What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
I've got a good one here for you, today.
When we talk about being shredded, what is it that people associate that with?
Having more muscle definition, or maybe more vascularity, or muscle maturity.
Meaning, it looks more like the muscles you'd see in a textbook, right?
Versus someone that just started training.
Or maybe even the muscle tone.
That's all good, but when you're trying to get lean, and have those muscles be visible,
and have all those qualities, the very first thing you need to do is be locked in on your
nutrition.
When you do that the vascularity starts to improve, as does the muscle definition.
But there is something you can do in your training that's going to do the other half
of it.
That's going to be increasing resting muscle tone to make you look a lot more muscular,
as fast as possible.
What you want to do – take the example here of my arm.
Now, I'm not going to flex by bicep by bending the elbow, and flexing it.
What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to let it rest, and then I'm going to tighten
it, and increase the muscle tone.
So here is the bicep at rest, and when I increase the tone you can see more muscle definition.
It starts to look a little bit more impressive, and it's harder.
All these things can actually be improved with overcoming isometrics.
There are four of them I want you to do, and there are places you can incorporate them
into your workout.
I'll start from the backside because nobody every works their back enough, and this is
a great exercise to do.
There are two things you want to do with overcoming isometrics.
You want to load up a weight stack as much as we can because we don’t want to be able
to move it, and we want to work from an extended position.
More of an elongated position, and we want to work form more of a contracted position.
So if I'm working the posterior chain, if I work extended first what I'll do is, I'll
take my right hand and grab the left, and then right arm, and grab the right, or the
left arm and grab the right.
Now what I do is, I give myself some tension here.
Now all I'm doing is letting myself round forward and then I'm going to try and pull
as hard as I can here, but I can't move it because the weights are too heavy.
But it's this isometric; trying to overcome the immovable.
Pull it as hard as I can.
Six seconds, rest.
Then go again.
Pull.
And rest.
I'll do one more.
Pull.
You can see these muscles on the posterior chain, the glutes, the upper back, the mid-back,
the lats are all in this more extended, stretched out position.
I can go the other way and get into more of a contracted position, but I'm going to stand
upright.
For this one, I grab the left with the left, the right with the right, I step back, here,
I'm going to take the leg that steps back – it's going to be that glute, that glute
is going to contract as hard as possible – here, squeeze the left glute, squeeze the back,
squeeze the triceps, the upper traps.
Ready?
We're going to start to overcome.
Now.
Pull.
As hard as I can.
And rest.
Then go again.
Rest.
Another one.
Okay?
Posterior chain.
Great for doing on pull day, on back day.
Now we go the other way.
Now, the other side – again, we want to go in this elongated position, and then we'll
set it up to be more of a contracted position – but anterior chain.
So, abs, biceps, chest, shoulders.
We set it up down here, down low, grab the left, grab the right, and step forward.
I'm going to tell you why this is actually really safe, too.
Even though you're going to think my vein is going to pop.
It's not, but it is.
I take a step out here, I open up, here, and pull.
And rest.
And here we go.
One more.
Now, one more.
We set them up, bring them out a little bit, set them up, bring them out.
Okay, now we're going to come out here, and here, we're in a more contracted position.
Out, squeeze the quad on the back leg there.
Pull.
Rest.
You're increasing the recruitment of muscle fibers because you can build toward this strength.
It doesn’t start out at peak levels.
It builds over those six seconds.
So with the force I'm pushing with right now, it actually increases every second as I recruit
more and more units.
One more.
Now, the reason why it's actually safe is because unlike yielding isometrics, where
the weight would be pulling me apart so when I fail, and I can't hold it anymore, my arms
drop back suddenly.
That's not happening here.
We're getting in this position here.
All I'm trying to do is, again, move the immovable.
Squeeze as hard as I can.
They're not going anywhere.
The muscles are in a shortened position.
They're not in that more vulnerable state.
Even when we're in the more elongated position here, again, they're not being pulled back
in this direction.
I'm trying to shorten from that position.
Ideally, really good for working through sticking points as well.
Getting in this position back here and trying to push from here as you go – whew!
My voice.
Trying to push from here is going to help with that sticking point during the bench-press.
So guys, remember if you want to get the most out of your training you want to use every
technique that's available to you to get the most out of your training.
At ATHLEANX we do that for you.
We lay it all out for you step by step in our plans.
They're available over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else you want me to cover, and I'll do my best to do that for you in
the days, and weeks ahead.
See you.