We've all seen those gym workout mistake videos where the people in them are making some pretty
bad mistakes and they're pretty obvious. Well, what if you're making some home or gym
exercise mistakes still and there are a lot more subtle. Would you even know? Well, in this video,
I'm not going to only expose what those exercise mistakes are, but show you how to fix them, and
it starts right here with a basic home exercise like the glute bridge. And with most exercises,
obviously, you know where you're trying to get to, but how you get there matters. You've been
told get the full hip extension. But did you know that the position of your pelvis matters?
It does. If you're doing this out of an anterior pelvic tilt, meaning you're dropping your hips
down and tilting your hip bones forward, well, guess what's happening? Your low back is taking
all the work because your glutes aren't really effectively doing their job out of an anterior
pelvic tilt position. Guess what happens when you have a weak low back? You wind up injuring it. So,
you want to make sure that you're doing this out of a posterior pelvic tilt,
tucking your tail under. You can still get to that full hip extension. But again, you're doing it the
right way and using the right muscles. Look, when it comes to bicep training, yes,
I know a thing or two about it, but even I was making this mistake. See, the idea here, guys,
is you don't want to curl like this. Instead curl like this. And there's a big distinction.
The amount of supination you're getting matters a lot because we know it's one of the main functions
of the biceps. And if we just stop halfway or keep our hands too narrow and never focus on
turning the hands over, you're going to limit the gains that you could be seeing. And you're
undervaluing how important that is if you've just been blatantly ignoring it all along.
So, what you want to do is focus on getting those pinkies to turn up and out almost fully
flip them over. In other words, they're starting down at your thighs. I want them
to be turned upwards as high as you can towards the sky. Then and only then will
you be getting full supination and then and only then we will be fully activating the
biceps so that you can start to see the best results possible. I promise you it works.
Now, as often is the case when I demonstrate this next exercise, people are shocked when I tell them
that hand placement matters when you're doing a Bench Dip. I showed this on Live with Kelly and
Ryan about how to properly place your hands on a bench because it matters, and it matters a lot to
the health of your shoulder. So, a bench dip done without attention to where your hands are, are
going to almost naturally drift forward. Fingers are going to want to grab the edge of the bench
and point straight ahead. But what that does is it throws that shoulder into that anterior capsule,
causing some excess stress in the shoulder that can lead to either discomfort or injury. So,
the fix here is just simply to rotate your hands out. And it is a very subtle but simple shift,
and it gets you to do the exercise right. Because by doing this, I opened my shoulders up,
I get them into more external rotation, it doesn't diminish anything that I have going on in my
triceps. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that you get a better contraction than the triceps,
but the fact is make sure you're not continuing to screw this up because you want to keep our
shoulders healthy while we're still trying to build those triceps up.
Mistake number four is not keeping the chest and the pelvis linked throughout
the exercise. Not only does this create a more inefficient and less powerful squat,
but it also leads directly to the squat mourning. We know how ugly this can be and it's also quite
bad for your back. You can avoid this, however, by just simply thinking about the chest and the
pelvis as one unit and moving them in space at the same time. It's quite simple because
these are pretty big moving targets and pretty easy to control. It becomes most challenging
at the bottom of the squat where there's a tendency to allow the hips to move first,
thereby breaking that link between the two. However, if you do this and do it right,
not only does this lead to, as I said, a more efficient squat, but one with a straighter bar
path. And a straight bar path is a good squat and one you're going to want to try to emulate every
time you get onto the bar. So now let's move to an exercise where the flaw is a little less subtle,
but no less problematic. And we're talking about the Pullup. If you do your pullups
with your knees crossed just like this, you're not doing the pull up as best you can because
you're inviting what I call energy leaks into the exercise. An energy leak is just
where you're not creating an efficient line of pull throughout the exercise.
In other words, the transfer of power through your hands to lift your body up over the bar
is dissipated through the weakness in that laxity that you created by just letting your legs dangle
underneath you. If you do this, instead, and you point your legs out in front of you, you create a
much more efficient transfer of power through your hands to lift your body up in space and again,
you will actually get more out of the exercise by doing it. Don't allow fatigue to allow those
legs to start drifting back into that bent knee position. Keep it this way and I promise it's not
just better execution, but better results. Next, we have a commonly mis performed kettlebell
exercise that can also actually be done with a dumbbell, we're talking about the Swing. Now,
here's an example once again where our bodies are looking for the easy way out. If you don't
have strong enough glutes, guess what, most of us don't, then we're going to look for help somewhere
else in our legs and this goes right to the quads. So instead of hinging back like you should, you
just sort of squat yourself down and bring those quads into the fold. That being said, that's not
the only problem with the exercise. We oftentimes focus on the movement of the kettlebells,
and by doing so, you start focusing on lifting it through space using your delts instead.
You shouldn't necessarily worry about how the kettlebell moves through space, you just need
to move through the proper hinging of the hips. I want to make sure I drop my ass backwards and
then explode through and let the kettlebell drift as. It will with each subsequent correct rep that
kettlebell will actually flow a little bit higher each time. But you're not actively trying to lift
it, you're just letting your body do what it wants to do and that is work naturally.
If you're going to do Calf Raises, don't do them like this because your calves likely won't grow.
