The 6 Best Lifts for NEW Muscle Growth (GUARANTEED!)

Even if you’ve been performing the best lifts and exercises for muscle growth, you may not be seeing all the gain you should be from your training. In this video, I’m going to show you the 6 best lifts you can add to your main foundational strength exercises to get much more from them. You have to r

Today I’m going to show you six seldomly performed exercises that are going to help you patch up those weak links in the big exercises that are making up the foundation of your training program. More importantly, I will help you see all new gains from them. What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com.

Today I want to show you six exercise that, again, you probably aren’t doing. There’s one you should be doing every day. That’s a hint. But they serve an important, complementary role to your main, foundational exercises. If you’re not doing them, I feel that you’re leaving some gains on the table.

In every one of our bigger lifts there’s a tendency for the weak link in that lift to hold back the overall progress you’ll see. However, if I told you that these exercises, I’ll show you are going to help you address those weak links, I think you’d want to listen. That being said, I want to break down the following exercises. A deadlift, a squat, an overhead press, and a weighted pullup. So, let’s start first with the deadlift.

When it comes to the deadlift there are two exercises that apply here because I feel that there are two issues we have, just trying to get the bar off the ground. That is: do you have adequate leg drive through the ground to get the bar going? And second, once you do, do you have adequate upper body strength and stability to keep the bar where it’s supposed to be? Especially on that proper bar path tied to your body on the way up. A lot of times we lack one or the other.

If we were lacking in the upper body stability and strength, then what you’d want to do is this right here. This is the chest supported row. Not only did I put this up on Instagram a few days ago, but I also shared that this is something I struggled with a great deal, when I started the lift a long time ago. I felt like I had the ability to drive through the legs to generate force into the ground to get that bar going in the opposite direction. But I didn’t have the ability to keep that bar nice and tight because the weakness through my upper body and shoulders allowed the bar to drift down, forward, and away from me, making me lift a lot harder.

So, what this does is demands that you learn how to pull from a no-momentum state without the help of your legs. You can see I’ve practiced this a lot and tried to get myself a lot stronger on this so I could pull with no legs. So, when I got back into the position of a deadlift and had the benefit of my legs, I’d be able to pull a lot more. The next thing is that some people don’t have the ability to drive into the ground, or as I’ve pointed out before in our deadlift tutorial video, they don’t even know that the legs are really supposed to be driving that initial part of the movement. At least to the level of the knees.

It’s like a standing leg press. So, you want to be able to train your body to know that the leg drive is important. But when that’s established, how do you do it with an exercise? How do you get better at that? This is where I like to break out the reverse lunge or the dumbbell lunge, in general.

What the lunge makes you do, if nothing else, it makes you learn how to drive hard into the ground through one foot at a time here. The fact is, I like to do mine with a step back, in reverse because it takes the anterior stress off my knee. So, for somebody that has knee pain or discomfort, particularly from patellar tendonitis, the step backward takes off some of that strain. But it doesn’t diminish the main benefit this exercise provides and it teaches you how to push hard through that forward leg, so you can get all the momentum of your body back up to a standing position. Again, if you had taken this into a forward lunge there’s even more demand.

When you step forward and have all your momentum, plus the weight going forward, and now you’ve got to push to drive back and get back up to a standing position; you will quickly learn, if you don’t know already, that you need to learn how to push with great force through your legs, one at a time, into the ground. So when you come back into the deadlift and setup with both feet able to contribute now – again, with that tight upper back – you’ve got a great combination to help you rip that bar off the ground and get it going in the right direction so you can complete the lift. Next, sticking with the leg movements here, we’ve talked about the squat. You guys have heard me talk before about the value of the glutes when it comes to performing the squat. Again, the sticking point in a squat is most likely going to be the bottom of the lift.

You’re not half repping it. You’ve got to go down low enough to not only see benefits from the exercise, but more importantly, you need to be able to activate the glutes. Set them up to contribute to the lift. Put them on a stretch. The only way to put them on a stretch is to get deep enough.

But when you’re deep what’s the consequence? A lot of times you can’t get out of the hole. This is a great exercise to help you do that. This is a variation of the glute-ham raise because we’re not completing it to the point where we’re doing the hamstring curl. What we’re doing is preloading the glutes by putting us into relative hip flexion here at the bottom of lift, weighting it if possible.

You may not be able to. If you can’t, you can go without. You can work your way up with dumbbells. The fact is, you can overload this exercise. But with that pre-stretched glute, the main driver of getting out of that position into hip extension has got to be the glutes.

You want to focus on initiating the contraction by squeezing your butt cheeks together. I know the low back is going to want to contribute, just like it would in the bottom of a squat. That could become a very faulty movement pattern when you take it into your squat. You want to teach your body that, like everything else, we start from the ground up. We drive our strength and force through the ground first and it goes up the kinetic chain.

Therefore, the glutes are going to encounter that force first and you want to make sure they’re doing that. So, you squeeze and initiate every, single repetition by the squeeze of the glutes. Let the low back contribute after. Hold in full extension and come down. If you do a few sets of these guys and start working them into your routine you’re going to have a stronger lower back.

More importantly, you’re going to be neurologically wired to utilize your glutes right at the moment they’re needed the most. Moving onto the upper body. One of the foundational pressing exercises you should be doing is an overhead press. With that being said, we know there is some variety in how we can perform that exercise, depending upon how much of the lower body we want to involve, and what the purpose of our training is. If you’re trying to be more powerful and explosive, you’d want to incorporate the lower body because we know how much that can contribute to generating force, like we just said, ‘from the ground up’.

But we also have the alternative to try and strict up our form, to try not to get the lower body to contribute. But here’s the thing, our bodies are pretty damn smart. As soon as you put yourself on your feet, they’re going to find ways to rely on ground reaction forces to accomplish what it is we’re trying to do. So, what we can do, if we’re trying to get ourselves even stronger in this exercise, is sit our asses down. Literally.

On the ground. Like you see me here in a Z-Press. The Z-Press is one in which our legs are literally removed from the equation here. They’re just out in front