Hypertrophy Back & Shoulders Workout | Stephanie Sanzo aka StephFitMum

Primeval fans get ready to WORK as powerbuilder and Primeval Labs athlete Stephanie Sanzo is back with another muscle and strength building upper body workout.

Today’s workout is a hypertrophy-focused workout targeting the upper back and shoulders.

Can you hang with StephFitMum?

Here’s the workout:

StephFitMum Warm Up

Before all of her workouts, Stephanie performs a thorough dynamic warm up which helps increase blood flow, prepares the muscles, and lubricates the joints,

Here’s Stephanie in action performing her typical upper body warm up:

Now, let’s get to the workout!

Back & Shoulders Hypertrophy Workout

As with other Stephanie Sanzo Back & Shoulders Workouts, Stephanie begins with a couple of heavy compound exercises to focus on strength development. Afterwards, she moves onto the higher rep work to build muscle and get a serious pump.

Here’s the workout:

Back & Shoulders Workout Training Tips

Seated Overhead Press

The overhead press is a staple mass-building exercise for the shoulders and triceps, yet many people lose out on much of the muscle-building bang of this exercise due to using excessive leg drive when pressing overhead.

By performing the exercise seated, you place yourself in a more stable position (thereby allowing you to press more weight) and eliminate any cheating that may occur from the legs.

Additionally, when pressing overhead, make certain that you keep everything your elbows close to the body and in alignment with your wrists as this will help avoid any unnecessary strain on those joints.

For this exercise, Stephanie is keeping a strict “military position” and allowing the bar to go down no lower than her chin on the eccentric as this helps maintain tension on the shoulders the entire time. Allowing the bar to go down and touch the chest removes some tension from the shoulders and loads it more onto the triceps, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not the goal that Stephanie is going for with this particular exercise.

Chin Ups

For building a strong, wide back, there’s no better exercise than chin ups. They can be performed any number of ways utilizing different grips, rep schemes, lifting tempos and loading.

If you’re able to complete more than 12-15 reps per set without breaking a sweat, it’s time to add some external loading in the form of a weight plate hanging from the waist. The purpose of adding weight to this exercise is to keep you in the “strength-building” rep range of 5 reps per set.

A common mistake when performing the chin-up is that lifters will rely too much on their biceps to complete the movement, which limits the overall number of chin ups you can perform and also reduces the amount of work the lats are doing during the exercise.

To help reduce the contribution of the biceps and shift more tension into the lats, think about pulling through the elbows rather than the hands and wrists when initiating the chin up.

Seated Arnold Press

Moving onto the hypertrophy portion of the workout, Stephanie begins with another great shoulder exercise -- the seated Arnold press.

As you’re aware, the seated Arnold press begins with your arms bent holding a pair of dumbbells racked in front of your shoulders, as they would be had you just completed a bicep curl.

As you push the dumbbells overhead, externally rotate your arms, so that at the top of the movement, your palms are facing forward. As you lower the dumbbells, reverse the movement, rotating the arms in towards the body, ending with the dumbbells in the front rack position again.

Neutral Grip Lat Pulldown

For this exercise, Stephanie likes to use the D-handle bar. The reason she prefers this bar is that it allows her wrists to remain in a neutral position, and it’s wider than the grip she was using for chin ups, which will tax the muscles of the back in a slightly different manner than the supinated grip chin ups did.

Again, just like with chin up, focus on driving the elbows back to fully engage the lats and slowly return the bar to the starting position to increase tension on the lats and force more blood into the muscle.

Back & Shoulder Triset Burnout

To complete the workout, Stephanie performs a triset (three exercises performed back to back to back with little to no rest between) consisting of:

• Dumbbell front to side raise
• Cable Straight-Arm Pulldown with rope attachment
• Cable High Row with rope attachment

Again, these three moves are performed for higher reps to force as much blood into the back and shoulders to help build size (and get a massive muscle pump!).

These three moves hit all the major muscles of the shoulders and back and will be a fantastic way to finish the workout now that the heavy lifting is done.

Fuel Your Workouts with Intracell 7

As with all of her workouts, Stephanie relies on Intracell 7 to help fuel her mind and muscles during training.

The reason she enjoys using Intracell 7 is due to the mix of fast-digesting carbs it contains that supply her muscles with readily useable energy to keep them performing to their best all workout long. 

In addition to performance-boosting carbohydrates, Intracell 7 also supplies a full spectrum of essential amino acids (EAAs) that help limit protein breakdown and support muscle protein synthesis.

To top it off, Intracell 7 also contains valuable hydration agents and blood flow promoters to help shuttle these performance-sustaining nutrients to working muscles.