Most lifters should be able to press something relatively heavy overhead. If you can’t, it often means you’re missing the full use of your shoulders. Maybe you can’t move your shoulder through its full range of motion or maybe the stabilizing muscles of your shoulder blades and trunk can’t create stability to safely produce force.

The strict standing barbell press involves the shoulders, upper back, triceps, and even upper chest. It trains the entire body to create a stable base to push from, but it can be difficult to steadily improve and progress tends to stall much sooner relative to other barbell lifts. That’s why it’s important to know and use many different variations to help continue building muscle and strength. Here are eight overhead variations that will help you impress mom, again.

Best Overhead Press Variations

• Landmine Press
• Landmine Push Press
• Bottoms-Up Press
• Kettlebell Z Press
• Earthquake Bar Overhead Press
• Snatch-Grip Behind-the-Neck Press
• Swiss Bar Overhead Press
• Overhead Pin Press

Landmine Press 

Sometimes, pushing weight directly overhead can cause more harm than good. It may be because of an injury or just a lack of flexibility in the shoulder, triceps, lats, or wrists. The landmine press is unique because the pattern of movement is between a straight vertical and horizontal path.

This hybrid type of motion gives many of the benefits of direct overhead pressing while reducing the joint angle that may be putting a dangerous demand on your shoulder.  

When to Use It

The landmine press is great to use when recovering from injury and building back strength and function from time off training. It allows you to still develop strength and muscle while you work to restore full function of the shoulders to press directly overhead. 

It’s also a good variation to use when doing an intense phase of bench press training, as it won’t fatigue your shoulders excessively or affect recovery quite like straight overhead barbell pressing. 

How to Do it 

If you don’t have a landmine holder, you can wedge a regular barbell in any corner where it won’t cause damage. Load the bar and pick it up by the head (the end of the sleeve where you load the plates).

The landmine press can be performed with just one arm or both together. If you’re using two arms, cup the end of the barbell sleeve with both of your hands. Place the head of the bar near your sternum with your torso leaning slightly forward. Set your feet between hip and shoulder-width apart. Keep your elbows close and pulled in as you press. As your elbows lock with the bar almost at the crown of your head, shrug your shoulders up before returning the bar back to the starting position. 

If you’re using the one-arm variation, grab the end of the sleeve with one hand and place the bar at the front of your shoulder. Stand and press the same way, driving the bar forward and up to lockout, followed by a shoulder shrug. Make sure you keep your elbow in, so the bar stays in line with your shoulder throughout the entire movement. Flaring your elbow will alter the pressing angle, reduce power, and shift stress to the joint.

Landmine Push Press 

The push press is a great way to increase overhead stability with weights you couldn’t otherwise strict press. You use your legs to help to drive the weight up in a push press, allowing you to use heavier weights. 

But a standard barbell push press can be difficult to learn and to do efficiently. The landmine push press is easier for people to grasp because of both the path you drive the bar and the position of your shoulders relative to the bar.  

When to Use It

The landmine push press is a great exercise to add whenever your pressing progress slows or hits a plateau. The exercise can be included on either bench or overhead press days as a way to overload the pressing muscles with more volume while still moving relatively big weights. 

How to Do it 

Just like the landmine strict press, if you don’t have a holder you can wedge the bar in a corner and load it the same way. Because using heavier weights is a specific benefit of the landmine push press, it’s best performed with both hands on the bar. Cup your hands and place  the head of the bar almost directly on your sternum. Set your feet between hip and shoulder-width apart and flare your toes out very slightly. 

Brace your core and dip your knees as if you were preparing to jump as high as possible. Drive your feet into the ground and explosively extend your knees and hips as if you were trying to jump. Your heels will lift from the floor from this aggressive ankle extension, but keep the balls of your feet in contact with the ground — don’t actually jump into the air.

As your ankles extend, shrug your shoulders toward the bar. Try to make the bar fly off your chest from your leg drive and shoulder shrug. Then, push with your arms to extend your elbows. Let your heels touch back to the floor right as your elbows extend with the bar over the crown of your head. Control the bar as you bend your arms and absorb the momentum with your legs and trunk as you lower it.

Bottoms-Up Press

This is one of the best, but most challenging, pressing exercises for shoulder and scapular function and stability. It’s often used as a rehab or “prehab” drill because it engages most of the postural muscles like those of the rotator cuff that stabilize and move the shoulder blade. 

Balancing the bell upside down trains you to find the most stable path of motion and forces you to control the movement. Sometimes, the dominant muscles responsible for pressing overhead are restricted by how well your shoulders are stabilized. Improve those muscles and you can improve how much force you can create.  

When to Use It

These are great to do on deload weeks or at the very beginning of a new phase of training. You can think of them as a developmental exercise to prepare the shoulders for heavier, more intense training ahead. 

How to Do it

The bottoms-up press can be done standing or sitting, but a half-kneeling position actually puts you in a great mechanical position to do the exercise. Kneel down with the kettlebell in one hand and that side leg kneeling on the ground, with the opposite leg forward. Squeeze the handle and turn the weight upside down so the bottom of the bell is facing the ceiling. Crush your grip to maintain the weight in this vertical position.

Move your elbow toward your center so your thumb is in front of your face and your elbow is at a right angle with the floor. Slowly extend your elbow up to the ceiling and move your upper arm slightly back to put it in line (or covering) your ear as you lock out overhead. Stabilize the weight overhead briefly before slowly returning back down to your face. 

Kettlebell Z Press 

The Z press is an excellent choice for increasing the tension and demand on your shoulders and upper back without necessarily increasing the load used. Often you’ll see a lifter arch their spine or lean back during a standing overhead press because they lack the postural control and trunk or upper back strength needed to keep their spine neutral while pressing.

Sitting upright on the floor with no possible leg drive or back support helps you feel any change in your spinal position, so you can focus on preventing the problem. Pressing from the floor with the offset weight of kettlebells challenges your trunk and shoulder stabilizers in a way other exercises can’t.

When to Use It

Use the kettlebell Z press at the beginning of a workout to warm up your entire shoulder complex. One or two sets with light to moderate weight is enough to get your shoulders moving freely without causing fatigue that could affect your main training. 

Adding it to the end of a hard pressing workout is also a great way to add more volume, because you don’t need to use much weight or too many reps for the movement to be effective.  

How to Do it 

Sit on the floor with your legs straight while keeping an upright torso. Hold a pair of kettlebells with your palms facing each other at shoulder-level. Exhale hard through your mouth trying to force the air out of your torso to make it as narrow as possible. You should feel your ribcage drop down and the muscles in the front and sides of your torso, around your core, contracting.

Keep these muscles engaged to prevent your back from arching or your ribs flaring up as you press overhead. Keep your upper arms in line with your ears and rotate your hands palms-forward as you lock your elbows. Shrug your shoulders as your elbows lock before returning to the starting position. 

Earthquake Bar Overhead Press 

The earthquake bar is a bridge between training stability and increasing pressing power. The bar is designed to shake and swing, which engages the deepest and smallest shoulder stabilizers. Because it’s one straight bar, you can use relatively heavier weights than you could with dumbbells or kettlebells.

If you don’t have access to an earthquake bar, hanging resistance bands from the ends of both sleeves of a standard barbell and attaching weight plates is an effective alternative.

When to Use It

You can think of this like a secondary lift which can be done right after a heavy overhead barbell press or bench press. Though you will use much less weight, you can use a similar weekly progression of set and reps that you’d use for your main pressing lift. The instability will be the key challenging element to this exercise.

How to Do it

Set the bar on a rack just as you’d do for a standing overhead press. Start with relatively light weight and gradually slowly add more as you feel comfortable and learn to control the movement. Grab the bar with your thumbs just outside your shoulders. Angle your elbows just slightly in front of the bar. Shrug your shoulders forward and up to create a support for the bar, whether you have the mobility to rest the bar on top of your shoulders or not. 

Step back from the rack and set your feet hip-width apart with your knees just slightly unlocked. Wait until the initial swinging stops and pull your chin back (think of giving yourself a “double-chin”). Press the weight up slowly, keeping the bar as close to your face as possible. 

Once the bar passes the crown of your head, very slightly push your head and sternum forward so your elbows lock overhead as the bar is directly over the base of your neck. Shrug your shoulders upward and stabilize the bar at the top. Lower the weight by pulling your chin back and returning the bar to the starting position.  

Snatch-Grip Behind-the-Neck Press 

Usually you’d only see Olympic weightlifters use this as an accessory exercise, but it can be very beneficial to anyone looking to improve overhead strength or build their upper back and traps. 

The ultra-wide grip challenges your rear delts and upper back in a very unique way. If you start with relatively light weight and progress slowly, the snatch-grip behind-the-neck press can actually improve your shoulders’ working range of motion and strengthen the muscles and connective tissue that support good shoulder function.

When to Use It 

These can be pretty difficult, so instead of adding them as an accessory exercise after heavy standard overhead pressing, take a few weeks to prioritize the exercise by progressively working heavier instead of performing the standard barbell overhead press. Do them as the first main lift on a pressing or upper-body focused day. 

How to Do it 

Place a bar on a rack at your back squat-height (roughly upper-chest level). Walk under the bar and place it on your back as if you would for a high bar squat. Unrack the weight and step back. Slide both hands out until your index fingers are generally outside of the knurl marks on the barbell (smooth rings).

Angle your elbows directly under the bar, keep your neck straight, and brace your trunk while keeping your ribs from flaring up. Press the bar while keeping it in line with the base of your neck until your elbows lockout overhead. Don’t let the bar sway forward or behind your neckline. Shrug your shoulders at the top before returning the bar all the way back to the top of your traps.

Swiss Bar Overhead Press 

The Swiss bar is one of the best tools to use if you’ve had any shoulder or elbow pain, or pre-existing injuries. Its key benefit is multiple handles that let you place your hands close or wide while keeping a neutral-grip (palms facing each other) position.

This neutral position gives even those rotator cuff dysfunction a way to press without causing more strain in problematic areas in the shoulder or upper back.

When to Use It

The Swiss bar press is great to do when your shoulders, elbows, or wrists get cranky from other types of pressing. You can use the exercise in place of other overhead pressing options until you fully rehab an injury or recover from whatever nagging pain is causing issues.

How to Do it

Decide which grip-width feels most comfortable use and set the bar on a rack, the same you would for any overhead barbell press. Grab the handles and rotate the bar so your thumbs face toward your head. Unrack the weight and step back to your standard press foot position, roughly hip-width apart. Start with the bar about chin height.

