What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
We’re going to break this sucker out one more time today to help you see how you can
take one exercise and allow it to hit two completely different sides of your body.
A push with your chest, or a pull with your back.
It’s all about how you do it.
So when you’re training at home I think one of the biggest benefits of an exercise
that you can come up with is versatility.
The more versatile a home exercise is, without using equipment, the more beneficial it becomes,
and the more important it becomes to your training regimen when you’re trying to train
with nothing around you.
At ATHLEANX we have mastered how to train with your own body, and how to build muscle
while doing it.
A lot of you don’t know how to build muscle by training with your own body.
Here’s how you work your chest and your back.
If you’re at home, you’re going to do the exercise I’m showing you here.
This is called a floor pullover.
Now we know that the dumbbell pullover is one of the best exercise you can do for building
your back, and I’ve also shown you in the past videos how tweaking the contraction,
and the inhiation of the contraction on a dumbbell pullover can actually shift a lot
of the focus right here to your chest.
Your upper chest.
Now I want to show you how you can do it in the home version of this.
The No Equipment version of it.
When you’re in here, and you’re pulling down it’s all about where you initiate that
contraction.
We know that you can either initiate the contraction with your lats by pulling with your elbows.
So when I’m out here, in this position, if I pull down and lead with my elbows – so
you watch the exercise here again as I’m doing it.
If I were to lead with my elbows and pull down we’re going to maximize the contraction
of the lat, and the contribution of the lat to the pullover.
It’s the same way if you were doing a dumbbell version of this.
You’d have the dumbbell over your head, you lead with your elbows, with your lats
all in one piece.
Now, the tweak I want to make here – if you want to shift the focus and get some work
in on your upper chest – is instead of pulling down and leading with the elbows, you actually
try to pull in, and squeeze.
The inhiation of this contraction is what’s going to pull the arm down, and back, or your
body in this case, back up.
So here’s how it works.
Here’s why I’m breaking out the marker.
As you see here, we have discussed in previous videos how the upper chest fibers – the
ones that go from your clavicle – they all come in this way.
They all come up like this.
Up to your upper arm here.
So they’re all angled that way.
When our upper arm is up, over our heads, now you can see that they’re angled up this
way.
If we were to contract them this way they’re going to pull down that way.
So it’s pulling my arm down here to initiate a pullover, but we’re using the upper chest
to do that.
So when you’re in this position what you want to do is – okay, I’m on the floor
now, out in that fully extended position.
When I’m on the floor, when I pull, I stick my chest out, and then I contract there.
I’m contracting this way.
I’m pulling my hands, even though they’re fixed on the floor, in that way, to pull me
down.
Then come up, and over the top.
Here, into the floor, pull my body up, and down.
Here, into the floor, pull my body up, and over.
You can see that we can shift the focus.
So what I like to do with this exercise is do it both ways.
Either do a set to focus more on the contraction on the top of the chest, or do a set to focus
more on the contraction here in the lats.
Or alternate your reps.
A set for the top, a set leading with the elbows.
A set here for the top, a set – I mean, a rep – from the top, and a rep from the
elbows through your back.
Guys, you can build muscle, and you can make this exercise very, very difficult depending
upon how far you allow your body to stretch out.
It’s more that you have to overcome to pull yourself back.
By overloading, using your own body – forget it.
Your body is just like dumbbells, and weights, and everything else.
If you can provide an overload, you can build muscle.
That’s how we do it here, and that’s how you have to start doing it.
especially if you’re going to try to train and build your chest at home, with nothing
at all.
Our ATHLEAN0 program is a completely bodyweight only program.
No equipment at all.
We can allow you to build some serious muscle in just six weeks by following that program.
You can get that over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful make sure you leave your comments
and thumbs up below.
Let me know whatever else you want to see on this channel.
This is a Bodyweight Wednesday workout video.
Sometimes it will be Washboard Wednesday.
If you guys want more Bodyweight Wednesday I’ll make sure I do that, too.
Just let me know in the comments below and I’ll do my best.
Guys, I’ll see you soon.