Fitness

My biggest question is simply why you would want to train pure isolated side delt strength.

My biggest motivation is to be able to lift this heavy blue cooler from my passenger seat, over my body, and then to lower it to the ground without it bumping into the armrest. It was the reason why I (incorrectly) focused so heavily on dumbbell shoulder presses and increased my 1-rep max so much this year (a little over 20% in 3-4 months). If you've ever seen the "fly episode" of breaking bad, I'm similarly motivated on this 1 singular endeavor only to come to the slow realization that my cooler-lifting goal is probably more side-delt focused than front delt. 🤦‍♂️

Honestly, my biggest thought is that if your goal is general health, fitness, and weight loss, you should just save yourself the time and effort and drop side delt exercises entirely.

If I had no other life responsibilities, I would honestly spend 4-5 hours daily in the gym. I genuinely enjoy lifting heavy stuff and I never tire of it! However, I have about 2 hours daily I can devote to the gym but my bottleneck is mental fatigue. I obsessively try to optimize my daily habits but have regrettably noticed that gym fatigue negatively impacts all other parts of my life by seemingly depleting my will-power. I'm still experimenting but it seems lat exercises and arm exercises are my best options for minimizing gym fatigue so I wish to embrace those. My glute bridge stuff is about to be dropped. I'm only doing it because I had chronic back pain for 3 years, before getting a 90% improvement last year. I'm trying to get strong glutes to get that last 10% of improvement but I plan to quit doing glute bridges and find better glute exercise.

But if going to the gym is fun for you and you just like training side delts, then I’d say that you can give it a shot, but I wouldn’t expect a sure result. We gain strength in two ways - neuromuscular recruitment, and growth of muscle tissue. Muscle tissue grows when it is pushed close-ish to its physical limit, which is why we usually see more reps used for smaller muscles - with a small muscle like the side delts, 5lbs is a big jump, and doing 2 reps with, say 30lbs might be easy while doing 3 is impossible. But doing reps with 15lbs, we can do 10 or 20 or 30 reps until we find muscular failure. Meanwhile, if you are chasing pure strength, a lot of the gains come from learning alignment of the body, which comes into play less for isolation moves. So hopefully you are also practicing Pavels feed-forward techniques, or else I expect your gains to level off pretty quick. Not to say you won’t see strength or hypertrophy gains with this protocol - just saying that you are n=1 here

Fully agreed and I will look more into Pavel's feed-forward techniques as I'm still new to his stuff. I'm reading his "Simple & Sinister" book for kettlebells because I can do them at night before bed or when winding down late in the evening. I must admit I was extremely skeptical of Pavel's claims because I previously believed 100% in the "reps in reserve" theory and that you should minimize junk volume or leaving too many reps in reserve. But now I'm fully convinced that Pavel's claims are valid after all my lifts went up significantly in just 2-3 months with his GtG style with high rest times. 💪