How to Get Brutally Strong at Home (WORKS FAST!)
If you want to get strong fast but you think it’s impossible because you are working out at home, you are definitely going to want to watch this video. Whether you are training at home due to current circumstances or do so by choice, it doesn’t mean that you have to compromise on your strength gains
What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx. com. So today I’m going to show you how to get brutally strong away from the gym, like in your own home.
You see, because whether or not you’re training at home right now because of current circumstances or whether you choose to train at home, the beauty is if you do plan on going back to the gym, and you want to resume lifting big again, what you do right here after watching this video is going to set the stage for all new levels of strength and all new gains because you’re focusing on the things you might not be focused on right now. I’m going to cover some of those smaller things that pay big dividends in the long run. With that being said, guys, let’s dive in. All right, so when it comes to building strength, you have to always remember that all strength needs to be built upon a solid foundation. Because I’ve mentioned many times before in other videos how if you’re simply chasing numbers but you’re not necessarily building them upon a solid foundation, eventually it’s going to crack.
And when it cracks, those numbers don’t mean shit anymore. See, if you can squat 600 pounds, but you feel like a 600-year-old man the day after you do it, it’s not really serving its purpose. So with that being said, the first area of focus here is actually one that’s going to impact more of the dead lift if we do this right and it’s straight arm scapular strength. And what we mean by that is the ability to have stability through our shoulder girdle whether or not you’re moving your arms here in space on a solid rigid torso or whether you’re able to move your torso in space on a solid rigid arm positioning. And we know that in the deadlift this is required to perform it properly and to have good bar path and stability of the bar as it travels up during every single repetition.
Well, that being said, what can you do at home? This is the beauty about this video. You could do these things without equipment. You could do these separate from your regular gym time. Because if you don’t do these things often enough, you’re not going to get the volume that you need to actually make a long-standing corrective impact here.
So with straight arm scapular strength, the first thing I want you to do, if you have access to a band is to simply do this: hang it over a pull-up bar and do this straight arm push down. And again, this is just simply working on building the strength in through the shoulder girdle as you move your arms through space trying not to buckle at the elbow or let the triceps take over. But we could take it a step further here. This is a more complicated body weight exercise it’s the front lever raise. And because it is more difficult, you could just simply utilize the band to assist you and take away some of that weight to allow you to do this.
And all I’m doing is exerting the force through my arms down into the bar to allow my body to raise up. This is not simply trying to lift up with my abs. This is trying to move my body by pushing down through those straight arms, which again, is what translates over to the dead lift where you need to have the same ability to stay tight as you lift the bar of the ground. And then finally, if you don’t even have any equipment at all, if you don’t have a pull-up bar and no band, it doesn’t mean you’re out of options here. You could do this, this is a sliding body weight pull down.
The principle is the same: can you move your body through space, once again, with that rigid arm set up here not sacrificing the stability. Doesn’t matter which one you pick, guys, just make sure that you do pick one and you start to work on this. Because, again, this is a golden opportunity for you to build that necessary strength that’s going to translate back over to the bigger lifts whenever it is that you get back to the gym. Next we move on to our second area of focus, and this one’s going to be very obviously when we think about what it is we’re trying to improve. This is horizontal pressing stability.
Thinking about the bench press, right. And we know that the bench press is one of those exercises that doesn’t automatically come to mind when we think about stability because we’re laying down on our back. But there’s a huge amount of stability required to do this right. And if we do it right, guys, that means that we’re going to get contributions from the shoulders at the bottom of the bench press. You see, we need stability there because the bar actually does travel in space.
It doesn’t go straight up and down. The natural arc of the bar is to be able to come a little bit lower on the chest line during the descent and go back up more towards the head on the travel back up to the top. So if we can reinforce that and work on stability through the delts, that would be something we would want to work on. So how do we do it? Well, we can simply do this push-up saw variation.
And what it does is when I come up from the top of the push-up, and I actively move my body forward, basically simulating that the bar is going to be traveling closer down to the lower pec line because the hands in this case are, you could see that the front delts fire up there. They’re need to control that forward momentum. Right, if I were to exaggerate that and let my hands drift all the way down here, my front delts would be trying to stabilize and keep the bar a little bit more in its proper path so they have to fire and stay engaged in order to provide that stability. So we can mimic that in a body weight scenario here that’s going to help us to train that when we go back to the bar. The second thing is I can actually just changing the positioning of my hands here, rotating them back about 45 degrees, to get that long head of the triceps more engaged by bringing my arm both closer to my torso and back into extension to have this translate a little bit better over to the close grip bench press.
But then the last thing I could do is work on something else, like the other side of my body, and there’s where we know we need that stability of the shoulder girdle back and down during any bench press to do it in a safe way. So the back widow is an exercise here that comes in really handy. You could do these either four repetitions, or you could do them in a static hold. The fact is, it gives you a chance here without any equipment at all to work on the key ingredients that are going to be necessary when you get back under that bar. So while we’re on the topic of the big three, we might as well round them out and talk about the squat.
And what is it about the squat that often times cuts the legs out from somebody while they’re trying to do it? It’s the inability to maintain proper positioning of the upper body actually. And to maintain proper thoracic extension. And I don’t care whether you’re doing a high bar squat or a low bar squat, you still need to be able to have good thoracic extension to maintain the proper bar path that we mentioned for the dead lift on the squat too. If you want to do a front squat it becomes even more imperative because once that load gets out in front of you, any additional thoracic rounding because you’re lacking mobility is going to be disaster for what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
So how do we do this? Once again, we break out that minimal equipment. And the first thing we can do is wrap it up around the top of the pull-up bar again and just do this. This is just a banded walk back. And the idea is by putting our arms up overhead, it becomes a little bit easier for u