Rob Riches is a fitness model and YouTube vlogger who shares a lot of his intensive workouts through his channel. He’s a guy with a highly ripped and defined physique and as for his shoulders – you can easily see all three of the deltoid heads in high definition. Now that’s a ripped physique.
How does he build these highly detailed delts? He uses a workout that he describes as insane. Seeing as all of his workouts are pretty insane, you just know this means these ones are going to be incredibly tough going!
Here’s how Rob gets such shredded shoulders…
Warm Up
Rob starts his shoulder workout with a warm up that ‘prepares’ his muscles for the ranges of motion they’re about to be put through. Using lighter weights, he combined around the worlds (using a weight plate), chin ups, shrugs and arm rotations to protect himself against injury.
Superset 1: Single Arm Barbell Lateral Raise/Single Arm Cable Lateral Raises
For Rob’s shoulder workout, he uses a separate set of exercises to directly target each of the three deltoid heads. He starts with lateral deltoid raises using a barbell in order to prevent cheating. When we use dumbbells we will often swing our arms into the movement to help ourselves through, but with a barbell that is pretty much impossible meaning you’ll use much better form. It’s also great for challenging your supportive muscles.
Next up is the cable lateral raise which once again makes cheating impossible and keeps the tension on all the way through the movement. Training a single arm at a time lets you use more weight.
Superset 2: Reverse Pec Flyes/Bent Over Dumbbell Raises
Now Rob hits the rear/posterior deltoids. He does these using a superset of reverse pec flyes (pec flyes where you face forward and pull the cables behind you) and bent over dumbbell raises keeping an arched back and bent knees.
This is something that is missing from a lot of people’s workouts: it’s all too easy to ignore the rear delts as you can’t see them in the mirror. For a great looking back though, you really need to concentrate them. The good news? Because we don’t train them often, they will respond quickly to training for rapid growth.
Superset 3: Upward Rows/Forward Raises
Front deltoids get trained during the chest but they rarely get focus individually. This is what Rob’s training is all about: hitting every single muscle head directly and attacking large muscle groups from every angle. By doing that he’s able to make sure that every last striation and detail is brought out in high definition.
Rob trains upward rows using a heavy kettlebell and simply pulls the weight straight up. He supersets these with forward raises using a bilateral (both arms) movement. He stresses the importance of lowering the weight if necessary in favor of better technique. It’s all about controlled movement through the perfect range of motion – so when you start cheating and swinging around the place, drop the weights!