Pull your neck in, as if you were giving yourself a double-chin, and keep the bar close to your face as you press overhead. Push your head slightly forward as you lock your elbows overhead. Shrug at the top as your elbows lock before lowering to the starting position. 

Overhead Pin Press

Part of the reason overhead pressing can be so hard to improve is because you push from a static position, particularly on the first rep. In many other lifts, like the bench press, you have the eccentric (lowering portion) of the lift which helps store force that you use to press the weight back up.

Because you don’t lower the bar first in an overhead press, you have to be able to muster a large amount of force suddenly without momentum. This is called “starting strength” and a pin press is one of the most effective ways to specifically train this quality.

When to Use It

If you can’t create a stiff and stable base of tension, you can’t suddenly create this force. And if you’re shifting your torso back and forth as you press, you definitely don’t have a good base of support. 

Consider swapping all barbell overhead pressing for pin pressing until you improve this stability. Because the bar is supported on the safeties, you can better focus on setting your trunk and keeping it stiff and fixed in place as you push hard against the bar to lift it from the starting position.

How to Do it 

Set the bar on strong safety bars at the height you would start your press from, generally around neck-height. Set your feet hip- to shoulder-width apart and grab the barbell with your standard overhead grip. Get in position under the bar and brace your entire trunk and back so your ribs won’t flare up and your spine is locked in place.

Keep this static position as you press as hard and fast as possible, brining the bar to lockout overhead. Return back to the pins and let the weight settle there before re-bracing and repeating for another repetition.

Muscles Worked by the Overhead Press

The overhead press is primarily a “shoulder exercise,” but it cannot be completed without assistance from several key body parts. Each of these body parts will be put under training stress during the exercise.

Shoulders

Your shoulders (deltoids or “delts”) are the primary movers during the overhead press. These muscles are responsible for flexing your arms overhead. The shoulder muscles consist of three heads — the front, side, and rear — which are involved in moving the arm in those respective planes of motion relative to your body.

All three muscle heads are used to press the weight overhead, but can be emphasized with various types of lateral raises.

Triceps

The triceps work to extend your arms, which is the latter portion of any shoulder press. The lockout portion of any overhead press, specifically, strongly activates your triceps. (1) The triceps are worked through a long range of motion during any overhead press variation, with the muscle recruited maximally in the top half of the movement.

Core

Your abs and lower back work together to form a strong, stabilizing core which supports overhead pressing. Any degree of sideways or backward lean is prevented through strong core stabilization. (2) It’s not unusual to feel sore abs after an intense overhead pressing session, which is one indicator of how significantly the core muscles work during the movement.

Overhead Press Form Tips

A few key technique cues can turn your basic overhead press from pain into progress. If you’re performing the lift from a power rack, set the safeties near shoulder or neck-level, not near your chest. Beginning the press from a position that’s too low leaves you with poor leverage that shifts more strain to the shoulder joint than the shoulder musculature.

During any press exercise, grip the bar as hard as possible. This will start a chain reaction of strength from your wrist and forearm muscles, through your upper arms, into your shoulders and upper back. (3) It’s a surprisingly effective way to stay tight while producing more power and minimizing joint strain.

Similarly, don’t stand up “passively.” Before each repetition, flex your core, glutes, legs, and calves. Imagine gripping the ground with your feet. This will help to establish total-body stability to drive a strong upward press.

Press More Over Your Head 

Bench press variations are fairly commonplace. Without giving it much thought, lifters tend to do much more horizontal pressing than vertical, but too much horizontal work and not enough vertical pressing can lead you to develop deficiencies in the muscular development and control of the entire shoulder girdle.

Learning and trying new overhead variations not only increases the potential weights you can use for your barbell overhead press, but also reduces the gap between these two pressing patterns making you much stronger and more balanced. Diversify your overhead training and reap the strength, stability, and muscle-building results.

References

1. Kholinne, E., Zulkarnain, R. F., Sun, Y. C., Lim, S., Chun, J. M., & Jeon, I. H. (2018). The different role of each head of the triceps brachii muscle in elbow extension. Acta orthopaedica et traumatologica turcica, 52(3), 201–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aott.2018.02.005
2. Shinkle, J., Nesser, T. W., Demchak, T. J., & McMannus, D. M. (2012). Effect of core strength on the measure of power in the extremities. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 26(2), 373–380. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0b013e31822600e5
3. Gontijo, L. B., Pereira, P. D., Neves, C. D., Santos, A. P., Machado, D.deC., & Bastos, V. H. (2012). Evaluation of strength and irradiated movement pattern resulting from trunk motions of the proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. Rehabilitation research and practice, 2012, 281937. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/281937

Featured Image: MDV Edwards / Shutterstock

The post 8 Overhead Press Variations for Stronger Shoulders appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Pulling in a vertical pattern strengthens your back, shoulders, and arms, while also building the muscles that support and stabilize your shoulder blades. This maintains healthy joint function which, in turn, keeps your entire upper body strong. 

However, the lat pulldown isn’t enough to build thickness in your entire back and it’s not the only way to keep everything strong, healthy, and balanced.  Eventually, you need to make some adjustments. Over-focusing on classic straight bar lat pulldowns without any change in angles, grip, or technique won’t be enough to for complete development.

If you know which muscles and attributes you’re looking to address, you can wisely choose the right exercises for better results. Here are 12 of the best alternatives to build a bigger, stronger, more complete back. 

Best Lat Pulldown Alternatives

• Behind-the-Neck Pulldown
• Rhomboid Pulldown
• Stiff-Arm Pulldown
• Lying Cable Pullover
• Crossed Band Pulldown
• Supinated-Grip Pulldown
• Weighted Pull-Up
• Mechanical Drop Set Pull-Up
• Inverted Row
• Ultra-Wide Grip Bent-Over Barbell Row
• Landmine Row
• Single-Arm Face Pull

Behind-the-Neck Pulldown

“Scapular control is as cool as a really wide back,” said no person ever. Maybe you don’t do standard pulldowns to target the muscles that control your shoulder blades, but the basic movement does train muscles that control and rotate them. Pulling the bar behind your neck creates an even more efficient path.  

Why Use the Behind-the-Neck Pulldown

By slightly altering the mechanics and path of this vertical pull, you train the supporting muscles of the shoulders and shoulder blades through a more complete range of motion. If you have suitable shoulder mobility and can perform the motion without pain, pulling behind your head allows you to target the muscles that rotate and lower the shoulder blades. 

The kicker here is that when your shoulders and scapulae (shoulder blades) are well-positioned, with the behind-neck movement, your body can create higher levels of strength and develop more noticeable upper-back muscle.

How to Do the Behind-the-Neck Pulldown

Set up on a lat pulldown machine as you normally would. Use a long bar attachment and grab it with an overhand grip beyond shoulder-width. Sit with your arms straight overhead and shoulders “shrugged” up. Keep your forehead, chin, and sternum in line as you lean slightly forward. Let your arms be pulled slightly back, in line with your hips. Keep your body forward as you pull the handle down. Ideally, aim to touch the bar to the base of your traps, near your neck, but pull to a comfortable depth based on your overall mobility.

Think about trying to shrug your shoulders “down” as you bend your arms and drive your elbows down. In the bottom position, squeeze your shoulder blades down before straightening your arms and controlling the weight up. Let your shoulders rise as the cable pulls you into a controlled overhead lat stretch. Start with light weight and a full range of motion, and increase slowly without sacrificing form. 

Rhomboid Pulldown

This movement may feel a little funky at first, but it’s a simple and effective way to shift focus from your big lat muscles to the smaller muscles of your upper and mid-back. To do these, you’ll use close or neutral-grip attachment and a very specific body angle. 

Why Do the Rhomboid Pulldown

The rhomboids are deep muscles between the shoulder blades that pull your upper back together. If these supportive muscles don’t function well, there’s a good chance you will eventually deal with some shoulder dysfunction, pain, or injury. The rhomboid pulldown targets these muscles while also building muscle in the center of your mid-back, which for many, is lacking thickness and development.  

How to Do the Rhomboid Pulldown

Grab the a close-grip attachment with your palms facing each other. Lock your legs under the pads, but lean your torso back to create a roughly 45-degree angle between your upper body and the floor. Pull your hands to your sternum and allow your elbows to flare out at a 90-degree angle to your shoulders. Keep your trunk braced and stable as throughout the exercise.

In the bottom position, think of pulling your shoulder blades together and your shoulders down to the ground. Control the weight on the way up, but keep your torso angled backward for the entire set.

Stiff-Arm Pulldown

This single-joint (isolation) exercise is arguably better at building lat thickness than traditional pulldowns because the work it done only by the lats with minimal assistance from the shoulders and arms.

Why Do the Stiff-Arm Pulldown

The stiff-arm pulldown, also known as a straight-arm pushdown, is great at building lat size and general mobility because the muscle has to overcome resistance through a long range of movement. You need to control the resistance through a long arc that puts your lats in a significant stretch toward the top. This is one of the few exercises that actually strengthens shoulder extension (raising the arm) along with training your shoulder blades to slide downward into a stable position.  

How to Do the Stiff-Arm Pulldown

Attach a straight bar or rope to a cable near the top of your head. Stand tall, grab the bar or rope with your elbows slightly bent and your palms facing down (on a bar) or facing each other (with a rope). Maintain a bent-arm position as you “sweep” the attachment toward the top of your legs.

At the bottom, imagine pulling your shoulders behind your torso before you let the weight pull your arms back up. Control the weight and let your arms come all the way up for an active stretch at the top. 

Lying Cable Pullover

Dumbbell or kettlebell pullovers are sometimes used as an alternative to pulldowns or, more specifically, an alternative to stiff-arm pulldowns, but expecting people to do those free weight exercises light enough to limit the contribution of the chest, arms, and shoulders is like asking them not to look at themselves in the mirror after a good arm pump. Lying cable pullovers are a more effective way to emphasize the contraction of the lats and other back muscles with relatively light weight and high tension.

Why Do the Lying Cable Pullover

This exercise gives you all the same benefits of stiff arm pulldowns — increased lat recruitment with limited additional muscles — while also increasing the duration that the muscle held under tension. And the longer the muscle is contracting under tension the more muscle and strength can be built. (1)

How to Do the Lying Cable Pullover

Lie on a flat bench with a cable set slightly above head-level. Use a rope attachment to allow for more range of motion. Grab the rope with your hands facing each other. Maintain a slight bend in your elbows and pull the rope toward your legs while keeping your lower back flat against the bench.

Keep your hands facing one another and try to touch your pinky fingers to the floor. In the bottom position, squeeze your shoulders together and think of pushing your triceps through the floor before controlling the resistance all the way back. Let the resistance pull your arms as far back as you can tolerate, above and behind your head.

