He Trained Like Jeff Cavaliere for 90 Days!
If you ever wondered what it would be like to train like Jeff Cavaliere for 90 days, now you can see. In today’s video, Jesse from ATHLEAN-X shows off a body that followed a focused plan for the first time in his tenure with Jeff. Here, we highlight the nine most important elements of the training a
What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. Jesse Laico, Athleanx. com. Speaking of Jesse Laico, I think congratulations are in order today.
Why is that? How many years you’ve been here? Just over four. For the first time in four years, Jesse’s been able to stick to a plan for 90 days.
You want to throw one of my intros out there as a congratulations? I m not sure that s something to celebrate. I think, as a matter of fact, half the people out there like to jump through the camera and strangle you for a wasted opportunity.
Well, he trained like Jeff Cavaliere— For 90 days. For 90 days and he s made some gains. A lot of people are writing in, what has Jesse been doing? I’ll say this, it s consistency— Yeah. —and that s really important.
However, there are things I want to showcase as to what you actually did that have been the most beneficial. Right. But before people do get a chance to jump all over you, you do have good reason for not being able to stay consistent over all these years, a lot of starts and stops. Yeah, it all has to do with the previous head trauma. A lot of head trauma.
Everybody has followed the channel knows that Jesse’s had quite a few concussions. You’ve probably seen it play out in front of you quite a few times on camera before. But it’s legit and I’m actually proud of him and I want to make sure that you guys see the nine best things that I think you’ve taken from that 90 day experience that are going to help those out there. Sounds good. So, we start with a little bit of a no brainer here.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You re going to make that joke? A bad choice of words. So, we start with the obvious. And actually, this is one Jesse had a head start on a long time ago.
You probably watched the evolution of his posture from something that looked like this, to something that looked like this. Or as these pictures show, from this to this. Jesse came to me not only as one of the hardest of hard gainers, but one of the most poorly postured individuals I’ve ever seen. He’s not alone, though. A lot of you out there will find that you have terribly rounded shoulders, your lack thoracic extension to your upper back.
You have a bad pelvic tilt, whether it be even posterior or anterior, Jesse had the latter. The fact is you need to work on those because they screw up the mechanics of your lifts, which we re going to cover next, and by doing so, hold back the potential you have for excelling in those lifts. So we actually focus on making sure that as part of Jesse’s routine and it’s been part of your routine, right? It has been. I ve been pretty consistent with it.
You know, I was doing it every single day, but now I’ve been doing it a few times a week just to keep it up and to reinforce that good posture. Working on the things that are kind of your focal points and not everything in the books. No, exactly. And we have a whole bunch of videos that cover all these different topics all you got to do is search your issue plus Athdlean-X and you’re going to find it. Just make sure that you don’t ignore it and start building into your training.
Also, with postural inefficiencies, mitigated the focus was on trying to get Jessy’s compile lists to be better, right. To get stronger and then because you have more efficiency in performing them as a possible inefficiencies, go away. Yeah, as my posture got better, it felt like the bar was flying up. I was just more efficient with the lift itself. So you focused on them a little bit more, basically the big three.
Yes. And not to mention here, you’ve developed some impressive numbers, I would say. Well, I’m an elite level power lifter now. I d be a little careful with that one. Okay, advanced level power lifter.
I still might be a little careful with that. I mean, look, you can see here he’s accumulated some pretty big lifts for his body weight. As matter of fact, we’re going to cover in a video later this week about Jesse being able to perform a three-time body weight deadlift. And who would have thought little Jesse could actually get it done? But it was the focus on building the base foundational strength.
Remember, guys, you don’t improve anything upon a cracked foundation. When you fix the foundation, the strength itself will be a hell of a lot easier to build and it will come a lot faster than if you do it on that cracked foundation. And that leads us to point number three. It wasn’t all just about building strength. As a matter of fact, that’s just one component of it.
What else were you doing? Well, just like you, I was incorporating body weight movements and also hypertrophy training itself. And the body weight for control, not just going through the motions of trying to get rep after rep. No, I was trying to command my body in space and really slow the movements down so that way I could feel every single muscle working throughout that movement. And of course, as you did that, you dip count went up, you pull up, count went up.
But beyond that, when it comes to hypertrophy, we talk about it all the time, if you want to build the most well rounded and high performing physique, you have to have elements of hypertrophy, training. Yup. And that means instead of going for the efficiency we seek with our strength based movements here, you’re actually seeking, I always say it, inefficiency, right. Yeah. Making the muscle do more of what it doesn t want to do.
Yeah, making that muscle really, really work. So like on your lat pulldowns, your back is like really doing more of the work as opposed to just getting the bar down. Right. If you incorporate all of these into your training, you see the results. As a matter of fact, you start to see the growth beyond just the increase in strength gains.
And so now going hand in hand with that increased focus on hypertrophy, training or the inclusion of the hypertrophy training is also the intensity techniques that we’d like to incorporate along with them. Yeah, you know, I was doing what you do now as you. I was doing some drop sets, partials, pause reps, as well as— Rest, pause. Rest, pause. Basically, anything to again take the intensity, let’s say, to and through failure.
Yeah. Not just taking the sets to some point short of failure. And when we talk about failure, we’re really talking about form failure. That’s what you’re instituting across the board. Yes.
But at the same time, I do believe that in order to force changes in growth, you need to push your body where it’s not comfortable going. And these intensity techniques are something that you really shouldn’t shy away from, especially if you want to see similar gains. So now we have to talk about one of those things that was maybe holding you back a little bit before. And that was what? Running.
As I’ve mentioned here on the channel before, I was a distance runner. I liked running, it really helped me with lacrosse. I have no issues with running, it s an athletic and positive thing. But your distance was a little bit excessive. Yeah, it was the primary of my training, but I’ve changed that to be the supplement to my training.
So now serving that role as his conditioning work, which we advocate every week. Yeah. But it wasn’t your primary focus. No. And even as such, you were still doing some of your distance work just for the benefit of your heart.
Yeah. Which I always advocate. But you were shifting a little bit more the intensity of even the running. Yeah, I we were moving towards sprinting and then we started moving towards conditioning drills such as, you know, agility work.