The ONLY Exercises You Need (MEN OVER 40)
If there were only 10 exercises you could do for the rest of your lift, especially if you are over 40 years old, which would they be? In this video, I am going to give you the 10 exercises that I would do for the rest of my life and why I would choose those over others as well as why I think you wou
What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalerex. com. So, if you could do just 10 exercises for the rest of your life, what 10 are those going to be? Now, keep in mind, you cannot do any other exercises so your selections are important.
Well, I put together my list of 10, and I’m sure I probably left out a few, but I’m going to cover them for you and tell you why I’m picking the 10 that I’m picking, and you can see how they compare with yours. So, let’s start with my first choice, and it’s going to be the box squat or squatting to a box. Now, the reason that we do this is to ensure that we have the confidence of knowing that there’s something there to catch us should we not be able to make the rep. Now, see, this is a big deal because a lot of times, especially at the age of 50, as I get older here, I want to have the confidence of knowing that when I go down to perform a squat, I’m not going to get pinned under the bar. Now, I can ensure myself some more safety by making sure that I have the safety pin set at the proper height.
You’re gonna always want to do that. But the box does something very special. The box gives you that target point. So, initially, just as you start the rep, if you’re not performing the exercise properly by having some available hinge in your hips, this is going to force you to do that because you have to hinge to actually start to align your butt with the box you’re about to sit on. A lot of people just tend to squat from the knees, especially when they’re lacking the confidence and the strength of their legs as they go down into that rep.
And it works at all different weights. If you’re approaching very heavy weights, you can still squat to a box. And the box does not have to be at a high height. Ultimately, you want the box to actually be below parallel, just below parallel. So, you’re performing a proper depth squat.
And it actually in that point will just serve as reassurance that you made the rep at the proper depth. But just including that box is a huge difference between performing a regular freestanding squat and having just that reassurance that often times fixes any of the biomechanical errors that wind up with you feeling sore in your back, in your hips or anything after performing a squat. Now, that will likely take away all those issues and in doing so make that exercise even better. Next up, I’m going to stick with the legs and it’s the reverse lunge. Now, there’s a big difference between the reverse lunge and a regular forward stepping lunge.
And that has to do with how it feels on your knees. And I can tell you as somebody that’s dealt with a lot of knee pain, this is going to be a game changer if you find yourself in the same boat. Cuz stepping backwards takes away almost all of it. And it also does something really, really important. It challenges your frontal plane stability and strength, too.
And it’s weird because it’s just another sagittal plane exercise with you stepping backwards in this plane. But when you’re on one leg, unlike when you’re performing the squat, your hips are going to want to shift. They’re going to want to drop in one direction or the other. And when they do, you have to use the glute medius on that side to hold your hips level and prevent that. And that’s a big deal because a lot of us will tend to get really, really weak in those muscles, which leads to a lot of low back pain, which leads to a lot of these kind of escalating problems down the line.
The key here is to make sure you have a wide enough base of support so that when you’re stepping back, you’re not stepping with your feet in line, but you’re stepping back and out. That will widen your base of support and make you feel like balance is not the challenge here, but you’re able to build this strength up without balance being your limiting factor. And the other thing is as you go down, you want to kind of twist your torso just a little bit over that forward knee to screw yourself into place. And again, give yourself good hip stability on that forward leg so you can drive back off of it and come back up to standing. This exercise is a no-brainer for me.
It should be in every single program. It’s a perfect complement to that bilateral squat. Now, I don’t care what age you are, you’re always going to likely want to bench press. And the thing about bench pressing is it’s actually quite functional because at some point you might find yourself on the floor and need to get up off of it. And the only way you’re going to be able to do that is to have the strength to be able to push your body at least up to a kneeling position where your leg strength can take over.
Now, I’m not saying that that’s the bar that you want to set, that you want to be as low as just having the function to get off of a floor. I’m saying we want to maximize our strength as we get older. And the best way to do it is going to be with some variation of a bench press. Now, I like to say a dumbbell bench press over a barbell variation every single day of the week because I feel like it’s a lot easier on your joints, particularly your shoulders. And with a dumbbell bench press, you can still weight this exercise adequately to get that overload needed to provide the change that you’re looking for.
What I would recommend, however, is to set the angle of the bench to what you’re seeing here. And that’s 30°. The 30° incline bench press seems to be the best angle for balancing out your ability to use heavy enough weights to continue to get strong, but at the same time being protective enough on your shoulders. I would also tell you to make sure that you’re pulling those shoulders down throughout the entire exercise and targeting that lower outer portion of your chest with the dumbbells to ensure that you’re getting a good stretch, full range of motion, and making sure you go slow enough through every single rep so you don’t apply any unneeded stress to your shoulders. It’s a game changer and one that will stay in your plan no matter how old you are.
Now, as we work our way into our fourth exercise, keep in mind this is not a geriatric list of exercises. This is one that I actually wish if I could go back into my 20s, I could replace a lot of the things I was doing with because these exercise would have set the stage for a healthier version of me today. But they certainly set the stage for people who are in their 40s or 50s for a lot of pain-free ability to be maintained long into your next two decades of life or more. So now what is the fourth exercise here? It’s going to target the shoulders, target more of those middle deltoids is going to be the high pull.
And it’s not just the middle delts, but also importantly the rear delts. This pull occurs from bottom to top. And it’s not an upright row. I know a lot of you are looking at this and saying, “I can’t believe Jeff has finally flipped his lid after all this time. He put the upright row in his favorite 10 exercises that he’s going to do for the rest of his life.
” That will never be the case. I’m not doing the upright row because the elbow and wrist positioning is vastly different in the high pole. You want to make sure that your wrists are higher than your elbows because what that does is it creates external rotation at your shoulders rather than internal rotation that you would get from an upright row. And that’s a big difference maker when we’re talking about maintaining shoulder health for the long haul. When we do the high pull, we get that abduction that you would normally get on a lateral raise except with the dumbbells held a little closer to our body.
So, by decreasing t