What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
It's Memorial Day and we're celebrating and commemorating those that have served our country,
by serving you up one hard ass workout. we're going with a heavy lower body calisthenics
upper body and conditioning workout all rolled into one, straight from our special tactics
program.
This program was designed to take military physical readiness exam testing to a whole
new level; to fill in the gaps of what I felt was missing from current physical readiness
exam prep testing. I hope you guys find this valuable. Again, straight form the program.
You'll be able to learn more about special tactics over at ATHLEANX.com, but in the meantime,
give this one a shot. All right, let's kick off week two now. Let's bring up the energy.
You're going to need to make sure that you bring it because this workout is going to
be even a little bit tougher than the last one.
We're doing it again as a lower body strength focus. So heavy weights here, four sets to
failure, five to six rep mx. We've got our upper body calisthenics, a couple new exercises
– or at least one new exercise in here for everybody – and then we've got to start
with our gut check in.
Today is a classic military endurance test – muscle endurance test. The flexed arm
hang. We've got to do it for 1:10. Again, I told you, the numbers I'm picking here,
those are good numbers. That is the top score that they're looking for in the military test
here. They're looking for a 1:10 flexed arm hang.
So I'm going to set that as a standard here. We've got to make sure that is what you're
pushing toward. You may not get it, but at least if it's in your head you have this goal
you're going to be pushing to try to get there, and that's what we want. If you don’t make
it we'll have some things for you to do at the end.
Now, the flexed arm hang first, let's just go through it and demonstrate it. We have
a way that we do it that's a little bit different than military standards, okay? Military standard
says that when you do the flexed arm hang you can go either overhand, or underhand.
We like to go overhand here for it and you're going to get your chin up over the bar.
Again, it's okay if you go underhand. That's fine. You come up over the top, chin up over
the bar. The key difference here is that the military allows you to continue to count this
test until your arm is straight. So this is still okay, and this is still okay, and this
is still okay. Even that's still okay. It's until your arms go all the way straight that
they disqualify you.
We disqualify you when your chin goes below the bar. So if you're up here and then as
soon as you start to get down here, maybe your chin dips, that's okay. If it comes down
to here you're out. We're no longer counting that. But it's good because we're going to
apply that when we get into the end of our work out here in our punishment phase.
We're going to apply the standards to what we're doing. Let's get there in a second.
So we have our lower body strength. Barbell squats, alternate dumbbell reverse lunges,
barbell head thrust. We're not recreating the wheel here, guys. We're not reinventing
anything. These are classic strength training exercises. Barbell squats we know.
We don’t have to demonstrate those. Alternating dumbbell reverse lunges; I've covered the
value of a reverse lunge, especially as it relates to people that have knee discomfort
when they do regular lunges. Why? Well, we've talked about it on the video before – our
YouTube video – that when you step out in a regular lunge your knee is in an open chain
position.
Again, it's not a bad exercise, it's just for people that have knee problems, and this
could become troublesome. They step out in an open chain position, there's a little bit
of stretch eccentrically on the quad as it is already. Then when they land there's a
lot of force that goes into that anterior knee that could cause some problems.
But if we keep our foot in a closed chain position – so we're still looking at that
front leg – it's already closed chain, meaning it's in contact with the ground. If I step
back now it stays closed chain and I can come up. I'm also not directing all that force
forward. I'm directing the force backwards and away from it.
Then lastly, because I get a little bit more hip flexion here, ¼ of the quad muscles direct
us and will actually be a little bit more on slack when we're down in a more flexed
hip position as we are here in a reverse lunge. So we'll get a little less strain across the
kneecap. So we just do a reverse lunge. We step backward and we come back out of it,
okay?
Each leg here, taken through to five to six rep failure. Then we've got our barbell hip
thrust and it's kind of going back to that whole position we were in where I demonstrated
how to do a forward press with a bench press. Now we're just doing the first part of it.
Again, get back into this position here and the key of this exercise is just finding the
right placement.
