what's up guys Jeff Cavalier aex.com so if you're watching this video then you're likely in the gym but are you doing the exercises I'm going to show you today likely you are because they're 10 of the most popular but there's a big difference between just doing an exercise and doing it properly my job is to make sure that you're doing them all properly and it starts right here with a pre-ra curl you see a lot of us don't really like the exercise as much because we feels like we get a strain on the biceps in
that stretch position in in a not so good way and a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're sitting back too much to start the exercise right you're getting into this position here there's a lot of vulnerability on the biceps in this position actually if you come close here you can see the tendon in my left arm which is the only one that's really left intact at this point after tearing the right bicep is really under a good amount of load and it gets even more and more and I get in
the sitb back position so if you want to do this exercise more safely and more properly I want you to lean forward over the bench a little bit more and dig the elbows into the pad because when you dig the elbows back into the pad you engage the lats and the lats in this position are able to actually contribute and offset some of that load that happens to the biceps in the bottom position here now again this is a good exercise for applying a stretch and load to the biceps in that bottom position but again
you want to make sure you're doing it safely we've seen people tear their bicep tendons doing it having the lats engaged by digging those elbows back into the pad will give you the benefits without causing any of the problems that being said what's the next exercise here well lat pull down is obviously very popular too but when we talk about latp pull down if you're trying to do it in a way that you want to focus on building your lats then using this bar might be a big mistake why is that because holding the bar
in this position right around the bend of the bar is good for getting the entire back development but if I really want to zero in on the lats then I have to put something on there that gives me a much more narrow grip and this is where something like the tricep push down bar comes in really handy cuz in this position here I have to be narrow and what happens with the narrow grip is my elbows go further in front of my body right Wide Bar elbows will drift wide narrow bar elbows will drift in
front placing the lats on more of a stretch so the exercise starts to look more like this good contraction at the bottom good stretch up here at the top now you might be thinking to yourself well then that means then this vbar handle might be even better right because it keeps me in tight what you'll notice is it actually limits a little bit of the extension of the arm behind the body though because when I get down here the hands become the stopping point of how far this bar can get or how close this bar
can get to my chest versus when I have this bar here I can get my hands all the way up against the chest and my elbows can go much further back behind my body into extension which you'll feel even more so with a great contraction in the lats next next up the push-up another classic basic exercise that we're all doing but are you setting yourself up properly to do the exercise right here's a little trick to make sure you do every single time you want to put your arms up over your head when you get
down to the starting position here and then simply slide your elbows down until they're about 45° away from your sides in this position here all you have to do is just slide your hands back to put them under your shoulders right there is the perfect push-up position to make sure that my elbows are stacked over my wrist that give me a good safe strong push-up now one other thing to note when you push up do you just go straight up and down because we know that's not the natural Arc of a pressing movement if I
want to follow the path of a bar when you do a bench press then what happens is I want to make sure that when I'm pressing up I'm actually pushing back a little bit rocking a little bit back onto my toes so you see that I let my toes rock down as I go down and then I rock backwards as I go up and what that does is that follows the more natural Arc of the bar when we do a bench press right when we're in this position here we press the bar goes up and
back just a little bit we mimic the same thing here when we do the push-up number three a lunge one of my favorite ways to train my legs is with a lunge and particularly a dumbbell lunge because I think that if you get in trouble you need to get rid of the weight it's a lot easier to drop the dumbbells than it is to drop a barbell now which direction do we go forward or do we go backwards for me I want you to go backwards if possible because it takes some of the strain off
of the need to do that but I want you to do it in a particular way don't just step directly back to do the lunge I want you to step back and out to widen your base of support so you come out that way okay now the reason for that is with a wider base of support I'm not going to feel balance Challenge and a lot of people that do the exercise claim to not like it because they feel their balance is more compromised than their ability to train their legs another way to ensure that
