What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. You asked for it and I'm bringing it,
the perfect push workout out, complementing our perfect pull and legs work outs in our
PPL series. Guys, look, I understand that perfect is subjective right, in the eye of the beholder.
I mean, even Jesse's been called perfect, but then again, that was his mother.
When we look at creating a perfect workout, no matter what it is, you have to understand
there's a lot of selection's that go into that. I'm making my bold selections here and putting
them into this workout for a reason because I believe it's going to work to help you to build
muscle. That being said guys, I want to break it down for you step-by-step and show you not just
what we're picking, but why we're picking it so you can get the gains that you're looking for.
Okay, so now a quick refresher for those that are unfamiliar with the PPL split, it's Push,
Pull and Legs. On the Push that you're training your pushing muscles generally your triceps,
shoulders and chest. And on Pull day, you're training your biceps and back, noting that there
are a lot of back muscles and we're accounting for those in that workout. And, of course,
you have your legs on a specific day as well. And the way we're going to actually break this down in
this PPL split is by starting with a Pull workout, follow it with a Push workout, which is what we're
going to show today and then go into our legs. Now, after that, you have two options. You can
either repeat this cycle for six straight days of training before taking a day off and
then repeating it all over again. Or you can do what we do here, which is take these three days
and then put a rest day in between and you start these three days again,
followed by another rest. This is called that, asynchronous split. And you're getting
more frequent rest days in between these workouts, which allows for more recovery. But it also on the
offside here is, is creating an unpredictable off day. Some people don't like that, but I do believe
that the benefits of getting that extra off day are going to serve you well.
Which brings us now to our workouts and the exercise. And that's why I said workouts,
because in the perfect pitch workout here, we actually have two of them Push One and Push Two.
And the reason for that is we're going to select exercises that actually help to complement each
other from Push One to Two, but also help to stand alone with their own benefits. And I believe when
we're trying to accomplish something as big as creating muscle growth with this split, we need
to have more options at our disposal. We're going to break them down into two parts. Part One here
starts with our classic push exercise here from actually building strength as one of our main
mechanisms of driving growth through overload and this is the Barbell Bench Press. And we're
going to perform this as four sets of four to six. We're going to leave one or two reps in the tank,
though not taking all the way to failure. However, it is important that as you start to
fatigue, that you may have to adjust the weights accordingly to allow you to continue to fall
within this four to six reps range. The next exercise, however, is one specifically designed
to complement that one and then say Hi-to-Low Crossover. And the reason why I like the crossover
and I've talked about this in many videos before, is it gives me the chance to do what the Barbell
Bench Press doesn't, and that is to get the chest into a completely contracted state by getting the
arm fully adducted across the body. Now, when we take the angle from high to low, we're allowing
ourselves to follow the fibers to hit more of the lower chest, the abdominal fibers here. But most
importantly, it gives us the opportunity to get that full adduction of the hand across the chest.
Good hypertrophy exercise. Good spot here at the number two spot, three sets of 10 to 12.
And now we're going to shift the focus a little bit to the shoulders. And here I'm going to go
with the Dumbbell Shoulder Press. Now, I have the opportunity here to try to do an overhead
press with the barbell, but I believe that is better served as a strength building exercise
that's going to get its own day, hence Push Two. Now I'm doing the standing version here rather
than the seated version. And if you watch my Iron Face-Off video, you would understand why. When you
sit down, I don't like the restrictions that come from pushing your scapula back into the bench,
which can disrupt normal shoulder mechanics. Not to mention if I can get you on your feet, I
always like to take that opportunity. You perform that for four sets of 8 to 10, slightly higher
up range, again, reserving the lower ranges for strength base progression in that second day.
We then move on to that second exercise, following up very much the same way we did
with the crossover. And this is the 1 1/2 Side Lateral Raise. Again, trying now to focus a little
bit more for hypertrophy on that middle Delt. And we could do it with this one and a half rep style
that increases the time that we're under tension in the exercise. So, we take it up fully all the
way, we come down halfway and then we have to go back up to the top again. Eliminating all
momentum from the movement and again, forcing the muscle we're actually trying to get to grow to do
the work. We perform this one in three sets at a higher rep range of 12 to 15. Again, really
focusing on good quality contractions, not muscle substitution that often happens with the traps and
simply just momentum swinging the weight up. And then we come back, and we move to the direct
tricep portion of the workout, understand the triceps we've been working through all
the other exercises we've been doing so far. But in this case, we're going to go directly
at them. And we're going to actually pair them up with, get this, a pulling exercise,
a bicep exercise here on push day. Why? Because we have an opportunity when we pair this in
the entire PPL split we put together here to get some additional volume for the biceps on push day
without interfering with what we're trying to accomplish here and our pushing exercises. And
that is we start with a big push exercise for the triceps, my favorite, the Lying Tricep Extension,
this is going to perform for three sets of 10 to 12 to failure, and they're going to go right into
the Dumbbell Waiter's Curl. And these are both good exercise selections here. Number one, the
tricep exercises hitting the long head primarily by getting that good, stretch in the bottom
position, we're able to do something we haven't necessarily done through the other exercises.
When we push overhead or push out in front, the medial lateral head tend to get most of the work,
the long head here is going to get some extra special attention through the first exercise.
