TOP 5 WORST EXERCISES (Stop Doing These!!)

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What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalere, athletex. com. Come take a trip with me today to the iron graveyard. We’re going to dig up five of the worst exercises that you can be doing.

Now, why do I call them worse? Well, first of all, guys, we have to qualify as a physical therapist and professional strength coach. I have to judge the merits of an exercise on its riskto benefit ratio. When I talk about that, I mean if I have overhead throwing athletes, pitchers, quarterbacks, a heavy overhead snatch is not the best exercise choice for me, especially when I know I have better options. Right?

One bad rep can end a career. Realizing that I don’t have all professional athletes watching my channel, I still have to be able to provide you reasons why I feel that these may not be the best options for you. Even if you’re after just aesthetic growth, even if you’re after just the purposes of looking better. Okay? So, what I want to do is break down the five of them and give you my reasons of why I don’t feel they’re the best options and then let you decide.

Okay? No discussion of the worst exercises starts without bringing up the flies. Now, the controversy can get started right away. Guys, you know how I feel about this exercise. We know that a lot of people make the argument that doing chest flies increases the stretch on the chest, right?

It’s simply not true because we know that the origin insertion of the chest prevents that from happening. We know that with the chest, we can actually feel where it goes. If you put your hand across your upper chest, you can feel where it inserts over here onto your upper arm. Basically, when we’re here or we’re here, once we get to the bottom of what would be a bench press, this is this is the maximum amount we get on the uh a stretch we get on the chest. So, if we open our arm up even further, that doesn’t do anything.

It doesn’t add a any extra stretch. There’s no more excursion here of this muscle. What we are feeling is a stretch on the coral brachiialis which actually comes from here down to here. Now we can see if the arm were to go further back that that increases the stretch here on that muscle. But what are we doing here?

Chest flies or corical brachiialis flies? We’re not. And if we open up the arm and we increase the load that’s out here and increase the length of the lever arm, that could potentially cause one bad rep, one bad overload, and cause us to have a torren pec. Again, if you’re doing it for the adduction that we get from a chest fly, which is a great reason to do it, there are better options. As a matter of fact, why don’t we get on our feet like we try to with Athleen X and do something more like the 3D uh cable crossover.

All right, but that’s number one. Now, let’s go on to the shoulders. Number two, our behind the neck shoulder press. We all know that there are a lot of ways that we can push a bar up overhead. I’m telling you that there’s a better way, especially when we’re looking at the health of our shoulders in the riskto benefit ratio.

We know that any way we can get that bar up overhead is going to overload those shoulders. But the plane that we’re doing it in can make all the difference. So when we talk about a behind the neck shoulder press, my issue with this guys is that we’re pushing in an abnormal plane of motion. When we look at the orientation of our shoulders in the joint, the glenoumeral joint is our shoulder joint. The ball and socket, they will angle forward at a slight degree forward like this.

So basically if the ball and socket moves inside that, the natural plane of motion is to be slightly ahead of us. Okay? Slightly out in this direction that way. If we go straight out to the side, not only are we causing the rolling of the the ball in the socket to be abnormal, but we’re also causing an increase in the likelihood for impingement. The reason for that is is is is right here where I can show you.

Basically, we have our ball and socket like this. Okay? If we take the ball in there and we go to move it up in the in the forward, the correct plane, you can see that it rolls inside that socket with plenty of room to come all the way up to the top. Okay. If we have our arm way out to the side over here, okay, it’s going to be hard to show, but basically the arm’s going to be going up this way.

If we have it there, because the socket is rounded here, we start to hit the lateral portion of the socket right away, okay? As it goes up, that causes impingement. Secondly, when we’re able to get our arms in front of us and push straight up, we’re able to activate a nice balance between the upper traps and the serrus anterior. What that does is it causes the upper traps to pull this way, the serratus to pull down and around this way so that our shoulder blade actually tips. By tipping here, we increase again the amount of space that we get in here for the scapular for the the glenoumeral head.

So, lots of reasons why we don’t really want to be pressing way back here. And it’s just as good to get our elbows in front of us and press up. Next up, upright rows. Sticking with the shoulder and sticking with a concept that I’ve covered in depth in another video. The upright row is one of the worst exercises I feel you can do for your shoulders, especially again because we have so many better options and small tweaks can lead to big and positive changes.

The problem I have with the upright row is the nature of the exercise itself puts us into an impingement position. Again, as a physical therapist, if you were to come into my clinic and I was going to test you for shoulder impingement, I would put your arms in this position, literally like this, and push down. Okay? and push down right here. That is exactly the position of an upright row.

And I don’t care how wide you grab the bar. If you’re going to grab the bar, the weight is pulling your hands down and you’re trying to raise your elbows up. That is an impingement provocative test. We don’t want to be doing provocative tests, clinical provocative tests, on a rep byrep basis. All you’re asking for, guys, is to develop an impingement if you already don’t have one.

And you might argue you’ve been doing the upright row for years and years and years and it’s a great shoulder exercise. You never have problems. Just because you’ve never had problems, doesn’t mean that you won’t have problems even on a given particular day or one single rep. It’s that kind of thing, guys, where overuse and overload in a consistent way can lead to a breakdown eventually of those uh structures inside your shoulder. So, number three and one I firmly believe belongs in that iron graveyard.

Number four, good mornings. This might be an exercise that you think was already in the iron graveyard a long time ago because you don’t see many people doing them anymore. The reason why probably too many people have gotten hurt doing them that they’ve abandoned them. Here’s the ironic thing about this exercise. I actually think it’s a good exercise in terms of the movement pattern that it’s requiring you to do.

However, I find that so many people lack the thoracic extension necessary to do this exercise properly. As you can see, as I’m demonstrating here, I have a proper hip hinge, which puts me in a safer position. It’s not a hinge straight forward at the waist that could really compromise my low back. I’m actually allowing my hips to absorb most of that energy and do this thing properly. The problem is the thoracic extension is an absolute requirement here.

And one of the areas that we are so limited on as guys who tend to work sitting at a desk or just guys who tend to do all of our work in front of us, thoracic extension becomes a problem. When you cannot have that proper thoracic extension, all that force gets driven down uh above and be above and below the the the area tha