How To Build Your Shoulders, Arms, and Glutes Before Summer | Mind Pump 2825

Summertime is here. We're going to talk about how you can sculpt some body parts that look great on the beach. Delts, arms, and glutes. We're going to talk about rules. We're going to talk about programming, best exercises. Let's go. This is what used to win bikini shows. Oh yeah. I mean, arms, delts, and glutes are really what bring the body together, especially for women. You mentioned bikini shows like this is like. Yeah, I would. And if I would order them, I would order them in glutes, shoulders, then arms in that, in that order of priority. Um, so when, when I trained obviously a lot of, uh, female competitors and, you know, you're presenting your physique on a, on a stage, uh, in a bikini. And the, the girls at one shows had, especially glutes and shoulders. Those are like the, a lot of times arms will look really good when you have good shoulders. Like, cause everybody has biceps and triceps. And if you can separate that look with the shoulders, it gives a very sculpted looking arm. And so that was when it came to the programming, that's what was unique about how I programmed first, let's say like a female competitor versus like a male competitor, or just a normal person. Like when, uh, we were presenting this symmetry, this symmetrical, uh, balanced physique, uh, a lot of times these were the main focus points of, of how I program that. Yeah. Uh, they're, um, they're definitely body parts that, um, really contribute, I would say the most to the, what we consider aesthetics, right. To the look that people are looking for. You mentioned the delts, um, really well-developed delts make the arms look good. Yes. Um, and so, uh, that makes it real important for the upper body. And then of course, glutes, uh, that's like a big priority with people's training now. Uh, glutes are important functionally and athletically as well. Uh, strong glutes make you fast and make you powerful. Uh, but well-developed glutes just look good. And it's not a muscle that you can fake. You build it. Uh, and you can build it. You definitely can build it. Yeah. In fact, all the muscles that we just talked about can be, um, radically changed through the proper application of strength training. And what I mean by proper application, uh, a lot of what I'm talking about is programming and programming in fitness jargon. What that essentially means is, uh, the combination of, uh, sets, reps, exercises, the organization of them, the order of them, the weekly schedule, the monthly schedule, the larger cycles, which could be two or three months long. Like that's, uh, what programming is. Um, and that makes a huge difference. And what a lot of people understand about body parts, their, their knowledge is typically limited to exercises. Like I know exercises for body parts, but where you place them, of course, how you perform them, that's real important, but where you place them and then how you put together the entire program makes a huge difference. I mean, a well written program will produce 50 to 80 percent, uh, better results than one. That's a huge, huge difference. I actually really enjoy this conversation because, um, it is nuanced and, uh, getting back to, and I know this, this applies to everybody, but why I keep drawing back to the bikini competitors is because those were all, I never got a bikini competitor who had never lifted weights. These are already people that have been lifting weights for a long time. But when I would like, so just like a normal client before I take a competitor through anything, it's like first week is just tracking what you do. I want to know how you train. I want to know what you're eating. I want to know your mood, all the, all the things. And I have never had a client. Uh, so that I did not radically change the way they lifted weights. Uh, and I think. It was always programming. Yeah. And I think that's because, uh, women still, men are susceptible to this too also. But, uh, I think women are sold a lot of these movements that are not the best for development. They're designed around sweating and burning calories. And it's all about the feel. Yeah. A lot of times it's just, uh, way too many reps and they're just squeezing the muscles as opposed to super setting exercises, short rest periods, isolation movements. And so a lot of times I would just radically shift that and make a few other tweaks nutritionally. So that, and we, boom, we just see this huge difference. I'm so glad you said what you're saying, what you're saying. Cause when we think sculpt, we tend to think fat loss. And now there's, there's a component there, right? There's definitely a component there of very little, not having a lot about the very last step that the majority of sculpting is building. Like if you want shoulders that look like you work out, if you want arms that look like you work out, if you want glutes that look round and full, like you work out, um, you have to build them. Okay. And not only that, but he, but having a little bit more muscle in your delts at the same body fat percentage