What's up, guys? Jeff Cavalier, Athlean-X.com.
Let's face it; our wrists are often the overlooked element when it comes to a strength training
program, but it's the wrists that often undermine your ability to do well on those other exercises
that you do place a high value on.
Like deadlifts, bench-press, or sometimes people will even complain about the wrists
be hurting them on a pushup. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's going to require
that we change our mindset about the way we do train our wrist and forearms.
We can do it really simply. We take a band here, and we anchor it to a pullup bar here
behind me – which is what I have here in the squat rack setup. An empty bar, put the
band around your writs, and then go ahead and reach for the bar.
In this position here, we've got ourselves setup so there's a strong force pulling me
back up in that direction. If I let go of that bar here you'll see where this is taking
me. When we typically do our wrist and forearm strengthening, we usually move our wrists
on a fixed forearm.
Whether we're moving it back, or moving it this direction, right? It doesn't have to
always do that. We talk about relative motion. These can still work the area here, but we
change around what moves and what stays fixed.
If we keep the hand here fixed and not move our forearm, we're still going to work our
wrist and forearm, but in a much different way. You're going to find as soon as you try
this that it really tends to zero in all the focus right here on the wrist, helping it
to become much stronger and much more stable when you go ahead and do your big lifts.
What you do is, you have your hand here hooked – again, that's where it wants to go – so
with it here I'm just going to push against the resistance of the band in this direction,
the same angle that the band is right here. Down and away from me. Down and away.
You could see right off the bat that yes, all the muscles in my forearm are working
here, but I could really feel it centered right here around the wrist. I'm just pushing
down and away. Again, the wrist kind of stays here, the hand is staying fixed, but the forearm
is doing the movement.
The forearm is going down that direction. All you do is rep out that way, pushing the
forearm down and away from you. The wrist is just going along for the ride. We could
do the same thing if we come this way – again, now it's underneath and now what we're doing
is we're allowing ourselves to roll a little bit.
The forearm – I'm just pushing down with the wrist. I'm actually pushing just against
the band, right in that direction. I work on doing that. Again, you'll find that you're
working your forearm, but at the same time you're really strengthening your wrist. So
much so that you can actually get in this position and hold it and try to hold it as
long as you can.
So what you're doing is your strengthening your ability to maintain a solid wrist when
you then go – especially [inaudible 0:02:50] because you're sort of in a position where
you're going to be needing it here when you're gripping a bar.
Again, go back this way, it pushes down, hold it, and strengthen your ability to maintain
a solid wrist while you're holding a bar. You take that back, you apply it to – like
I said in the beginning – dead lifts, bench-press, any exercise – even pushups. You're still
going to have to maintain a solid wrist position here.
A lot of people do them in neutral grip because they feel that their wrists feel weakened
when they do a pushup. This exercise will help you to start correcting that. As I said,
it might seem small, but it's only small until it actually winds up screwing up your big
lifts.
Then it becomes a big problem. Let's not allow that to happen. Guys, at Athlean-X we train
you like athletes. We don’t overlook the little things that don’t seem to matter
because ultimately we know that they all play a part in helping you to train and act and
work and function and lift like an athlete.
So if you're looking for a complete training program that doesn't overlook anything, head
to AthleanX.com right now and get our Athlean-X program. In the meantime, if you've found
this video helpful make sure to leave your comments and thumbs up below and I'll do my
best to keep bringing what you guys want to see in the videos ahead.
All right. I'll talk to you guys soon.