Crossed Band Pulldown 

This movement is perfect for using resistance bands rather than a cable machine because the tension of the bands combines with the long range of motion to target the smaller muscles of the back. The crossed band pulldown can also be called a “banded rhomboid pulldown” because it works those smaller upper back muscles similar to a rhomboid pulldown.

Why Do the Crossed Band Pulldown

By pulling the bands in a cross-body motion, you are training the muscles that move and support the scapulae with a specialized effort you wouldn’t be able work with cables. These supportive muscles not only keep your shoulders functioning properly, but they provide the stability needed to build high-level pressing and pulling strength, and they contribute to unique thickness of the back musculature.

The resistance bands allows for more tension at the end range (peak contraction), which is where most people need to build more scapular control. As you pull the band, it becomes more challenging and the muscles have to create more tension, compared to steady resistance with cable pulleys. 

How to Do the Crossed Band Pulldown

Anchor two resistance bands to the top of a squat rack, pull-up bar, or other high and stable structure. Space the bands to be just outside the width of your shoulders. Grab the left band with your right hand and vice versa, and sit on the floor between them.

Keep a neutral spine, not arched or rounded, and pull the bands across the front of your body. Try to drive your elbows toward the floor behind you. Hold and squeeze the contacted position for one second before controlling the bands into a stretched position with straight arms. 

Supinated-Grip Pulldown

To keep your shoulders healthy and your upper back strength balanced, you need to do vertical pulls with your palms both facing away (pronated grip) and facing toward you (supinated grip). The supinated-grip pulldown, or “chin-down” (as opposed to a bodyweight chin-up), is a great option to build this supinated-position strength whether you can do chin-ups or not. 

Why Do the Supinated-Grip Pulldown

This hand position doesn’t magically make it a biceps-only exercise. This grip variation trains the connections between the biceps, delts, and upper-back muscles differently from a pull-up or pulldown. (2) It also builds more balanced upper back stability and more shoulder mobility.

How to Do the Supinated-Grip Pulldown

Use a straight bar attachment and set up just as you would for a standard pulldown. Grab the bar with palms facing you and hands placed right at or a little wider than shoulder width apart.

Pull the attachment down by driving your elbows to the ground and try to touch it right below your collarbone. Squeeze the elbows down before controlling the cable back up. 

Weighted Pull-Up

Most don’t think that pulling exercises that target the upper back should ever really be loaded heavy, but that line of thinking is a big mistake.

If you’re looking to build your back as big as you can, you need to combine high-rep sets with heavy weights. The weighted pull-up is an extremely effective, if slightly advanced, way to get the job done.  

Why Do the Weighted Pull-Up

Pull-ups are typically done to build muscle size using only your body weight for as many reps as possible. But they can and should sometimes be loaded as heavy as possible and performed in rep ranges as low as three to five per set. This will expose you to new types of muscular stress that leads to muscle growth. 

How to Do the Weighted Pull-Up

Take an overhand grip with your arms at, or just a little wider than, shoulder-width. Pull from a straight-arm hang to your chin or neck reaching bar-level. Warm-up with bodyweight-only sets and then add a weight using either a dip belt or a weighted vest. Start with a weight that you know you can do at least five reps with.

Perform multiple sets of three to five reps, adding just a little weight after each set. When you reach a very challenging weight and feel like you can only grind two or three reps, stick with this weight and try to do two to four more sets.

Mechanical Drop-Set Pull-Up

It’s important to do vertical pulling exercises with a variety of hand positions – overhand, underhand, and neutral-grip. Each grip is mechanically different in terms of difficulty and muscle recruitment, and this can be exploited to do more quality volume, which results in greater strength and muscle growth. (3)

Why Do the Mechanical Drop Set Pull-Up

A pronated (palms away) hand position is most challenging and prioritizes the lat muscle and upper back. A supinated (palms toward you) hand position is slightly easier and emphasizes the biceps and shoulders, and a neutral position (palms facing each other) offers the greatest leverage and is least challenging, recruiting the brachialis and shoulders. (4)

A “mechanical drop set” is a specialized technique that allows you to do as many reps as you can with the most difficult hand position. This causes the emphasized muscles to work hardest. You then continue to add more tension to the same muscle groups with a supinated grip, and finally using neutral-grip hand position. In total, you are able to do more volume than you could normally achieve using exclusively any one grip.

How to Do the Mechanical Drop Set Pull-Up

Take a shoulder-width overhand grip on a pull-up bar and lift yourself from a straight-arm hang to your chin near bar-level. As you reach muscular fatigue, let go and reset your grip to take a shoulder-width underhand grip. Continue performing additional repetitions until you reach fatigue again. Let go and finally take a neutral (palms facing) grip. Continue the last phase of the set with more reps.

One effective approach with this method is to pick a pre-determined rep count for each hand position. For example, if you can do five standard (overhand) pull-ups, you may choose to do two or three reps of each grip. This increases your pull-up volume significantly because you end up doing a total of six to nine repetitions instead of only five.

Inverted Row

The inverted row is often done with your body parallel to the floor, with your feet elevated to make it a true horizontal rowing motion. While this is a great variation to build the entire mid-back and lats, doing these at a 45-degree angle with your feet on the ground may be an even more efficient way to strengthen your back muscles similar to a lat pulldown. 

Why Do the Inverted Row

This is a great option to replace or add more bodyweight movements. Strong or experienced lifters tend to neglect bodyweight training, maybe throwing in a few push-ups here or there, but that’s short-sighted. Bodyweight pulling movements, in particular, demand trunk stabilization and good scapular control which carry over to strength and stability in nearly all exercises.

If you can’t do bodyweight pull-ups, you need to find other ways to train your pulling muscles. The 45-degree inverted row uses your bodyweight to build strength and muscular coordination. This moderate angle makes it a different and effective way to strengthen the scapular muscles and still build the lats, comparable to a traditional pull-up or pulldown.

How to Do the Inverted Row

Set a barbell on a rack somewhere around ab-height. You can also use a Smith machine. You may have to adjust this higher or lower once in position depending on your arm length. Grab the bar with an overhand grip, with your arms a little wider than shoulder-width. Slide your feet out until your body is at roughly a 45-degree angle with the floor.

Keep your legs straight and pull yourself toward the bar. Aim to touch your chest to the bar before lowering under control and repeating for the set number of reps. 

Ultra-Wide Grip Bent Over Barbell Row 

The wide-grip barbell row might be one of the best exercises to increase thickness in your lats and traps while building strength that carries over to other big lifts. If you see someone who does this exercise often, heavy, and well, you can count on them having a big and powerful back. 

Why Do the Ultra-Wide Grip Bent-Over Barbell Row

The ultra-wide grip row not only makes your lats wider, but it builds thickness in the mid-back better than many other exercises. The challenging wide grip also taxes your forearm muscles, making them bigger while building a stronger grip. The bent-over position requires your hips, trunk, and hamstrings to stabilize you body and create tension to support the weight. This total-body recruitment makes you stronger for pretty much anything else in the gym or on the field. 

How to Do the Ultra-Wide Grip Bent-Over Barbell Row 

Stand over a barbell with your feet hip-width apart. Hinge forward at the hips, squat down, and grab the bar with a palms-down grip as far wide as your grip will allow. The bar should be difficult to hold, but be sure you can keep it in your hands for the entire set. Stand straight up with the bar in your hands and your arms straight. Slightly bend your knees as you hinge from your hips.

Keep your knees slightly bent and bend forward until your back is close to parallel with the ground. Hold this position with your elbows locked and keep your back flat and your abs braced. Row the bar toward the bottom of your sternum. Control the weight back down to a straight-arm position, and repeat for repetitions.

Landmine Row

The landmine row can train the lats more without causing, or worsening, any potential shoulder problems because it places a unique demand on the body compared to other barbell or dumbbell exercises. The angle and leverage of the landmine create a different stress on the muscles and joints. It allows the lifter to adjust their body position and change the pull of the weight.

Why Do the Landmine Row

This exercise is done using a “v-bar” attachment, which requires a neutral-grip. This helps you contract your lats through a full range of motion while allowing the shoulder blades to move into a natural position. This not only helps to reduce shoulder pain but also reinforces and builds the shoulder-stabilizing muscles.

Because landmine row moves though an arc range of motion rather than a straight line, it creates different leverages for your muscles. For that reason, the weight typically feels heavier at the bottom and lighter at the top, which is the opposite of most exercises. This “reversed” strength curve means that the landmine row can train the lats differently by placing them under greater tension at the bottom position. 

How to Do the Landmine Row

Put one end of a barbell in a landmine unit, or in the stable corners of a squat rack. Attach a neutral-grip v-bar handle around the free end of the barbell just below the collar. Straddle the bar, squat down to grab the handle, and stand up supporting the bar with straight arms. Make sure your back is almost completely parallel with the floor and your legs are slightly bent.

Row the bar up and try to touch your wrists somewhere between the bottom of your sternum and your abs. Lower the weight by straightening your arms under control. Try not to “hitch” or bounce as you lift the weight. The more strict the movement, the better it is for building muscle and strength. 

Single-Arm Face Pull 

Standard lat pulldowns are usually done in hopes of building wider backs, but it’s not really just about building back width. You need to build muscle on your upper back and across the backs of your shoulders, as well. There are more focused ways to develop these key areas than just using the simple pulldown.

Why Do the Single-Arm Face Pull

The single-arm face pull targets the rear delts (back of the shoulder) and the upper and inner parts of your back. These muscle groups not only need to be strong for optimal shoulder health and stability, but they need to be well-developed if you want your back to look as thick as possible.

Training one are at a time helps you narrowly focus on properly moving your shoulder and shoulder blade. Single-arm exercises like this also train your trunk to resist rotation so, as an added benefit, you’re also training core stability.

How to Do the Single-Arm Face Pull

Attach a single handle to a cable pulley at forehead-height. Grab the handle palm-down with one hand. Straighten your arm and step back until the cable slightly pulls on the weight stack to lift it up. Stand tall with your knees slightly bent and your feet about hip-width apart.

Keep your palm facing down as you pull the handle toward your ear. Think “chicken wing” to keep your elbow high and pointed out. Focus on pulling your shoulder blade in toward your spine. Hold and squeeze at this end position for one second. Don’t let your shoulder shrug upward. Control the weight back without letting it pull your shoulder too far forward as your arm straightens. 

Benefits of Lat Pulldown Variations

There are three basic reasons to include this vertical pulling motion in your training: muscle size, muscular strength, and musculoskeletal health. Whichever reasons are on your goal list, there are plenty of effective movements to get the job done.

