[Music] okay welcome everyone to a new episode of technique Tuesday this week we're going to be looking at the most effective exercises and training techniques for targeting the rear delts but before we get into the movements themselves let's have a quick look at the biomechanics and anatomy involved first so the primary function of the rear delt is transverse shoulder abduction basically when you move your arm out to the side in the horizontal plane like you would in a reverse fly it was the same basic movement pattern that you'll see on the basic rowing variations like the Pendley row where you have the arms moving out to the side as the elbow bends so while the rear delts will be highly active in compound pulling exercises such as the row EMG data from button natal shows that isolation exercises such as the reverse PEC deck tend to outperform compound exercises like the seated row for the rear delts which has led dr. Brett Contreras to conclude that quote isolation exercises for the rear delts kick the out of compound exercises so while you certainly can grow a decent set of rear delts by just doing heavy rows on their own I think it's important to include some isolation exercises to really maximize their development now another important but often neglected function of the rear delts is external rotation that's basically rotating your arm outward and because of this I would say my single favorite rear delt exercise would have to be the rope face pole because it combines transverse abduction and external rotation so there are two different ways you can set this up and they're both good but we'll cover the main way first so for this variation you're gonna set the cable up at shoulder height and grab the handles with a neutral grip so basically your thumbs should be in contact with the handles not your pinkies take a stable stance a few feet back from the cable machine and slightly retract your shoulder blades so your upper back is in a nice and strong starting position and from here you want to focus on driving your elbows and back as you simultaneously pull the rope toward your forehead and although this may happen naturally you also want to think about depressing your shoulder blades throughout the positive so basically think about tucking your shoulder blades down which is also going to get some of the trap musculature involved and help keep the shoulder in a Morse your lifting position and the negative is essentially a reversal of the positive where you're gonna let the rope come forward and down under control while keeping your shoulder blades in that secure position and this variation is also great for strengthening the rotator cuff and it's a fantastic assistance exercise to include on a push day to help balance out the pushing demand on the shoulders and can help correct front to back shoulder and balances and might actually help correct forward slow chain posture issues as well so for this variation because we're isolating the rear delt and rotator cuff muscles I like to use lighter weight for something around 15 to 20 reps okay so another spin on this is to set the cable up at eye level and pull the rope straight back toward your chin without the external rotation component or rather squeezing your shoulder blades together and driving the elbows back and this variation on the face pole can be thought of as a high row where you're essentially getting the traps and rhomboids more involved as well and because this variation is getting more muscles involved including the biceps as you pull the weight back I prefer to load it a bit heavier so more in the 12 to 15 reps own and I'll personally often do these half lying so I can brace my torso against the floor allowing me to go heavier without losing balance now not everyone has access to cables or a rope and sometimes it's smart to just switch things up anyway as you can also do the face pull with dumbbells or you bend over at the hips until you're close to parallel with the floor keeping a natural arch in your lower back and then you just copy the same a basic movement pattern as the external rotation face pole or you pull your thumbs toward your ears and whether you're doing these with dumbbells or the rope one of the best cues I like to use is thinking about performing the movement as a we're double biceps pose where you're basically lifting your arms up and flexing your biceps from the back so here we're doing the same basic thing except we're bent over and have dumbbells in our hands one other exercise that I really like for the rear delts is the reverse PEC deck and as we saw in the EMG results from button natal the reverse PEC deck shows the highest rear delt activation out of all the exercises tested although they didn't include a face pull so maybe that would have been better who knows but with the reverse PEC deck you're basically locked into position so you can do pure shoulder abduction without external tation which is nice for really isolating and burning out the rear delts now interestingly research from Schoenfeld and colleagues found that using a neutral grip with the shoulders more externally rotated led to more activation of the rear delt maybe because as we already said external rotation is one of the functions of the rear delt but with that said some subjects did see better results with the pronated or palms down grip and I personally find I can get a better mind muscle connection this way so my best advice is to either periodically switch back and forth between a neutral and a pronated grip or go with what allows you to feel your rear delts firing the best of it either way just like the cable variation rounding your scapula forward via protraction and thinking about swinging the weight out instead of back might help improve the mind muscle connection with your rear delts another solid rear delt movement worth mentioning is the bent over reverse dumbbell fly and I do like this movement however similar to the dumbbell chest fly you run into the problem of reaching maximum tension when the dumbbells are furthest out to the sides at the top with tension then decreasing throughout the rest of the range of motion until there's just about zero tension on the rear delts at the bottom so to work around this I like to stop the dumbbells slightly short at the bottom and keep more of a constant tension groove going and about the top 3/4 of the range of motion and again you want to think about lifting the dumbbells out in an arc rather than back which is going to shift emphasis away from the traps and on to the rear delts and as for grip position again you want to pick a grip that feels comfortable for you however I find that a pronated palms down grip allows me to feel my rear delts firing the best now I would say the most common error that I see with rear delt training is basically turning the movement into a row by retracting too much remember that to hit the rear delts we need to be training transverse abduction so the arms should be swinging out to the sides not being pulled straight back so to really target the rear delts optimally it is important that you pay close attention to your form and slow the movement down as much as needed until you get the mind muscle connection right so typically just going wider and paying closer attention is going to fix this issue ok so guys that is all that I have for training technique for the rear delts if you guys haven't seen my shoulder science explained video I'd recommend giving that a watch that's a little bit of an older video but all of the information is still very relevant as you can check that out and you can also check out my upright row video if you're interested in hearing my thoughts on that exercise a lot of people seem to have missed that video so I'll put links to both of those over here and you can check them out now please leave me a like 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