you're doing this right though is when you step back also rotate just a little bit with the chest over this front knee because that will actually reenter the center of gravity put it right up over that main Bas of support here so I feel stable and I can press back up to the top so the two parts are widen and out little turn of the chest in the direction of the forward knee if you want to do these forward you can actually cover this in the Rocks video training video he steps forward and out and
with a little turn over that front leg forward and out with a little turn of the chest over that front leg do that and I promise you that will actually feel good for the first time in a long time moving on next exercise the line tries extension whether you call this a skull crusher a nose breaker or like I do a line tricep extension where the elbows are in space determines how much your triceps are actually doing the work so when you do the exercise I don't like the version where your arms start straight up
overhead come down to your forehead and come back up and again doesn't matter whether you're using dumbbells or an easy curl bar to do this or even a straight bar what's backing here is that in the top position there's not a whole hell of a lot of work being done by the triceps yes they're keeping the elbows extended but we can put more work on the triceps by getting the arms back over our head to start now we can get the long head into a better stretch position at the bottom here and then when we
stop at the top there's still a lot more tension being driven into the triceps here than there would be here and if you don't know or want to question that all you have to do is do that for yourself hold the dumbbells here or hold them here and see which part works the triceps more clearly it's when they stay in this orientation angled back behind the body now obviously there's things like the JM press that start and stop in this position here but that's a different exercise with a lot heavier weight if you want to
do this exercise properly get them back and keep them back for the duration of the exercise until your very last repetition next Bulgarian split squat another great exercise well actually one of my favorite leg exercises that you can do and I talk about how most people hate the exercise but once again it's probably for the wrong reasons you hate it because it's awkward or every time you do it you feel like you get set up and then you got to hop or hop over here or over here or you do the exercise you're falling you're
like this shit's not working my legs because I'm too worried about falling over there's a simple way to make sure you get this right every single time sit on the bench with the dumbbells on your thighs extend your leg out as far as you can okay from here widen it out just a little bit more okay so right from where you are get a little bit wider at that point reach forward put your dumbbells down like that do not move this leg come straight up on that heel and put your back foot in contact here
with the bench in this position though you don't want to be on your toe you want to again broaden the base of support so I could do that by folding the foot down when when I fold it there's more foot in contact with the bench to give me better balance what this did is this put me in the exact position I need to be in in terms of distance Away From the Bench to ensure that when I go down I'm in the exact position I need to be to put the work where it needs to
be either into the thigh or quad if I stay upright or more into the glute and posterior chain if I lean forward when I do the exercise but either way when you do this you'll feel stable you'll feel balanced and you'll feel the exercise exactly where you intend for it to be felt next up we have a crunch pull down working the ABS this time I tell you if I had a dollar for every time I saw someone do this I'd be had a lot of dollars right when someone does a crunch pull down how
many times do you see this they lock it in here looks good and as they go down they crunch okay if you can't spot the problem then again likely you're doing the same thing I don't want you to move your butt any closer to your heels from the moment you set this exercise up imagine that there's an imag there's a a line right back here that I cannot cross if I want to do this exercise properly because what I'm looking for is flexion of the trunk that's the the the the job of the ABS so
when I'm in this position here if I flex straight down from here and round out the back then I'm doing the work of the Reus abdominis flex the spine down and come up flex the spine down it's a good stretch exercise for lastats two cuz I'm having to e centrically control this on the way up particularly if I use a lot of heavy weight here which this exercise is actually conducive to but what I don't want to do is again go down and sit back don't cross that imaginary line behind you if you want to
do this right next up moving on my favorite exercise the face pull how do we do the face pull well I can tell you right off the bat to do it right you don't do it with one rope right I've showed this before pull one like this get that second rope steal it from whoever else is using it just for a second couple reps a couple sets that's all pull that down also okay so you have this setup you need the longer rope to be able to establish the right position at the top of the
