5 Simple Exercises EVERYONE Screws Up!

Did you know that there are 5 common exercises that everyone screws up at some point in their lifting career? In this video, I am going to show you what those 5 exercises are and how they get messed up so that you never get them wrong again when trying to build muscle.

what’s up guys jeff cavalier athletes. com today i’m going to show you five exercises that everyone screws up and regardless of what state in your lifting career you’re at whether you’re a rank beginner just learning the exercise for the first time or a fatigued lifter even as a more experienced lifter i’m going to correct these for you once and for all so you never have to worry about screwing them up guys let’s start breaking them down one by one and so the reason why these five exercises tend to be the most problematic again is not just because of the most common but they do a good job of allowing you to hide through compensation meaning you think you’re doing it right and even that more advanced lifter when they start the fatigue starts to do it wrong so here’s a good example of it the glute bridge you know how to do the exercise right you’ve been told you want to get to full hip extension but did you know that the position of your pelvis matters it does if you’re doing this out of an anterior pelvic tilt meaning you’re dropping your hips down and tilting your hip bones forward well guess what’s happening your low back is taking all the work because your glutes aren’t really effectively doing their job out of an anterior pelvic tilt position so the low back here will do more of the work and guess what happens when you have a weak low back you wind up injuring it so you want to make sure that you’re doing this out of a posterior pelvic tilt tucking your tail under you can still get to that full hip extension but again you’re doing it the right way and using the right muscles so now let’s move to an exercise where the flaw is a little less subtle but no less problematic and we’re talking about the pull-up if you do your pull-ups with your knees crossed just like this you’re not doing the pull-up as best you can because you’re inviting what i call energy leaks into the exercise an energy leak is just where you’re not creating an efficient line of pull throughout the exercise in other words the transfer of power through your hands to lift your body up over the bar is dissipated through the weakness in that laxity that you created by just letting your legs dangle underneath you if you do this instead you point your legs out in front of you you create a much more efficient transfer of power through your hands to lift your body up in space again you actually will get more out of the exercise by doing it don’t allow fatigue to allow those legs to start drifting back into that bent knee position keep it this way and i promise not just better execution but better results now as often as the case when i demonstrate this next exercise people are shocked when i tell them that hand placement matters when you’re doing a bench dip i show this on live with kelly and ryan about how to properly place your hands on a bench because it matters and it matters a lot to the health of your shoulder a bench dip done without attention to where your hands are are going to almost naturally drift forward fingers are going to want to grab the edge of the bench and point straight ahead well what that does is it throws that shoulder into that anterior capsule causing some excess stress in the shoulder that can lead to either discomfort or injury so the fix here is just simply to rotate your hands out and it is a very subtle but simple shift and it gets you to do the exercise right because by doing this i open my shoulders up i get them into more external rotation it doesn’t diminish anything that i have going on in my triceps as a matter of fact i’d argue that you get a better contraction than the triceps but the fact is make sure you’re not continuing to screw this up because we want to keep our shoulders healthy while we’re still trying to build those triceps up next we have a commonly misperformed kettlebell exercise that can also actually be done with a dumbbell but no less incorrect we’re talking about the swing now here’s an example once again where our bodies are looking for the easy way out if you don’t have strong enough glue switch guess what most of us don’t then we’re gonna look for help somewhere else in our legs and this goes right to the quads so instead of hinging back like you should you just sort of squat yourself down and bring those quads into the fold that being said that’s not the only problem with the exercise we oftentimes focus on the movement of the kettlebells when that actually should just be going along for the ride and by doing so you start focusing on lifting it through space using your delts instead you shouldn’t necessarily worry about how the kettlebell moves through space you just need to move it through the proper hinging of the hips you can see here i’m not worried about involving my quads i want to make sure i drop my ass backwards and then explode through and let the kettlebell drift as it will with each subsequent correct rep and good biomechanical efficiency that kettlebell will actually flow a little bit higher each time but you’re not actively trying to lift it you’re just letting your body do what it wants to do and that is work naturally now this one might be the most egregious but i can tell you this we’ve all been there we’ve all done a push-up like this and there’s a reason for it our body wants to perform the exercise like this because when we flare the elbows out either at or above 90 degrees we’re creating a shorter distance on the push-up our heads tend to dive forward getting us to the ground faster giving us the illusion that we’ve actually reached the end of the rep when our triceps and chest have had to do a hell of a lot less work if instead we tucked our elbows the way we should into that more 45 or 60 degree position it would create a longer travel force make the exercise more difficult but guess what more rewarding and this is actually validated by just having you try something if you wanted to push something with as much force as possible how would you do it would you flare your elbows like this and try to push or did you tuck your elbows in more like this and give it a push i think we all know the answer to that but if you don’t see for yourself and give it a shot the bottom line is when you get this right you start to get the muscles that you want to build up in the first place working the way they should and you avoid that excessive internal rotation and elevation that comes from doing it incorrectly now speaking of exercises if you’re looking for the only ones that you need to look jacked like him this bearded hunk of muscle something like that then you can watch this video right here if you’re looking for a program guys head to athenex. com and also make sure you click subscribe and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out see you soon