Blast Your Delts with the Side Lateral Raise

The side lateral raise is a super effective exercise to target your delts.

Although biceps win the award for show off muscle of the arms, massive shoulders will give you a superhero look. Adding width to your shoulders will also increase the v taper of your torso, making your waist look chiseled and your upper body look massive. It’s a very important piece to a muscular and aesthetic physique overall.

I don’t rely on the side lateral raise as my primary shoulder exercise for mass. I prefer the military press to use the bar and perform a compound exercise.

However, it’s a great supplemental exercise to really stimulate muscle growth in your shoulders.

Here’s what you should know.

Side Lateral Raise vs Rear Delt Fly

First, let’s make sure you are looking for the right exercise. You’ll often hear the term delt fly or rear delt fly, which is referring to a different exercise than the side lateral raise. They overlap in many ways regarding form and muscles worked, but in the end, they target different areas of your body.

When doing flys for your deltoids, you bend your torso forward at the hip and you move the dumbbells up and back. This leads the fly to emphasize your rear deltoid muscles and also activate muscles in your back. For a side lateral raise, your torso stays straight up while you move the weight up directly at your sides. The change in body position and direction of your arms focuses your attention on the middle and front delt more.

Both of these are great exercises, but the side lateral raise is the focus here.

The development of the front and middle delt is a great way for skinny people to gain mass and build a stellar physique. Big shoulders add to an overall muscular build, whether looking from the side, front, or back.

Performing the side lateral raise properly

The movement seems very simple, as the name gives away most of the exercise. However, people screw up the form all the time, and completely kill the gain potential by doing the exercise incorrectly. Let’s make sure you’re not one of those people. Here are some tips and cues I’ve learned over time. After implementing these, I’ve felt a true burn in my deltoids and seen them grow.

Your hands are hooks

This is my favorite tip for a lot of similar dumbbell exercises. For some reason, we’re taught to grip every bar as tightly as possible. It stems from wanting to fully control the weight and also activate the muscles of the forearm. However, that muscle activation is taking away from your ability to activate the muscles you are actually trying to target. During a side lateral raise, you should feel your deltoid working. A key indicator that you’re not performing the exercise properly is if your shoulder is not sore at all afterwards. Sometimes you’ll instead feel soreness in your neck, back, or arms. Visualize your hands as just hooks that hold the weight for you, but don’t lift it.

Lift your elbows

This tip goes along with the one above to treat your hands as hooks. If you perform the movement while thinking of lifting your hands with the weights, you will naturally start to squeeze the handles tighter and do the opposite of the tip above. Instead of thinking of lifting the weight up, think of lifting your elbows.

Remember, your hands are just hooks to connect the weight to your arms, and now your elbows need to go up. Practice this over and over, as it will build a solid mind-muscle connection that will ensure you are actually working your delts and encourage your shoulders to grow.

Kill your momentum

A common gain killer with flys or side lateral raises are using your body’s momentum or energy from moving to get the weight up. This is especially true when people use really heavy weights or get fatigued toward the end of a workout.

Don’t let momentum swing the weight up for you. Don’t let your torso swing back and forth during each rep to help you through the reps. This will just take focus off of your shoulders and reduce the growth you are looking for.

Hold your body still. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given here is to pause about a quarter way through the rep. This means when you are brining the weight up, pause when you are halfway between a resting position and having the weight fully up and extended.

The pause only needs to last for half a second. Then continue on through the rest of the rep as usual. This eliminates all of the cheating momentum that happens at the start of each rep, so that it’s purely your deltoid lifting the weight up.

Give this a try, and I bet you’ll feel an immediate difference.

Rotate your wrist slightly upward

You want each rep to end with your thumb just slight above your pinky. This is called external rotation. By doing this, you put your shoulder joint in a safe position, especially when it’s vulnerable with a weight far from your body and your arms extended.

Check out this video from AthleanX that explains. It’s an old one, but still holds true. Injury prevention is really important to make sure you don’t miss training time on your path to gaining muscle.

Drop the weight

Don’t actually drop the weight at the end of your sets. This means you should use less weight, so that you’re not ego lifting. This is always the case when you are training for massive gains. Too many of the mistakes with side lateral raises can be fixed by just leaving the ego at the door. Use a dumbbell that is challenging, but not impossible for you to get up with proper form for a set.

This could mean 5 pounds, 10, 15, 20 or something else, depending on what works for you. Don’t let your ego force you to use a weight that won’t actually lead to growth. Even the biggest guys at the gym use light weights to train.

Using a manageable weight improves safety and puts your shoulder in a better position. It also allows you to focus on your form and ensure its your deltoids that get activated throughout each rep.

Variations for the side lateral raise

Dumbbells have a lot of benefits when doing this exercise. You can easily modify the weight, and work each arm separately to ensure proportionate growth. However, there can be benefits to different variations of this exercise. This may be necessary for people who don’t have access to dumbbells, like those working out while traveling. Also, it could be necessary to use something other than dumbbells if you are trying to get through a workout in the gym during a busy time. Maybe you just want to change up the feel of the exercise from time to time.

Here are a couple of options for you:

• Bands
• Cables
• Kettlebells
• Seated
  • Try this instead of standing. It can remove the assistance of swinging your body or using your legs to swing through the reps.
• Water bottles
  • If you need to go bodyweight with this exercise, using a water bottle instead can help go through the full motion without much added weight. You’ll be surprised how much this can burn.

Thought or questions? Leave a comment!