Increased Muscle Recruitment

Many people want to build their lats thicker and wider. Bigger lats give an athletic look many people want. Whether it’s on a bodybuilding stage, at the beach, or just for your own personal physique goal, a well-developed back includes wide lats as well as a solid upper and mid-back.

The lat pulldown, on its own, isn’t sufficient for targeting the multiple muscles involved in building complete back size.

Improved Strength Development

The more overall back strength you have, the more weight you can lift. Back strength is essential for a strong, stable upper body. This strength and stability carries over to big lifts like the deadlift, when maintaining proper position for efficient technique.

A stronger back even carries over to lower body exercises like the squat, to help your upper body transfer power from your legs through your core and upper body.

Joint Health

Healthy, well-functioning shoulders and shoulder blades (scapulae) are essential for any lifter. If you press weights overhead (up), you need to pull weights down. Basic muscular symmetry helps to reduce the risk of shoulder and upper body injuries. (5) Vertical pulling trains coordination and control between your shoulders and the scapulae, and it reinforces the postural muscles surrounding your scapulae and the entire middle back.

Get Down with All the Pulldowns

The lat pulldown is one of the most popular vertical pulling exercises for building muscle and strength. It’s an effective and time-tested exercise, but you still need to stress the upper and mid-back muscles with different angles and demands to create a maximum training effect. You can’t haphazardly add variations and hope for the best, because that can be a counterproductive waste of time. Review the exercises above, figure out which suit your specific needs, and plug them into your training plan. Soon enough, you’ll have all the variety you need for a well-rounded, and well-widened, back.

References

1. Burd, N. A., Andrews, R. J., West, D. W., Little, J. P., Cochran, A. J., Hector, A. J., Cashaback, J. G., Gibala, M. J., Potvin, J. R., Baker, S. K., & Phillips, S. M. (2012). Muscle time under tension during resistance exercise stimulates differential muscle protein sub-fractional synthetic responses in men. The Journal of physiology, 590(2), 351–362. https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.2011.221200
2. Lusk, S. J., Hale, B. D., & Russell, D. M. (2010). Grip width and forearm orientation effects on muscle activity during the lat pull-down. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 24(7), 1895–1900. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181ddb0ab
3. Leslie, Kelly & Comfort, Paul. (2013). The Effect of Grip Width and Hand Orientation on Muscle Activity During Pull-ups and the Lat Pull-down. Strength and Conditioning Journal. 35. 75-78. 10.1519/SSC.0b013e318282120e.
4. Plantz MA, Bordoni B. Anatomy, Shoulder and Upper Limb, Brachialis Muscle. [Updated 2022 Feb 22]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551630/
5. Drigny, J., Gauthier, A., Reboursière, E., Guermont, H., Gremeaux, V., & Edouard, P. (2020). Shoulder Muscle Imbalance as a Risk for Shoulder Injury in Elite Adolescent Swimmers: A Prospective Study. Journal of human kinetics, 75, 103–113. https://doi.org/10.2478/hukin-2020-0041

Featured Image: Wood Water Wall / Shutterstock

The post The 12 Best Lat Pulldown Alternatives for Back Size appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Although powerbuilding is often considered a specific style of training, it’s really just an overall structure given to any training plan. And it’s a structure that many experienced lifters were doing even before it was given a name.

While there’s no reason to be dogmatic, here are some basic guidelines that can help you decide where to put your focus, what to include and what to leave out, and how to best organize your training to pack on size and strength.

• What is Powerbuilding?
• Who Should Use Powerbuilding?
• Why Train for Powerbuilding?
• How to Plan a Powerbuilding Routine?
• Common Powerbuilding Mistakes
• Sample Powerbuilding Program

What is Powerbuilding?

Training for powerbuilding means that you focus on increasing strength in big, compound (multi-joint) lifts while also building muscle through more classic bodybuilding-type training with isolation (single-joint) exercises and exercise variations, also called accessory movements.

One example would be starting a workout with sets of deadlifts, followed by accessory exercises concentrated on individual muscle groups such as the back and hamstrings. The main compound lift would be done for lower reps with heavier weights to develop strength and power.

The accessory exercises are done with relatively higher rep ranges in order to develop individual muscles while reducing wear and tear on the joint. That can include anything from single-joint exercises like biceps curls to multi-joint movements like split squats or pull-ups.

An upside to powerbuilding is that you can choose what to prioritize for specific goals. If you eventually decide to enter a powerlifting competition, for example, you could allocate more time to training heavy with the big three powerlifts — back squat, bench press, and deadlift — and minimize some of the bodybuilding work.

Or, when beach season approaches, you might keep the heavy barbell lifts to a minimum and spend most of your training doing muscle-building accessory exercises to build a serious physique while remaining relatively strong.

While powerbuilding gives you flexibility in exercise choice, there are some things to keep in mind for the best results.

Who Should Use Powerbuilding

Powerbuilding is for those who don’t have one singular physique or performance focus, but instead want to be physically well-balanced.

If you want to be strong, muscular, and fit, there’s no reason to get stuck working towards some grandiose weight in a barbell lift, reaching a specific body fat percentage number, or breaking a certain time for an endurance workout.

That’s not to say you won’t still set PRs (personal records), build endurance, and drastically improve your body composition with a more general training powerbuilding approach.

You may not break state lifting records or be shredded enough to step on a bodybuilding stage, but you can still end up stronger and more muscular than people who put all of their training eggs in a single basket.

Powerbuilding training can also be useful for people who compete in other sports or physical hobbies. When you’re approaching a competition, strength and conditioning training does need to be tailored to your specific sport or activity, especially when you’re competing at a very high level.

As long as you’re not in a competitive season, powerbuilding can be a great way to build a broad foundation for novice athletes and it can help experienced athletes remain well-rounded.

Powerbuilding for New Lifters

It’s great that powerlifting-inspired, strength-focused training has become popular in recent years. However, too many people with no lifting background dive headfirst into heavy training after seeing it for the first time.

While powerlifting can build an excellent level of upper and lower-body strength, beginners need to build a foundation using more variety than this type of specialized training can provide. Powerbuilding training is a better alternative for beginners because it builds a much broader base by developing more attributes with more exercise variety.

A beginner starting with a broad base will be in a better position to build on. With powerbuilding, you can steadily improve in big barbell lifts, similar to powerlifting-based training. Those barbell lifts can be markers for you to track your progress — not just in strength, but also in movement quality. Your technique will improve as you progress.

You also have more freedom when choosing  different exercises, variations, and training methods on a powerbuilding program. Powerlifting is exclusively focused on moving the most total weight in the back squat, flat bench press, and deadlift. Powerbuilding lets you focus on different barbell lifts while performing a wide variety of isolation exercises. In the long-term, this leads to better balance, proportion, and overall healthy function throughout your body.

Why Train for Powerbuilding

A Powerbuilding routine is excellent not only for building strength and muscle, but also for developing work capacity and resilience toward injury. This is primarily because powerbuilding allows flexibility to use a variety of exercises and training methods, instead of a relatively smaller handful of goal-specific exercises or methods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Muscles grow bigger and stronger more quickly than the connective tissue that attaches those muscles to bones. If your training routine is excessively focused on building strength, like many powerlifting-based programs, you’re on a potentially dangerous path.

The disproportionate increase in muscular strength may create a condition where your muscles exert levels of force that your connective tissues can’t support. That can lead to the type of injury that keeps nagging for years.

Powerbuilding programs make it simple to incorporate moderate-to-high rep accessory exercises which increase blood supply and metabolic growth factors to tendons and ligaments. This type of training makes the connective tissues thicker and stronger, while increasing the muscles’ ability to withstand fatigue and do more work.

Powerbuilding routines also leave room for hybrid training methods which build muscle and aerobic capacity together, such as “tempo interval circuits” — alternating 20 to 45 seconds of steady state activity (rowing, stationary bike riding, sled dragging, etc.) with 10 to 15 reps of an accessory exercise, repeated for a total of 20 to 60 minutes.

These methods can all be included in powerbuilding programs to build a more well-rounded, highly capable body that’s more resistant to injury. You can still decide to specialize with powerlifting or bodybuilding-focused training later, if it suits your specific goal.

How to Plan a Powerbuilding Routine

While you do have a lot of flexibility when arranging your powerbuilding training plan, there are some important things to consider when designing a program.

Choose Your Main Lifts

First, decide which compound lifts to prioritize. You can use the classic back squat, flat bench press, and deadlift, or you can substitute similar alternatives. For example, you could trade the bench press for the overhead press if overhead strength appeals to you.

To focus on leg strength, you may want to include both the back squat and front squat while leaving out the deadlift for a few months. However, using “overlapping” exercises or very similar movements will require extra attention to planning, explained later.

There are no strict rules regarding which exercises to include, just pick what you like and stick with it. You can choose whatever big compound lifts you prefer, and you can even change them over time.

However, because the main lift is strength-focused, it should be a movement which allows the greatest potential weight to be lifted. This will almost always be a barbell exercise. Plan to use three to five sets of three to six reps with a challenging weight.

Know Your Training Split

Next, decide what order you’ll train your lifts and muscle groups. You can do this by following a push/pull split, an upper/lower split, or a muscle group split.

Push/Pull Split: The push/pull split alternates training days focused on “pushing” muscles and movements (including squats and squat variations, chest and shoulder training, and triceps work) with days focused on “pulling” muscles and movements (including deadlifts and deadlift variations, back exercises like rows and pulldowns, and biceps training).

The most common way to program a push/pull split is to pair a pushing movement main lift with accessory pushing exercises. For example, a workout could begin with heavy squats, followed up with upper and lower-body pushing accessory exercises including hack squats, leg extensions, overhead dumbbell pressing, and skull crushers.

If you’re training with more than one push (or pull) workout per week, you might focus the accessory work to only the muscles used in the main lift. For example, heavy front squats followed by the leg press, Bulgarian split squat, standing calf raise, and ab training.

Upper/Lower Split: This is exactly what it sounds like — each training day is devoted to either upper body or lower body exercises.

On day one, you might bench press and then do the dumbbell overhead press, pulldowns, cable rows, and triceps extensions. Day two could include the deadlift, lunges, hamstring curls, and calf raises. While day three might focus on the barbell row, chin-ups, chest dips, incline pressing, and biceps curls.

This approach can be manipulated to improve overall recovery time by adding rest days to extend the time between workouts. This makes it a very suitable choice for older lifters who may need to carefully monitor the weekly wear and tear on their body.

Muscle Group Split: This is a classic “body part split” seen in most bodybuilding programs, with each training day focused on one or two specific muscle groups. However, the main compound lifts still focus on building strength with that body part as the primary working muscle.