automatically looks leaner. Yeah. So in other words, you don't even have to get leaner if you just built your delts a little bit. Now, suddenly you've got definition and shape. This is of course, especially true for the glutes where a little bit of body fat on the glutes looks good anyway. Um, but it's true for all muscles, a well-developed member, built muscle looks leaner at higher body fat percentages. And the building part of sculpting is what people typically miss, especially women because they're so typically rushed to get lean. It's like if you had more muscle, it would get easier to get lean anyway, but also you're just going to look better in those muscles. You highlighted in the beginning. It's like it builds out that ratio. So that actually you look, uh, more thin and what they're desiring from that effect because of the fact that they built and develop these muscles, it gives you that hourglass kind of figure. I mean, I would say all of sculpting is the building process. The part where you lean out or diet or cut is just revealing the work of the sculpting. It's all you're doing. It's like you, all the real work is done in, uh, the off season. Once you go into prep or another way of saying that, once you decide I want to lean out, right, get lose body fat. At that point, you're just revealing the hard work that you did into building and sculpting the body. And if you're not choosing the right exercises, you're not hitting protein intake and you're not hitting in a sufficient calorie surplus. You're not going to do that, right? You're in this perpetual cycle of pushing your body in the, all these exercises, hoping that your body's going to burn, but not giving it the tools, not doing it. It's like, and this is an area that a lot of both men and women get stuck here of, you know, training in the gym four or five, six days a week and eating really good, but then not seeing change in their body. Yeah. And along those lines, uh, the best rule of thumb, uh, or one of the best, uh, things to focus on is getting stronger. Okay. So you can burn a muscle where it burns and it gets tired and gets fatigued and he gets sore. None of those are good predictors of any change in shape or definition of the muscle. None of that. Okay. Uh, it just means that you exhausted or tired the muscle, a better predictor of whether or not the muscle is going to look different is strength. If you get consistently stronger over a period of time, you know, if you, if you're training properly for a 90 day period and you've added 30 pounds to an exercise, you're going to look different. I can't say that for if the muscle got sore this many times or if it burned really bad during these exercises or you got really sweaty during your workout, you can do all of that look exactly the same, but if you consistently get stronger, your muscles are gonna look different. Your body's going to look different. So it's one of the best predictors. Of sculpting. So that would be the first thing I would say is get strong. In fact, if you focus on getting stronger for most people, especially for women, you're going to get great results from that muscle mommy 50% off right now. Go to maps muscle mommy.com use the code muscle mommy 50 for the discount. Back to the show. The second thing is when you're looking at your workout programming, a good rule of thumb, it's not a hard rule, but it's a general rule. Most of the time you want to do a, you want to focus your energy on the compound lifts before you do the isolation lifts. So compound lifts, you know, there's two general categories of exercises, compound and isolation, and you can loosely break it down and say compound lifts involve more than one moving joint in an isolation movement really involves one joint. So an example of this for the delts, a compound exercise would be an overhead press. So I'm using the, the, the, the shoulder joint and the elbow joint. An isolation movement would be a standing lateral. That's an isolation exercise. Uh, when you're doing your workout, you want to prioritize the compound lift in the beginning of the workout. Why? This is where you're going to lift the most weight. This is we're going to apply the most tension. This is most taxing. This is where you want the strength gains. You want all the strength gains to go to the compound lifts because they give you so much. You're going to build the most muscle from those specific exercises. And then two, you want to be able to perform them effectively. And so like fatigue itself is something you, you don't want to factor that in quite as much. So that's why prioritizing it first, you know, you're able to eliminate that. And then whatever you have, you know, left energy wise, we're going to put into isolation. I'm so glad you, you brought this up as one of the, one of the main points, because, uh, I was actually really surprised at the controversy that we got on the, on the shoulder of the ranking of the shoulder stuff, because it was, uh, how to sculpt, you know, like best exercises sculpt your delts. And we put lateral raises as toward the bottom of that. And that's because