maratoolDumbbell Incline Shoulder Raise
How to do the dumbbell incline shoulder raise
- Sit on an Incline Bench while holding a dumbbell on each hand on top of your thighs.
- Lift your legs up to kick the weights to your shoulders and lean back. Position the dumbbells above your shoulders with your arms extended. The arms should be perpendicular to the floor with your palms facing forward and knuckles pointing towards the ceiling. This will be your starting position.
- While keeping the arms straight and locked, lift the dumbbells by raising the shoulders from the bench as you breathe out.
- Bring back the dumbbells to the starting position as you breathe in.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Muscles worked
The prime movers are the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.
Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the triceps straighten the elbow to finish the movement.
How this movement works
One joint moves, and it moves the load away from the body. With nothing recruited to assist, the target muscle reaches its own limit rather than the limit of the weakest link in a chain — which makes this useful for adding volume after the heavy compound work, not for opening a session.
It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.
What you need
Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.
Every exercise using:Dumbbell
These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:
- External Rotation with Bandband
- External Rotation with Cablecable
- Handstand Push-Upsbody only
- Jerk Balancebarbell
- Kettlebell Arnold Presskettlebell
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 74 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.