7 Subtle Exercise Fixes for BETTER Gains (WORK INSTANTLY!)

Whether you’re trying to gain size, strength or both there are a few tried and true exercises that will get you there. Any coach worth his or her salt will tell you to stick to the basics, big compound lifts that put the muscle through its full range of motion while allowing you to move maximal weig

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. The only thing that could kill a great exercise is making a big mistake while performing these great exercises. Today I want to cover seven of the best exercises that you could be doing and should be doing but show you how to make sure you’re not making these common mistakes along the way.

What are we talking about? Guys, the exercises that work. The squat, the deadlift, a lined tricep extension, a barbell row, an overhead press, an ab wheel rollout, and a lateral raise for your shoulders. All these are common exercises that you’re going to see if you go into any gym today. Lot of people are doing them.

However, you’re likely to see the very same mistakes I’m going to show you here today. I’m going to knock them out one by one and show you what you should be doing instead, and make sure you’re avoiding these common pitfalls. Let’s kick it off with one of the bigger lower body exercises. That is the squat. As a matter of fact, it’s going to have something very much in common with the other big, lower body exercise the deadlift, which I’ll follow this up with.

With the squat, see if you can notice a difference between these two squats. One of them may look right to you and one of them may not. If you think the one where I’m overextending is right, then you need to fix that. A lot of people think when they get to the top of the squat, especially when they want to get over activation of the glutes, or feel a really good squeeze in their glutes, they really try to get into hip extension. But what you’re doing there is really not providing any additional benefits for the squat.

If you think about how your body is loaded, it’s loaded from the top down. We call it axial loading. What you’re doing there is a translation move, side to side. So, you’re not effecting the fact that the weight on your body is loading you downward and you’re just carrying that weight side to side. You’re not loading that additional extension.

However, what you are doing is placing additional shear stress on your lumbar spine that’s not necessary. When you do the squat what you want to do is what I showed you on the other side. You want to make sure you come straight up and down. Not only are you going to be saving your back, but at the same time you’ll have a more efficient movement pattern because a squat should be executed on a straight bar path, up and down. You can see that’s possible when I’m not moving my body and translating it front to back.

So, become more efficient in the movement, save your back at the same time, and you’re making sure you’re getting this right every, single time. Next up is the deadlift and as I mentioned, it’s the same problem happening here. We tend to try and overextend the lift at the top of the movement, with very little extra benefit for the exact reasons I just laid out on the squat. Your loading is still up and down. The bar is subject to gravity, and the forces are acting straight downward.

having this translation force front to back is not giving us any extra benefit. As a matter of fact, once we lifted the weight up out of the hinge and got into a straight, vertical position here, leaning back more is not getting us any benefit. It’s giving us the same detrimental effects that the squat was, in terms of shearing on the spine. What we want to do is get to vertical. A lot of times what people will do is try and trick themselves into thinking they’ve completed a rep.

They’ll take it from here, they’ll get up, they’re not even there, they’re still in that cat-back posture, and then they do this, and they come underneath, which is a posterior pelvic tilt. But they’re still not even in full hip extension. They’re deceiving themselves by leaning backward to think they’re lifting the bar up even more, thinking they’re completing the rep. That’s not the case. Make sure you finish the rep by going into full hip extension, completely vertical, stop there, and go back down for your next rep.

Exercise number three is not a big lift, but it’s no less popular as you see people using this every day in the gym. It’s the ab wheel rollout. However, they’re turning this move into something it’s not supposed to be. They’re turning it into a hip flexion and extension movement. We’re not trying to train the hip flexors here, guys.

We’re not trying to train the hips at all. As a matter of fact, what I want to do is take my hips out of the movement. This is and anti-extension ab movement. I’m trying to prevent the overextension of my spine as I lengthen my body out because we know as I lengthen the moment arm I’m going to be more subject to the force of gravity, more subject to its wanting to cave in my lower back, letting my abs give out, and bring me down to the ground. That’s what we’re trying to fight.

So, it doesn’t have anything to do with our hip flexors. As a matter of fact, we’re going to get our body out there, lock it in, and then try to curl in through flexion of the spine, and then back out to a neutral position to avoid overextension. So, take your hips out of it. If you find yourself rocking back and forth, you’re doing it wrong. Get your butt in one position.

Try to keep it in one position and let the upper body do the rest of the movement out and in the entire time. Exercise number four is one of the better tricep exercises you could do, as long as you’re doing it right. It’s the tricep extension. You can do this either with an easy curl bar, or you could do it with dumbbells, as I’m showing you here. The key is how you’re performing the lift.

The key is where you’re starting and stopping the movement from. I feel like a broken record when I talk about the force of gravity, but when we’re lifting dumbbells and lifting weights in general, most often we are fighting the force of gravity. Which is what makes it so damn difficult. What we have to understand though, is when our arms, or whatever the moving part, is parallel to that force of gravity we don’t have nearly the work being done in those muscles anymore, and we’re not subjecting our body to the same amount of stress. When we’re trying to build muscle, we want to subject ourselves to stress.

That’s why it’s so uncomfortable. However, you can see in this first version of the tricep extension here, when I extend my arms all the way straight up over my body like many, many people do it’s very easy at the start and stop of the exercise. I could stay here for a long period of time if I wanted to. Not in the case where I make this slight shift on the elbows backward. Start and stop all your reps on this exercise with your elbows angled backward from vertical by about 20 to 30 degrees.

Instantly, I now have to fight to hold those dumbbells up against the force of gravity because it’s no longer acting straight down on my arm. It’s acting down on my arm at an angle, as you can see here. That makes all the difference. Subjecting the triceps to a lot more tension on every, single rep over time, set after set is going to have a bigger benefit to you, and a better benefit on your triceps in the long run. Make sure you get this right, guys.

It’s a very quick and easy change to make. Moving on here, I always say it’s impossible for me to separate the physical therapist from the strength coach when we look at exercises because we know if we do them incorrectly the repercussions will mount up quickly. So, what we’re looking at here is a popular shoulder exercise that is done wrong so often. Probably because it even has its own catch phrase. That is ‘pour the pitcher’, when you do the exercis