What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
A common question that I'll get for sure is, 'Jeff.
If you could only pick one piece of equipment to train with, what would it be?'
Would it be Barbells, Dumbbells, or Cables?
My answer is, 'That's an impossible question, guys.'
Because if you want to train and train completely, at some point, you're likely going to want
to train with all 3.
And there's one very specific reason why that is.
And that's because each one of these has its advantages and disadvantages, and each one
is going to stress your body in a completely different way.
So I thought, to underscore that point I would take one single exercise and demonstrate how
using those 3 different pieces of equipment
can drastically change the impact that exercise has on our body.
So, we'll do a Kneeling Overhead Press, ok.
Again, let's get a bit of stability going on through our core.
It's a good athletic movement.
We're going to get our shoulders working for sure, but we're going to do it with 3 different
pieces of equipment.
We'll start with the barbell.
So, I've got to clean this thing up, ok.
I'm talking about the advantages as soon as I put it down.
So, Barbell here.
Clean it up.
Get down into our lunge.
Stabilize.
And press.
And down.
And you can see that I'm able to use, you know, a pretty decent amount of weight with
the barbell.
That's one of the big advantages of it.
The reason why we're able to push more weight with a barbell is because we don't have to
worry about the stabilizer muscles working as hard as they do when
we use an individual, 3-dimensional dumbbell, ok.
There's more movement ability with individual dumbbells then there is with a fixed bar.
So, that might explain why you might be able to be a 300 pound Bench Presser, but you can't
press 150 pound dumbbells, alright.
So, that's advantage number 1.
A little bit heavier weight, build a little bit more muscle.
Next.
We could go into our Dumbbell Press, and again, come down and press up.
Now, again, one of the nice things here is, if there is an asymmetry in muscle strength
from right to left,
it's going to be exposed here because one arm, the one that's weaker, that was getting
helped by the fact that the bar was fixed together,
is not going to be so lucky when you're using dumbbells, ok.
But, one of the nice things here is you're shortening your lever arm.
You're able to keep your dumbbells in a little bit more, so, for this exercise, you can press
it without maybe that frontal plane challenge that you had from the bar this way.
because the weights were distributed a little bit further away from you.
So, I had to work my core a little bit more with the barbell there as well.
Again, is it an advantage or a disadvantage?
It depends on what you're trying to work.
If you're working for pure strength, you want to consider that.
Thirdly, when we use cables, you've got to follow the line of resistance.
You've got to follow the line of the cables.
So, here, I can get down and press.
And yeah, this is great.
I'm still doing an Overhead Press, but guess what's really working?
You can probably see it.
It's my core because here I'm not just pressing up, but the cables want to pull me back here.
So I really have to work my core.
So, yeah, it's a Cable Press,
but we have a whole other element in play because of the direction of the force of the
cables is altering definitely the direction of force of gravity against dumbbells or a
barbell.
So, you'll see, you've got to train everything guys.
There's really no 1 way to train if you want a complete body.
And there's no 1 exercise to train if you want a complete body.
You have to put it all together, and you have to put it together in a way that makes sense.
I try to do that for you guys already, step-by-step with the ATHLEANX Training Program.
If you haven't already and you want a step-by-step program that will layer these things in exactly
when I feel you need to start using them,
and also, give you guys ways around some lack of equipment because I realize that not everybody
has access to all of this.
I show you ways you can do it very inexpensively with bands that cost like 10 bucks that can
replace these cables.
We do that at ATHLEANX.COM in our ATHLEANX Program.
In the meantime, if you found this helpful, make sure you leave a thumb's up and a comment
below.
Whatever else it is that you'd like to see, leave that in the comments, and I'll make
a video on it.
Alright, guys, I'll see you back here again soon.