The Warrior awakens before the sun rises. To the Warrior, there's only one goal in life: To be stronger than the previous day. This means he must battle complacency and inner weakness. The Warrior must first win the struggle taking place within himself. The, he must overcome every external adversity that is presented before him. All of these adversities become battles within the larger war.
To win this war, the Warrior must reach deep down inside himself and find out what he's truly made of. A warrior does not say, "I will try." A warrior says, "I will do". No excuses. No regrets. No failures. If you live a life where you put limits upon yourself, you might as well be dead. Never accept mediocrity. To live, you must kill these self-imposed limits.
A warrior does not say, "I will try." A warrior says, "I will do".
A warrior always has a battle plan. You must learn to draw up a plan, implement your plan, overcome adversities, maintain discipline and control under great stress, and ultimately defeat your foes. To be a warrior, you must adopt this way of thinking. Now let's use this knowledge to improve your arsenal. It's time to build your shoulders.
The Battle Plan
The essence of the warrior's workout is to select those exercises that will elicit the greatest response. Therefore, you should always your workout with basic, heavy mass-building movements. These movements will recruit the greatest number of muscles from a particular area into the movement, therefore lending themselves to the heaviest weights.
Begin with the behind-the-neck military presses. This movement is one of the most riskiest due to the precarious position your shoulders are put in. The key is to be careful, start light and increase your poundages slowly over time. This exercise is the overall mass-builder for your shoulders. Your rep range should be in the neighborhood of 6 to 12, 12 for the warm-ups and down to 6 for the heaviest sets. You will do 4 working sets after your warm up.
You will do as many warm ups as needed to thoroughly warm up the shoulder area and get to your desired starting weight. Doing warm up sets is absolutely imperative for your first exercise.
Your next exercise will be seated dumbbell presses. The use of dumbbells for presses will help incorporate all of the stabilizer muscles in the shoulder region and make you stronger for all pressing movements. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. After doing these basic "mass" movements, head on to "isolation" movements.
Your shoulders should be thoroughly warmed up and fatigued. Now you need to isolate each individual muscle of the shoulder area. Begin by targeting the medial and front delts. To do this, superset standing side dumbbell laterals with front dumbbell raises. This combo will completely destroy the area. Go balls-to-the-wall here. Use the heaviest weight possible while keeping strict form. Finish 3 supersets of 10 to 12 reps for each exercise with absolutely no rest between them.
The key to both of these exercises is bringing the dumbbells as high as possible with your pinky slightly higher than your thumb (think of pouring a can of beer into a mug. The goal here is to completely exhaust the muscle and recruit every last muscle fiber. You'll know when you do it right. Your shoulders should be on fire and feel like they have been hit with napalm. You got to love the burn. You got to be able to take the heat.
There's one last area you need to hit. Rear delts. To be a true Warrior, you must never forget this area. Two exercises should crush this often neglected region. Begin with lying rear delt dumbbell lateral raises. This exercise is performed on an incline bench set at the lowest incline. Lie on the bench with your face facing into the bench and begin raising the dumbbells.
The rear delts are small in comparison to the rest of the shoulder complex. And since all the stress is placed onto the rear delts, they do not require a tremendous amount of weight. Even though you won't be using the large dumbbells, go as heavy as you can for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. After you finish this, they should be really pumped and screaming for you to stop. But you're not going to stop now. You're not finished yet. Go over and grab a low cable pulley and do 3 sets rear cable laterals. Again make sure that your pinky is higher than your thumb throughout the movement. Doing it this way places a greater amount of stress on the rear delt.