The 10 Best Exercises You DIDN’T Do Last Year! (BUT NEED TO)

Most people waste an entire year doing exercises that don’t actually build durable strength, protect their joints, or carry over to real life.

Many of the exercises I’m going to show you here in this video are ones you probably aren’t doing right now or you didn’t do them in the last year, but you should start doing them this year. And especially if you want to be training for many years to come, these exercises are going to pay big dividends. We start with a bar hang. Now, I’ve talked about this exercise since probably 2014. What are you doing?

Not much, but just hanging here on a bar for as long as you possibly can. The benefits are many. Number one, we get good core activation and strengthening from this position. Number two, you’re getting good shoulder mobility. You have to be able to get your arms up overhead to maintain normal, healthy shoulder function.

This is a great way to do it. Number three, this is reinforcing thoracic extension. That’s that area of the spine below the neck and right here up to the rib cage that we tend to see a loss of mobility in. It rounds out and creates very poor posture. This is going to give you really good thoracic extension and allow you to do so with just this one simple hang done ideally every single day.

Men, you should be targeting up to 2 minutes. It’s a long time, but it’s something you can build towards in the next 365 days. 2 minutes of a hang. Women, if you can get to a minute and 30, you’re doing great things. But whatever you do, don’t miss out on the bar hang if you want to kick off your year the right way.

And the second exercise you need to do is one down here on the ground, and it’s the side plank. Now, it’s different from a regular plank. It can be much more challenging and therefore much more beneficial, but you have to do it right. See, what a lot of us do is we keep this leg on the ground. We lift up into a side plank and we work on what we’ve been told, the pillar strength, right?

The lateral pillar strength, being able to hold your torso still as you lift up and again get challenged from gravity on the way down. But we don’t want to necessarily focus from here to here because the big benefits come from the hip strengthening, namely the glute medius. That is what we can challenge if we progressively stop supporting ourselves with this top leg. So what that means is can you lift your body up into a horizontal position but then not have this leg supporting you. So can you get up into this position here?

Now that bottom hip is having to do all that work to push down to the ground to lift you up, give you that hip abduction that that glute medius is responsible for. And when you do, you don’t only build stronger hips, but you’re going to fortify your low back to prevent that back pain that you might be used to once a year or twice a year from maybe not coming back at all this year. If there’s one exercise that my knees here at 50 wish I discovered when I was in my [music] teens, it’d be the lunge, but done a very specific way. Because if you do a reverse lunge rather than stepping forward, you’re going to find that almost any knee pain that you get from traditional leg training is gone. However, when we start, we start with a regular reverse lunge with a step back.

And again, the direction of your torso is going to determine what part of the leg you’re feeling more. So, if I keep an upright torso like this, I’m going to get more of the quads. If I lean forward a little bit when I do this, I’m going to get more of the glutes. Versatile that way. However, we can go one step further, literally by changing the direction as well, cuz I don’t always like to work in that sagittal plane, straight forward and back.

We can take this and step to the side in a frontal plane and work different muscles and then step back into a quarter step where we now have a rotational step going on. So we’re working in all three planes of motion. So again, a three-way lunge here, back and back, side and side. And then again, step back, quarter turn, lunge, push back, quarter turn, lunge, and push back. is not just multi-dimensional, but it is a way that you can train your legs progressively load with heavier and heavier dumbbells and not have to worry about the knee pain that might be debilitating right now.

So, exercise number four might surprise some people cuz what’s happening is a lot of people maybe Tik Tok is telling them that they don’t need to do direct arm training because all their compound lifts is going to do everything they need. That is not true. Coming from somebody that has some pretty decent arms, I know that when you want to get your best arms, you need to directly train them. What do you want to do? A simple curl will do everything you need it to do for your biceps.

However, I do want to focus on a couple things. Number one, if you do these together at the same time, it’s going to be a little bit more difficult because you have to control the weight of two dumbbells combined with your core. If you were to separate them one at a time, you’re going to have an easier time getting one contraction. You’re also going to have an easier time handling more weight per arm. Please go to failure and don’t just go to failure in a very strict way, but allow yourself to start the workout or the exercise and set in a very strict way, but then realize that we have the opportunity with a curl to do some cheat reps at the end.

And what that means is getting a little bit of a lean back just to get the dumbbells going and then eccentrically controlling that and slowing it down on the way down. Cheat it up. down [music] and slow it down. The nice thing about an eccentric rep on a curl is if you don’t have control anymore, you can simply drop the weights in a safe way, but it still gives you a chance to overload those biceps, build them up with direct arm training in the next year. Now, this next exercise is another one you’ve likely been doing in the last year.

It’s the dumbbell bench press. However, if shoulder pain has made it a lot more difficult for you to do or maybe you had to stop altogether, then try this elevator press variation of it because this is going to do a few key things that will make the exercise possible again. And when you start to build your strength back up, your shoulder will feel better. We start in the bottom position and press one dumbbell up. As it comes down, the other one comes up.

That one then stays in the down position. What’s happening here is a couple things. Number one, to control the dumbbells in space, cuz we’re doing one at a time, you’re going to want to be a lot more deliberate and slow. The slowness of the movement is going to provide a lot of stability to your shoulder joint. So whether you have a structural issue or whether you just have a lack of stability itself, the slowness is going to actually provide a lot of relief of discomfort just by doing that.

But what it also does is it requires this down arm to stay in this position of tension or higher tension for a longer period of time. It’s not resting down here. There’s more stretch applied here. There’s more tension cuz I’m holding the weight still not resting against my body. It’s being held out here in space.

So when we do that, it makes for a lot more difficult exercise. But again, at the essence of it, it’s still a press and a bench press for your shoulders or for your chest, but at the same time, it gives you that reprieve that your shoulders aren’t getting right now. It’s a nice way to build them up in the next year. For the next exercise, if shoulder pain was making bench pressing difficult, then overhead pressing probably isn’t even a thing for you. But it still could be if you change how you do it.

Again, I like to do a single dumbbell at a time for my overhead press cuz this does a few different things that you’re going to feel the benefi