it's not everybody's go-to probably. That's why. Yes. And it's like, it's not a bad exercise, but if I'm going to rank it right, if I'm having, it's not going to come close to competing with the compound movement, right? There's just, there's just better compound lifts for the shoulders that will build and grow, which again, to our point earlier, it will sculpt the shoulders better than a isolation exercise that by the way, you can't even load very much. In fact, they don't lend themselves well to loading. No, you know, and then they, your traps end up overtaking the movement. And the point is to build these delts. And this is why that, that movement was ranked so low on our list, but yet got all kinds of heat. And I was like, Oh wow, I'm surprised so many people don't realize this and are out there probably doing all kinds of lateral raises when it would behoove them to be focused more on compound lifts that will build more of their shoulders. So generally speaking, you know, we're talking about delts, uh, arms, which is biceps, triceps, and glutes. The first exercise in your workout for those body parts should be a compound lift, and then you can follow up with isolation. So compound lifts for delts would be like overhead press compound lifts for triceps would be dips close to your bench press. Believe it or not, there's a compound lift for biceps. A lot of people don't know this, but you can do what's called a, a pull down with a curl, uh, emphasis. So it's literally like a, like a reverse grip or supinated grip pull down. But rather than focusing on the back, you're trying to do a curl as you come down. That's a compound lift for the biceps and then glutes. You have like your squats, your dead lifts, your hip thrusts. These are compound lifts, uh, that you can load heavy to build the glutes and then you can move into the isolation stuff. The other thing is you want to prioritize these body parts at the beginning of the workout. And you also want to prioritize them with the more, with more of the volume. So what do I mean by that? Okay. So I'll use delts because I think this is a good example. Is it a bulk of the training? Yeah. So typically when you're, when you're doing a workout, like a common split that someone may do is what's known as a PPL split. So this is called a push pull legs splits. Very common way to break up the body parts. So the push day would include chest, shoulders, and triceps. Pull day would be back biceps. And then the, uh, leg day would be, of course, legs. So let's, let's talk about the push day. Almost always in a workout, people will do chest before shoulders. Okay. Now that generally makes sense. Generally speaking, you want your delts are so active in chest exercises and the chest exercises are heavier. So like a bench press, you'll do more than you will. Let's say an overhead press. So typically you start your workout that way. But if you're, if your focus is delts, if you're like, look, I don't care about really developing my pecs, I'm sculpting of a woman's physique. This is where we'll go first. Yes. Yep. I've never had a woman come to me and be like, I want to build my chest up more. It's always, if you want, it's, this is where, this is where programming gets a little bit different, uh, with men and women, uh, especially when we're talking about aesthetics, right? Is your, you're going to focus on a muscle group that makes a difference. Like with women, a lot of, some of my female clients, we did hardly any chest training and put that extra volume into building the delts. And, and you have to account for that too, because you don't want to just do more shoulders, which is a mistake that people make is they do everything. And then they slap on more volume on the shoulders. It's no, if I'm going to take from anywhere, I'm probably going to take from the chest and I'm going to add the volume in the shoulders. And so back to your point about volume, uh, matters and understanding how you organize this and where you take, because just adding more shoulders, because someone says, Oh, this is how you should build. It's like, well, then you're doing too much. And so there's a delicate dance there. That's right. So you want to do more work for the body parts you're trying to develop, but that doesn't mean you just add more work to your overall workout. You take away some work from other body parts. Your body can only tolerate so much total work or damage. Okay. And if your goal is again, to develop your delts, Adam gave a great example, take away some of the work for chest and throw it onto shoulders and prioritize it at the beginning of the workout. Same thing with glutes and even arms. Look, if you're looking like, I just want to, I'm not that interested in developing my back a lot, but I want my biceps to look really good or my triceps to look really good. You might even do those before the larger body parts. If the goal is to sculpt and shape a particular body part. Row nutrition provides excellent supplements utilizing liposomal technology. Now this technology allows the compound to be utilized far more effectively. Liposomal