Today I'm going to show you six seldomly performed exercises that are going to help you patch
up those weak links in the big exercises that are making up the foundation of your training
program.
More importantly, I will help you see all new gains from them.
What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I want to show you six exercise that, again, you probably aren't doing.
There's one you should be doing every day.
That's a hint.
But they serve an important, complementary role to your main, foundational exercises.
If you're not doing them, I feel that you're leaving some gains on the table.
In every one of our bigger lifts there's a tendency for the weak link in that lift to
hold back the overall progress you'll see.
However, if I told you that these exercises, I'll show you are going to help you address
those weak links, I think you'd want to listen.
That being said, I want to break down the following exercises.
A deadlift, a squat, an overhead press, and a weighted pullup.
So, let's start first with the deadlift.
When it comes to the deadlift there are two exercises that apply here because I feel that
there are two issues we have, just trying to get the bar off the ground.
That is: do you have adequate leg drive through the ground to get the bar going?
And second, once you do, do you have adequate upper body strength and stability to keep
the bar where it's supposed to be?
Especially on that proper bar path tied to your body on the way up.
A lot of times we lack one or the other.
If we were lacking in the upper body stability and strength, then what you'd want to do is
this right here.
This is the chest supported row.
Not only did I put this up on Instagram a few days ago, but I also shared that this
is something I struggled with a great deal, when I started the lift a long time ago.
I felt like I had the ability to drive through the legs to generate force into the ground
to get that bar going in the opposite direction.
But I didn’t have the ability to keep that bar nice and tight because the weakness through
my upper body and shoulders allowed the bar to drift down, forward, and away from me,
making me lift a lot harder.
So, what this does is demands that you learn how to pull from a no-momentum state without
the help of your legs.
You can see I've practiced this a lot and tried to get myself a lot stronger on this
so I could pull with no legs.
So, when I got back into the position of a deadlift and had the benefit of my legs, I'd
be able to pull a lot more.
The next thing is that some people don’t have the ability to drive into the ground,
or as I've pointed out before in our deadlift tutorial video, they don’t even know that
the legs are really supposed to be driving that initial part of the movement.
At least to the level of the knees.
It's like a standing leg press.
So, you want to be able to train your body to know that the leg drive is important.
But when that's established, how do you do it with an exercise?
How do you get better at that?
This is where I like to break out the reverse lunge or the dumbbell lunge, in general.
What the lunge makes you do, if nothing else, it makes you learn how to drive hard into
the ground through one foot at a time here.
The fact is, I like to do mine with a step back, in reverse because it takes the anterior
stress off my knee.
So, for somebody that has knee pain or discomfort, particularly from patellar tendonitis, the
step backward takes off some of that strain.
But it doesn’t diminish the main benefit this exercise provides and it teaches you
how to push hard through that forward leg, so you can get all the momentum of your body
back up to a standing position.
Again, if you had taken this into a forward lunge there's even more demand.
When you step forward and have all your momentum, plus the weight going forward, and now you've
got to push to drive back and get back up to a standing position; you will quickly learn,
if you don’t know already, that you need to learn how to push with great force through
your legs, one at a time, into the ground.
So when you come back into the deadlift and setup with both feet able to contribute now
– again, with that tight upper back – you've got a great combination to help you rip that
bar off the ground and get it going in the right direction so you can complete the lift.
Next, sticking with the leg movements here, we've talked about the squat.
You guys have heard me talk before about the value of the glutes when it comes to performing
the squat.
Again, the sticking point in a squat is most likely going to be the bottom of the lift.
You're not half repping it.
You've got to go down low enough to not only see benefits from the exercise, but more importantly,
you need to be able to activate the glutes.
Set them up to contribute to the lift.
Put them on a stretch.
The only way to put them on a stretch is to get deep enough.
But when you're deep what's the consequence?
A lot of times you can't get out of the hole.
This is a great exercise to help you do that.
This is a variation of the glute-ham raise because we're not completing it to the point
where we're doing the hamstring curl.
What we're doing is preloading the glutes by putting us into relative hip flexion here
at the bottom of lift, weighting it if possible.
You may not be able to.
If you can't, you can go without.
You can work your way up with dumbbells.
The fact is, you can overload this exercise.
But with that pre-stretched glute, the main driver of getting out of that position into
hip extension has got to be the glutes.
You want to focus on initiating the contraction by squeezing your butt cheeks together.
I know the low back is going to want to contribute, just like it would in the bottom of a squat.
That could become a very faulty movement pattern when you take it into your squat.
You want to teach your body that, like everything else, we start from the ground up.
We drive our strength and force through the ground first and it goes up the kinetic chain.
Therefore, the glutes are going to encounter that force first and you want to make sure
they're doing that.
So, you squeeze and initiate every, single repetition by the squeeze of the glutes.
Let the low back contribute after.
Hold in full extension and come down.
If you do a few sets of these guys and start working them into your routine you're going
to have a stronger lower back.
More importantly, you're going to be neurologically wired to utilize your glutes right at the
moment they're needed the most.
Moving onto the upper body.
One of the foundational pressing exercises you should be doing is an overhead press.
With that being said, we know there is some variety in how we can perform that exercise,
depending upon how much of the lower body we want to involve, and what the purpose of
our training is.
If you're trying to be more powerful and explosive, you'd want to incorporate the lower body because
we know how much that can contribute to generating force, like we just said, 'from the ground
up'.
But we also have the alternative to try and strict up our form, to try not to get the
lower body to contribute.
