8 Worst Bodyweight Exercises Ever (STOP DOING THESE!)

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com. Today we’re taking another trip to the graveyardhere. Not the iron graveyard because you see there’s no iron involved here. We’re talkingabout the worst bodyweight exercises ever. So maybe we’ll call this the calisthenicscrypt. The fact is, guys, these exercises aren’t good. I’m going to break down for you why,but more importantly, as always, I’m not going to leave you hanging. I’m going to show you what

to do instead. So with that said, let’s get this list kicked off with our first exercise.All right, right off the bat, let’s talk about a common tricep exercise, the bench dip. The reasonwhy we do this exercise is because it allows us to get that long head of the triceps into its fullycontracted position. If we can get the elbow straight and importantly, at or behind our body,then we can more fully contract the triceps. That’s great. However, at what expense to your

shoulder. You can see here as Jesse, of course, I named him to do the bad versions of all theseexercises. When he goes down to the bottom here, he’s putting a lot of stress on that anteriorshoulder capsule. The head of the humerus literally gets thrown forward into that capsule,creating some extra stretch, which is not something we want when it’s there to providestability in the first place. So what we can do is if you insist on doing this, you want to make

sure you do this all important change in hand position. And that is you don’t have your fingersface forward, you turn them out like this. And at the same time, you open up the chest and externallyrotate the shoulders. By simply doing that, you’re allowing yourself to create more room and a bettershoulder position on the exercise. But we don’t have to do this exercise. We can do this exerciseinstead. This is the Cobra Pushup. And what it provides us is the same opportunity to get our

elbow fully straightened and to get that arm back or at the level of the torso because that willgive us that fully contracted long head of the triceps. Without undergoing any of the stressesthat come from performing the bench dip, we’ve got a better option. Exercise number two makesthe list because it’s only a hair more difficult than what I’m doing right now. And that is layingon my ass doing pretty much nothing. You see, if you follow my channel for any length of time,

you realize I’m not really a big fan of the plank. Why? Because it really is an underwhelming,under delivering exercise because it simply doesn’t provide enough challenge for thosedoing it, trying to strengthen their core. Look, if the world record holder can maintain a plankfor more than eight hours, likely it’s not challenging enough for you. And we realizethat what it does is it oftentimes reinforces some of the postural muscle imbalances we’ve

already developed. It kind of doesn’t really make sense that we continue to do it, especiallyfor long durations. So what you would do is a whole bunch of things. As a matter of fact,I made a whole video devoted to some of the things you can do that would replace this exercisewithout compromising the underdevelopment of the muscles that we really need to work on,and that’s on the backside posterior chain. I’ll link that video for you at the end of this video,

but the bottom line is there’s much better ways for you to utilize your time when you’re tryingto train your core, and this just ain’t one of them. Exercise number three is actually not evenan exercise, but more of a stretch. But it’s the hamstring stretch that doesn’t really stretch thehamstring. You see, you probably see people doing this all the time, but the fact is it’sbiomechanically flawed because what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself into a posterior pelvic

tilt, which is taking all the stretch off of the hamstring and throwing it more onto the mid backand the low back like you see here. You see, if you want to do this right, you’ve got tounderstand that to get the hamstring stretched, you want to be in more of an anterior pelvic tiltversus posterior pelvic tilt. Why? We break out Raymond to show you exactly what the problem is.the hamstrings will attach from the pelvis down here past the knee. And we can see that if the

pelvis is rolled back this way, then all it’s going to do is put this hamstring more on slack,get it closer to its insertion point. If we want to make this more taut, what we do is we take thepelvis and we flip it this way. So as the pelvis goes up and forward, it places more of a stretchon the hamstring. Well, we could do that by simply making that tweak like Jesse’s making here,but trying to sit up as tall as possible. Instead of directing the force and leaning forward and

down, you try to reach straight out so you can stay in that anterior tilt and still get thattension on that fully straightened knee. Or you could do what I’m doing here. And this,I think, is superior because number one, you’re standing, which is always a good idea if you’retrying to have it transfer over to what you’re going to be doing when you’re on your feet.But more importantly, you’re able to easily get that leg out in front of you and really get into

that anterior pelvic tilt and maintain it. And it gives you the wall as a target to try to movedirectly towards. In other words, pushing your chest directly towards the wall. Now look, you’renot going to get that far, but you are going to feel a much greater stretch on the hamstring.And isn’t that what this is all about in the first place?You guys didn’t think I’d actually be doing this shit with 19 concussions, did you?

Now, look, even Jesse’s not crazy enough to attempt the next exercise here, and it’s theneck bridge. Now, look, I get it. A lot of wrestlers have used this very exercise to buildmassive necks, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t turn their necks into massive pieces ofshit in terms of the quality of their cervical discs and spine in the process, because this isan absolute crusher. If you look at the biomechanics of it, you can see it right away.

We’re getting an unbelievable amount of compression directed down through that cervical spine bysimply getting into position to start the exercise. And then when you factor in whetheryou’re going forward or backward, the amount of shear that gets thrown in on top of thatis simply a recipe for disaster. Remember, guys, you only get one cervical spine in your lifetime.It really is your job to protect it. So what can we do instead? Well, we have some options,

albeit a little bit less cool looking, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still able to strengthenthe muscles in our neck simply by using, in this case, isometrics if we want to stick to bodyweight options. You take a towel, you put it over your head and you resist yourself into flexionand you resist yourself into extension. The good thing about isometrics is the amount of force thatyou apply is one that can increase as the strength in your neck improves itself. So we can actually

allow ourselves to progressively overload with more force directed from our hands as we getstronger. Again, you only get one of these. The best thing you can do is make sure you don’t screwit up.Why?Why?

Why?Why?Why?I mean, do we even have to talk about this one?Look, if you want to take arguably the greatest bodyweight exercise ever, the pullup, and

turn it into that, a monkey f**king a football, then you’re really losing out on what thisexercise was intended to deliver in the first place.And that is serious gains for those that are actually going to do it right.Look, all you’ve got to do is go straight up and straight down.hard enough, I promise. If you need to make it any harder, you can certainly strap some weight around

your waist like I’m doing here, but it’s not that complicated to do. You want to pull your bodystraight up until your chin is up over the bar. You want to lower yourself back down until yourarms are straight. If you