Training days typically work around the chest, back, shoulders, arms (sometimes broken down into a biceps day and a triceps day), and legs. “Leg day” may also be separated into one quadriceps day (with squats) and one hamstring day (with deadlifts).

For example, you might start “quadriceps day” with front squats, and then maximize muscle growth with accessory exercises that specifically work the leg muscles used in a squat — including lunges and leg extensions.

On shoulder day, you may use the push press as a main lift, followed by dumbbell overhead pressing, lateral raises, rear delt flyes, triceps pushdowns.

Choose Your Accessory Exercises

Once you’ve selected your main lifts and training split, you’ll know which accessory movements can be plugged into each day.

Accessory movements should be chosen to build size in muscles that need attention and are appropriate for each training day. If you’re following a push/pull split, you wouldn’t perform leg curls as an accessory movement after bench press; they’re different types of movements and the hamstrings aren’t recruited when benching.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking accessory exercises are a lesser priority than your main lift. Accessory movements are primarily responsible for the “building” part of powerbuilding. They help you pack on size and support strength progression in the main lifts.

When it comes to accessory exercises, work for three to five sets of eight to 15 reps. You may want to include traditional isolation exercises like lateral raises or seated leg extensions, or variations of the main lift such as an incline bench press or dumbbell overhead press.

You could also use alternative exercises like kettlebell swings, farmer’s walks, or sled drags to build the size and conditioning you’re looking for. Accessory movements allow you to focus more on muscle growth than raw strength, so choose the movements based on your individual needs.

Determine Your Training Frequency

The last step to setting up your powerbuilding program is to decide how many days per week you’re going to train. Typically, the longer you’ve been training, the more volume of work you must do to continue to see progress.

This usually means more experienced lifters will need to train more days each week than when they first started. Someone who has been doing powerbuilding training for a year or less can often improve with only two to three workouts a week because the overall stimulus is still relatively new and their body responds well.

Lifters with more than two years experience will probably need to train three to five days per week to achieve the volume and intensity needed to continue seeing results. One or even two workouts per week couldn’t accommodate enough exercises with enough sets and reps, using enough weight, to trigger sufficient muscle and strength gains.

However, you can structure your week to make the most out of fewer training days. Yes, the longer you consistently train, the more work you will need to add overall. But if you appropriately pair your compound lifts and add accessory exercises that fill in any potential gaps, you don’t necessarily need to lift five days a week.

For example, you might follow an upper/lower split three days per week using the bench press and barbell row as main lifts on one upper body day, trap bar deadlifts and squats on a lower body day, and a shoulder press on the next training day.

Common Powerbuilding Mistakes

Powerbuilding can be a relatively straightforward approach to training — lift heavy and then lift a little lighter — but several common mistakes can limit your recovery and reduce results.

Poor Fatigue Management

One of the biggest issues to keep in mind is managing your fatigue throughout the week. You can do this by following a proper training split, grouping main lifts together, and organizing your split to reduce the total training days each week. Each of these were addressed in the planning section above.

You can also manage nervous system fatigue by avoiding excessive overlap with similar exercises. If you were to design a powerbuilding routine with four different squat variations as the main lift four days in a row, you never give your nervous system or squatting muscles a chance to recover. You’ll likely burnout before seeing any significant results.

Instead, you might do back squats and squat cleans on day one, with Zercher squats and front squats on day three or four. This creates a structure that allows you time to recover from the physical and physiological stresses of squatting.

Yes, it may suck to do heavy cleans after heavy squats or front squats after heavy Zerchers, but your body will adapt because it’s given the chance to recover. In the end, the total training plan will be more productive and you will adapt and grow stronger from it.

Overemphasizing Main Lifts or De-emphasizing Accessory Work

Some lifters get so caught up in chasing heavy weights that they overlook accessory work. If they’re in a hurry on a given day, accessory movements might be performed haphazardly, with reduced effort, or even skipped entirely. That’s a one way ticket to plateau city, where strength stalls and muscles remain under-sized.

For optimal gains in both size and strength, the main lift and the accessories should be approached with balanced effort and enthusiasm. If you wouldn’t skip a set of heavy deadlifts, you shouldn’t consider skipping a set of pulldowns or lunges.

If the unexpected happens and you need to trim your time in the gym, don’t simply drop the accessory movements. Take the opportunity to dial up the intensity and use supersets to fit more training sets into a shorter amount of time.

Sample Powerbuilding Routine

Now that you have the general outline for how to structure your training, here’s a sample program putting it all into action.

This adaptable template keeps the main lifts focused on building strength and includes alternative methods to increase work capacity and develop muscle.

Day One

• Back Squat: 4 x 5 (70% one-rep max)
• Overhead Press: 5 x 3 (75% one-rep max)
• Bulgarian Split Squat: 4×10 (each leg)
• Dumbbell Upright Row: 4×10 (superset with previous exercise)

Tempo Interval Circuit — Perform for 20 minutes:

• Sled Push: 30 seconds 
• Feet-Elevated Push-up: 15 reps
• Sled Pull: 30 seconds 
• Lat Pulldown: 10 reps

Day Two

• Deadlift: 2 x 3 (75% one-rep max), 2 x 3 (80% one-rep max)
• Landmine Row: 4 x 6 (each side)
• Romanian Deadlift: 4 x 6
• Cable Pull-Through: 3 x 15
• Two-Arm Dumbbell Row: 4 x 10 (superset with two following exercises)
• Cable Face Pull: 4 x 10 
• Pallof Press: 4 x 6 (each side)

Day Three

• Bench Press: 4 x 5 (70% one-rep max)
• Front Squat: 4 x 3 (75% one-rep max)
• Goblet Squat: 4 x 8
• Lateral Lunge: 3 x 6 (each side)
• Dumbbell Floor Press: 3 x 12 (superset with previous exercise)

Accessory Circuit — As many sets as possible in eight minutes: 

• Inverted Row: 6 reps 
• Chest-Supported Front Raise: 8 reps
• Chest-Supported Rear Raise: 8 reps 
• Seated Hammer Curl: 10 reps 
• Overhead Dumbbell Triceps Extension: 8 reps 

Building the Best of Both Worlds

Powerbuilding training is not only a great way to build a broad base for beginners, it’s one of the most efficient ways to structure your workouts for becoming stronger, more muscular, leaner, and capable of more than just picking up heavy things or flexing in poses. If you’re motivated to build a well-rounded body, spend some time powerbuilding.

Featured Image: Tom Yau / Shutterstock

The post Powerbuilding: The Training Method for Size and Strength appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It took me a while to admit. I’d throw that deep self-shame shade on myself because I should have been able to keep to my intentions, schedules, and plans, right? Probably, but I (and you) need to handle ourselves tactfully. If we don’t, the belligerent toddler inside makes things even worse.

I’ve settled on dealing with myself with more open boundaries.

This open boundary concept is how it started—I decided on what I wanted my physical training to look like based on what I genuinely enjoyed.

It meant practicing some:

• Muay Thai
• Jiu-jitsu
• Training a little Olympic weightlifting
• General basic barbell work
• Strength and conditioning type workouts that heightened the ceiling for how much work I could do

Create a Framework

When I drew up an outline, I thought flexible with a planned focus for each day’s training.

But I miscalculated just how much of a madman I am. If someone else showed me this first draft of a flexible outline, I’d have told them it looked like a training program to prepare someone to join the military special forces.

I was trying to set an outline where my workouts were mapped out with room to change and adjust, but I’d get way too mad at myself if I changed too much during a week. So yeah, that didn’t work.

I came up with another idea eventually, though, to get my inner toddler-tyrant to agree with me.

I’d create a framework. Saying framework instead of outline seems like a pointless change in words until you define the term.

Framework means foundation or core.

Discover Your Core Functions and Foundations

I worked through this:

• What was the core of how I want my body to function, operate, and feel? Ok, I have it.
• Next, I asked myself the foundation for the training and activity I needed each week to get and keep this function.
• I thought long and hard about what I needed and why I needed it.
• I analyzed everything that could be called exercise and thought about what physical activities I enjoyed that I wasn’t doing often or wasn’t doing at all.
• If what I was using as exercise didn’t directly contribute to how I wanted my body to feel and operate, it didn’t fit into my framework.
• This selection process kept me from adding too many things and putting too much restriction on myself again.
• You can imagine this freed up some time for me and made it possible to adjust and modify what I did week-to-week and day-to-day.

On days when that child inside was particularly irritable, I could ask him what he wanted because my framework allowed for change and guided my actions without much thought.

We could agree, and I still did what I found truly important at the end of the week.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming that you’re like me, even if you don’t know it yet. You’ve probably been criticized for bouncing around, doing too many types of physical training. But you, like me, are probably just curious about how much your body can do.

So this entire essay, as I’ll call it, because I’m incredibly high brow, will be a discussion of what you need to set your framework and why you need it.

I love my physical hobbies. Some of them keep me active and are incredibly satisfying but wouldn’t keep me functioning and feeling how I want if doing them alone.

Some of them, like jiu-jitsu, could be done as my exercise. But to do more physical hobbies, enjoy them better, and prevent injuries, I also need to put myself through specific forms of strength and conditioning training.

Finding what you need and how to fit all you want together is how we’ll figure out your framework.

Alternate Stimulating and Push Days

It’s not about fitting more into your week.

It’s about finding what you can’t do without, what you need, and then throwing the rest out.

If you have a few different interests and physical hobbies, you can’t push yourself to your max each time you lift weights.

Challenging days are fine, but times, where you do push limits should be few and far between.

Hitting maxes in the weight room and red-lining in conditioning activities isn’t building ability; it’s testing it.

You should do most of your strength and conditioning work pretty decently below your limits, including your limit strength and your total volume.

More difficult days, though, should be offset by easier ones.

I’ve started classifying them as stim and push days. Stim standing for stimulating and push is pretty self-explanatory.

The stim days are to be done a day or two before the push days.

If you did some loaded movement four times in a week, it would usually mean you’d do one at the start of a week and again halfway through. If you only planned for two times, you’d start the week with a stim day and end it with a push day.

The loaded movement here isn’t bound to what’s considered standard weight training with barbells or dumbbells. It can be, but it can also be repetitive rounds of the kettlebell, medicine ball, and sandbag movements.

It can also be pushing or pulling sleds or carrying heavy objects over short distances or long ones as you would in rucking.

For Stim Days:

• Choose just 2-4 exercises you can do with ease that are similar patterns as to what you plan to do on your push day.
• The whole point is to prepare your body for the more challenging work you plan to do in a day or two and move through the same range of motion.
• You only need a couple of sets of basic movements with moderate reps for each. If it takes you longer than twenty minutes, you’re doing too much.

