however. The body position of this exercise also eliminates much of the blood pressure problem that occurs with the standard bent-over exercise (this exercise does require some abdominal stabilization, which will have an effect on blood pressure - no more so than any other exercise, however).

2. It’s a body-moving exercise. As I explained above, exercises that move your body through space will activate more muscle fibers.

3. You get tension through a greater range of motion of the rear delt. Rather than just getting tension in the contracted position of the exercise, you get it almost all the way from start to finish. Granted, you lose tension at the top, but supersetting or following this exercise with a variation of the standard rear delt lateral raises will address this.

4. You get an extremely effective and controllable negative on the rear delts. The negative or lowering portion of the movement of a standard bent-over lateral raise is extremely difficult to control and properly target to the rear delts due to the position of your body and the tendency for the larger muscles of the upper back to take over. This exercise eliminates that problem and forces ALL the tension of the negative onto both rear delts at the same time (the arm with the dumbell fighting the lowering and the arm on the floor, pushing against the ground). These two opposing forces allow for an extremely intense and effective negative (you’ll feel this one for days the first time you do it).

CONCLUSION:

If you’ve never felt your rear delts after a shoulder workout, this exercise will help you feel EXACTLY where those are! Regular use of this exercise will help you develop your rear delts to their maximum potential far more quickly and effectively than any other single exercise you can do for them.

For pictures on how to perform this exercise, please click-here.

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Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of".

He can be contacted at betteru@fitstep.com .

As a long-time trainer, I’ve learned a LOT of lessons about building muscle and losing fat. But nothing beats the learning curve of my first year of training. I didn’t always make good progress. In my first year of training, I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of things the hard way. I also did some things quite right completely by accident! Have a read through some of the most critical lessons I learned in the very first year of my training career.

IN THE BEGINNING…

I wanted nothing more than to get big and strong. I had been an endurance athlete all through high school (cross-country running, speed skating, skiing) but wanted to make a change. I was 17 years old and skinny and jumped into weight training with both feet. I saved up some money, bought the Cybergenics supplement program (mistake #1! - basically that was just an expensive multivitamin) and started training. It was June of 1991, just heading into summer.

I had a good program and I started getting stronger right away but wasn’t really gaining much muscle. I was, however, getting absolutely ripped to the bone!

By the end of the summer, I still weighed about 150 lbs soaking wet (right where I started 4 months earlier) but I swear I was about 4 or 5% bodyfat. When you can see the division line between your upper pecs and lower pecs without flexing the chest, you know you’re at low bodyfat!

LESSON #1

I wasn’t eating NEARLY enough or frequently enough and wasn’t getting enough protein. I would rollerblade or bike to the gym first thing in the morning and do my workout, eating NOTHING immediately after training. I would rollerblade home then eat a bowl of cereal. Then I would go to work as a lifeguard the rest of the day, eating maybe once or twice more that day with my largest meal being dinner.

THEN IT WAS OFF TO UNIVERSITY…

Having just graduated from high school, I enrolled in university that fall. I had learned my lesson about not eating enough and I was determined to make up for it.

And make up for it I did…with cafeteria food! Some people drink too much their first year of college - I ate too much.

Not to knock the food service there, but I’m just sure they deep-fried the salad. To show you my knowledge of nutrition at the time, I would (in the interest of trying to keep fat levels in my diet down) order fried eggs and cut out the yolks, eating only the whites (which were shiny with overused cooking oil). All this never realizing that I would have been better off cutting off the whites and eating the yolks (that’s where the fat-emulsifying lecithin and the majority of the good nutrients in the egg are!).

Eight months later, at the end of my first year of school, I was 70 pounds heavier, probably about half of which was actually muscle mass. At one point, I sat down and calculated my caloric intake on some of my "big eating" days and found it to be almost 9,000 calories per day!

LESSON #2

When I learned my lesson about eating more to gain muscle, I didn’t learn the lesson that you can eat WAY too much and you can easily eat the wrong types of foods. Sure, I got big and strong, but I probably went from 5% bodyfat to 15 to 20% bodyfat at the same time. NOT the results I was looking for! What I needed to do was eat more, certainly, but also eat a better quality of food.

That, plus I’m sure all the "Weight Gain 3000" type of supplements I was taking didn’t help matters! Looking back on the ingredients, it was mostly cheap milk protein and maltodextrin (a high glycemic, cheap carb source).

TRAINING AT UNIVERSITY…

As I was eating more at University, I also ramped up my training. I would try and do more and more sets and use more and more weight. Because I was eating so much more, I was still making great progress! Plus, being then 18 years old, I could beat the tar out of myself in the gym and still recover from it pretty much without a problem.