creatine better than creating liposomal glutathione far better than regular glutathione NAD. You want the mitochondrial energy benefits. You want to use NAD and feel a difference. You got to use it with liposomal technology and row nutrition is the best in the industry for that. Go check them out. Get 20% off, go to row nutrition.com that's R H O nutrition.com forward slash discount forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump to get that 20% off discount back to the show. Um, then we have, you know, kind of two ways you could train your body with strength training and it's a good idea to do both. You have your heavy days and you have your light days, heavy days, reps are low and I'm just trying to be strong. Lighter days. I'm focusing more on getting a pump. My reps are much higher, probably around 12 to 15 and I'm just trying to get good blood flow. It's a good combination or way to alternate your training or to add some kind of novelty. And so both of them have value. Both of them run out of value. If that's all you do is the point that I'm trying to, well, this really prioritizes strength and recovery. That's what I like about this is you have a day where I'm really focused on going heavy, which I'm going to put extra stress on the body and really promote getting stronger, which we know in turn will build muscle. And then I follow that up with a lighter, a lighter training sessions, which now is more, I'm still going through, I'm still training, but it's, it's more facilitating recovery and rest resting me up to get ready again to do another one of those. Another way to do this would be to do phases. So I would do a few weeks where I'm going heavy and then a few weeks where I'm going lighter or the rep ranges change would be a different way to put it. My rep ranges, you know, next few weeks is five or six. The next few weeks is let's say 12 to 15 and it's a great way to keep the body progressing because the body does adapt pretty quickly to a specific rep range. If you just stay there, you have to change it all the time. Next up is look, you want to sculpt your body. You better eat a high protein diet. By the way, you better eat a high protein diet even if you're trying to get lean. Okay. Even if your goal is to try to lose body fat, high protein preserves muscle better than a non high protein diet. If you want to build, which is what we're trying to do, you definitely need to have high protein. Now what does this look like? One gram of protein per pound of body weight or per pound of target body weight. So if you want to weigh 140 pounds or 150 pounds, that's how many grams of protein you're going to eat on a daily basis. Makes a big difference. If I'm, if you're, I'll just give an example. If you have two identical women, everything's identical, both of them 145 pounds. One of them is eating 80 grams of protein a day. The other one's eating 145 grams of protein a day. Even if everything else is the same, even if the calories are the same, so the 80 gram of protein is having more carbs, fats, whatever make up the difference. The 145 gram protein person is going to build muscle faster and better than the 80 gram protein person. It makes a big difference. Does. And here's the thing with it. You can't make up protein. So you can't have like low days and they go, okay, I'm going to make up for it today. It's every day. It's everyday consistent is when it really makes a difference. Your body doesn't store protein like it does carbohydrates or body fat or fat protein is every single day. Be very consistent with high protein. You also need good sleep. Uh, trying to build and shape the body, even trying to get lean on not good, consistent sleep. Good luck. You're playing this on hard mode, if not impossible mode, uh, with porcelain. Those are two no exceptions. That's right. I mean, it's like you said, like every goal, it's like these two make such a massive impact. In whether or not you're going to get anywhere towards your goal. Well, and it really needs to reflect what your training intensity is looking like too, because that seems to be the easy lever that everybody can pull, push harder in my workout, train to failure, get after my workouts, but then not pay a lot of attention to how they've been resting that week. And you need to learn to be able to, this is a lot of my coaching when I'm coaching competitors is like, how did you sleep last night? Yeah. Like, okay. Even though today I wanted you to really get after it or chase PR, this is not a day we do that. Like you need to back off, go through, we're going to go through the workout still. We're going to do it, but then back off a little bit right now. And I think this is something that we, we, we tend to ignore. And it's like when you are in the build in scope, you're trying to build muscle. It's so the recovery piece of this is such a large piece of the puzzle that I will scale back on intensity and or volume in a training routine. If my client isn't getting adequate rest because of how important it is. Oftentimes I've had clients who were doing everything pretty well. Uh, consistent, decent