There's two real big keys. The placement should be right in the crease of your hip. So how
do you find that? Let's say the bar is too far down. Just lift your knees up. If you
lift your knees up off the floor it'll roll it right into that crease that it needs to
be in. Secondly, once it's there take your hands and push away. Don’t let it just sit
right down into your pelvis.
That could become a little bit uncomfortable. Push it forward into your thighs. Now when
I lift up it's not resting on my bones, it's resting on my muscles, but I don’t really
feel any pain. So when we do the hip thrust we push in that way and then we just push
up, drive up through our hips. Okay, I also like to dig my heels in when I press, not
going flat footed because I can activate my hamstrings more, in addition to my glutes.
So there's our heavy work. Now, for our light work- upper body. So, we've got assisted chin
ups – and I'll show you how to do those. Last time I just discussed them. Now I'll
show you how. If you can fail between 15 and 20 without then don't use the assistance,
but if you're somebody that does 7 reps, 8 reps, or 9 reps usually then you're going
to need some help. Take a band out – this is one of our ATHLEAN-Xtreme bands here.
You wrap it around the bar and then put it through itself. You take this side of it,
put it through here, and pull, okay? Now, when it's here you're going to pull down,
step into the band, come up, and now we just unweighted our body here by about 40lbs. So,
now that allows you to get to 15 or 20 if you were already struggling to get there in
the first place. With this being the light focus we're not looking to really, really
tax your upper body.
Secondly, we've got the new exercise: archers. Archers is a pushup hybrid exercise. You come
down here, hands will go out wide to here, you're going to slide to one side until your
arm is straight, and then you're going to push yourself back to the other side until
that arm is straight. You've got to get up to a pushup position though. So here, so you
slide straight, straight, trying to pull your fingers at the end. Now, it looks like a tough
exercise.
It's definitely not easy, but it's a bodyweight movement. It is a callisthenic. It's not going
to overload you too much, but if it is – if you can't even do the movement – do it on
your knees. So if you look at it this way, you drop down, you're here, and then slide
out that way. Okay? Finally, we've got, lastly, our rear delt iron cross. This is one of the
underappreciated exercises that really targets one of the areas that we don’t tend to target
enough.
Not just the rear delts, but also rhomboids, upper-middle back. So you're working on that
entire upper posterior chain beginning here. I say to bend knees as needed to reach your
rep goal. So if you start out with your legs out straight you're going to be arms out and
down, push up, push down and through the floor, and lift your upper back off the floor, okay?
You can probably see here, the posterior delt does a lot of work to try to accomplish this.
If you saw my upper back at the moment it would be really under tension. Now, if I need
to use my knees to help a little bit, then I could do that. I could walk them in and
press right here. You want to hold about a 2-3 second contraction to really make sure
and establish that posterior delt activation. What do we have for conditioning? Well, I
told you guys we're going to slowly increase this as we go. Today, an additional one mile
now, up from the half a mile last week.
Now we're up to a total mile at the end of your workout. As far as your grinder, or your
punishment for the flexed arm hang, today we're not going to change much at all except
for the fact that we're going to still do the same exercise, we're going to still scale
the amount of punishment based on how far away you were for the original goal. But now
we're going to allow you to stay in that exaggerated, flexed arm position.
So before where it was chin over bar that was the only thing that matters, now we're
going to make you do it again and maybe even add some time, depending on how far away you
were form that goal. But you're going to be allowed to do it with some semblance of a
flexed arm. So as long as you've still got something going you're allowed to continue
to count your time. If you can make it through that then, again, good job!
The point is, again, not punishment, but improvement. Do it at the end of your workout. One more
shot. Give it your best and then turn the page – however you do – and move on to
the next workout tomorrow, which is yet another burst training workout. Another special tactics.
We'll talk about it tomorrow – Air Raid coming up. Good job, guys! See you back here
in just a few hours. Welcome to ATHLEANX special tactics.
If you're preparing for a physical readiness exam, be it for the military, the fire department,
or the police department then this is the training that you want to use. If you're not
and you're just trying to be a bigger, faster, stronger version of yourself, or a general
bad ass; then ATHLEANX Special Tactics is for you as well.
Guys, get ready for some action.