What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
Today we're going old school iron with the 6 greatest old school exercises of all time,
and more importantly, I'm going to give you six ways to make sure you're getting the most
out of them.
Let's do this.
Okay, first of all, when we talk about old school exercises we're not talking about outdated.
We're talking about exercises that have stood the test of time and deserve to remain in
your training and conditioning programs because these exercises flat out work.
Even though we do some really unique things here in our style of training with Athlean-X,
when you went to train like and athlete you've got to build strength; these exercises are
great ways to do that.
Without further ado, let's kick off the list with our number 1 exercise, old school.
How can you start without naming the king of all lower body exercises: the squat?
The one thing I want to cover here to help you guys out with it is this one tip that
made a big difference for me, especially as someone that struggles with my knee pain as
I do this exercise.
If you can maintain the angle of your back and the angle of your shins parallel at all
points in the range of motion in this exercise, you will be able to not only lift more pain
free, but you'll be able to lift more: period.
If you look at how I'm doing this now, as I go down I want my back angle to be in alignment
with my shin angle at all points.
For me, I found that I would actually start leading with my knees and allowing my shins
to go forward while I maintained an upright back because I like to do a high bar squat.
Maybe for me, we know that a high bar squat is not the best thing for me to do if I've
got bad knees.
So I have to go a little bit lower with the bar, angle my back to match my shin angle,
and then keep it there.
So if you do your squats in the mirror, make sure that you're doing everything you can
to maintain those two lines parallel at all points in the range of motion; down and back
up.
I'm telling you, you will start lifting more on this kind of the lower body exercises.
Since we're talking about exercise kings, let's talk about the upper body equivalent:
the pull up.
We can weight this sucker, too.
So we can really load up the weight and overload ourselves to get a lot out of this exercise,
but you've got to make sure you're doing it the right way if you want to overload your
back and your lats.
To do that, two simple tweaks: all you have to do is lean backwards.
Don't do the exercise completely vertical, straight up and straight down.
If you lean back just a little bit away from the bar you actually allow the lats to do
a little bit more than what we were meant to be doing.
You want to be able to get extension back behind our body and we could do that instead
of going completely straight down, vertical; but by allowing ourselves to tilt back.
If you want to start doing more of this exercise instantly – and I mean instantly – then
what I've talked about before; plugging your energy leaks.
If you want that transfer of power to go from your back and the muscles in your back through
to your arms so you can get your body up to that bar, then you'd better plug all the loss
of energy that we're getting through the other parts of our body.
So many times I see people doing this exercise very loose and free.
Their legs are hanging and swinging, their core is completely relaxed, but if you want
to keep that transfer of energy straight up and down through your arms, then you want
to plug those energy leaks by simply contracting the muscles in the rest of your body.
I promise, if you straighten your quads out, tighten your legs, keep your knees straight,
point your feet down and away from you, get your glut squeeze together, tighten your abs;
everything tight from the chest down, you will instantly add to the number of pull ups
that you can do, and therefore start adding to the result that you're seeing from this
classic upper body king.
Okay, next up; how can we ignore the bench press?
Probably one of the classic ways, the best way to build your chest…or is it?
Well, it may not be if you're gripping the bar too wide.
The best way to grip the bar in a bench press if you want to develop your chest, is narrower.
You really don’t want to go any farther outside your shoulders because doing your
bench press out wide, you're not allowing your body to capitalize on one of the main
functions of the chest.
That is horizontal abduction.
Bring your arm across your body.
If you stay way out here, wide with your grip as I'm showing you here, you're not really
ever getting to a point where your arms are abducted across the front of your body; midline
your body.
However, if you could bring yourself in toward midline, you can instantly see a much better
chest contraction and just by making a slight change in position of your hands you'll see
much better results from this exercise, and much better growth in your chest from doing
it.
Number 4 – my favorite exercise, especially from this athletic carry over – is a deadlift.
There is never an instance where we're not trying to lift, or develop power from the
ground up.
