What would you say if I told you there were only 2 rear delt exercises you need to do in order to get rounded shoulders? In this video, I am going to show you the two rear delt exercises that should make up the bare minimum of your shoulder workouts. Not only are these two exercises for rear delts great for building boulder shoulders, but they will also help you complete your development all three heads of the delt muscles.

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Some might tell you that you only need two exercises total in order to build a muscle group. I disagree. I don’t think anyone should be limited to picking just two exercises for a muscle group because each one often has multiple muscle heads as well as multiple functions that can be targeted individually through exercise selection.

The problem with rear delt exercises is that the most common ones performed don’t even train them through all three of their functions. For example, the rear delt fly or reverse dumbbell fly is great at training the shoulder through horizontal abduction. That said, that is only one of the three main functions of the rear delt muscles. You want to also figure out how to perform shoudler external rotation and extension.

Now, it may be tempting to confuse the recommendation of being internally rotated at your shoulder at the end of horizontal abduction as something that is best for activating the rear delt. That may be true to get an EMG to read a little higher during that particular exercise. However, if you changed the mechanics of the exercise to include direct shoulder external rotation and extension (as I’m going to show you) and combined it with horizontal abduction you get a much better exercise overall for firing up the rear delts.

So that said, it’s time to ditch the reverse fly in favor of the rear delt row.

And it is an important distinction to make right away that the fly motion is one that gets the person to focus on their hand and the dumbbell in their hand rather than the elbow. Think about it. When you perform even a traditional chest fly exercise you are thinking about getting your dumbbells and hands out wide to create a big stretch on the pecs and then arcing them back to the top in a long, pendulum motion.

That is great when horizontal abduction is the only motion you are trying to target but bad when shoulder extension is the goal.

On the other hand, when you think about rowing a dumbbell up you immediatley shift your focus to the elbow instead. Moving the elbow back behind your body is instantly more achievable.

Be sure as you perform this first rear delt exercise that you are dropping the elbow and allowing your thumbs to win the race to the top of the rep. Your thumbs should be pointing behind you at the end of the rep to ensure that you have good shoulder external rotation during the exercise and are maintaining safe shoulder biomechanics at the same time.

The second exercise is one that you can actually perform on back day rather than shoulder day. This is actually great since it allows even those following a bro split to hit their rear delts more than once per week.

This exercise is the seated cable row, however it is performed in a very different way than traditionally done. If you want to hit the rear delts much more than the lats then you want to flare your elbows and bring the straight bar up high on the chest rather than keeping your elbows tucked into your sides with the bar targeting your waistline.

As with the rear delt row, you are going to want to keep your elbows dropped down as the hands come up to prevent any shoulder impingement or faulty shoulder biomechanics and to keep the shoulders safe. The greatest advantage of this exercise over others for building bigger rear delts is that it allows you to use weights that these muscles typically aren’t exposed to.

For those wondering where the face pull sits in these best exercises for the rear delts, it’s a great one, it just isn’t in the top two.

So be sure to include these two exercises in your shoulder workouts and back workouts respectively and you’ll be shocked at just how much growth you see in this often overlooked head of the delts.

If you’re looking for the other muscle groups in this only 2 exercise series, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube!

For a complete step by step workout and nutrition plan be sure to head to athleanx.com and get one of the ATHLEAN-X workout plans that is best suited to your goals.

Jeff Cavaliere MSPT, CSCS served as both the head physical therapist and assistant strength coach for the New York Mets. Jeff earned his Masters of Physical Therapy and Bachelor’s of Physioneurobiology from the College of Health Sciences University of Connecticut Storrs. He is a certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist by the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).