Again, the Dumbbell Waiter's Curl is also a long, hard exercise, but this time for the biceps,
serving again is the perfect complement and giving us a chance to get some additional volume. Three
sets of 10 to 12 on both ends of the superset. And before we call it a day here, guys, no
Athleane-X workout is complete without making sure we pay a little bit of attention to bulletproofing
our body to the use of some correctives, and by corrective of choice here it's a Rotator Cuff
External Rotation. Guys, simply grab a band and perform this boring but all-important exercise to
finish out this workout, three sets of 15 to 20. When you do a push and workout, you're internally
rotating a lot. The muscles on the front side of the body tend around the shoulders and pull
them into internal rotation, simply doing some additional direct external rotation here is the
perfect way to finish this first push workout. And that brings us to push workout number two. And
as I said before, not just for the sake of doing another workout, but meant to complement what
we either did or did not do in the first push workout. There are certain things I still want
to accomplish here, and it starts right off the bat with a heavier focus, Overhead Barbell Press.
And again, we to do this the same way we did the bench press with four sets of four to six,
leaving one to two in the tank, making sure to adjust the weights accordingly to make sure you
stay in that rep range on all four sets. Again, serving as the compound lift here meant for giving
us an opportunity to increase our strength to drive hypertrophied through that mechanism.
We follow that up by shifting our focus away from the shoulders now to the chest again. And this
time with a variation of a bench press, the same one that we brought the Dumbbell Overhead Press in
in lieu of the Overhead Barbell Press. Now we're going to bring a Dumbbell Press in
and lower the Barbell Bench Press and this time to do the Dumbbell Underhand Bench Press.
I love this exercise because it allows us to actually work the upper chest even though we're in
a flat bench position and it saves our shoulders and front delts specifically from the overload
that would come if we were trying to do this as a regular Incline Dumbbell Bench Press. So,
we get the benefits of upper chest training without having to put ourselves in a position
mechanically that might overtax your shoulders. Now, with a brief reprieve of the shoulder work,
we're now able to go back to it directly. In this case, just like we did in the first push workout,
we're going to try to hit the middle delt more specifically. As a matter of fact, we're also
going get the benefit of getting the rear delt involved here. But we're going to do it by driving
with a posterior chain pull dominant movement. That's right a pull-down movement push day. And
the reason we do this is for that exact reason, if there's any fatigue that has accumulated
to this point, you're going to have a chance to offset that by pulling rather than pushing
more and still working the same muscles. The abduction row is simply getting that shoulder
into the necessary abduction to hit the middle in the rear delt this time. But we don't have to
drive that through a lot of the typical pushing movements, especially like a Side Lateral Raise.
So, we lean forward and drive into abduction by rowing the arm back and out, making sure to keep
extra rotation at the shoulder. But you'll see and feel that this will light up the middle and
rear delts very effectively allowing you to train it even heavier as well, in the 8 to 10 range,
while still allow you enough energy to continue to attack the rest of this push workout.
Which brings us to our fourth exercise here, back to the chest is the Dumbbell Floor Fly. Now,
you guys know how I feel about the unsupported version of this done on a bench, I feel like
it compromises the health of your shoulder and increases the risk where we don't need
to. If we simply do this down on the floor, we get two additional benefits. Number one,
we have the safety net of the floor to make sure that we're not over stretching the capsule of
anterior shoulder. And secondly, we have the opportunity to go a little bit heavier because
we can take these up and we can even cheat them up to the top if we have to and lower them down.
What we're really focused on here is getting that eccentric overload, which we know is
another driver of hypertrophy. We perform these for three sets of 10 to 12. Which brings us to
the direct tricep portion of the workout, which is going to once again be superseded with some
additional bicep work for volume. But this time we're going to go a little bit heavier. We're
going with the tricep Close Grip Bench Press performing three sets of six to eight reps to
add a strength based movement that is more tricep focused to create additional games. We select this
exercise as a complement to the tricep extensions we did, which was focused more on the long head.
Here, once again, now we're using some additional weight to focus on the medial lateral heads. And
the exercise we're going to pair that up with this time is simply a dumbbell curl of choice and I
mean that. After all, curls are essentially curls, no matter how you perform them. The fact is you
choose one of them, perform them for three sets of 10 to 12, slightly higher up rep range, pair them
up as a superset and you're off and running. And that brings us to that final spot once again.
And I have an interesting selection here to end the second workout. I want to work on some scapula
control and some scapula strengthening, but I still want to get a little bit additional volume
here for the chest and this is going to be with the Pushup Plus. And the idea here is you simply
go into the top of a push up, but then you push all the way through as hard as you can, allowing
your shoulder blades to wrap around your body into protraction. This is going to train the Serratus
and give them some stability that they oftentimes don't get unless you intentionally try to train
for it. You're going to go three sets to failure here, I'm not so concerned about what that number
is, as much as I'm concerned that you're nailing the mechanics on this every single time.
And then you have guys, the perfect push work out, broken down into both parts, part one and two,
both of them here for you to view and make sure you take your screen shot so you could take them
with you to the gym and make sure you get this right. Guys, remember, it's not just the exercises
you pick, but why you're doing what you're doing that gets you the results. If you're looking for a
step-by-step programs guys, we have done that all for you already there over at Athleanx.com.
If you like this series, if you like the perfect workouts, make sure you leave a comment below,
tell me what else you want going to cover, I'll do my best to do that for you. And if
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so you never miss a workout when we put one out. All right guys, good luck. See you soon.