6 GREATEST EXERCISES (Old School Edition!!)

Build muscle size and strength fast by training like an athlete here

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Okay, first of all, when we talk about old school exercises we’re not talking about outdated.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.