I was seeing increases in strength and bodyweight on almost a daily basis. But then something happened…something that opened up my eyes…one workout I was in the gym for almost 2 and a half hours!

LESSON #3

I was training WAY too long and with too many sets. I was still making progress but only because I was eating so much. Little did I know, I could actually make BETTER progress by cutting my training time WAY down. From that day on, I always stopped my workouts at the 1 hour mark, no matter where I was at in the program. And it did wonders for my results. I think the week after I started cutting back, my strength shot up and my bodyweight went up 10 pounds. THAT opened my eyes.

In the Spring Semester, I tried a program that, if you’ve been training awhile, may be familiar with: Serious Growth by Leo Costa. At that point, I started training twice a day, six days a week, but only 45 minutes per session, at the most. Still eating a ton of food every day, I made excellent progress with this system and learned about the benefits of keeping your eyes on (and cycling) training volume.

BUT I TOTALLY NEGLECTED CARDIO TRAINING…

At the start of the eight months when I was furiously trying to increase my bodyweight, I had read that when trying to gain muscle, you should reduce cardio training. The aerobic work could burn up calories that could be used by the body for building muscle and might interfere physiologically with the muscle-building process.

Well, I took that a little too far and cut cardio training completely out. My thought was, I was doing cardio in the summer (blading to the gym and back) and didn’t gain any muscle. When I was endurance training, I didn’t gain any muscle. So maybe cutting it out was necessary. So I didn’t even hardly walk up flights of stairs unless I had to.

LESSON #4

Too much cardio training (especially long-duration cardio training) CAN interfere with muscle growth, sure, but as I’ve learned since that time, SOME cardio training should always be a part of any mass-building program. The key is to do the RIGHT kind of cardio training (i.e. interval training, which can actually help the muscle-building process).

Let me put it this way, it’s nice to be big and strong but when you’re big and fat and strong and lose your breath going up a flight of stairs, you’re not exactly at the pinnacle of health. Plus, think of it is this way…you NEED good cardiovascular functioning when training for muscle mass. What pumps blood and nutrients to the muscles? What helps you recover faster in between sets?

Cardio and muscle-building are not mutually exclusive concepts. I include it in ALL my muscle-building programs now.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR?

Well, at that point, being big and strong but big and fat, I decided I needed to burn off of the excess (the old bulk-and-cut concept). But then I made a HUGE mistake. I went back to similar habits that got me lean the previous summer. I didn’t eat nearly enough to support the muscle mass that I had built and I didn’t eat enough protein.

I also started running again, which at this point having not done any cardio training for 8 months, was a HARD lesson to learn. Imagine going from being a 150 lb cross-country runner who could do 5 km in about 15 minutes to being a 220 lb weightlifter who couldn’t even jog slowly for more than 3 minutes straight!

Now, even though I was TRYING to do long-duration cardio, it actually resembled interval training more than anything because I had to stop and walk every few minutes. As I got in better cardio shape, I started running longer distances straight through (I would have been better off sticking with the intervals - little did I know!).

And I did lose weight and did lose some fat but I lost a LOT of muscle along with it. Nothing is more depressing than losing what you’ve worked so hard to build. I didn’t lose all of my muscle and strength but it was enough to set me back.

LESSON #5

What you should eat and how you should train are actually fairly similar when you’re trying to build muscle or burn fat. The main differences lie in how much you’re eating and training variables such as rest periods and cardio frequency. You still need to eat a lot of protein regardless of your goals and you still need to lift heavy, even when on a fat loss program (it’s how you tell your body that it needs to hold onto muscle).

Increasing cardio frequency, eating fewer calories and decreasing rest periods in between sets will get the fat burning process moving in the right direction. Don’t starve yourself or go nuts by dramatically increasing your training workload.

SO WHAT HAPPENED IN MY SECOND YEAR OF TRAINING?

That’s a story for another day…it involves going so far in the opposite direction of my first year of training that I actually made my roommate throw out a pot of water he was boiling for spaghetti because he added a pinch of salt (never mind that the sauce we were using had about 20 times that much salt in it already)!

Look for Year Two in the future, but in the meantime, check out more information on fat loss and muscle and strength-building by clicking here or by clicking here:

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Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of"

It’s safe to say that muscle soreness is something EVERY trainer has experienced at some point in their career. Severity of muscle soreness (known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short) can range from mild discomfort when you move to the point of being almost crippling.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is "should you train when your muscles are still sore?" The answer is not quite as simple as some people make it out to be, though. Many trainers will tell you "if the muscle is still sore, don’t train it." And, in truth, for many people that’s the safest answer.