A dead lift is the perfect opportunity to do this.
However, it can be a little bit complex for people to master the hip hinge.
I think I've made it very easy for you to do this.
Watch as I do the exercise.
Here's all you ever have to focus on: the timing of your hip hinge is very simple.
As you begin the exercise from a standing position, allow your hips to continue to drop
back.
This is a hip movement, 100%.
As you get right down to where the bar is at the level of your knees, that is where
you stop hip hinging and you just allow your knees to bend.
You allow the knees to break as the bar goes straight down to the floor.
When you come back up, just simply push through the floor, through your legs until the bar
reaches knee level.
At the point that the bar reaches knee level, then allow the hips to hinge forward to drive
the rest of the movement to its completion.
You're really just thinking about that one area, which is the bar and the knees.
Wherever the bar is transitioning across the knees, that's when you're transitioning away
from knee bend to hip hinge.
Next up: the classic arm builder – I have to admit, one of my favorites – the bar
bell curl.
Now, here's the way that I think you would get a lot more out of your barbell curl.
Number one: be a little bit willing to cheat the rep.
if you want to build bigger size in your arms.
What I mean by 'cheating the rep' is – I've covered this before – allow yourself to
lean a little bit forward to start the rep and then initiate the movement.
When you get to vertical, that's when you want to freeze the movement because anybody
could continue to lean all the way back and allow the bar to basically fall on top of
them.
I say you still want to power the bar up, but sometimes you need that little extra momentum
so as you handle a heavier load, because that leads to the most important part of this exercise.
The way to get more out of it is to slow down your eccentric.
Fight every inch on the way down.
That is how you build your biceps to be bigger.
You want to be able to create that overload, but sometimes the load that we can lift is
not as much as we can handle on the way down.
We know that our eccentric strength is going to be stronger.
So get that load up by allowing a slight bit of a cheat, but then on the way down fight
it, fight I, fight it.
I'm telling you; you will build much bigger biceps much faster just by slowing down that
tempo and initiating it with a little extra body English to get it up there in the first
place.
Finally, the classic upper body movement: the overhead press.
The best way to get more out of this exercise might be to ditch the barbell that you're
using and opt for dumb bells instead.
We understand the fact that with the direction that we press the weight up over our head
makes all the difference in our delt development.
Then you're going to understand that this isn't the best way to do it when you use a
straight bar.
When you press up and over, what you want to do is have your hands out wide and then
you want to press them in at an angle.
We have something in our programs called the Wide-Arc Shoulder Press.
The Wide-Arc Shoulder Press does just that.
It allows us to come nice and low on the outside, and as we come in we're actually going almost
in a triangle like a pyramid shape up toward the top.
Sometimes we even tilt the dumb bells down toward each other and just doing it here,
without even holding weight, you should be able to feel the delt contract a lot more
than you have before.
If you look at a barbell it doesn’t allow us to do that.
We've got a fixed hand placement here that we press straight up overhead.
So we're not getting this twisting motion that allows our delts to be that much more
active.
So, if you use dumb bells you can get that outside low, wide position and then up on
top, narrow peak of the pyramid that is impossible to do with a non-moving, fixed bar.
Make that quick change and I promise you'll see quick changes in your delt development
as well.
There you have it, guys.
The old iron is still firmly in place, because these six exercises have stood the test of
time for a reason.
They're effective exercises that work and hopefully work even better for you now that
I've showed you six ways to hopefully get more out of each and every one of them.
If you're looking to get more out of all your workouts, if you want to take your workouts
and your training to the next level, if you want to base your foundation off of the old
school iron, but take it to that next level of sophistication that we provide here at
Athlean-X, by helping you train like an athlete; then I invite you to head to AthleanX.com
and get our Athlean-X training system.
In the meantime, if you're found this video helpful make sure you leave your comments
and thumbs up below.
Let me know what else you want to see here on this channel, guys.
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to make sure I bring it to you in future videos.
I'll see you guys back here again real soon.