What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
The only thing that could kill a great exercise is making a big mistake while performing these
great exercises.
Today I want to cover seven of the best exercises that you could be doing and should be doing
but show you how to make sure you’re not making these common mistakes along the way.
What are we talking about?
Guys, the exercises that work.
The squat, the deadlift, a lined tricep extension, a barbell row, an overhead press, an ab wheel
rollout, and a lateral raise for your shoulders.
All these are common exercises that you’re going to see if you go into any gym today.
Lot of people are doing them.
However, you’re likely to see the very same mistakes I’m going to show you here today.
I’m going to knock them out one by one and show you what you should be doing instead,
and make sure you’re avoiding these common pitfalls.
Let’s kick it off with one of the bigger lower body exercises.
That is the squat.
As a matter of fact, it’s going to have something very much in common with the other
big, lower body exercise the deadlift, which I’ll follow this up with.
With the squat, see if you can notice a difference between these two squats.
One of them may look right to you and one of them may not.
If you think the one where I’m overextending is right, then you need to fix that.
A lot of people think when they get to the top of the squat, especially when they want
to get over activation of the glutes, or feel a really good squeeze in their glutes, they
really try to get into hip extension.
But what you’re doing there is really not providing any additional benefits for the
squat.
If you think about how your body is loaded, it’s loaded from the top down.
We call it axial loading.
What you’re doing there is a translation move, side to side.
So, you’re not effecting the fact that the weight on your body is loading you downward
and you’re just carrying that weight side to side.
You’re not loading that additional extension.
However, what you are doing is placing additional shear stress on your lumbar spine that’s
not necessary.
When you do the squat what you want to do is what I showed you on the other side.
You want to make sure you come straight up and down.
Not only are you going to be saving your back, but at the same time you’ll have a more
efficient movement pattern because a squat should be executed on a straight bar path,
up and down.
You can see that’s possible when I’m not moving my body and translating it front to
back.
So, become more efficient in the movement, save your back at the same time, and you’re
making sure you’re getting this right every, single time.
Next up is the deadlift and as I mentioned, it’s the same problem happening here.
We tend to try and overextend the lift at the top of the movement, with very little
extra benefit for the exact reasons I just laid out on the squat.
Your loading is still up and down.
The bar is subject to gravity, and the forces are acting straight downward.
having this translation force front to back is not giving us any extra benefit.
As a matter of fact, once we lifted the weight up out of the hinge and got into a straight,
vertical position here, leaning back more is not getting us any benefit.
It’s giving us the same detrimental effects that the squat was, in terms of shearing on
the spine.
What we want to do is get to vertical.
A lot of times what people will do is try and trick themselves into thinking they’ve
completed a rep.
They’ll take it from here, they’ll get up, they’re not even there, they’re still
in that cat-back posture, and then they do this, and they come underneath, which is a
posterior pelvic tilt.
But they’re still not even in full hip extension.
They’re deceiving themselves by leaning backward to think they’re lifting the bar
up even more, thinking they’re completing the rep.
That’s not the case.
Make sure you finish the rep by going into full hip extension, completely vertical, stop
there, and go back down for your next rep.
Exercise number three is not a big lift, but it’s no less popular as you see people using
this every day in the gym.
It’s the ab wheel rollout.
However, they’re turning this move into something it’s not supposed to be.
They’re turning it into a hip flexion and extension movement.
We’re not trying to train the hip flexors here, guys.
We’re not trying to train the hips at all.
As a matter of fact, what I want to do is take my hips out of the movement.
This is and anti-extension ab movement.
I’m trying to prevent the overextension of my spine as I lengthen my body out because
we know as I lengthen the moment arm I’m going to be more subject to the force of gravity,
more subject to its wanting to cave in my lower back, letting my abs give out, and bring
me down to the ground.
That’s what we’re trying to fight.
So, it doesn’t have anything to do with our hip flexors.
As a matter of fact, we’re going to get our body out there, lock it in, and then try
to curl in through flexion of the spine, and then back out to a neutral position to avoid
overextension.
So, take your hips out of it.
If you find yourself rocking back and forth, you’re doing it wrong.
Get your butt in one position.
Try to keep it in one position and let the upper body do the rest of the movement out
and in the entire time.
Exercise number four is one of the better tricep exercises you could do, as long as
you’re doing it right.
It’s the tricep extension.
You can do this either with an easy curl bar, or you could do it with dumbbells, as I’m
showing you here.
The key is how you’re performing the lift.
The key is where you’re starting and stopping the movement from.
I feel like a broken record when I talk about the force of gravity, but when we’re lifting
dumbbells and lifting weights in general, most often we are fighting the force of gravity.
Which is what makes it so damn difficult.
What we have to understand though, is when our arms, or whatever the moving part, is
parallel to that force of gravity we don’t have nearly the work being done in those muscles
anymore, and we’re not subjecting our body to the same amount of stress.
When we’re trying to build muscle, we want to subject ourselves to stress.
That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
However, you can see in this first version of the tricep extension here, when I extend
my arms all the way straight up over my body like many, many people do it’s very easy
at the start and stop of the exercise.
I could stay here for a long period of time if I wanted to.
Not in the case where I make this slight shift on the elbows backward.
Start and stop all your reps on this exercise with your elbows angled backward from vertical
by about 20 to 30 degrees.
