How can I target certain muscles in isolation? I do my compounds first but when I do secondary movements like Rows, Facepulls, and most pulling exercises my traps take over. It has Pros because my traps are big, but I can’t feel my rear delts on band pull aparts etc. Any advice?
Have a look at this:
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Many people have trouble MMCing with their rear delts. (I know I do.) One thing worth trying is to feel it from the ‘outside’ first; ie, literally, with your hand…
For rear delts, this is most easily accomplished via one-arm cable raises. Stand facing a low pulley set on a light weight. Hold the cable with one hand, hand at your side, palm facing your thigh. Keep the arm relatively straight. Now slowly extend at the shoulder joint (ie, move your hand up and behind you). While doing this, place your free hand on the rear delt that is working, and feel it contract. Make little adjustments to your hand, arm and shoulder positions as needed to maximize the feeling of contraction. Once you can feel it well from the outside, transfer your attention to the feeling of the contracting muscle itself. That’s what it feels like to work rear delts.
Also: Train rear delts with isolation movements–reverse pec deck, cable work, bent-over DB laterals. You’ll have much less trouble feeling the rear delts in isolation than you will during compound movements. If you still have trouble, do unilateral isolation work, and continue to use your free hand to feel the muscle contract.
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Not a fan of MMC. Focusing on the target muscle will break the natural and efficient movement pattern, and can lead to chronic pain.
Do the movement correctly, with a reasonable weight, reps 8 or over, and the target muscle will be worked as a biproduct of the movement.
If this doesn’t do the trick, you will need to adjust your hand position on the bar(wider or narrower), the path of travel of your elbows(close to your body, or out to the sides), where the bar starts and finishes(eg upper, mid, or lower chest for a bench press) . Experiment and the right combination will pump/work your target muscle without you even needing to mentally focus on the desired area. Once again it is a bi product of doing the exercise, properly for you.
If you want to develop your upper chest with an incline press, but it feels like your delts and triceps are doing most of the work. Just by contracting your upper chest more during the exercise all you are going to get in the long run is rotator cuff trouble. Sure it feels like you are getting more stimulation, but by mentally concentrating on your chest and you are neglecting your stabilisers forcing them out of the movement. Instead adjust the incline level or play around with hand placement etc, until you find a version of the movement that results in the stimulation you are after.
If that doesn’t work you are probably still using too much weight, or perhaps you need to try an entirely different exercise.
because you are shrugging your shoulders without realising.
Lower the weight, concentrate more.
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Go into a deep stretch and make sure you feel your rear delts being stretched. People typically lose the feeling during the negative when they aren’t consciously keeping tension on them. Make sure the load is on your delts at the start. Use your elbows to pull your rear delts towards the pulley handles. Same thing for lats.
I do best isolating my rear delts by shortening the movement. I like reverse cable fly’s. I try to set my shoulder blades so there’s no retraction during the movement. I let my arms cross on front as far as they’ll go and stop when my arms form a 90 degree angle with my torso (like the lockout position of bench press). I also use an overhand grip.
I think about pulling my elbows out.
I also have better luck doing one arm at a time and moving kind of slowly through the movement.
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This is good advice. I also like to work “hard to feel” muscles like delts by isolating the top and bottom halves of the ROM, and to keep constant tension throughout the set. Higher reps are also usually necessary since the traps will tend to take over if the weight is too heavy, but the fibers in the lateral and rear delts seem to require a great deal of TUT to be sufficiently activated.
Chest supported DB swings (see John Meadows shoulder training article) are great for the bottom half of the ROM for rear delts. I’d never experienced soreness (or such an intense, direct pump) in those muscles before trying that exercise. I do basically the same movement with standing DB LRs and it works equally well.
I think band pullaparts suck as an isolation exercise, and they really do nothing for my rear delts. You lose tension completely when the band is stretched out.
Rows are tricky to get the MMC on because most people are taught to pull the weight straight up to their rib cage. Really you need to try to put the DB or machine handle in your hip pocket to really get a good lat contraction. It also helps to keep constant tension by doing a pretty slow negative on every rep, and not straightening your elbows all the way.
This main idea (incomplete ROM to isolate a target muscle) was heresy to me for many years. I’ve progressed quite a bit since I let go of that dogma.
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Consider starting with some targeted isolation work instead, either with decent intensity as an actual pre-exhaust or lighter work for activation. Stiff-arm pulldowns before rows work really well.
The touch technique ED explained is killer, especially with 1-arm reverse cable flyes. I’ve also been playing around with deadstop reverse dumbbell flyes face down on a flat bench as a way to work the top half of the rep.
I like the deadstop technique in general, what they lose in ROM they make up for in activation and muscle firing, just not totally decided about using them for reverse flyes yet.
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One thing I’ve used to hit my rear delts and lateral delts - both of which can be difficult to feel - is on the concentric part of the rep, I begin the rep and insert a tiny dead stop about 5-10% of the way into the lift before continuing - the muscle primes itself as the lift begins, and it allows you to really feel the muscle contracting as you then continue the concentric rep.
Also, if your traps are taking over, you are likely either:
- Not keeping your shoulders down
or - You are pinching your shoulderblades too much
Normally pinching your shoulderblades seems like it’s the right thing to do, posture-wise, but if you spread your shoulderblades during rear delt flyes, the rear delts are the only muscles that CAN bring your arms back. The ‘shoulders-down’ cue refers to not shrugging your shoulders, which can easily happen if you are using too much weight, which is super easy to do with small muscles.
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