For me, it’s often as basic and brief as this:

I do this a day before a push day, where I plan some heavier squatting, Olympic weightlifting movements, and more strenuous training for Jiu-Jitsu.

Why? Because making hinge patterns like RDLs, which get my posterior chain active, always gets me moving and feeling better after the rest days that I usually take on the weekend. It doesn’t take much, but the difference in the quality of my squatting patterns and more demanding training the next day is pretty drastic.

Picking unilateral and trunk and shoulder stability exercises like these help me stave off old nagging injuries and prep me for heavier lifting. In the positions I’ll find myself doing in jiu-jitsu.

Why Alternate Days?

It’s easy to fire hard out of the gate when we start a new physical habit at the beginning of the week.

Week one is easy. But again, this enthusiasm doesn’t last unless we’re one of those genuinely exceptional, disciplined few.

I stopped lying about how much self-control I had, and you should stop lying to yourself, too.

Using this alternating model, we can strike a bargain with our less agreeable sides to get moving at the beginning and the middle of the week, both points when we’re the laziest.

It’s not such an overwhelming burden to do a workout like I just described. It’s short, easy to do, and makes you feel good. The thing is, it gets the ball rolling at the start of your week and keeps it rolling so that you’re more willing and ready to keep pushing on the other days.

Doing such little work seems like a waste of time at the moment.

It isn’t about that moment, though. That little work keeps you going, and you find yourself consistently moving forward.

Some Density Training Is Important

No need to go into exercise triviality, but I’m being liberal in calling this density training. What I am saying you do is focus on how much work you can do within a specific time and change the details now and then.

There are two ways I suggest doing this:

1. The first is to keep the same rep count for the movement each week (or however often you do this) but increase the total time you repeatedly do the same movement(s) using the same weight.
2. The second way is to keep the same time limit each time you do this, but try to do more reps or more weight with those reps in the given time.

You can do this with just one movement or a group of movements for either option.

In both cases, you’re increasing the endurance of the muscles you’re using, improving your ability to do more work over some time, and building on your limit on how much weight you can move and keep moving.

The best and most enjoyable way I’ve found is by using challenging weight, keeping reps low, and setting a time limit that can be steadily increased.

This increase keeps loaded movement training what it should be. It trains my ability to repeatedly create strong physical output and resist fatigue in the working muscles and my body’s complete systemic ability.

I pick at least two complementary but different movements, and I alternate back and forth, resting as needed for whatever total time.

Here’s an example: 8 Minutes:

• I’ll rest for however long I need between the movements to make sure I move well with a challenging weight for the entire period.
• I’ll write down how many times I cycle through these movements after I’m done.
• Then, I’ll try the same two movements with the same weight, rep count, and time limit again after a week.
• I may even do it every week without changing anything for a few weeks.
• Each time I’ll see if I can do more rounds of this without straining myself too hard or sacrificing the quality of my movements.
• If I can get through more rounds keeping these rules for myself, I know that I truly improved my physical capacity in more than just one way.
• I’ve increased how much work I can do in a set amount of time.
• I’ve gotten stronger, not just in how much force I can produce in one effort but also in how I can keep repeating that same effort to make the same amount of force.
• This consistency in itself is a measure of conditioning—my ability to endure stress and recover from it to repeat the same high-force effort over and over.
• If weeks later I do more work with the same weight simultaneously, I’ve increased endurance in all systems of my body.

Eventually, I’ll make it harder. First, I’ll use heavier weights, keep the rep count and time limit, and then increase the total time.

Using complementary movements is essential for this type of training.

Both the movements in my example are hip-hinge dominant patterns. The deadlift is the more general strength movement that can be loaded heavier, while the snatch takes more coordination and learning efficiency. So it complements the heavier deadlift because the total load you can use for the snatch will be much less.

The snatch gives your trunk and hips a mini active rest while still training quick, forceful total body movements and building upper body and shoulder stability.

You’re still adding more training to the muscles of the trunk and hips but allowing for momentary recovery from the heavy work of the deadlift.

Keep Mentally Engaged

Our physical activity needs to be creative; I’ve already made this point.

That means whatever we use as a routine has to keep us mentally engaged.

If we use movements, we have a knack for, but we still find fun in doing, we can challenge ourselves to do more than last time and create a game for ourselves each time we repeat the pattern.

Games keep us interested. Sober commitment to some fitness goal gets stale.

Once we’ve reached a point where increasing the time we do this makes no sense, or we’re just tired of what we’re doing, we can switch up:

1. The movements
2. The implements we use as weights
3. Or increase the load we use for the movements

This game of besting yourself gives you a greater sense of effort and fulfillment.

You get to show yourself how much you’ve improved over the total collective physical traits you can train.

You’re not just getting stronger; you’re able to create strength over and over.

You’re not just more cardiovascularly fit; you’re muscles are learning to endure and recover from more work.

Create a Go-To List of Movements

For this framework to work, you have to keep using exercises that you can rotate through quickly, efficiently, and for long periods without losing the movement’s quality.

• If you can cycle through the movements quickly, your workouts can be however brief you want them, but still effective.
• This isn’t the time to try new exercises where you have to move cautiously and consciously. You can set aside time for skill practice, but they can’t be in your core group of exercises for this density-type training.
• Getting in and out, as it were, demands you be very skillful with the movements you choose and not need an extensive and drawn-out warm-up and prep to get into the high-paced training.
• This training brand gives you the freedom and flexibility to choose and do two shorter sessions throughout the day. But if you can’t keep the sessions short, you’re not saving time or effort.

So, I keep a shortlist of lower-body focused hinging, squatting, and swinging patterns and upper-body pressing and rowing patterns. This is the list I pick from, and you can use it or go by it to form a list that you animate all your own.

Hinge Movements

• Barbell RDL: Fundamental and easy for me to do, given my background in barbell sports; Some prefer using dumbbells or kettlebells, and that’s a great option, especially if you’re training at home and don’t have room for a barbell. For me, it’s easier to load a bar with a weight I know will push me but that I can maintain for however long I set my clock.
• Suitcase Deadlift: (Video above). This movement is excellent for both push and stim days. It can be very challenging with a heavy kettlebell or dumbbell, but you can also rotate quickly through this and whatever other exercises you choose. I think of these for this density-based training on push days because the one-sided loading makes it very difficult but limits the weight you can use. It’s tough for you to stabilize your trunk and keep it from bending to one side. So you work harder without loading yourself with potentially too much weight for the time period you set, as you could do with a conventional deadlift.
• KB Swing: You really can’t go wrong with this whether you’re using them on push or stim day. Adjust the weight, volume, and intensity easily for each day. You can very easily transition to other exercises from here and move through at a steady pace. Lateral or rotational swings are also a great alternative to use to focus on different patterns and muscles.

Squat Movements

• Goblet Squats: For this, you can use kettlebells, dumbbells, heavy med balls, or sandbags. I prefer goblet squats over barbell squats when rotating through exercises in a time limit because it’s easier to pick a bell or ball up quickly and start moving. Unracking a back squat can be quite a process. Clutching a weight in front of the body close to the chest also challenges trunk strength and keeps the quality of the squat movement more evenly as you tire.
• KB Squat Swings: You can think of this as a hybrid hinge and squat pattern, but I put this in my shortlist for squatting movements. Again this is very easy to adjust depending on your focus for the day.

• Med Ball Cleans: For push days, you may have to invest in a heavier med ball, but it’s well worth it. This clean can be a quick, explosive movement you can repeatedly perform that builds coordination, grip, and back strength.

Press Movements

• Barbell Floor Press: Using a barbell for this is great if you’re pairing this with a lower-body movement where you use kettlebells, dumbbells, or med balls. You can set up the bar with your set weight and keep rotating back and forth between the movements reasonably easily.
• Dumbbell or Kettlebell Push Press: I prefer the push press over strict (if you have the mobility and stability) because you can challenge heavier weights but keep the pace.
• Landmine Push Press: An excellent alternative to keep the athletic full-body motion of a push press for those who aren’t ready to push directly overhead.

Pull Movements

• Bent-over Barbell Rows: Great for either day in your alternating training plan; Again, easy to modify and rotate with a dumbbell movement.
• Alternating Bent-Over KB/DB Rows: You can get a lot of volume in with these and move through them quickly.
• Pull-Ups: If you can do them, there’s not much better density training than hopping up there quickly after completing another exercise and repeating it again and again.

I’ve practiced all these movements more times than I care to count, even before structuring my training like this. So, I know if I pick them, I can move through my workout without much thought.

Design a Loose, Self-Adjusting Structure

Practicing with all this, I’ve inadvertently figured out what tools are best for each day. A barbell is suitable for most of what you could do in a stim day if you have enough skill.

You can warm up and easily load it to what you need to give yourself the type of workout you want. Simple movements using dumbbells are also suitable for this day.

Sandbags, medicine balls, kettlebells, or rubber atlas stones are better for push days. You can put them down quickly and move through a whole sequence of movements with little transition.

You can change what you use and how you use it as often as you want, but you’ll also find that having these easier and more challenging days starts influencing your decisions on what to do and how to do it.

The Benefits of a Flexible Structure

The point of the framework is to fit the necessary work you need to feel and look how you want in your daily life without giving it much thought.

Too much thinking, and you’ll talk yourself out of this. But, if you have markers to reach and the flexibility to adjust with the constant changes of each week, you can reach those marks with more consistency and with less effort.

Check out what I mean with this example of an actual week of training I outlined for myself using this model:

Day One (Stim): Monday or Tuesday

• If done on Tuesday, stretch Monday evening (vice versa)
• Every other Monday, try to train muay Thai/jiu-jitsu

Part A:

Part B: Loaded Movement: 2 exercises (4-6 sets 5-8 reps)

Day Two (Push): Wednesday

Day Three (Stim): Thursday

Part A:

Part B: Aerobic: (20-60 mins)

Day Four (Push): Friday

Part A:

Part B: At JDI

Throw Away the Book; Keep the Story

You’ll see that nothing is set in stone. You don’t need to start day one on Monday, or even on the same day each week.

I even write out alternate schedules as to when to do some particular physical activity so that when I’m faced with a giant disruption in my schedule that mentally fries me, I don’t have to figure it out on the fly; I follow my plan B.

My life, probably like yours, changes literally every week.

Some days I need to pick my kids up or drop them off at school or activities at different times or even on different days.

Sometimes I schedule an hour for a meeting, and it lasts two—although I’d rather drop a big rubber atlas stone on my foot than sit in a two-hour session.

