What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. Today, I'm going to show you a magic trick.
I'm going to make this dumbbell and this arm disappear before your very eyes. You ready?
Okay, that's not the trick. But I promise you, it's going to feel like a trick, because the next
time you do a dumbbell bench, press is literally going to work that very next set. Okay, but it
has to do now with how you grip the dumbbell. But before I show, you want to ask you a question. How
are you benching right now? Do you look like this when you perform a dumbbell bench press?
Or do you look like this? Now, let me give you another shot. Go back to the first clip.
Look at the wrist, do you look like this when you do it? Or do you look like this?
See, the wrist position is entirely different. But what the wrist position does is it changes
what's happening at the end of your wrist and more importantly, setting up the biomechanics of
the press to become more efficient and stronger in that press. Why is that? Well, first of all,
we want to look at what we're going to do. In this grip here instead of gripping it, traditionally
right down the middle of the dumbbell, I want to shift my grip just a little bit to the end. And
then I want to focus my squeeze through these two fingers. Now, wrapping it over that four finger,
but this is not a hook grip guys we re not pulling anything. I'm just squeezing as hard as I can
through those at the thumb side and of the dumbbell. These get wrapped around for support.
And what it does, you can see is it just starts to position this side of the hand a little bit higher
than this side. Okay? And that's important. And why is that important? We break out Raymond
here, or at least part of Raymond, to show you why that's important. You can see if my wrist
was this way that the radius, the bone on the top side of the forearm here is longer at the end,
than the ulna is. And that's by design of our bodies here, we have a longer radius than ulna.
So, you can see that if I had the dumbbell on my hand, and I put the weight in the hand like this,
it can cause compression at that portion of the wrist where the radius meets the wrist itself.
That's not good, especially if you have wrist pain that's going to feel very uncomfortable
for people. The wrist pain alone is enough to take away some of the weight that you can press there,
but more importantly, what it's doing is actually taking this wrist out of biomechanical alignment.
Because believe it or not, the best way to do this is to get a little bit of that gapping here
by letting the thumb tilt up just a little bit. And again, the carpal bones will sit down on
the base of support here through the radius and the ulna, but it's better mechanically aligned
because we have a little bit of space here and we don t get that compression. All right.
So that's why that tip will work for you. Now, the best thing about the squeeze part of it
is that when I'm squeezing through here, you can try this yourself right now. If you have your hand
here and you squeeze those two fingers as hard as you possibly can squeeze here, you'll feel your
chest actually activate a little bit. You'll feel your arms tighten up against your body.
And the reason for that actually goes back to a shared neurological lateral cord from the brachial
plexus that actually feeds the muscles that do this and also feed the muscles that do this.
That gives a little bit of the heady side of things. But again, you can feel it
right now just by doing it and will actually reinforce itself when you do that now.
Let me show you one thing. I know there's a dumbbell video,
but how would this apply to a barbell? If I got down on the bench here, obviously I m restricted
to what I could do because my hands are fixed on a barbell and they re not on a dumbbell. But there
is one modification you can make to give yourself a little bit better shot of feeling less pain
through your wrist and being able to press more. And that is you want to go a little bit narrower
on your grip rather than wider. So to exaggerate this, so you could see what I'm talking about very
clearly. If I took a really, really wide grip, the wider I go, the more compression I get on the
radial side of the wrist. Right. You can see that the wider I go, the more compression I get.
So, if I wanted to get off of that radial side, I'd want to go more narrow. And you could see as
I go more and more and more and more narrow, I actually have very little compression on
that radial side. So, I'm not suggesting you close group bench press all the time when you
want to bench press. What I'm suggesting is you find the typical width that's good for you on a
bench press and then just go a little narrower than that to help offload some of that strain
and compression on that radial side. The fact is, guys, if you try this,
I promise you go grab a set of dumbbells and do this is going to work on whether
or not you're using lighter weights, you ll be able to do more. Or whether you start to
tap into those heavier weights, you re going to be able to do more weight there, too. I promise
you guys, give it a shot, it will work. In the meantime, if you found the video helpful
and you try it out, it works for you make sure you leave your comment below. If you're looking for
programs where we put the science back in strength always you can head to athleanx.com. And finally,
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so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right guys see you soon.