What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
It's bodyweight Wednesday and this one is inspired by you.
Really not you specifically, but one of you because ELee Wingfield wrote "Can you make
a couple of videos that are great for the upper body, but don’t need any equipment?
Next year I'm going to be going to boarding school and you're only allowed to go to the
gym once you're 15."
ELee Wingfield, you're looking for something you can do that doesn't rely on A) a lot of
space; or B) having to have access to a gym.
So, if you give me 24" of space, I can get you exactly what you want.
As a matter of fact I can get you more than what you want because I'm going to show you
how to train your legs as well.
We call this the 2X6 workout.
Give me 2ft of space this way and 6ft this way, and I can get you a workout.
If you're a little bit bigger than 6ft then I'm going to ask for just a few more inches.
The idea is, with the right type of training you can train in a very small amount of space,
and if you pair your exercises up properly – as I always advocate here with bodyweight
training – you can train really, really hard and build muscle doing it.
I'm going to cover your chest, your back, your shoulders, and your legs all in this
workout.
Okay, first up we're going to cover chest.
Before I even start I want to cover one rule with you.
If you can't do the first exercise here don’t feel bad.
Just don’t do it.
If you can do one or two of three reps of it – or maybe 10 – do as many as you can
and take it to failure.
As soon as you reach failure you then move on to the easier version, or the B version
– or B exercise – and then take it to failure again.
The idea is, with bodyweight training, if you can train to and then through failure
you can actually build a lot more muscle than you might have thought from doing it.
So with our chest, the first thing we're going to do a Spiderman plyo pushup.
We're going hard right off the bat.
We want to try to tax our chest as much as we can.
With this, you can see, it's a very explosive exercise.
I'm getting all four of my limbs off the ground.
I have to be explosive in order to do that.
I take it to failure and I don’t rest.
I go right into our torso twisting pushup here.
The idea behind this pushup, if you already haven't seen me cover this in a separate video,
is probably the best pushup you can do because it gives you that additional activation of
your chest through adduction.
As I come up and I twist my chest, my arm is staying fixed.
I'm actually getting the adduction that we need to fully activate our pecs.
This is a great action for you to incorporate into your pushup to take it and make it even
harder.
Now we're moving on to the legs.
This time, again, another combo, no space required here.
The first exercise, remember, stay at the hard side here.
We're going to go to pistol squats.
So what you do, you try to do your pistol squats on one leg at a time.
Come down, take yourself to failure.
As soon as you reach failure on that leg you move to the other leg and go to failure.
Now remember the deal.
If you can't do pistol squats that's fine.
If you want to move right to the second exercise here – which is a split squat lateral jump.
So a split squat, explosive move, switch your legs up, jump laterally, get right into position
again, switch your legs up, again split squat, jump laterally, and keep going until you reach
failure.
You might find a conditioning component added to this as well, which is never a bad thing.
Now we're back to the upper body, on the opposite side of our body – the most important side,
I say – and that's the back.
Here we're going to present to you another combo, but you have to do one thing.
You're got to kick the shoes off here to probably do this properly.
If you have a hardwood floor, even better with your socks on.
This is a bodyweight pullover.
You guys know how I feel about the pullover being one of the best exercises you can do
for your back, but with the bodyweight version here, all you're going to try to do is keep
yourself in a fixed version, almost a pushup position, and then pull your whole body through.
So basically what you're executing is a straight arm pushdown, by sliding your body through
space.
So it's that relative motion again.
What's moving?
Are your arms moving while your body stays fixed?
Or in this case are your arms staying fixed and your body moving through?
The idea is, it's still going to work the back.
It's still a pullover and it's still going to allow you train your back without weights.
You're going to move right from that to what we call a back-widow.
That's another bodyweight back exercise that's going to hit more of the mid scapular muscles
and those muscles a little bit higher up on the back.
Here you just drive your elbows down into the ground and lift your body up.
My feet are flat on the ground – as you can see here – but the idea is to try to
drive my elbows back and down as I lift my chest up, and away from the ground.
You'll definitely feel this one, and again, after going to failure on the first exercise
you're going to find that you're already pretty fatigued.
That's exactly what you want.
You go to failure on this one as well.
Okay, finally we wrap up with the shoulders here and we're going to end sort of the way
we started.
Explosively.
You want to tax those shoulders right away if you can, try to get yourself to failure,
and then give you that mechanical drop down set.
The thing that's just a little bit easier that's going to allow you to keep pushing
through.
Well, we're going to do it here with our plyo mule kick.
This exercise is great for attacking the shoulders, especially in a plyo metric way.
We're going to attack the ground and allow the shoulders to be eccentrically loaded.
From here I'm going to try to push myself back away as explosively as I can to actually
try to pop myself back up to my feet again.
In which case, I'm going to continue on rep, after rep, after rep.
however many it is for you.
Remember if you can't do it, don't do that part.
Skip it and go right to this next exercise, where we try to continue this burn going.
From here we're doing our power push away.
The power push away basically takes our body – and because of the orientation of it to
the ground, we're now favoring a lot more of our shoulders to actually press our body
and move it against gravity here – than we would in a traditional pushup.
So slide more backward, get your arms pushing away from your body, and you'll work a lot
more of your shoulders than, obviously, if you have them directly under your body, which
you would with a chest exercise.
Guys, the idea is this: you can train hard.
You can train with your bodyweight and you don’t need access to a lot of equipment.
My friend here who's going to boarding school, he doesn’t need access to the gym to be
able to continue to see gains.
But you have to know how to train hard.
You've got to know how to pair your exercises up to allow you train harder than you maybe
already are with your bodyweight training.
I hope you guys found this helpful.
If you want more of this stuff – obviously, it's bodyweight Wednesday, guys – I cover
what you want to see, you let me know – just like my friend did there – and I will do
my best to bring more videos to you like that.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that trains you with nothing at all – we
could probably do the whole damned program in 2X6 – it's the ATHLEAN0 program.
You can head over the ATHLEANX.com right now.
No bars, no bench, nothing at all; literally zero equipment required for you to build muscle
in six weeks.
All right, guys, I'll be back here again in just a few days.