I used to work out a lot with weights, and the check comes due on that,
your joints start to hurt, this, back, knees, it just happens. Sometimes getting into that
kind of shape can kill you. There's fantastic trainers like Jeff Cavaliere on Athlean-X,
his videos are amazing. But at my age, I found the hardest, toughest, most productive way is
bands. Training with bands. I can't argue with a thing he said.
What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx.com. Look, I am not one to ever argue with Sylvester
Stallone. As a matter of fact, anybody that's followed me knows he was my childhood inspiration
for doing what I do today. So to hear those words come from him is literally the pinnacle of what
it means to me to do what I'm doing right now. That being said, the bands, and the comment about
bands, guys. I am putting together a whole new series here for you starting today on the best
exercises you could do with bands. Because I think they're one of the most underappreciated,
underutilized tools that we should all be using. Not just as we get older, but right now,
to make better gains. Today, it all starts with the chest exercises, guys, the eight best.
Let's start breaking them down one-by-one. And we start it right off here guys with a powerful one
that's going to make you feel a chest contraction like maybe never before. All with the use of just
a single band and it's called the saw. It's not a crossover. Okay, a crossover would take your arm
out in front of your body, but that invites a lot more shoulder into the exercise. We want to limit
this as much as we can to the chest to enhance the work done by the chest. So with the saw setup,
you take a band like this, you anchor it about chest height to something sturdy,
you put your hand inside the band with the elbow locked in place. Because what you want to do is
allow the elbow to power your arm to drive across the chest. Again, it's not about getting your arm
away from your chest, you simply just drive your hand across your body into adduction. If we can
drive this even an extra inch you'll feel even more of a contraction. Speaking of adduction, one
of my favorite ways to actually include it into a more standard exercise that you can do at home
or anywhere, like a push-up, is to simply anchor the band to a low point here, grab hold of it, and
then perform this crossover push-up. And you can see that I perform a regular push-up unaltered,
but as I come to the top, I'm able to take my arm, reach it across my body against the resistance
of the band to get that resisted adduction and increase the overall effect on my chest. It's a
simple modification to a standard exercise, but it results in bigger dividends for you in your chest
gains. Exercise number three while we're talking about push-ups is actually just a resistant
push-up. And a lot of people have probably done this before, but are you doing it the right way?
See, what I like to do is turn this more into a speed pressing exercise. So I take the band,
then I wrap it around my body, and I have good resistance at the top of the exercise. As I push
up, I'm encountering more and more force. My goal is to drive you into full extension of your elbows
as powerfully and as quickly as possible. If you just take it you go at a slow pace, I think you
lose a lot of the benefits of the movement. Now we don't have to restrict ourselves to just a push-up
on the floor. If you have access to a bench, and you want to turn this into a more standard bench
press feel, then you simply anchor the band under the bench like this, take hold of each side of the
loop, and then again, drive your hands up over your body with power and speed. Don't make this
a slow exercise. The faster you go, the faster you'll start to see better benefits from it.
Now if the more traditional standing version of a banded bench press is something you're looking to
do, then exercise number four is tailor-made for you with one very important modification. You see,
we call this the wrap around press. So you take the band, and once again, you anchor it
to something behind you. What you do though is you allow your elbows to flare out a bit to the side,
which is actually a natural pressing position for a standard bench press anyway. But what's
important about this is it creates the sort of wrap around or the corner effect that the band
has to go around, which will actually introduce some adduction stresses to the exercise too,
those all-important adduction stresses. So what I do is instead of having my elbows tucked to my
side and pressing straight out, by just flaring them a little bit you can see that now the band
wraps around the corner of my delt, and that right there provides the resistance that I
need as I bring my hands across into adduction. You can actually see the resistance in the band
change as it gets a little slack when I pull into adduction where we're getting both the
elements of pushing our hands away and across that makes this a better version of a standing press.
So as we head into exercise number five, you might be asking yourself, This is great, Jeff, but what
do I do for my upper chest? Actually, there's s few things you could do that are tailor-made,
and actually maybe even better with bands than potentially with a dumbbell version. And this
is called the upper chest pullover. And I've shown this to you before on how effective it is
to change a traditional lat exercise to more of an upper chest exercise by modifying the position of
our hands as we do it. But the band actually does this even better. Because I hook my hands in this
position on the bands, and what I'm trying to do is actually squeeze the back of my hands together,
creating internal rotation. Now you might be saying, Wait, Jeff, an internal rotation,
that never happens. Most of the times it wouldn't, but we're not actually going into elevation,
we're actually bringing our arms down away from elevation, while we get into internal rotation
so we're not looking at the same impingement stresses that we might get. But it will do is
it gets that squeeze, again, in adduction with our arms operating in that same position that
they would be in a normal incline bench press. So we're getting that better activation of the
clavicular fibers of the upper chest. Give this one a try, guys, I promise you the banded pullover
will light your upper chest up like never before. And with exercise number six, we're going to stick
with that upper chest. This one's called the prone punch-out. And what it is, is basically simulating
the same line of push that we would have in a traditional incline dumbbell press, except we
do this down on the floor. And as we press the arm out in front of us, I'm almost dragging it
across the floor. Of course it's off the ground, but I'm keeping it low, because what I'm trying to
simulate here guys is this: the same angle here. Because whether I'm down here on the ground,
if I sit up, you can see that this is actually the same angle of push that we would have on
a traditional dumbbell or barbell incline press. That's the way we're going to hit the upper chest
here, guys. And just because you're using bands, it doesn't mean you have to compromise that goal.
So now I'm six exercises down, two to go. We've talked about the upper chest, we've talked about
the middle chest. How do we hit the lower chest or the abdominal head? Well, we know we can do
dips to do that, and the best thing about bands is they take dips, and they make them a lot better.
If we want to, we can use them in an assisted way. Right, let's say you struggle with dips right now.
The bands can actually become your best friend because you can anchor them across the handles
and then simply put your knees on top of them to assist you at the hardest position of the dip,
which would be the bottom, coming up to the top. But if you're really looking for more of
a challenge, you put those bands over your back, and then you perform the resisted dip. And I could
tell you right now, this is 60 pounds of extra resistance here, this makes each and every rep
more difficult. The difficulty level as it goes up should increase the stimulus on your chest,
and therefore the gains that you see from doing it. And that brings us to exercise number eight,
and I'm going to go back to the adduction one more time, because I don't think we
get enough of it. When you think about those classic chest exercises-- bench press, dips,
and push-ups-- we don't do it often enough. So the Cavaliere crossover is a great way to incorporate
it with a band. You just anchor it right down to a low point like that and you perform it like this.
It's the adduction of the arm across the chest that makes this as powerful as it is for getting
that better chest contraction. It doesn't have to be the hand coming all the way across the body,
it simply has to be the bicep getting closer to the midline of the chest. And that is exactly
what happens under the resistance of the band in the Cavaliere crossover. And so with that,
guys, whether you're listening to Sly or to me, or to both, you guys should know by now
the value of bands is definitely something that cannot be underappreciated. If you're looking to
do more than just your chest, guys, make sure you subscribe to our channel and all the series here,
this entire series will cover all the different muscle groups and the exercises you can do with
the bands. If you're looking for bands themselves, guys, we actually have our own elastics available
over at Athleanx.com to go with all the programs that we have at Athleanx.com as well. If you like
the video and you like the series, make sure you leave your comments below. Tell me what else you
want to see next. And also, if you haven't done so, make sure you click subscribe, turn on your
notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right, guys, see you soon.