exercise and what the right position is is 90° angles up here next to my head okay pull towards the face to get the right height but keep those 90° elbows established at the top cuz what I see all the time is people taking this overhand grip and doing this okay while this might work the rear delt because you're getting extension of the elbow behind the body at the shoulder that's okay but you're limiting the extent that you could be training the back we could do much more than the rear dels when we do a properly
executed face pull so you take an underhand grip this way okay like a handlebar grip on a bike then we step out far enough and again I Look to establish basically this double bicep Flex position here behind me elbows directly pointed towards the floor and thumbs pointed back behind me and what this does is now you get external shoulder rotation here and you work the rotator cuff not to mention you work the mids scap muscles too so you get a lot more than just the rear delts which are still being worked heavily in that position
too now next exercise we do the uh crossover all right so we have a cable crossover one of my exercises I like to do for chest I talk about all the time how you want to make sure that you have adduction into your chest exercises right it's not just about pressing or dipping or even doing push-ups at some point you have to cross the body the midline to really work the chest so what we need is an exercise that or variation of this that lets us do that but there's something people miss all the time
when we do and that is body position they'll set up like this and they'll let the arms come across the body and they'll say I did it right this is exactly what I'm supposed to do when in reality that's not because what I'm doing is I'm chasing my hands with my chest right if I chase my hands with my chest the shoulders are always going to win that race they're going to go out faster and further than your chest leaving your chest behind and compromising in the contraction that you get instead think about letting the
chest go backwards instead of forwards okay don't chase the hands try to separate from the hands hands go forward chest goes backwards let that chest get prominent now one other thing here let's say you have a hard time feeling the chest contract this exercise is designed to do that but you have options right I could take these cables and bring them straight across midline I could have them go from low to high right in this position or I could go from high to low let me ask you a question if I told you right now
to contract your chest as hard as possible what would you do would you go like this probably not would you go like this you know maybe 30% of you but without even knowing it a lot of you would just go like this right you go here and the reason for that is because the natural contraction of the chest is going to occur at this high to low angle because of the orientation of the chest fibers and that abdominal head of the chest so if you have a hard time feeling your chest or you're not kind
of a chest nonresponder make sure you're going down while you do the exercise so when you go down again chest still goes backwards but the overall angle of the crossover is from this high to low position that's going to help you to feel that a lot one more I'm having fun with these if you like this I'll do more of these just kind of taking you through the gym so here we have a lateral raise now I love the lateral raise I do it with dumbbells all the time a cable lateral raise is a different
Beast a cable lateral raise allows you to train the uh side delts middle delts much more explosively much heavier and more most importantly with a good stretch to start them because when we use dumbbells there's not the opportunity for stretch that we get when we have a cable that can cross our body but instead of going behind the body which I've coached before you're you're going to limit the amount of weight you can use from back here because you're pulling from a very weak position so instead of going behind the body which will give you
that pre-stretch on the on the middle delts just go in front allow yourself to walk away from the machine a little bit and get the stretch on the middle delt you're still going to get one here you're also going to get one of the rear delts but I can more explosively pull up and get into that top position pull up and get to that top position so almost like a cheat lateral again with the heavier weights and again apply the stretch to it becomes a more effective hypertrophy stimulus if you want to get a little
bit more resistance come down a little bit lower so now this is going to have this resistance curve up and away so at the very top of the exercise I still have a good amount of tension up on the middle delt I have some here a little bit less but that's okay again we have the ability to still kind of abbreviate this a little bit keep the tension high at the bottom and also still have the tension high at the top but regardless of what exact angle you set it up at I would highly suggest
that you incorporate some of the cable laterals into some of the side leral work that you're already doing so there's our little walk around the gym those are 10 exercises that are very popular if you're looking for a program that not just you know incorporates these because it's not just what you do but how you do it head to aex.com guys we have step-by-step programs that show you how to do everything you do properly full meal plans full programs all available over there supplements as well all right guys see you soon
