Balancing The Front Delts: Alternating Front Raises

Here’s a nice front delt exercise that gives you a lot of control over your form.

Alternating Front Raises

You’ve already seen me do this exercise with a barbell, but there are some good points about doing it with two dumbbells.

If one side is weaker, training them separately allows you to call quits when the weaker side is done – you only do as many repetitions as it can, forcing the stronger to stop before it reaches exhaustion. Over time this lets the two sides balance out.

In my experience you also concentrate better on how each side does. With a barbell it’s easy to led the stronger side take the lead and the weaker trails behind, more or less only assisting the stronger.

Eugen Sandow’s Workout

Those of you who had a look at Eugen Sandow’s workout plan I put online over here immediately recognized this exercise.

I followed his recommendation of only going to shoulder height, contrary to what ExRx wants you to do. As I said, you reach maximum resistance when you’re parallel to the floor and going much beyond that is a bit pointless.