What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to uncover a hidden area of strength for you.
And I don’t say hidden because I'm trying to be gimmicky here, it's hidden because mostly
likely – and don’t feel bad – you're one of the ones that's overlooking this critical
element if you want to see impressive strength gains and really realize your true upper body
and lower body potential for that matter.
What we're talking about is straight arm scapular strength.
Now I know scapula, you're throwing in any freaking term here and half of you guys want
to get out the door and leave the video.
I promise, stick around, I'll make it work your while.
It's actually a very critical component of your overall strength picture and it has to
stop being overlooked as of today.
Okay, so what are we talking about?
Well, it's executing movements out of this straight arm position.
The key factor is that if you can't stabilize your scapula, keep them in place while you
move your body around them, then you're never going to have the ability to perform your
bigger lifts like bench press, like the deadlift – which is critical to having straight arm
scapular strength – correctly, or even to their full potential.
Therefore, that's going to be the weak link.
Maybe not your legs in your deadlift.
Maybe not you lats, or your chest in the bench press or in the pull up or anything like that.
It's going to be your scapular strength and that's where you have to plug that leak so
we can get you stronger.
So how are some of the ways that we can do this?
Well, we can kind of start on the easy end with some bodyweight movements.
This is just sort of like the planch, tuck position, or a modified beginner planch tuck
position that we do just sitting on the end of a bench.
All you have to do is keep your arm in, again, straight at the elbow, right here beneath
you and try to lift your body up off the bench.
That's it.
Now, for those who never worry about straight arm scapular strength, obviously you're not
training with ATHLEANX because I make sure that we include a lot of this, even in our
beginner program.
But what you want to do is just be able to get yourself off the bench and feel the muscles
engage around your entire shoulder girdle and see if you can hold it there.
It can be 15 seconds if you're starting out.
60 seconds if you can.
Try to work up to 2 minutes, all right?
Are the triceps working here?
A little bit, but your elbows are locked out.
Most of the work here is going into the scapula and the scapular stabilizers and that's the
point.
You can then take it down to the floor.
Again, bodyweight version; any of us can do it.
You'll allow your shoulder blades to kind of pinch and retract together.
Get into the plus position here, using your serratus to plus your shoulder blades apart
from each other and then you want to lean your body forward, which is going to test
that straight arm scapular strength.
Your shoulders will work, your entire shoulder girdle, once again.
Then you rock yourself back, allowing to collapse, and repeat the process.
See if you can bang out 10 of these, 15 of these, 20 of these.
The goal is, obviously, to take wherever you are now and start improving that.
We can take it up a notch.
We can go down into this inverted row position.
Here, it's actually like a modified very beginner version of a front lever.
Now, we've talked about the front lever raise.
I've done a whole video on that before.
I'll link that over here for you.
That's obviously an extreme example of straight arm scapular strength.
It's why most people that can do those tend to have a lot more relative upper body strength
and overall strength for that matter.
They can do some pretty impressive things.
Gymnasts come to mind, first and foremost.
But you want to be able to modify that here because you may not be able to do that right
away.
You do that by rocking back while you do this straight arm hold.
So you're not trying to push through your quads here to get your body up, you're using
your straight arm scapular strength to pull yourself up, okay?
Focus on the legs just being there as an assistance.
They're not there to drive you, okay?
Now, we can make it even more difficult.
We can go to the weighted version.
Now, I'm not saying that this movement is difficult, but if you weight this heavy enough
– as I always advocate – then you're going to get a lot out of this movement and it's
a critical component, and one of the major staples of ATHLEANX training; and that's a
straight arm push down.
You don’t have to do it with a cable machine.
We don’t require you to have that to do ATHLEANX.
You could do it with a band at home.
The further away you stand the more resistance you're going to have.
But the idea here is, yes, you're using your lats, but they wouldn't be able to optimally
function if they didn’t have the stabilization of the scapula first.
That's what this exercise does.
This translates directly over to a deadlift.
You can see me deadlifting here from a previous video.
The deadlift requires that you have straight arm scapular strength to stabilize the bar
and stabilize the entire upper body so you can execute the lift without loss of energy
from the ground all the way up to the top.
Your quads will be able to execute with more strength because they're not being diverted
or lost through this weak and loose upper body.
So if you can execute a straight arm push down here, then you could do a lot more with
the deadlift.
Probably more instantly than what you think you're even capable of.
Finally, an advanced version of this straight arm scapular strength concept is a head banger
pull up.
So you get up to the top of the pull up and you don’t have to worry about going up and
down anymore.
Now you want to worry about going in and out.
In and out.
Obviously, this is very difficult and complex.
You're not actually getting completely – or I'm not getting completely out to straight
arm, but the idea of getting out there and resisting the temptation of my body to just
cave and fall out is demanding heavy doses of straight arm scapular strength.
So as you see here, guys, there's a lot of examples of how you could do it at all levels
of difficulty.
My job as a coach and as a physical therapist is to A: make sure that you're doing these
first and foremost because if you're not you'll never reach your true potential, I can promise
you that.
And B: I want to make sure that you're doing them the right way in the right progression.
I lay it all out for you in our ATHLEANX training system.
No matter what program of ours you're on, you're going to be doing straight arm scapular
strength work because I realize just how important it is to the overall picture, and hopefully
now, after this video you see that, too.
Again, if you're looking for that program – or any of our programs – they're over
at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, I hope you found this video helpful.
Let me know below by leaving your comments and let me know what else it is that you want
to see and I'll do my best to cover it here in the weeks and months ahead.
All right, guys.
I'll see you back here soon.