If I rigidly wrote a training plan where I was supposed to do a particular exercise with a particular weight for a specific amount of sets and reps, and I missed that day, I’d get discouraged that I didn’t follow through. Then, I’d sabotage the rest of my week because why the hell not?

I already messed up, so I might as well burn it all down.

Setting the mark that I should make a certain pattern of movement, but not choosing a specific exercise or giving myself the rule to change to some other exercise with the same pattern on the day, keeps me from skipping the workout if I don’t want to do what I planned when I wake up that morning.

Routine creates freedom to do what really interests you.

Physical routine is usually the first to go, though on a busy week. So throw away the book and keep the story.

Make it easy to do what you need without tying your hands in too much rigidity.

If you want to learn the best way I’ve ever found to keep yourself free and open, and you live in the NYC/northern New Jersey area, check out this event I’m putting on August 28th, with tickets available here.

The post Prevent Self-Sabotage With a Flexible Framework appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

My college roommate told me that he thinks of me as a guy who listens to moody, poetic, eclectic music alone in his room. He told me this after I shared my existential crisis during my early twenties with him.

My college roommate told me that he thinks of me as a guy who listens to moody, poetic, eclectic music alone in his room. He told me this after I shared my existential crisis during my early twenties with him.

Calm Me Down, Bob(s)

When I started powerlifting, I was at peak aggressive masculine energy. Getting amped up to lift heavy wasn’t a problem. I had the opposite problem—controlling my intensity.

I’d get too worked up and couldn’t focus my energy on doing the lifts well.

Then, I started playing music at the gym that I’d usually listened to while relaxing at home. At that time, I was listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. Not sure why I listened to both Bobs so much at the time, but it’s also when I had long hair.

Marley’s melodies and Dylan’s reflective lyrics lowered the noise in my head, unlike rap or hard rock that just heightened the static.

My new gym music helped me self-regulate, and my lifting improved.

The King of Pop’s Cue

When I became more competitive in powerlifting, I trained and worked under my mentor, Bill Gillespie. Bill is widely admired in the sport of powerlifting and professional strength and conditioning.

A group of us, led by Bill, trained simultaneously on the same days each week for years. Bill went through a period where he played Michael Jackson’s greatest hits album every single training session—Same songs, same Michael, same album, repeat.

I liked Michael, still do, but after a while, it became maddening. Then, one day, the madness disappeared, and I didn’t hear anything anymore, only a low hum.

I never bothered to ask Bill why he did this, but I overheard him explaining it to a friend sometime later. He constantly played this type of music for the football players he coached during their workouts and for us. He explained to his friend that he wanted a constant.

Every time we heard this music, we knew it was time to work. The man knew what he was doing. The music was a subliminal cue of sorts in our heads.

Auditory cues can be pretty effective. We hear a song, and it prompts a memory, causes a feeling, or triggers us to perform.

That’s what happened with all of us unknowingly going through Bill’s experiment.

It also taught us to lift undistracted and without any dependency on anything external. We didn’t need music to get us in any state, and nothing could distract us and take us out of our focus.

The Jazz Rewire

I started listening to jazz when I was a kid, and my love for it grew as I got older.

When I took up Olympic weightlifting again, I started listening to it almost obsessively, which probably wasn’t a coincidence. I’d listen to jazz in the morning, on my way to work, and often when I trained.

John Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme, was my first choice to play while lifting weights.

I first started playing jazz while I practiced the snatch and clean and jerk because I loved the music. But I kept using it during training because I realized it helped me relax my mind’s analytical function.

It helped me find a condition of mind that was a sort of effortless awareness, almost as if I was curiously noticing my actions and movements while staying detached from them.

There’s evidence that jazz influences brain-wave activity to:

• Help you focus
• Bring out the expressive parts
• Even raise your heart rate

When I put on Coltrane and grabbed the bar, I was sensitive to every movement and change. I switched from conscious thought to be in the moment.

With all his artistic improvisations, John Coltrane’s freestyle jazz fed a mental state more like an artist with a headful of colorful impressions trying to paint a picture than a scientist analyzing movement mechanics.

Music You’d Listen to in Skinny Jeans

Music has influenced who I am more than lifting weights did. It got a hold of me before the drive to become athletic and strong.

My training never determined the music I listened to, but my music has always influenced my training and thinking.

Early on, I told my college roommate I was thinking of quitting powerlifting and that I was worried it had already become too much a part of my identity.

But he didn’t see it that way. He saw me as someone guided by music. And it can be a pretty significant guiding force.

I spent a lot of time by myself or in messy, shitty apartments with friends who looked like the dude from The Big Lebowski listening to music.

The powers that be labeled most of what we listened to as Indie-folk. I’m not sure what that means, but we didn’t care. We just loved the picture that the music drew.

I was never interested in listening to music I was supposed to as a big, burly man. My taste made music a tool for me to use any way I wanted.

The benefits of music for athletic and lifting performance can be too simplified.

Coaches always bring up some studies regarding how music helped participants perform a certain percentage better. Then, these coaches share their own ideas on how listening to their personal favorite rock, hip-hop, or electronic dance music can make you more aggressive and lift more weight.

The conversation quickly digresses to personal opinions without thinking about what kind of music and how the researchers were using the music. Music was never only just a way for me to make myself more aggressive to no aim. I think music like this has a place, but it’s not always what’s needed or most helpful.

More than anything else, music has helped me learn a visceral connection to movement and lifting weights.

My music connection was free from the problem-solving mind. There have been times I would sit still before training to listen to artists like Bright Eyes and Sigur Ros because it would quiet my monkey brain. It would reshape an experience that could be gray and mundane.

Instead of a box to be checked off for the day, music helped me to creatively lift weights and open my senses—full of color and energy.

That’s what music is for, to open and feel the inexpressible as it is already. It’s not a supplement to force an emotion.

It’s a gift that allows for the release and surrender to feeling, not its control.

The post Lifting Big, Dylan, Jazz, and Skinny Jeans appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

On day one, I was the head strength and conditioning coach for three teams.

I had to balance that with being one of the primary strength and conditioning assistant coaches for football, which took up a hefty chunk of my time.

Becoming a college strength and conditioning coach isn’t easy, but it was the young guy Jesse’s dream. There wasn’t time to sit and revel in my epic triumph as I had dreamed. I was thrown right into the thick of it.

On day one, I was the head strength and conditioning coach for three teams.

I had to balance that with being one of the primary strength and conditioning assistant coaches for football, which took up a hefty chunk of my time.

It’s not that I wasn’t ecstatic about it or that I didn’t have any experience.

I had been interning and volunteering for years as a strength and conditioning coach, but when all of the coaches’ and athletes’ eyes shift to you and hold you responsible, you can get a little spooked.

I had more to deal with than I ever thought I would. One of my responsibilities was to work with injured football players during team weight room workouts.

As they rehabbed with athletic trainers and physical therapists, the injured players were still required to come to team workouts. It was an excellent chance to focus on movements and muscles unrelated to their injury.

We can work on drastic imbalances and weak points during this time.

Coaches wanted their players to keep the strength and explosive power they’d already built, so maintaining upper-body explosiveness was a considerable concern, especially for linemen.

Typical pressing and pulling exercises could keep general upper-body strength and even explosive potential if done smartly. However, players would still lose movement coordination from their trunks to their limbs when they had a leg or foot injury and had to stop dynamic exercises and drills that also used their lower bodies.

So I took an exercise that my boss had healthy players do in a circuit during certain times of the year and adapted it—the seated dumbbell clean and press.

Train Coordination Between the Upper and Lower Body

Unlike typical pressing exercises, the dumbbell clean and press train the coordination between the upper and lower bodies.

Hinging and extending rapidly from the hip and then immediately stabilizing the torso to stop the movement’s momentum and press the weight overhead.

No, you’re not pushing through your legs and creating power this way, but the explosive hinge and the extension at the hip challenge the torso athletically in a pretty unique way.

The support you need to learn to create from your trunk is in some ways even more significant than if you did a similar movement standing.

Since working as a college coach, I’ve used the dumbbell clean and press with myself and those I’ve coached from all different backgrounds as both a way to work around injuries and as a calculated accessory exercise for upper-body circuits or conditioning sessions.

You can push heavier weights than you thought possible with any strict pressing exercise.

It will challenge and develop serious strength and stability in the trunk and the shoulders and the entire upper-back musculature because of the momentum and timing you’ll learn.

It is also one of the few upper-body-focused exercises I’ve found that’s great to include in a sequence of timed sets where you reduce weight and try to reach as many reps as you can in the given limit.

How to do the dumbell clean and press:

• Sitting on the edge of a bench will provide enough room to touch the dumbbells to the floor in front of you.
• Start seated upright with one dumbbell in each hand, holding it with a neutral grip (thumbs facing up), and make sure to keep your lower back from excessively arching.
• Keep your arms relatively straight and hinge over from your hip crease with a flat back until the tops of the dumbbells touch the ground.
• Making sure your trunk stays braced; extend hard through your hips to sit up with your torso tall again. Try to shrug your shoulders at this exact moment.
• Use this explosive movement to whip your arms and propel the tops of the bells to your shoulders, keeping them rotating close around your elbow with the same hand position.
• As soon as they touch your shoulders, drive them overhead, keeping the bells in line with the side of your ears.
• Be careful not to lean too far back but instead firmly stop your momentum, keeping your torso very rigid before you press the weight overhead.
• Return the bells to your shoulders and then take them back down to the floor as you did before.

The Focus Is on Control and Stability

Try to keep this movement fluid and continuously pausing for just a second at the top of the press to drill shoulder stability.

But stay in control and only move as aggressively as possible without losing posture as you clean the dumbbells from the ground to your shoulders.

This exercise is great to load up and build total upper-body strength or use for local muscular or total endurance.

The biggest mistake you can make is doing more weight or more reps without maintaining control and stabilization.

Most of the magic from this exercise comes from learning to quickly create force over a short distance and just as quickly halting the movement and finding the stability to deliver the force in a different direction.

Think about first moving the weight back into your body; then, you’re quickly shifting and driving it overhead, all the while keeping yourself from falling off of a bench.

When You Get Bored

I like having options to satiate my hyperactive self, but it keeps me training the same abilities.

Making this a singular movement into a snatch instead of a two-part clean and press does just that.

• Make sure you can stabilize the clean first before trying this, but if you can, pick up some lighter dumbbells to start and turn them so that your palms face the ground.
• Hinge over the same way but don’t worry about the bells touching the floor. Extend, shrug, and keep the bells close to your body and think about trying to throw them overhead, locking them in place with shrugged shoulders overhead.
• Pause up there, lower the bells close to your shoulders, and keep cycling through the movement.

