12 Exercises That Completely Change The Human Body

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. Today, I’m going to talk about the 12 exercises that everyone should be including in their programs. So, it figures we start with the king of all lower body exercises, the squat.

And we know that this exercise is incredibly powerful for hitting the quads and the glutes and the adductors and even the hamstrings. However, it’s also one of the most fundamental movement patterns that we all need to learn how to get stronger at. I mean, hell, even getting up and down off the toilet every day is going to require that you know how to squat. Now, I for one know firsthand exactly how orthopedic issues can limit your ability to do the exercise. However, it doesn’t mean you skip the exercise altogether.

There’s always something else you can do. There’s always another variation. I’ve shown at great length the benefits of a Bulgarian split squat, allowing you to train one leg at a time and keep a flatter, more neutral lower back for those of us that have back issues. I also showed how squatting to a box can be a lifesaver for those that have patellar tendinitis or knee issues. Or even for those that just aren’t capable of handling heavy loads on the exercise, you have the option of a single dumbbell versions like a goblet squat or a drop squat.

The bottom line is you’re not just allowed not to skip leg day, but you’re not allowed to skip squats provided you’re able to do at least one of those variations. So, now that the squat is referred to as the king of all lower body exercises, you have to also look at it maybe in a different way. Even a great album has an A-side and a B-side. For me, the B-side in this case is the posterior chain, and there’s no better exercise for hitting the posterior chain than the deadlift. The deadlift is going to train the all-important hinge pattern, which is one that you’re going to need to master if you not only want to excel at the lift, but actually in everyday life.

You see, the hinge is not simply bending over at the waist, but letting your hips sit back as you bend over at the waist. And that is a key difference because if you can learn how to master this, you not only will become much more efficient in all of your lower body exercises, but you’ll be protecting your low back at the same time. Now, once again, orthopedic limitations can rear their ugly head here, and people can say, “I just can’t do the exercise without my back hurting. ” Well, it might be because you’re trying to bend over too far. You see, there’s nothing stopping you from performing a mat-elevated version of the exercise to just take a couple inches away from the bottom of the lift.

Those few inches can make all the difference in the world between you actually being able to perform the lift pain-free and not performing it at all. Likewise, you can perform it with a trap bar. Once again, the higher handles allow you to perform the lift from the shallower depth without having to abandon it altogether. Guys, there’s always a way if you’re willing to find it, and here I’m going to make sure you find it because the deadlift needs to be in your program somewhere. And so now let’s shift our focus to the upper body here for exercise number three, and while we’re at it, why not complement the big three?

We’ve got the squats and the deadlifts already, so now it’s time for the bench press. And we know that the bench press is one of the best ways to build the chest, period. What we also get is a king of all pushing exercises because we’re getting ample shoulder and triceps training on the exercise, too. Now, I get it, you can have a preference for how you train the exercise. Maybe you don’t even have access to a barbell, and you want to do it with dumbbells, that’s fine with me.

Again, orthopedic issues sometimes rear their ugly head here, and they cause shoulder pain as you bring it down. Bicipital tendonitis, rotator cuff issues, remember there’s one thing that’s always a great equalizer in those cases, and that is just simply slowing the reps down. If you perform these reps very, very slow, often times the pain that you feel goes away, and that goes back to what I say all the time, is it the structure that’s the problem, or is it the stability? And often times on the bench press, it’s the stability. If you learn to lower the weights a lot slower and perform each rep with intent, often times those pains go away, and your ability to perform the exercise is restored, putting it back in its rightful place in this list of 12.

And so with the dead ringers out of the way, now we get to my personal preferences, and you’re not going to find an Athlean-X program that doesn’t include this next exercise, and it’s the pull-up. And the reason why the pull-up appears in every Athlean-X program is not because I think it’s the best bodyweight back exercise there is, it’s because I think it’s one of the best back exercises that there is. It demands not only a great amount of strength to pull your entire bodyweight up to the bar, but it requires you to be able to do so with a rigid torso, meaning you have to be able to keep good core stability from your feet all the way up to your fingertips. That being said, if the exercise is too easy, it’s easily scalable. You can simply attach some weight around your waist to make the exercise more difficult and create the overload that you need, or you can simply add a band here to create an assisted option.

The fact is there’s no escaping this exercise. It’s one of the best pull exercises you can do, bodyweight or not. And by the way, maybe you’re struggling to do your very first pull-up right now. Or you can do pull-ups, but you just want to be able to do a lot more. I actually put together a free gift for you for watching this video.

You can get it over at athleanx. com/morepullups. It’s how to double your pull-ups in the next 22 days by following a specific progression. Guys, again, my gift to you for watching this video. Now, let’s get back to that video.

And so, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer because obviously the face pull is going to make its way into this list. And so, let’s just get it over with. The face pull is one of my favorite exercises, once again, for the posterior chain, but this time for the upper body. Because it doesn’t just do one thing. It trains the upper back, rotator cuff, and scapular retractors.

Three areas that we oftentimes just don’t do enough things for. And the nice thing about it is it’s pretty damn flexible. In other words, you can do it a lot of different ways. If you have access to a gym, you can certainly do it with a cable like this. Or you can just do it with a band like this if you’re training at home.

Or even if you have nothing at home, you just have a towel and a weight, you could do it like this, too. And speaking of the rotator cuff, let’s keep exercise number six here tied into the last one and keep that corrective exercise focus going. You see, I’m a big believer in the corrective exercises, and especially those that train external rotation of the shoulder. It’s not just something that I say as a buzzword. It’s something that we need to have in our programming because guess what?

The rotator cuff muscles are the only muscles that externally rotate the shoulder. So, if you’re not making a considered effort to work in some exercise that does this, I don’t care what the rest of your program looks like. This is one muscle imbalance that you’re creating that you’re not going to be able to overcome, at least not at the expense of the health of your shoulder. Something as simple as banded external rotation here is going to get the job done. Again, it doesn’t have to be sexy, it just has to be effective.

And if you don’t have access to a band, and you’re training a