The most common shoulder exercises like the shoulder press, flyes, or lateral raises require weights to be performed. In fact, there are few shoulder exercises that can be done without weights of some kind, simply because the shoulder muscles are mainly involved in vertical pushing motions. But we’re not here to make excuses, we’re here to find ways to train your body under any circumstances. So here’s a full bodyweight-only workout for those shoulders.
For this workout, experts at Mensjournal created a circuit that will target lateral, front, and rear shoulder muscles and find equivalent bodyweight exercises for each dumbbell exercise that you would normally do at the gym. Because of the difficult nature of shoulder training without equipment, these exercises are rather unconventional.
Handstand Pushups
We’ll do handstand push-ups against the wall to replace the dumbbell shoulder presses. By doing this exercise you’re effectively pushing your whole weight, so it may be too difficult for some guys (or girls). You should always go for it even if you can do just 1 or 2 reps, but you can replace it with pike push-ups for an easier alternative.
Bodyweight Side Laterals
This exercise replaces dumbbell side laterals and targets lateral delts. Basically, instead of side raising your arms, you’re fixing your arm on the floor and rotating your body up to perform the same muscle movement.
Reverse Iron Cross Pushups
Moving on to the rear delts you would do bent-over dumbbell lateral raises, to replace this exercise we’ll do reverse iron cross push-ups. Iron cross push-ups are done by spreading the arms as wide as possible, so we reverse the push-up by laying on our back to target the rear delts.
Pike Circles
Usually, the above three exercises would be enough as they target the three groups of shoulder muscles, but to make it harder for advanced guys and girls we’ll add a couple more exercises for explosive movements. You may have done shoulder tap presses with a dumbbell or kettlebell, the exercise in which you press the weight from shoulder to shoulder. A bodyweight alternative to that is the pike circles performed as regular pike push-ups with a modification of shifting your weight to the opposite shoulder in the lowered position and pushing up from there, moving in continuous circles this way.
Handstand Kickouts
Eccentric muscle contraction is very important in muscle training, that’s why we move the weights in a controlled motion, especially when lowering down. However, with weights it’s very easy to let them fall faster in your hand than we’d ideally like, to get enough eccentric contraction. There’s a technique to improve this movement where you would let the weight drop from your hand at the peak and then quickly catch it. This toss movement creates the biggest eccentric muscle contraction as you have to spontaneously stop the weight mid-air and decelerate it.
An alternative, and perhaps even better and safer way as you don’t have to toss weights around, to train your muscle ability to decelerate heavy objects (as far as shoulders go) is the handstand kick-out exercise. You perform this exercise by kicking your legs out from the handstand position back to a standing position thus adding explosive pressure to your shoulders.
