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Day 26:Shoulders & Abs

As I’ve mentioned before, shoulders are my favorite body part to train. Impressive delts—front, rear, and middle—make your physique that much more complete. As you know, I have a shoulder injury: a torn rotator cuff and labrum. I also need to have my clavicle shaved, all from a downhill mountain bike race accident years ago. But that doesn’t stop me from training my shoulders with my doctor’s approval and visualizing them as a strength of my physique. I believe visualization is a key component to success on any muscle-building program, as well as in other aspects of life.

Don’t forget to get in your supplements that support your workouts, recovery, and gains. Remember my acronym for this: PIP. That stands for Pre-workout, Intra-workout, Post-Workout. These supplements are not just about vanity—they’re about long-term health and performance. Getting in the proper supplements helps prevent an inflammatory response, which undercuts your ability to grow regardless of your training program. Inflammation is also a cause of many diseases, regardless of your age or outward appearance.

This workout begins by targeting the middle delts with dumbbell lateral raises. Then add your partials from the bottom of the rep, but don’t allow the weights to come to your thighs. Then move to alternating dumbbell front raises to hit the front delts.

Next is Arnold presses to hit both the middle and anterior delt heads, followed by rear-delt flyes on the Pec Deck machine. Avoid squeezing your traps for this move, emphasizing feeling your rear delts stretch and contract.

The finishing move for shoulders workout is dumbbell side-to-front raises. Check out my video for how to perform this move. Your shoulders should be totally fried by this sequence.

For lower abs, go with lying leg raises on a flat bench. Note how I lock myself in to get a proper contraction and stretch—no momentum, all abdominal work. I raise my butt off the bench and my legs in toward my sternum. Perform 5 sets, stretching between sets.

Dumbbell lateral raise

Sets:
3
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

Alternating front raise

Sets:
3
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

Arnold press

Sets:
3
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

Reverse machine flye

Sets:
3
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

Dumbbell side-to-front raise

Sets:
3
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

Lying leg raise

Sets:
5
Reps:
10 + 5 partial reps
Strategy:
Regular + partial reps

HIIT

Sets:
1
Reps:
3
Strategy:
4 minutes easy/1 minute full
intensity for a total of 15 minutes

POST WORKOUT

Now you have the weekend coming up, but these aren’t rest days. You still have to perform your two sessions of cardio on each day. Today is a great time to re-weigh yourself to see where you are before you shift your diet on your active-rest weekend. Once you know your current weight, you should re-calculate your macros accordingly.

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