I’ve made steady progress on my other lifts, but machine lateral shoulder raises are driving me nuts. For some reason, I’m stuck on this lift. I’ve stayed with it for months, but am not seeing any real progress.
At this point, I guess it’s best to just move on to other lateral shoulder exercises, but my stubborn streak has kept me from doing it until now.
Has this happened to anyone else? I can’t figure out why just this one exercise is a fail for me, when I’m seeing progress on everything else.
My other shoulder lifts are all presses, and have gone up steadily. It’s just the machine lateral raises that suck. Not sure if it’s because it is hitting my lateral delts, or because it’s my only shoulder isolation exercise, and it’s really my tris that are growing.
Dude if you’re doing like 3-4 other pressing movements and then doing these, then I wouldn’t worry about. Your shoulders are proabably just fatigued, in fact maintaing the same weight while increasing weight in the other movements is good since you’re using the same weight even after doing a higher amount of work before it.
Fuckin standing dumbbell curl. WIth good form, I can’t break 60x8 for over a year. To put this in perspective, I can DB preacher curl 50lbs for 6-8 reps. That went up from 35lbs last year.
I haven’t really gotten any stronger on lateral raises in like 8 months lol. Shoulders have gotten quite a bit larger in that time period anyways.
There’s always something you can do different with your form/tempo/angle of a lift so you can keep progressing (even if you don’t get that much stronger).
That’s the way i feel about most isolation exercises.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
In 5/3/1 when you stall, you take a step or 2 backwards (3-4 steps forward, 1-2 steps back is steady progress)
In something like DC you ditch the exercise and come back to it later. By then you should be able to reset and get farther than you did before.
If it were me, I wouldn’t keep repeating what wasn’t working.[/quote]
In my case, I tried switching it up. I went to barbell curls, EZ Curls, Cable curls etc. I’d come back to the DB curls a little weaker and eventually stall at 60 lbs again. Maybe it’s mental.
I don’t think everybody needs to be freaking out about the fact that his lateral raises aren’t going up… maybe it’s just me, but I find that the lift just doesn’t increase by crazy amounts unless you are using looser form/gaining fat too quickly (and is definitely better utilized as a pump exercise, as opposed to a power exercise)…
My two cents, thought, would be switch up the movement… strict DB laterals, looser DB laterals (will allow you to lose much more weight, but some might argue this is just the result of the way the weight is distributed differently - usually closer to body), etc.
Edit: Not to shit on progression - I understand that it is important, but it might be slower for lateral raises and more reliant on major jumps in variations of ones OH pressing, for instance…
Edit #2: Just noticed OP’s routine… scratch what I said until the full routine is posted b/c it looks odd upon first glance…
i did BBB ramp 1 and gained a good amount of strength- lifts went to Squat 315x6, Bench 225x4. then i did ramp 2 of BBB and didnt gain anything. (skipped super growth because i needed a change of pace… thats probably why i didnt gain anything) Now ive gone back to a normal BB type split and ive been getting weaker! i did lose a couple of pounds because i slacked on my eating for a couple days. But now im back to eating big and ive actually gotten weaker. This week= squat 315x3 and bench 225x2. Not sure what to make of this. Im starting at a new gym on monday though, so i’m considering using the 5/3/1 progression model on my main lifts. Or maybe i should do BBB and stick just to ramp 1 this time…hmmm
I wouldn’t be concerned with lateral raise weight, more feeling the motion where it’s supposed to target. Maybe its time to switch to db raise? or cable raises? Are you doing anything for rear delts?
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
In 5/3/1 when you stall, you take a step or 2 backwards (3-4 steps forward, 1-2 steps back is steady progress)
In something like DC you ditch the exercise and come back to it later. By then you should be able to reset and get farther than you did before.
If it were me, I wouldn’t keep repeating what wasn’t working.[/quote]
In my case, I tried switching it up. I went to barbell curls, EZ Curls, Cable curls etc. I’d come back to the DB curls a little weaker and eventually stall at 60 lbs again. Maybe it’s mental.[/quote]
try switching to hammers curls for a while go heavy maybe 6 rep max.
[quote]jwesus wrote:
I wouldn’t be concerned with lateral raise weight, more feeling the motion where it’s supposed to target. Maybe its time to switch to db raise? or cable raises? Are you doing anything for rear delts?[/quote]
I occasionally do reverse flies for rear delts, but it’s not a regular part of my routine.
It sounds like most people haven’t seen a lot of growth from isolated delt work?
[quote]jwesus wrote:
I wouldn’t be concerned with lateral raise weight, more feeling the motion where it’s supposed to target. Maybe its time to switch to db raise? or cable raises? Are you doing anything for rear delts?[/quote]
I occasionally do reverse flies for rear delts, but it’s not a regular part of my routine.
It sounds like most people haven’t seen a lot of growth from isolated delt work?
[/quote]
My shoulders are having dramatic improvements…My shoulder workout is all isolation exercises and if I press it’s the last movement I am doing…ton of lateral and cable variations…
Like Jwesus said, weight is of little concern, the contraction, feel, pump etc., is more important to me…Honestly besides my ego on the big compounds, weight doesnt matter much to me anymore…its all about the reps, control, form, contraction pump etc…I still lift heavy as hell though, dont get that wrong, you need both.