What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx.com. Today, we're going to cover 11 exercises that
allow you to tap into one of the most overlooked and underutilized muscle functions to get better
results. It's called the stretch reflex. So today we're going to go through that oh,
why are you back here again? Oh dude, stretch reflex. I'm What are you doing? I'm stretching.
It's not that kind of stretching. It's not? No. Oh, this is going to make my intro really awkward.
Feel good now? 11 exercises, guys, handpicked because they provide you with the best opportunity
to tap into that stretch reflex, which creates a greater potential for muscle recruitment and
an overall better gain. So with that being said, guys, we're going to cover every single muscle
group in the body here one-by-one. Let's start breaking them down. So now the stretch reflex is
actually something we all have. It's just that we're not really tapping into it if you don't
know how to. You see, to protect the mechanism that our muscles have, that allows us to get a
better strength of contraction when the muscle is momentarily stretched to its limits. And we
can do it by actually doing it purposefully, right, building it into the exercises that we
do. So one of the best ways to do this if we're talking about our triceps is to do something like
the lying triceps extension. Now there's a reason why this works better than anything else because
it takes the tricep muscle through a full stretch. See, if you just did this, this is the tricep push
down. You can see that while I'm getting a stretch because the elbow is flexing as much as I can, I'm
actually not getting a full stretch of the tricep because the long head requires that my arm be up
and over my head like this. It's not happening here. So, the right one is this, the lying triceps
extension. Because here I not only get the elbow to be bent as much as I can, but I get the elbow
up and over my head that recruits that long head arm stretch. So here's what we're going to do,
you're going to take this exercise and do it one of two ways. Either you do it just like this,
which means you get down to the bottom here, go into a full stretch, and then turn that around as
quick as possible. Get into the stretch and out of the stretch to elicit that stretch reflex. If you
want to do this in a more advanced level then you would do this. You take your rep all the way down,
you come up one quarter, hold for a brief second, and then allow sort of a drop into
that stretch reflex and come out of it. It becomes a little bit more ballistic at that point. Again,
more for the advanced people who have actually had experience with the stretch reflex,
but the fact is you could do it either way. If you want to get the triceps to have a stronger
strength in contraction and greater overall gains, then this is what you do. Now when it comes to
the biceps, the exercise of choice here is the incline bicep curl. Why? Because it gives you
that opportunity to put the biceps in a stretch position. Anything done standing is going to start
with your arms out in front of your body, or at best, at the side of your body. But if we can
get our arms back naturally behind our body, then we've already started to tap into that stretch,
but how we do the exercise matters. See, because if you do your incline curls like this, you're
actually never even allowing the bicep to get into a stretch position at all. And a lot of people do
this, they cut short the bottom range in motion. So to do this the right way, what you do is you
make sure the arms are sinking all the way back at the bottom. And again, you want to make sure that
you get out of this position to apply that stretch of the biceps. We could do something extra here,
which is another way to utilize the stretch reflex, and that is to contract the antagonistic
muscle, in this case the triceps. We know that if we can contract the triceps we have to momentarily
relax the biceps to allow for a greater stretch. That momentary contraction of the triceps gives
you that relaxation in the biceps, that triggers a stretch reflex, which allows for that greater
strength in contraction out of the bottom. In the advanced version we'll do the same thing.
You come down to the bottom, up a quarter, hold it for a brief second, drop down into that position,
get that tricep contraction, and bounce right back out of it again. Either way, it doesn't matter
which one you do or where you're starting from, they're both going to work to get those biceps
contracting harder. So now when it comes to the back, I actually got three exercise options here
for you. Because you want to stretch the back out you got to make sure that you get your arms
up out in front of your body. And there's no easier place to start than right here on a lap
pull down. But you're not going to do this. You're not going to do the overhand lap pull
down. Now there's nothing wrong with this. I've done this exercise a million times and love it,
but when you're trying to tap into the stretch reflex, then you've got to switch your hands to
this position. Why? It's not just about the hands, it's what happens to your arms when you do that.
Your arms come out in front of your body. And we know that since the lats attach to the upper arm,
going from a position of here to here creates a bigger stretch on the lats without even doing any
of the reps in the exercise. So when we do this, now we come down, and we can do them in the same
way. We either can do them the standard way of going into that stretch position at the top and
trying to quickly reverse the direction back down again. Remember, get that momentary stretch, take
advantage of that built in function of our body, and get back down into a stronger contraction on
that lat pull down. If, however, we want to go in and do this with a little bit more advanced way,
we can just make sure that we get it up there again. Remember, pull down just a little bit,
hold for a second, let it fall up to the top, and pull down again. Now we can do this to other
exercises. One of the ways I like to do it is with the seated row. And maybe you might have noticed
when Jesse did the exercise the handles weren't at the level of his midsection or at his chest,
they're actually much lower, why? Because if we allow ourselves to get our hands down low,
out in front of us, because we're leaning forward it's actually creating a relative
elevation of our arm, more stretch on the lats. As you see here now, with me being in this position,
I can get that stretch and I can take advantage of the stretch reflex by being a little bit
aggressive as I get towards the end of that repetition. Remember, allow the stretch to take
me through that full stretch and come back into a stronger, more powerful contraction. The second
version of this would once again be get the hands up, hold for a brief second, allow it to drop, and
then come back into a more powerful contraction. The last exercise is one that I actually credit
to my friend and colleague John Meadows, and it's the Meadows Row. But instead of doing it this way,
if you want to take advantage of a greater stretch reflex, then what you have to do is just apply the
slight rollout to it. So this exercise you can see is a great way in a closed chain environment
to train your back. But as I get the bar down to the ground, I simply roll it out to again,
allow myself to get a greater stretch and quickly roll it back and right up into the
rep. More powerful contraction, more muscle fiber recruitment, better muscle gains in the long run.
