Q: hey mike, in your 4 day push/pull schedule, why do you do shoulders 4x a week? isnt that too much? mon. and thurs. is shoulder press, tues + fri. is upright rows.

A: Good observation! The reason I included a shoulder exercise on both pull and push days is that while shoulder presses stress mainly anterior deltoids (front shoulder), the upright rows spread the work to anterior deltoid, medial deltoid (side shoulder) and traps. A narrow grip on the upright rows stresses the traps more while a wide grip stresses the medial deltoid more.

So you can think about 3 sets of upright rows as a set's worth for each: front shoulders, side shoulders, and traps. With that math, for the week it adds up to 8 sets for front shoulders which may be a little on the high side, but not ridiculous. By comparison, chest and lats get 10 sets each per week. If you're concerned about overworking the front deltoid (which is a legitimate concern since it gets involved to some degree in various chest, back, biceps exercises too), you may want to cut down the shoulder presses to only 1 or 2 sets per session.