8 Exercises for Incredible Strength! (NO EXTRA TIME)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. We’re kicking off the incredible strength series because I know you’ve got more strength then you ever thought you did. The problem is, you’re not looking in the right places to address it.

Today we’re going to start by looking at ‘what are those overlooked areas? ’ That is critical for helping you to build more strength in all of your big lifts. Here’s the thing: I’m going to show you eight ways, in eight exercises for you to sneak in this extra work so that you don’t have to feel like it’s a separate workout in order to address this. We’re talking about the hands, the wrists, and the forearms. If you have weaknesses in any of these areas your big lifts are going to suffer.

Think about it; trying to get under a bench press and lift heavy if your wrists are very, very weak, or try to execute a dead lift if you have no grip strength. I don’t care how strong your legs might be, or how strong your pull might be; if you can’t hold onto the damned bar, you can’t lift that much weight. So today we’re going to go through, as I said, different areas that will allow you to sneak these exercises in so it’s not a whole separate workout. Okay, first up is chest. One of the most common exercises that you will perform in a chest workout is a pushup.

I don’t care if it’s done as a primary exercise, or if it’s done as a follow up exercise to your primary exercises. The idea is the pushup usually makes its way into a chest workout. Here’s how you can change it to start working on your weakness. If your weakness is more in your wrist you can do a knuckle pushup, as I’m showing you here. The idea is to keep the wrists in neutral.

In other words, keep the wrists locked out in this position here. I don’t want too much flexion this way, I don’t want too much extension this way. Try to keep it locked out by resting on the top of your knuckles and perform your pushups this way, rather than on your hands. If you’re trying to work more in your grip strength and finger strength – hand strength – perform a fingertip pushup. Again, it’s just changing the way that you do the exercise.

You’re still going to work on your chest. You’re still going to do the exercise as you would normally, but you’re getting this added benefit of doing this now, in this version, for your hand strength. Next up is a very cool way to start adding some more hand, wrist, and forearm work into your back workouts. All you have to do is take another common exercise and make a slight, little change to it. This time it’s the pullup.

Let’s say you’re working on your pullups – which you should be in any back workout, by the way – as you approach failure, as you get to your last rep, as opposed to dropping off the bar, work on that forearm and hand strength. Hang from the bar. Do what we all a Dead Arm Hang. This will start burning through your forearms, through your fingers, it’s going to test also your mental fortitude and toughness. That’s great.

That’s all things you can benefit from as you’re trying to get stronger. A stronger mind is just as important as stronger muscles. But try to hand from this bar as long as you can until you have to drop. It’s just a slight, little tweak, on an already existing exercise that you should be doing in your back workouts. Next up is your biceps.

We all know that a lot of times when people train their biceps they are also training their forearms, too. But there’s a really simple way to hit the brachia radialis, which is going to be one of the bigger muscle groups right here. That’s going to add to the size and strength of your forearms and it’s so simple to do because all you’re going to do, once again, is take an existing exercise – a curl – and just flip your grip. Turn it to an overhand position, into a reverse curl. You’ll see from this clip and footage here that obviously this area gets targeted a lot more when we just turn our grip over.

You could just add a couple extra sets to the end of your workout and hit this area adequately to start making an impact. If you’re a follower of ATHLEANX you know it’s important not to just do strength work, but to also pair that up with conditioning work. For me, one of my favorite, all time conditioning exercises is a jump rope. For a lot of different reasons. One, we can get our heartrate up very quickly, we can burn a lot of calories, we can become more athletic doing it, but also, we get a heavy dose of forearm work here as well.

You can see as I jump rope here I have to work my wrists. As a matter of fact, the majority of this skill is how quickly and how coordinated you can be with your wrist rotations. You’re going to get that turnover. You’re actually getting forearm supination and pronation as well as just getting some of that general motion through the wrists. It’s going to help improve the endurance of these muscles here that you’re going to need, that will pay off as you start doing more of your heavy lifting.

Of course, all this applies to your ab training as well. There’s so many different exercise options, as anybody that even has our Six Pack Promise will tell you, hundreds, if not thousands of exercises you can do for your abs. but there are some that you can do to preferentially hit this weak area again. The first would be a cliffhanger plank. Don’t just do a regular plank, especially if it’s not even that hard for you.

Increase the difficulty of the exercise so you can get more benefit for your abs, but at the same time, place a lot of the strain and word on your hand strength and the flexors of your fingers. Try to stay in this cliffhanger position while you do the plank. Again, it’s kind of a two for one benefit. Better abs and better hamstrings at the same time. If you want to work more on those weak wrists of yours, here’s another option where you can keep your hands in that neutral position – your wrists in that neutral position – knuckles down, and try to do this seated tuck hold.

This is an incredibly tough ab exercise, but at the same time you’re getting the benefit of getting that extra, added wrist work that you wouldn’t have to really schedule out, or carve out a separate time for. We all know, when you’re busy you’re going to forget that part. You’re going to work on the abs and you’re not going to work on your wrists or hamstrings. It obviously is so important to that overall goal that we’re trying to have here, of increasing our strength. Now let’s get back to the workouts again.

Let’s say triceps are on board. Okay, no problem. Tricep push downs. Again, very common exercise. I’m trying not to create a zillion different exercises for you guys that you have to now start figuring out how you’re going to do.

As a matter of fact, this is an exercise you’re probably already doing, but with this tweak you’ll now be able to incorporate some of that extra, added work that we’re really stressing here. So on a tricep push down, instead of going straight down and ending it at the bottom of that rep, try to go for that little, additional wrist curl to get those forearm flexors working now. So again, push down at the very bottom against your resistance, you’re going to do a little bit of a wrist curl. You’re just going to work that underside here at the bottom of the forearm. You want to work the opposite side, the extensors?

No problem. A lot of times you’ll probably do a reverse grip push down to hit your triceps in a slightly different angle, in a slightly different way. We could do the same thing here. Do the underhand version of the tricep push down. At the very bottom, extend those wrists down just like this.

We’re getting that extra, added work in. That’s the importance here of this entire video. Extra added work without a lot of extra, added effort,