But, in fact, by NOT training when you’re sore, you could actually be missing out on results AND slowing down your recovery!

So what is muscle soreness? Muscle soreness is basically damage to the muscle fibers as a result of training. Without going into great detail on how it happens and how the recovery process occurs (which is beyond the scope of this article), muscle soreness is your body telling you that it’s in need of repair.

Now how can it possibly be GOOD for you to train a muscle again while it’s still sore? Here’s where we get into a contentious area. After reading this, you may choose to agree with me or disagree with me (if you’ve read my articles before, you know I’m anything BUT conventional) but all I ask is that you consider my arguments…

Now, if you’ve never trained a muscle hard two days in a row or trained it while it was still quite sore, you’re going to be in for a shock at how unique a stimulus it can actually be. Sure there are arguments against doing that, e.g. the muscle hasn’t fully recovered and you’ll be tearing it down even more.

But consider this…from an adapatation standpoint, of the following two scenarios, what would give your body the greater stimulus for growth?

If you train the muscle hard once, you’ll get a good growth stimulus. Your body immediately starts sending nutrients to the damaged area and starts rebuilding. When the muscle is fully recovered and is no longer sore, you train the muscle again and restart the process. This is the standard way of training and it usually means directly training a muscle twice a week with at least 2 or 3 days in between sessions for that specific muscle.

In the next scenario, you train the muscle hard then the next day, train it hard again. Recovery is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore when you train it on the second day.

Here’s the key…if you think about it, would the body see this second scenario as a greater threat to its survival? Would the body then ramp up its recovery processes to try and prepare for the next challenge, which it (from its recent experience of being hit with the same hard stimulus two days in a row) thinks is coming again very soon?

In my experience, this absolutely happens. The body’s response to training is a very simple "stimulus-response" system, but your body is also fully capable of sending more resources where more resources are perceived as being needed.

When you eat, your body sends more blood to the digestive system. Your brain doesn’t tell it to do that, it just happens. When you get hot, your body produces perspiration. The same thing happens with training. For example, when you train your biceps, your body sends blood and nutrients to the biceps for recovery. It doesn’t send it to the calves if the calves haven’t been worked.

If you train your biceps hard two days in a row, your body sees this as a big threat to the biceps and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically protect the biceps. If the biceps are still sore… VERY big threat! THEN you allow the biceps to recover. The two days of training has built much greater recovery momentum, getting more results out of your training.

Here’s yet another advantage to training a muscle when it’s still sore…even if you don’t train it hard, you will still be sending blood (and therefore nutrients) to that muscle, helping it to recover faster than if you didn’t train it at all. So even if you’re not up for a hard workout for a sore muscle, even giving it some light to moderate work will still help with recovery.

So I’ve talked about training a muscle two days in a row…what about when you’re scheduled to train it a couple of days later and it’s still sore at that point? The same concepts apply - your body will STILL perceive that as a greater threat and increase recovery.

The only times I would NOT recommend training when sore is if the soreness causes you to use poor form in your exercises or if the soreness is so bad that it makes the exercises too painful to do.

For instance, if you just did deadlifts for the first time in your life and the next day, you have a VERY hard time sitting down without falling down into the seat, you may want to wait a bit before doing deadlifts again. Your form will change because of the pain and it could lead to injury.

But if your muscles are a bit stiff or sore, go ahead and train them. Your body will ramp up your recovery processes in response.

How do I know training the body with this frequency can be effective? I’ll give the best example I know (WARNING - if you’re a proponent of high-intensity, very infrequent training, this will make you shiver in your boots!). This is NOT a program I would recommend lightly to anyone because at this time, being on vacation from work, I was basically only eating, sleeping and training…no stress, no extraneous activity.

This was one of the most extraordinary programs I ever put myself on, not only in terms of workload but results as well. It involved doing total body workouts twice a day, six days a week. This meant 12 total-body workouts per week, increasing the workload every week.

I used partial training, negative training, low reps and high reps. For the entire first week, I was EXTREMELY sore but I stuck with it and trained everything twice a day, no matter how sore I was.

After 3 weeks of this training, I backed off, still doing 12 training sessions per week but splitting the body in half - I was still working my whole body every single day and doing partials and negatives.

During the back-off phase, my recovery processes were practically unstoppable! NOTHING I did could make me sore (and believe me, I tried!) and my strength and muscle mass shot way up.

Conventional wisdom would believe I would be completely totaled at the end of a program like this, overtrained, small and weak. My results? In 6 weeks, I went from 208 lbs in bodyweight to 228 lbs. I went from a 295 bench press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep. I did a partial top-range lockout squat with 1100 lbs for 150 reps (not a typo!).

