Stop Doing These 11 Exercises (DO THESE INSTEAD!)

Nobody wants to waste their time doing exercises that don’t work. That said, even good exercises can become bad ones when they are performed incorrectly. However, certain movements deserve the title of the “worst exercise ever” simply because of their low reward, high risk nature. In this video, I’

JEFF: What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to do something we haven’t done in a while. That is visiting the Iron Graveyard where all the exercises we’ve killed in the past reside.

As a matter of fact, we’re going to revisit and pay our respects to some of those that we’ve already place in the graveyard and buried. More importantly, we’re adding a few more. Look, I’m going to do what I’ve always done on this channel. I’m not just going to tell you to stop doing the exercise and that’s it. I’m going to tell you the specific reasons why we put them in the graveyard in the first place.

More importantly, what you can do as a direct replacement for it. With that being said, we’re going to call in Jesse here to make sure we can get this video done the right way. JESSE: You want me doing the bad exercises? JEFF: Of course, because you’re the king of doing things wrong. You know what I mean?

JESSE: Okay, if I’m doing that, I want my new, new intro playing. JEFF: They’ve already seen your new intro. JESSE: No, no, no. My new NEW intro. Yeah.

Run it. JEFF: You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me. JESSE: Okay, we can get started now. JEFF: Can we? JESSE: Yes.

JEFF: Let’s go. Guys, the first exercise up is – so we might as well kick off this list with one that we’ve had dead and buried for quite some time on this channel. It’s the dumbbell fly. Done this way. Unsupported on a bench, which happens to be – most of us do this exercise.

The fact is, we’re hanging out here in all of our shoulder-wrecking glory when we do the exercise this way. This unsupported version is placing so much stress – not just on your chest. As a matter of fact, a lot of the stretch that you might feel here is being redirected to a different muscle in our arm called the coracobrachialis. More importantly, it’s what you’re doing and putting your anterior shoulder capsule at risk when performing it this way. We have alternatives.

I’ve discussed before, if you’re really dead set on doing a fly, do them on the floor. At least by doing them on the floor here you have a bottom. You have a safety net and you have additional benefit of overloading the exercise on the eccentric portion of it to get better benefits in terms of making muscle gains. But why are we even screwing around there either? If we want to do something that’s going to get our chest to respond, at least do something that includes adduction.

Take it from a point in the range of motion that gets our arm out from our body, it applies the stretch we were looking for in the first place, but then allows us to cross midline under tension. The fly doesn’t do that. When we reach the top, we’re losing additional tension on the pecs. We can get that by simply swapping this for a cable or band and continue to cross our body in a full crossover. So, there’s one exercise that signifies “I’m lost” more than any other.

It’s this one right here. It’s the dumbbell side bend. People will do this exercise ad nauseum trying to sculpt out a midsection, carve out their abs, get ripped obliques; whatever it is they’re saying. A lot of times they don’t even put the dumbbell in the right hand when they do. I’m here to tell you there really is no ‘right’ side to put the dumbbell in because the exercise itself is trash, if you’re trying to train your obliques.

We know by now that the obliques aren’t side bending muscles. Can they bend us to the side? Yes. But if you look at the direction of their fibers what do they prefer to do? Rotation.

So, if you want to train them, get a rotational exercise. One of my favorites to do is this. I hang from a bar and I simply try to initiate a rotation of my pelvis. Curl it up and twist it a little bit in one direction. I’m not looking to get my legs all the way up to the bar.

I’m simply looking to control the lifting and turning of my pelvis with my obliques and really focus on trying to do that every, single repetition. Now, I understand that some might say “Hey, this is really difficult. ” It doesn’t mean you have to do it hanging. You could do it over here in the captain’s chair as well to unweight a lot of your bodyweight, if that’s one of the issues you have right now that’s preventing you from doing the exercise smoothly. You do the same thing here.

Again, range of motion is not that critical. Initiating from the obliques and making sure you’re rotating, even just a little bit, to get them to do the job they prefer doing in the first place. Speaking of exercises that we do all too often, I’m going to throw another one in here. The concentration curl. Look, I’ve covered in a previous video how to do the concentration curl if you’re going to do it at all, because most of the time we alter the exercise so much that we change the strength curve on it.

We redirect most of the force into the shoulder, as opposed to the biceps in the first place, and there are things we could do that are better anyway. Like, maybe, stand up. Get on your feet. Like a barbell curl. We’re not getting crazy here, guys.

It’s just a lot better of an exercise. We can use more weight, we can make sure the force is being directed into our arms – what we’re trying to build in the first place – and more importantly, we can get a little bit of functionality because our core is going to have to help us control the weight. As we lift that heavier weight up, we have to be able to counteract that. None of that is happening when we’re just sitting on our asses on a bench. Posing, more or less.

I’m telling you right now, if you’re looking for better gains overall, the faster you can swap out this exercise for this one, the better off you’re going to be. A new addition to the Iron Graveyard is this one right here. The Cuban press. Now, don’t get confused because you’ve probably heard – “But, Jeff. There’s external rotation going on here.

Look. You like external rotation at the shoulders. ” There is. Except that there’s a whole hell of a lot of internal rotation with elevation that’s happening to get to the point of the exercise where you externally rotate. Not to mention the eccentric internal rotation that’s happening on the way down.

Guys, it doesn’t just matter how an exercise starts and finishes. What matters is how you go through the exercises. The journey is what’s most important. We can follow the same beginning and end points in a much safer way if we swap out to this one here. That’s the Urlacher.

Instead of going up to the top here by internally rotating our shoulders, we can initiate through our biceps – which is a natural movement – and transition to external rotation a lot sooner. We can bypass the internal rotation of the shoulder at all points in the exercise, making it a hell of a lot safer. Not to mention, the end result is a better exercise. If you were to do a few reps of each I guarantee you, the one you’re going to feel more effectively, training your shoulders, again, without all the pain is going to be the Urlacher. Swap it out, guys.

I promise you, the results will be worth it. Speaking of shoulders, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it’s for good reason because things aren’t changing. Biomechanically, a shitty exercise once will always be a shitty exercise. That brings us to the upright row. The king of all shitty exercises.

Jesse, thank you for demonstrating, once again. The fact is, we can do better than this. There is so much wrong with this exercise. I’ve mentioned before, as a physical therapist, if you were to come to me in the clinic and I was going to diagnose you with impingement I would put you in the exact posit