Look, we already have a hard enough time getting them to grow as it is, but if you keep bouncing
through every repetition, it ain't going to happen. And there's a reason for it. Anatomically,
our Achilles tendon that the calf muscles attach to are built for these ballistic
bouncy type repetitions. If you want to actually get the muscle itself to feel what you're doing,
then slow it down. And when you get to the bottom, hold it for four seconds to take all of that
ballistic stretch aspect of it out of the Achilles tendon and force it to be felt by the muscle
itself. When you get back up to the top, feel that contraction for four seconds up there too. Again,
these bouncy repetitions up and down aren't helping you out at all. Focus on every contraction
at the top and every elongation at the bottom and you'll get much better calves because of it.
Now, this one might be the most egregious, but I can tell you this, we've all been there. We've all
done a pushup like this, and there's a reason for it. Our body wants to perform the exercise
like this because when we flare the elbows out either at or above 90 degrees, we're creating
a shorter distance on the pushup. Our heads tend to dive forward, getting us to the ground faster,
giving us the illusion that we've actually reached the end of the rep when our triceps and chest have
had to do a hell of a lot less work. If instead we tucked our elbows the way we should into that
more 45- or 60-degree position, it would create a longer travel for us, make the exercise more
difficult. But guess what, more rewarding. And this is actually validated by just having you
try something. If you wanted to push something with as much force as possible, how would you
do it? Would you flare your elbows like this and try to push? Or do you tuck your elbows in
more like this and give it a push? I think we all know the answer to that. But if you don't,
see for yourself and give it a shot, the bottom line is when you get this right, you start to get
the muscles that you want to build up in the first place, working the way they should, and you avoid
that excessive internal rotation and elevation that comes from doing it incorrectly.
And next we go back to the gym for probably my favorite tricep exercise, or at least one of the
best you could possibly do, but only if you do it right. And you're not going to do it right if
you do this, and that is perform it as a Skull Crusher. People target their skull instead of
actually doing it where they should be, and that is much further back. So, angle your arms further
back like this and all of a sudden you light up that all important long head of the triceps. You
place it in its full stretch and get maximum potential for a stronger tricep contraction.
We do that with so many other exercises, but why do we forget to do it here, again, I think a lot
of times because we simply refer to it as the wrong thing. Throw Skull Crusher out the window,
we don't really need to do those anymore, especially if you want to do them right.
Next, we have a commonly mis performed ab exercise that could easily be done either at home or at the
gym. We're talking about Seated Knee Tucks. But you want to think of them differently
because you're not just trying to tuck your knees towards your chest. Instead, think of
it like you're going to lift your tailbone off of the ground and the knees should go much higher.
Try to think of them going almost as high as your forehead, even if they can't reach. The point is,
you're looking to create that same posterior pelvic tilt because that's what's going to
engage those lower abs. And if you can get this right, the exercise becomes a lot more
effective if you don't and you just continue to pull those knees towards your chest. Once again,
you're just over activating the hip flexors, which is just going to lead to probably low back pain,
but not help you to target the lower abs like you're trying to get the tailbone up on every rep.
And I promise you better results will come. Nothing says I'm stuck in the 80s more with my ab
exercise routine than this Dumbbell Side Bend, it's just not a good option if you're trying
to train your obliques. And let's not even talk about the fact that people will do these either
with two dumbbells at one time in which they turn themselves into a human seesaw, or they're
actually doing them for spot reduction of their love handles. In either case will that actually
happen because my problem here is you're asking for something that your body doesn't want to give
you, and that is an excessive amount of lateral trunk flexion. Your lumbar spine is not meant or
designed to do this, especially when you combine it with the fact that you've got a heavy weight
or at least a moderately heavy dumbbell in your hands. The fact is, like I said, there's a better
alternative and it doesn't require any equipment at all and it's a simple Side Plank Lift. And you
can see that when I lift myself up, the side that I'm actually training is the underside, the bottom
side there that's looking for that lateral pillar strength. And when I lower myself back down,
what does it look like I'm doing? If you turn your head sideways, it actually looks like a Side Bend,
right, done on the ground. But because we're doing this in this way, guys, I have much
more control of that frontal plane as it was originally intended. The fact is, guys, it's
not always the motion that's the problem. It's how you're performing it and more importantly,
how you're performing it that turns a decent motion into something that's nonproductive.
Next, we're back in the gym for a great back exercise if you do it the right way. And for me,
it starts by taking your knee off the damn bench because we don't need to. All we do is increase
the hernia risk of the exercise because we're exposing already somewhat weakened inguinal
tissues. All we have to do is get into a tripod stance instead, put your feet out on the floor
behind the bench. Use your hand to support yourself and row from here. The only issue
is what do you do with your elbow? Because a lot of times people do this, and they turn it into a
Hammer Curl that focuses much more on the bicep and the forearm than it does on the back.
So, what you want to do is just simply fix your elbow in place,
lock it up and then move your elbow back behind you to get your lats doing most of
the work as opposed to simply flipping this up and overloading the arm. And speaking of exercises,
if you're looking for the only ones that you need to do to get jacked like him--
Jesse: You mean this bearded muscle machine? Jeff: Something like that. Make sure you watch
this video here, it's going to show you the exact ones he did to make this transformation. Also,
if you haven't done so, guys, make sure you click Subscribe and turn on your Notifications,
so you never miss a video when we put one out. Full programs available over
at Athleanx.com. See you. Jesse: Watch the video.