But here's the thing, our bodies are pretty damn smart.
As soon as you put yourself on your feet, they're going to find ways to rely on ground
reaction forces to accomplish what it is we're trying to do.
So, what we can do, if we're trying to get ourselves even stronger in this exercise,
is sit our asses down.
Literally.
On the ground.
Like you see me here in a Z-Press.
The Z-Press is one in which our legs are literally removed from the equation here.
They're just out in front of us not contributing to the force generation of the lift.
Now we have to use the strength of our shoulders to get this barbell up.
It's another one of those chest supported row, no-momentum type setups where we're demanding
that the muscles we believe are being compromised by the more quick to participate lower body,
and we're making them do all the work.
So, if you're finding that you're not lifting as much on the overhead press as you feel
you probably should be, you're probably not as strong as you think you are, directly where
you need the strength the most.
And that's where this exercise comes in perfectly.
So, when it comes to the upper body pulling exercises, a foundational movement for you
– at least one of them – should be the weighted pullup.
We've talked about the benefits of this movement many, many times before.
However, it's how you address your weaknesses in trying to get stronger in this exercise
that's probably holding you back some because the area you're going to want to work, more
so than the areas that you can see moving, should be the areas you cannot see at all.
That is this foundational strength and stability of your shoulder blade.
As I've talked about here before, the glenoid-humeral joint is an interesting joint.
It's got a lot of mobility to be able to allow our arms to get into a whole lot of positions.
From all the way down here, to all the way up over our heads.
It's obviously valuable when it comes to performing a pullup.
We also know that the shoulders themselves have a lot of strength capacity, i.e. on the
overhead press, to allow us to do some things when we move them through space.
Obviously, the lats as well.
But it's the strength of the scapular stability that is going to ultimately undermine your
ability to do a weighted pullup if you're not strong enough.
Why?
Because, as I've used this analogy many time before, if you try to jump as high as you
possibly could, and you try to do it off this hard surface here, or off a lot of sand, I
can tell you right now you're not jumping higher off the sand than you are here.
That's because the base where you're trying to generate force from is moving.
It's giving.
It's weak.
Not like this firm floor.
So, if you want to do something for yourself that's going to help you get better at the
pullup, you'd do these.
These are weighted scap pulls.
All you're trying to do here is a straight pullup.
In other words, your elbows are not bending.
You're just allowing the weight of your body to pull your shoulders into upward rotation,
and then you're trying to drive them down and back by doing nothing but pulling down
with those lower traps.
Really trying to squeeze and strengthen the stability of those scapulas from the bottom
up.
The movement here is very, very small.
Maybe you can't handle weight.
That's fine.
I can tell you if you're incredibly weak in this area, even a bodyweight variation of
this is going to be challenging.
And if you're somewhere in between there's nothing stopping you from going over to a
lat pulldown machine and using the weight that's in between the two with the same mechanics
and idea in mind.
You want to try to initiate that pull straight down through the scapula.
Learn to stabilize them because once they're stable, once you have that stable base, once
you've gotten rid of the sand and replaced it with a stable base, now you want o generate
force?
Go for it.
You're going to be able to do a lot more things and you'll find a lot more reps when it comes
to the weighted pullup.
Finally, I don’t know how I feel about this exercise because I feel like it shouldn’t
be one of those that's a surprise to you.
If you've watched this channel for any length of time you're going to realize "Jeff?
He kind of likes face pulls."
As a matter of fact, they make their way into this video another time for a very good reason.
If you could think of one exercise that's complementary, that's an accessory movement
that you'd want to include, that could benefit all your lifts – in fact, all the lifts
we talked about here – what would it be?
You know the answer.
It would be the face pull.
You can see me doing it here.
The variation I'm showing you here is where I add the additional press to the top because
it requires additional stability of those mid-scapular and lower scapular muscles to
perform this the correct way.
There's not an exercise you'll perform that won't benefit from this movement and getting
stronger in this movement.
This is not meant to be done with just 5lbs.
You're supposed to get stronger at this movement.
The fact is, you'll be doing it frequently so you won't have to worry about frequent
jumps in weight.
Just go for an overall progression in the weight that you're using.
Try to get stronger here.
How could it help?
Well, think about it.
Is this going to help you in your pullups?
Of course.
Is this going to help you with stability on the deadlift?
Of course.
Is this going to help you with maintaining the tightness in your upper body throughout
the squat?
Of course.
Is this going to help you perform an overhead press with proper mechanics?
Of course.
Is this going to help on the bench-press to maintain tightness through your upper body
on the exercise?
Of course.
Guys, the face pull is one of the best exercises you can do.
Do not forget about it and start including it after all your workouts like I've asked
you to do before.
So, there you have it, guys.
There are some additional lifts that I believe you should be doing, especially if you're
finding yourself struggling to break through some plateaus on your bigger foundational
lifts.
You can't keep banging your head against the wall, guys.
There's a saying.
"If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting".
You want to have some strategy to allow you to breakthrough and I believe these exercises
give you a strategy to breakthrough in a powerful way.
They're addressing those weaknesses in the kinetic chain that are likely holding you
back.
If we can strengthen the weakest link, we're going to make you strong all the way through.
If you're looking for programs that address these weak links and build them into everything
we do, so we can minimize how often they appear, and how significant they are when they do
appear, head to ATHLEANX.com and get our training programs.
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All right, guys.
I'll be back here again in just a few days.
See ya.