Instantly, I now have to fight to hold those dumbbells up against the force of gravity
because it’s no longer acting straight down on my arm.
It’s acting down on my arm at an angle, as you can see here.
That makes all the difference.
Subjecting the triceps to a lot more tension on every, single rep over time, set after
set is going to have a bigger benefit to you, and a better benefit on your triceps in the
long run.
Make sure you get this right, guys.
It’s a very quick and easy change to make.
Moving on here, I always say it’s impossible for me to separate the physical therapist
from the strength coach when we look at exercises because we know if we do them incorrectly
the repercussions will mount up quickly.
So, what we’re looking at here is a popular shoulder exercise that is done wrong so often.
Probably because it even has its own catch phrase.
That is ‘pour the pitcher’, when you do the exercise.
You do not want to pour anything, guys.
If anything, you want to try and un-pour what you’re pouring.
Why?
Because when we get to the top of a lateral raise, if we’re letting our pinky get higher
than our thumb, i.e. pouring an imaginary pitcher of water, what we’re doing is putting
our shoulder into internal rotation with elevation at the worst time possible.
Especially realizing you don’t need to do that to adequately stimulate the shoulders.
What you want to do instead is the opposite.
As your arm comes up to the side, you want to make sure your thumb stays higher than
your pinky.
It’s not a dramatic move, but what we’re doing is taking inside the shoulder joint,
an internal rotation moment, and we’re turning it into an external rotation moment.
That is something that’s critical because that little extra amount of space clears room
for the glenoid humeral head inside the socket to get up there without likelihood of impingement.
You don’t want to risk impingement.
I know there are different types of acromions, there are different types of bone structures
that would allow some to get away with it more than others.
However, when you’re going to rack up rep, after rep, after rep hopefully year, after
year in the gym make this small change, guys.
I promise you, the benefits will be well worth the change in slight positioning here.
Moving on, we’re back to the bigger lifts.
In this case, the overhead shoulder press.
Once again, guess what?
I care about your shoulders.
Why?
Because we can make one, small change on this exercise and reap all the benefits that this
exercise provides, as one of the best upper body exercises we can do without the detrimental
effects that come to the shoulder joint by doing it incorrectly.
How are we going to do this incorrectly?
How are we going to screw up our shoulder joints here?
By going too wide on the bar.
What do we that have to do – it’s not necessarily more than anything of what the
implications are on the shoulder joint by going that wide.
When I take my hands out like this, what it does is takes my elbows out with it.
If I go wide on the bar the elbows go out with it.
The further back my elbows get, to the point where we could exaggerate it to do the overhead
press behind the neck, we know we’re fighting the natural angle of our shoulder joint, called
the scapular plane, which angles forward about 45 degrees.
To get optimal desired movement in your shoulder you want to have your arm angled forward about
45 degrees from straight horizontal here.
So, we could do that, just by narrowing up our grip on the bar.
You might find that you’re even a little bit stronger in here because your body is
tighter, you have more core strength and stability from below, and you get some tricep activation
and assistance as well.
So, we want to make sure we’re narrowing up that grip.
What it does is takes those elbows from that wide position, putting them out in front of
the body, mirrors that scapular plane, and allows us to press up nice, and strong.
Guys, it’s not going to sacrifice your form, it’s not going to sacrifice the way you
can press, but it’s going to save you in the long run.
So, make the switch.
And last, but not least, we get into the barbell row.
Another great compound movement here, and a great pulling exercise if done correctly.
Once again, we’re caring about those shoulders and we’re talking about elevation here.
You’re probably thinking ‘elevation?
But you’re bent over here.”
Guys, it’s not about the position of your body in space, necessarily.
It’s more about the position of your joints, in relation to other parts of your body, regardless
of your position in space.
The barbell row is a perfect example here.
If I go extra wide and pull up on the bar, I’m limiting a couple of things.
Number one: I’m limiting the amount of adduction that my arms could get to my sides.
How close I can get my arms to my sides for better lat activation.
We know that the best lat activation is going to come from having our arms in tight.
Not only that, we know the best carry over effect to some of the other big exercises,
like the deadlift, is when we can get our arms adducted tightly into our sides.
Which is why concentrate so much in ATHLEANX on straight arm pushdowns.
Regardless, better lat activation is going to come from having your elbows in.
The way we can do that is have our grip narrower, once again.
Not only that, we look at that position.
If I’m up here doing the row – I mentioned elevation before – you can see it.
Just because I’m bent over doesn’t mean that I don’t have elevation of the shoulder
here and, once again, with internal rotation with the weight being pulled downward, and
my hands and shoulders being pulled downward into internal rotation.
We can get our arms in here, a little bit tighter, elbows closer to the sides, and pull.
If anything, our arms are now traveling with more desire to be externally rotated as I
pull up into extension this way and open my chest up.
Again, one, small change might make a world of difference for you and it’s not going
to compromise the results you see from this powerful exercise.
There you have it, guys.
Seven exercises that are being done everywhere and now being done by you.
Hopefully right every, single time.
Guys, I say it all the time.
You’ve got to train hard, you’ve got to train smart, and if you do, you’ll train
forever.
If you’re looking for programs that do that for you, laying it out step by step, all our
ATHLEANX programs are available over at ATHLEANX.com.
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Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you in
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All right, guys.
I’ll see you again soon.