So now when it comes to the chest, maybe you're thinking, I know Jeff's not going to go to the
chest fly. Well, sort of. I mean I'm not going to do an unsupported dumbbell bench fly because
I know the vulnerability of the shoulder in that position and we wouldn't want to play around with
the stretch reflex of that exercise. In fact, we don't even do the exercise. However, you could do
the standing version here, which is the 3D cable crossover. We had the opportunity to do just the
traditional way here where we get that stretch and then explosively come out of it, or we can take
it up that quarter of a way, drop it back down a little bit more ballistically again, under control
always, come up back up to the top with another strong contraction. But we don't have to stop
there. We can apply this to a bench press also and in the form of a dumbbell bench press we have
a couple things we want to make sure that we do to make this even more effective. The first thing
is utilize what I've covered before as the chest master tip. Whenever you're training your chest,
you want to make sure that you take your traps and you depress them. Because when you depress your
traps, not only is it setting your shoulder blades back and down, but it's taking your shoulders from
a position of dominance from here and it's getting them out of the way so that the chest can do more
of the work. But I've also given myself a greater stretch on the chest, touching the outside of your
pecs with those dumbbells and driving at every repetition more forcefully. Of course you've got
the opportunity to do that extra quarter rep if you so choose, to get that more ballistic extra
push to make that repetition even that much more explosive. So you might be wondering, Well, Jeff,
what about a dip? A dip is a great exercise for the chest that actually does place a good stretch
on the pecs, especially those lower pec fibers. However, I wouldn't use it as a choice here
because you're already in a vulnerable position at the bottom of a dip. So going into a bottom of a
dip more aggressively is just taking an already vulnerable shoulder anterior capsule and placing
more stress on it. So a good exercise that does place a stretch on the chest, but not for this
particular use. So when it comes to the shoulders, if you want to create more width and size,
the middle delt is where you should probably focus your efforts. However, the side lateral
raise, as you can see here, has its limitations, as far as the stretch reflex recruitment goes,
because you never really get there. You see, if you want to stretch your middle delt out,
you're going to have to bring your arm across your body. And the only way to do this is to utilize
either cables or to change the way you do the exercise and the position of your body when
you do it. And we could do this here with this inclined side lateral raise. You could see as I
lay myself on the bench in this way, I don't get stopped by my own leg in the lateral raise. I can
go across my body, further out in front, and get that stretch that we're looking for. And again,
we can do this in that one and a quarter way, take it up just a little bit and then drop it
and more forcefully come out of the bottom here. The choice is up to you, it depends on your level
of experience, but this is the way to do it if you're looking to take advantage of this and
apply it to your shoulder training. So now when it comes to the legs, we can apply the stretch reflex
here as well. Think about it, a squat gives us a great opportunity to do this. However, you might
be thinking, Oh, we're hitting our quads, right? No, the stretch reflex when applied to a squat, is
actually placing it on the glutes. Because if you think about what happens at the bottom of a squat
you'd realize there's not enough stretch on the quads to actually take advantage of the reflex.
You see, if you get to the bottom of a squat, and you were to simply lay yourself on your side,
you'll see that this is not placing the quads on any type of significant stretch. Even though your
knee is bent, it's not bent enough, and of course to get a greater stretch in your quads knowing
that the rectus crosses the hip as well you'd have to get your leg behind your body. So this
isn't going to cut it there. But we do know that because we're in deep hip flection at the bottom
of a squat, we're going to have a great stretch on the glutes. We're going to get a stronger
thrust out of the bottom of the squat, the hardest place to perform the lift. Now that being said,
that doesn't devalue the pause squat. As a matter of fact, the pause squat is done for a different
reason. Remember, there's different aspects to your training. This is not the only thing you
should be pursuing, the stretch reflex. Because of the bottom of the paused squat you're learning
to take the stretch reflex out of the equation so you can get more strength and just overall ability
to overcome the inertia of being at the bottom of the lift so that when you go back and add the
stretch reflex to it, now you get the benefits of both of them. And finally, here we can hit
the hamstrings with an exercise like the single leg RDL or we could hit the glutes. You see, how
you do this exercise will actually change whether or not you're going to shift the focus from the
hamstrings to the glutes. A lot of people would do this exercise like this. And this might be
good if you're trying to create a stretch on the hamstrings. You see, because as you lean forward,
you're not getting any real loading of the hip because you're not allowing yourself to go into
hip flection at all. You're just simply bending forward at the waist which creates that stretch
on the hamstrings. This is the best way to perform the exercise if you're looking to get the stretch
reflex on the hamstrings. But if we wanted to shift the focus to the glutes, if you sit back,
you see you create the hip flection by hinging at the hips. And when you do hinge, that will load
the glutes up, preferentially recruiting them over the hamstrings because the focus isn't so much
on keeping a straight knee as it is on maximizing your hinge. Again, whichever you choose here guys,
the way you do it's going to be the same, and the idea is recruiting more muscle fibers to the task
at hand by taking advantage of a reflex you're probably overlooking right now. So there you have
it, guys, 11 exercises primed to help you get better gains, start to implement them,
and use them yourself to see better gains. In the meantime, if you're looking for a program
that builds in all these exercises at the right time to get you the right results,
they're all in our Athleanx programs over at Athealnx.com. If you haven't already done so,
guys, make sure you click subscribe and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new
video when we put one out. Maybe even a better intro from Jesse. All right, see you soon.