strength training. All I did was have them bump their protein and get better sleep. And it was miraculous how dramatic their bodies. I mean, I'm not talking subtle, but it wasn't like they subtly got stronger and subtly body. So it was dramatic. After a few weeks of this, it was like, Holy cow. Yeah. What has happened to my body? Yeah. I mean, exercising, that's just the, the catalyst to get you towards, uh, you know, the building process. The building process is really in the recovery and the sleep and eating. And it's also, it's the stress catalyst. So it doesn't, it doesn't take much to send a signal to the body that, Hey, we need, Hey, this person's going to do this thing. Lifting weights. Usually less than you think. Yeah. And so if you are hammering that and you're not getting adequate protein and rest, boy, you're going to really stall out. You can weigh back off the training and really focus on the protein and the sleep and boom, all of a sudden you see that person get stronger and add muscle. Totally. All right. So let's list a best exercises for each body part that we just talked about. Uh, we'll include a compound, I guess, in isolation. We'll start with delts. I think I named one of them already. I overhead press. Yep. It doesn't get better than an overhead press your money exercise. Now I like standing overhead press. You can do these seated, but I do like standing because it does involve a little bit of upper back stability. It's good for shoulder mobility and honestly, all things being equal. Uh, it's just a better exercise. Does that mean you can't do these seated? You can, you definitely can. There's a lot of varieties and versions of overhead presses you can do with dumbbells, barbells. You can do an Arnold press, a machine press. Uh, but overhead press is a must when it comes to the compound lift. I'm going to also throw a little curve ball here since we're just talking about best exercises and it doesn't fall in the category of your compound lift and that's a rear delt fly. That's my favorite isolation. That's where I was. Okay. So I don't know if you're going to go, you're going to go into isolation. Because I just, that to me, that's, that ends up taking a high priority, even though it kind of is counterintuitive or conflicting with what we're talking about with compound lifts because of its neglect. That's right. The rear delt doesn't really get hit. It's just, it's, it's just, it's, everybody does front delt type of movements or lateral type of stuff. And when you talk about sculpting a body and a physique and the shoulder in particular, building that round shoulder makes such a huge difference. Oh, I, I ranked the rear, the rear delt fly higher than the side lateral. Oh yeah. Definitely better. Which is, I think that's one of the things that we did in that, in that when we ranked the list that got controversy, that's right. No, it's for aesthetics. That's what makes the delts look round. Yes. A hundred percent biceps. I like the curl grip pull down where you're focusing on curling as a compound lift isolation exercise for bicep. It really, at this point I don't care. It could be a preacher curl. It could be a standing curl. It could be a, you know, an incline curl. Yeah, actually I like incline curls because it places the bicep in a stretch a lot. But there, yeah, you're good with that. Triceps, close grip bench press is my favorite compound lift and then overhead tricep extension just because of the stretch it places on the long head of the tricep. And I would rank that higher than even a tricep press down for overall. Oh, I would too. Oh yeah. I definitely would. And then glutes. This is easy. You guys barbell squats and hip thrusts. Like you can't get it better than those two exercise for deadlifts are great. Sumo deadlifts are great. Romanian deadlifts are great. They're all great. So civic squat and hip thrust. But if you had to pick two squat and hip thrusts like you're, and you can hit thrusts before you squat squat before you hit thrusts. I really don't care. Uh, but I think they're both, I mean that's why we held that masterclass for that was because it's, if you just, if you get really strong on the hip thrusts, you can get really strong and squat your butts. You're going to have a butt. You're going to build a butt from that. Now we have a program called muscle mommy and it is a well-programmed strength training program with an emphasis on the body parts that we just talked about. So it was written in a way to where, you know, the typical woman says, Hey, these are the body parts I really want to focus on. And so it was written in that way where they're prioritized both volume and priority in the workout. And it's written, like we said, with the best exercises first and the supporting ones after that. And it's 50% off for this episode right now. So it's half off and it's a full program. You've got video demos in their sets, reps, exercises, the whole deal. You go to maps, muscle mommy.com. The code is muscle mommy 50 and that gets you 50% off. You can also find us on Instagram. It's mind pump media. We'll see you there.