5 Popular Exercises - MADE BETTER!

Popular exercises are popular because they are able to generate results for those that perform them. In this video, I’m going to show you how to make 5 of the most common exercises you are doing even better with just a few simple changes. You will be able to start getting better results from your

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to talk about five incredibly popular exercises that I’m going to help you make better by the end of this video. We’re not talking ‘obscure exercises’.

Very popular. We’re talking about dips, lunges, Bulgarian split squats, pullups, and yes, even a tricep pushdown. Let’s start with the dip because I want to make an impact right off the bat. You know what a dip looks like. You’ve done hundreds of them, if not hundreds, of thousands of them, depending on how long you’ve spent in the gym.

The fact is, we can make this exercise better. When I say ‘better’ it’s not gimmicky. It’s better to make it better. we know we can work our chest in the dip, but we can also do – at the end of every, single rep – that not only will it not take away from what you’re doing with your chest, but it will add to the effectiveness of the exercise. That’s the dip plus.

The dip plus, you see, what I do at the top of the rep is, I don’t just hang out there, or get ready to descend into my next rep, but I establish a longer contraction on the chest by holding at the top, and then I lift up, and tuck my pelvis up, underneath me. Which instantly activates the abs, and serratus. We know that the serratus is going to tie into the overall appearance of the chest as well. So it’s a prefect combo to what you’re trying to do. All I’m asking is for a little extra lift at the end of every, single rep.

Again, not going to take away from the effectiveness of the exercise itself. Next up, I mentioned the tricep pushdown. Again, we’re going to use science here to make this exercise better. I actually devoted an entire video to this before, but it needs to be shown again, because it’s that important. We know that when we use a cable for our tricep pushdown that the line of force is going to be in line with the direction of the cable, and if we’re going to maximize the work that the triceps do, that cable should stay perpendicular to your forearm for as long as you can in the exercise.

In the beginning of the exercise it is perpendicular to the forearm, but when you finish it actually winds up being a lot steeper, and more parallel to the forearm. So the work the triceps are doing in the peak contracted position on a regular pushdown is just not there. But what we can do is institute this rocking tricep pushdown. What this does is it maintains that perpendicularity of the line, the actual cable itself, to your forearm throughout the entire range. So you can see when I start the movement here, it starts perpendicular to the forearm, and as I rock back, it allows the angle to stay as perpendicular as it’s going to get.

You’ll notice right off the bat from doing this, that your ability to hold a contraction of the tricep is challenged even more. Meaning, you’re going to get more from doing this variation of the exercise. Remember, it’s not compromising the integrity of the movement to make it unique. It’s adding to the effectiveness of the movement that makes it more worthwhile. Next we’re moving onto the legs and this is one of my favorite movements you can do anyway.

It’s the Bulgarian split squat. I like it because it’s a single leg movement, it’s athletic, but there’s one limitation here. It does require an additional balance component that a lot of us may not have. If you’re going to use this exercise to train for strength because you can, because you’re basically loading 80% on that one front leg; well, we want to take the balance component out of it, in that case because we want to focus only on the strength overload. We can do that with the hand-supported Bulgarian split squat.

So instead of just doing it freeform as I just showed you, you just switched to a position here next to a rack, next to something you could actually grab onto, and hold onto. Again, not to pull myself up, but to stabilize my body so I’m taking the balance component out of it. Next, we hit the classic pullup. You might be thinking “How can you make the pullup better? ” Well, we can make the pullup better because we can actually increase the stretch reflex that we get on the pullup, by just doing something that all of us can do on a single rep of a pullup.

That is, just change the positioning of our pelvis prior to the rep. So we have a twisting pullup here. All you have to do is twist in one direction, or the other, and then pull in that same direction. So if I twist toward the right – as you see me doing here – what I’m doing is, I’m getting a little added stretch reflex on the right side because as the pelvis turns back to the right, and my arm stays in front of me, we’re getting more of a stretch on the lat, on that side. As soon as we do that take advantage of that stretch reflex and pull hard with the right arm to try to pull yourself up, in that direction.

Then we twist to the left, and we do the same thing, but now we pull toward the left arm. Again, this asymmetrical pulling here is actually more functional than we originally find ourselves in, in some situations where we may even have to scale some kind of a wall. We don’t usually just pull directly up. We’re kind of favoring one arm, or the other, depending on the orientation of our body. So I would argue that this is an even more functional version.

The key again is, we’re not undermining the pullup itself. It’s still a pullup. As a matter of fact, we’re making it better because we’re adding that additional stretch reflex that just does not exist in a regular pullup. Then finally, this one is near and dear to me because I’m someone that suffers from a lot of knee pain. But when we do lunges we don’t want to have to abandon this exercise because knee pain is undercutting us, once again.

The lunge is a great exercise. It’s definitely an athletic movement for our lower body, but there’s a problem. Whenever we lunge forward, anyone that has knee pain will know and be able to sympathize, you might get a burning, or stabbing pain in the front of your knee as you step forward. That’s because you’re directing a lot of that force anteriorly, right through that patellar tendon. What we can do is, I’ve covered before, the value of a revers lunge.

It’s immense because what we’re doing is, we’re still getting the same mechanics of the lower body, but we’re taking the force, and we’re directing it backward, away from the kneecap. But we still want to be able to alternate and keep this movement going. So instead of going back and doing alternating reverse lunges we can turn it into a situation where we turn it into a combo exercise. So when I do come forward I switch legs, and now I work on a sprinter lunge. The value of the sprinter lunge is, as you lean forward, and tilt into that sprinter take-off position, you’re now loading the posterior chain.

You’re, once again, taking the force off that anterior knee, eliminating the pain that you might feel, but at the same time turning this into an anterior/posterior combo that’s better than just doing a straight lunge by itself. So you’re going to alternate back and forth. Again, a more athletic version, a better version, and more importantly, a safer version, in the long run, for your knees. So there you have it, guys. There are five exercises that you are likely doing – and you should be doing lots of them – but hopefully, as of today, you’re going to be getting more out of them because five simple tweaks is all you need to make, to make them even better.

Guys, it’s all about the exercises and how you do them that give you the differences that you’re going to see here with ATHLEANX, and in all of our training p