This is a VERY extreme example of training through muscle soreness and using maximum workout frequency. But the take-home lesson from it is this: you CAN get great results by training even when you’re sore! Your body will react to the stress and ramp up recovery in response.

One quick tip: if you want to decrease post-workout soreness, try taking 500 mg of Vitamin C about an hour before your workout. This helps protect against muscle soreness.

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Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of"

He can be contacted at betteru@fitstep.com.

When it comes to the topic of sports nutrition there are many myths and fallacies that float around like some specter in the shadows. They pop up when you least expect them and throw a monkey wrench into the best laid plans of the hard training athlete trying to make some headway. Of all the myths that surface from time to time, the protein myth seems to be the most deep rooted and pervasive. It just won’t go away. The problem is, exactly who, or which group, is perpetuating the "myth" cant be easily identified. You see, the conservative nutritional/medical community thinks it is the bodybuilders who perpetuate the myth that athletes need more protein and we of the bodybuilding community think it is them (the mainstream nutritional community) that is perpetuating the myth that athletes don’t need additional protein! Who is right?

Myth #1 "Athletes don’t need extra protein"

In a recent review paper on the subject one of the top researchers in the field (Dr. Peter Lemon) states "…These data suggest that the RDA for those engaged in regular endurance exercise should be about 1.2-1.4 grams of protein/kilogram of body mass (150%-175% of the current RDA) and 1.7 - 1.8 grams of protein/kilogram of body mass per day (212%-225% of the current RDA) for strength exercisers."

Another group of researchers in the field of protein metabolism have come to similar conclusions repeatedly. They found that strength training athletes eating approximately the RDA/RNI for protein showed a decreased whole body protein synthesis (losing muscle jack!) on a protein intake of 0.86 grams per kilogram of bodyweight. They came to an almost identical conclusion as that of Dr. Lemon in recommending at least 1.76g per kilogram of bodyweight per day for strength training athletes for staying in positive nitrogen balance/increases in whole body protein synthesis.

This same group found in later research that endurance athletes also need far more protein than the RDA/RNI and that men catabolize (break down) more protein than women during endurance exercise.

They concluded "In summary, protein requirements for athletes performing strength training are greater than sedentary individuals and are above the current Canadian and US recommended daily protein intake requirements for young healthy males." All I can say to that is, no sh%# Sherlock?!

Bottom line? High protein diets are far better for reducing bodyfat, increasing muscle mass, and helping the hard training bodybuilder achieve his (or her!) goals, and it is obvious that endurance athletes will also benefit from diets higher in protein than the worthless and outdated RDAs.

Myth #2 "High protein diets are bad for you"

Myth #3 "All proteins are created equal"

Conclusion

Over the years the above myths have been floating around for so long they have just been accepted as true, even though there is little to no research to prove it and a whole bunch of research that disproves it! I hope this article has been helpful in clearing up some of the confusion for people over the myths surrounding protein and athletes. Of course now I still have to address even tougher myths such as "all fats make you fat and are bad for you," "supplements are a waste of time," and my personal favorite, "a calorie is a calorie." The next time someone gives you a hard time about your high protein intake, copy the latest study on the topic and give it to em. If that does not work, role up the largest bodybuilding magazine you can find and hit hem over the head with it!

About the Author - William D. Brink
 
Will Brink is a columnist, contributing consultant, and writer for various health/fitness, medical, and bodybuilding publications. His articles relating to nutrition, supplements, weight loss, exercise and medicine can be found in such publications as Lets Live, Muscle Media 2000, MuscleMag International, The Life Extension Magazine, Muscle n Fitness, Inside Karate, Exercise For Men Only, Body International, Power, Oxygen, Penthouse, Women’s World and The Townsend Letter For Doctors. He is the author of Priming The Anabolic Environment and Weight Loss Nutrients Revealed. He is the Consulting Sports Nutrition Editor and a monthly columnist for Physical magazine and an Editor at Large for Power magazine. Will graduated from Harvard University with a concentration in the natural sciences, and is a consultant to major supplement, dairy, and pharmaceutical companies.

He has been co author of several studies relating to sports nutrition and health found in peer reviewed academic journals, as well as having commentary published in JAMA. He runs the highly popular web site BrinkZone.com which is strategically positioned to fulfill the needs and interests of people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge. The BrinkZone site has a following with many sports nutrition enthusiasts, athletes, fitness professionals, scientists, medical doctors, nutritionists, and interested lay people. William has been invited to lecture on the benefits of weight training and nutrition at conventions and symposiums around the U.S. and Canada, and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs.