What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
A little viewer participation in today's video.
I want you, right now, to stand up and put your arms at your sides, and I want to see
how you're standing, ok.
So, arms at your side, standing up.
Now, what direction are your thumbs pointing?
Are they pointing towards each other?
Or are they pointing straight ahead?
Now, most guys, I'd say 90 percent of the guys, especially if you lift, your thumb's
are going to be pointing towards each other.
Or at least they're not straight ahead.
And the problem is, guys, too much internal rotation at our shoulders.
What causes that?
A lot of the lifting and concentrating on all the muscles in front of us with an inattention
to the muscles in the back.
Now, I'm not saying you're not training your back.
I'm saying you're not training your rhomboids and interscapular muscles enough to counteract
all that heavy work that you're doing in front of you.
So, how's it supposed to feel?
Well, the way it's supposed to feel, we can do that with a band.
So you take one of the ATHLEAN ELAST-S Bands.
You're just going to twist one end over the other so you've basically got a little figure
8 here, ok.
Then you pull the band in half, so essentially we've just doubled it up.
Now, this is where it gets a little tricky, and I definitely recommend you do this with
a shirt on.
I want to show you what the difference is so you can see what's going on.
So, I'll have mine off and I'll take the beating.
You put it over one shoulder.
Let's put it this way.
It's actually my better shoulder.
So, put it over one shoulder, ok.
Now, you're going to reach back and through here and get your arm all the way around,
ok, so you're kind of wearing it almost like a backpack.
Now from here, again, I would recommend it in a t-shirt, but for here you can see right
away, it's really corrected my posture.
Chest is out.
Shoulders are back.
And if I rest my hands down, they naturally want to rest now with my thumbs pointing forward.
This feels great!
Unfortunately, I don't walk around this way, ok.
So, the problem is by me not walking around this way with my shoulders in the right position,
they have a lot of impact on what we do when we train.
If your shoulders are rounded forward, I already showed you a past video,
that's going to limit the mobility, literally bone on bone mobility preventing you from
getting your shoulders fully up over your head.
It's also therefore, going to drag down.
If your upper spine is kyphotic and rounded forward, that means that your mid spine is
going to be kyphotic and rounded forward too
because it's all connected, and you're going to start walking around with worse and worse
posture.
It's going to have an effect on your abs.
It's going to tighten your hip flexors, and a lot of things that cascade off of not being
able to stay in the right posture.
So, what do we do?
Well first thing is I've got to get myself out of this friggin' band to show you and
whip myself on the way out of it.
You take this same band, and you do band Pull-Aparts, and they're really simple.
You dictate your own resistance by just grabbing on, ok,
taking your thumbs, pointing them towards each other, and then pulling them apart and
rotating your thumbs back and out.
So, you're not just getting a Pull Apart here, and I'll show you what it looks like again
when I do it, you're not just getting scapular retraction,
you're getting external rotation because you're moving your thumbs towards the back behind
you.
You're turning them back behind you.
You're rotating up through the shoulder.
So, again, if I want to start really easy, I just grab the band about shoulder-width.
I pull it apart, and I pull my thumbs back and apart.
They're pointing towards each other.
They're pointing back behind me, ok.
So, again, pointing towards each other, pointing back behind me.
Towards each other, back behind me.
When I actually come in, I'm decelerating this.
I'm not just letting it snap.
Then there's no eccentric contraction of those same muscles that we're trying to develop.
We actually squeeze them back and then we decelerate them in.
We squeeze them back, and then we decelerate them in.
Here's the recommendation in terms of volume.
You didn't get this way overnight.
It took you a long time and a lot of reps to get here.
These muscles are more postural in nature.
I told you before about ab training.
More frequency is going to benefit you more than trying to do low volume and going really
intense.
So, I recommend you get a band and you carry it with you.
And you make it become a bit of a habit.
Especially if you're already struggling from this and you know you have bad posture.
Do this a few times at work.
Bang out 50 reps in the morning.
Bang out 50 reps on your lunch.
Do it when you're just thinking.
Try to work on that posture.
I'm telling you.
The volume, the lower intensity with the volume is going to really, really help to start counteracting
what's going on, alright.
So, a very simple tip for you guys, but you can see the importance of getting it right.
I talk about it all the time, guys.
If you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an athlete.
That means, it's not just everything we do here.
And it doesn't even mean you have to be playing a sport.
It means you have to start paying attention to the small things.
You have to start realizing that everything matters when your body's a kinetic chain.
And you have to function, whether it be athletically or just function in the real world.
You have to make sure that everything in that kinetic chain is working, and you can't ignore
one thing over the other.
Sure we all want bigger biceps, bigger chest, but you can't ignore the other things because
eventually that's going to carry over to those things as well and bring you down.
If you want a complete training program that addresses everything and overlooks nothing,
then head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and grab our 90-Day Trainig program.
If you found this tip helpful, make sure you give it a try, tell me, admit it if your thumbs
are pointing towards each other,
and let me know what else you'd like to see and I'll make sure I do that.
Alright, guys, we'll be back here again in just a couple days.