Don’t throw the bells and let go overhead, though. I’ll get blamed if they fall on your head, and I got enough problems already.

The post No Legs, No Worries- Keep Your Upper Body Strong and Quick appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I hated studying for certification tests. Right after college, I took one of the more reputable certifications for strength and conditioning. While preparing, it wasn’t very reassuring to memorize concepts the test-makers thought was more important than I did.

I was arrogant for sure, just like any twenty-something-year-old meathead, but to mount a straw defense, I already had some real experience in formal strength and conditioning. I knew that many of the answers to the test questions depended on the situation.

Theory and lab results don’t always pan out in a practical situation.

One of these theoretical ideas that never sat right with me was standard rest times. Most of the textbooks would have strict guidelines for how long you should rest between strength training exercises or conditioning rounds and bouts.

I dug into why they were recommended and found it to be arbitrary.

Textbooks would assert that:

• When weight-training for strength, you need to rest for 2-5 minutes between sets.
• When doing circuits for endurance, 30-second rests between the exercises were best.

Heavier weight means you need longer rest time to recover and repeat—that sort of makes sense.

I think the textbook’s authors did not clarify the rest times regarding recovery or what to push?

Instead, it would help if you had answers to:

1. Did the specific durations challenge your body’s capacity to endure stress and recover from it?
2. Were they recommended because anyone, regardless of training history, could recover completely with that specific rest time and be ready to push hard again?

Those are two very different concepts, and I’ll explain.

What’s the Purpose of the Workout?

If you want to feel strong or tireless at the start of each set, round, or circuit, you have to pay careful attention to your rest period.

If you want to challenge how much intensive work you can do and resist fatigue, you adapt to the exercise’s stress and limit your rest.

You need to know how much rest you need first to understand how to shorten it strategically.

• Sometimes you should be fully recovered and feel your best for each set. This recovery is the best practice for training compound-lifts with heavier weights.
• Sometimes, training isn’t to feel the best or lift the heaviest weights possible during the training session.
• Sometimes it’s best to work at a deficit during an individual training session to cause a long-term gain.

Training the endurance and tolerance of fast-twitch muscle fibers to curb fatigue is part of the foundation for your capacity for strength.

These fast-twitch types are the very ones that dominate strength and power movements.

Alactic capacity, the general capability to maintain high-intensity movement, makes up this foundation. To train these abilities, you need to monitor, reduce, and alter how long you rest between exertion periods in a workout as you become stronger and more conditioned.

Does a Real Standard Exist?

The recommended rest times for heavy strength training are usually based on the length of time the Central Nervous System (CNS) and energy substrates, which cause muscle contraction, need to recover.

It makes sense, but I’d strongly disagree that the average rest times given in the textbooks are standard for most people. I assume these studies take place in laboratory conditions.

I can’t emphasize enough how many people I’ve seen not fit this model in a practical setting.

The values, at the least, need to be looked at and tested further. I’m basing my view not just on what people tell me but on my concrete observations of how long it took them to repeat exercises with the same effort and intensity. And, I’ve seen these deviations in both inexperienced and experienced clients.

Textbooks for the associations that certify coaches usually mention that rest times can be changed and provide a range for this.

Still, I’ve never seen any solid recommendations on how, when, or how much to change it.

The Breath Can Tell Us Something a Device Can’t

Technology has created some great tools since these textbooks were written that monitor fundamental physiological shifts and monitor recovery. Heart rate monitors and devices that track heart rate variability are some of them.

While having data to track is invaluable, I think we have a built-in regulator that we can put to use in deciding how long to rest—the breath.

Observing the breath can tell us something that a device can’t.

It gives clues to how psychologically ready we are to take another heavy set or go through another intense exercise period. Controlled breathing can calm the body and mind, and by simply observing it, you can tell if you’re still panicking.

The word panic may seem dramatic, but it’s describing a stress-induced state from a mental attitude, voicing, “I’m not OK, or I can’t do this.”

However, even when heart rate lowers and other metrics show the body to be recovering, your breathing may still be speedy or labored.

And if the breath hasn’t calmed, your mind hasn’t calmed.

The mind can immediately speed up heart rate and blunt neural signals to the body to act coordinated, strong, and powerful. So even if the heart rate slowed and the nervous system and energy substrates had enough time to reset, you’re unsettled mind will kill your effort on the next set or round.

This calm is primarily an overlooked point of performance and recovery, but we teach it in great detail in our JDI Barbell course.

The Signals to Observe

If you’re trying to monitor your recovery between sets by tracking heart rate, you also need to pay attention to the quality of your breath.

• When you finish a set of weights or round of conditioning, your breath speeds up alongside your heart rate.
• You may also feel that your shoulders and chest elevate with every breath, even if you usually have a healthier breathing pattern where you expand and narrow your inhale and exhale through your lower torso.
• Your body is trying to take in more oxygen to make up for what you spend during the exercise.
• The breathing muscles in the chest, neck, and shoulders cause you to get taller with our inhale and shorter when you exhale. But they’re the back-up muscles for breathing, kind of like afterburners.
• The lower torso muscles that expand and narrow the belly, sides, and lower back on inhaling and exhaling should be the dominant breathing muscles, especially when resting.
• So even though those secondary breathing muscles can and should kick on to help you take in more air while you’re pushing through intense exercise, the primary forces should be responsible for your breath before your next set or round. If this doesn’t happen, then you haven’t fully recovered.

This up and down breathing pattern signifies that your breathing is labored, and you’re still in a stressed state.

Observe the Breath’s Patterns

To use the breath to decide our rest times, we have to make sure we naturally breathe horizontally where the torso widens on inhaling and narrows on exhale. If you want to dig into this, you can check out the work I’m doing with Dr. Belisa.

• If we have this excellent pattern, we can start to track how long it takes after a set to switch from using those afterburner muscles to a relaxed horizontal breath.
• There’s no need to force it; watch it and record it to use as a baseline. You can also track your heart rate to see the relationship between the two.
• Keep a log on how long it takes you to make this switch after each set until you find the average time across all sets over two weeks of workouts.

Also, make a note as to how you felt during each set or round:

• Did you feel like you were pushing just as hard each time?
• Were there sets where you waited just a little longer because you were more in touch with your breath?
• Were those sets better when you rested longer?
• Were you able to keep pushing hard for each set as fatigue crept in as it always will the longer a workout lasts?
• According to the standards I mentioned above, did you start your next set as soon as your breathing became more relaxed?
• What happens when you take a few more calm breaths even after you start breathing only horizontally before beginning the next set?

Start Somewhere

Sometimes it makes sense to shorten your rest time to train your ability to recover and push the needle on both local muscular and total endurance. Without a baseline, though, how do you challenge this?

You need to know how long it takes you to recover entirely from each type of activity. You also need to know the feeling of rebounding to a fully rested state.

Becoming more conscious of your breath’s changes and quality will improve the connection and awareness you have of your body.

Often you’ll see those who throw themselves too far into the deep end, trying to work at an intensity that’s not sustainable with too high a stress level for them to recover or adapt.

They’ll plan short rest times based on nothing other than what they’ve been told makes the workout challenging. If you have no idea how long it takes for you to recover completely, you’re just guessing, and you may shorten your rest too much to sustain your effort throughout your workout.

There’s nothing wrong with testing your ceiling, and there’s a time for that, but every set isn’t your last, and you can’t treat it like it is.

If you know your baseline, though, you can set challenging rest times in that sweet spot that pushes you, challenges your ability to recover, and also keeps you moving forward.

Consider the entire picture when planning strength or conditioning training. If you plan to do eight rounds or sets of something but only get through four of them because you pushed yourself to a breaking point during the first few sets, what was the point?

You couldn’t sustain the effort because you went too hard in the beginning.

In the end, you did less work, despite the frantic effort of your first couple of sets fueled by listening to loops of Rocky-themed death metal music remixes.

Sometimes training’s primary focus should be on maintaining as close to the same effort as possible for every bout. This primary focus includes all of your training sessions in a given week.

And to give every set a similar effort, you’ll need to monitor how much rest time you need after each set, circuit, or round to keep this up, and tracking your breathing can give you the details.

Track Your Breath for a Useful Metric

Let’s go over specifics. For the breath to be a helpful metric in deciding rest, we need to make sure we have an excellent horizontal breathing pattern and that our breathing muscles are strong. After this, we can start tracking the breath changes to get a clearer picture of our fitness.

Observe:

Make your set, your sprint, your circuit, or your round hitting a punching bag, as usual. When it’s time to rest, don’t intentionally slow or control your breathing. Watch a few breaths.

Ask yourself how the exercise bout influenced you:

Question 1. Is Your Breathing Labored?

• Specifically, are you breathing horizontally through your torso while also through your neck, shoulders, and chest?
• Are you not broadening and narrowing at all through your belly, sides, and low back and instead only using the shoulders and chest’s secondary breathing muscles?
• Record yourself or look in a mirror. Are you just getting taller and shorter as you inhale and exhale, or is your mid-section moving with it too?

A. 1. The first question’s answers will tell you if your primary breathing muscles need more work and how hard the effort was.

• If you find you’re just using the secondary muscles (breathing up and down with no broadening and narrowing of your mid-section), you need more conscious practice in using the right muscles and patterns.
• And if you do practice and strengthen these muscles, your recovery ability and performance will immediately improve.

Question 2. How Do You Inhale and Exhale?

• Are you inhaling and exhaling through your nose and mouth?
• Are you inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth?
• Are you inhaling and exhaling through your nose and mouth synchronously?

A. 2. If your answer to the second question is yes, it probably means you’re using both primary and secondary muscles.

• You may still be breathing well horizontally, but if you notice your chest and shoulders actively engaging when you breathe, you have more information about how hard that set was.
• If you’re breathing through both your mouth and nose, you’re pushing yourself physiologically and will need more time to recover sufficiently.

Keep it Going

Instead of slowing down the breath, controlling it, or quickly changing it to nasal only, let yourself breathe rapidly in whatever way comes naturally. Just watch it closely for at least 10-50 seconds without interruption.

At the moment, it starts relaxing even a little, deepen and extend your inhale and exhale without changing the pace of your breath too drastically or trying to inhale only through your nose if you haven’t naturally started doing it.

Take several breaths like this until you switch to an easy more nasal-only breath without forcing it.

Track and Repeat

Have a stopwatch or clock with you, and note how long it took for the change in breath to happen. Remember to write it down. Then make a judgment about whether you feel psychologically ready to start the next set, round, run, or drill and repeat the same effort as the last.

The longer you train, the more fatigue you’re going to build regardless of what you do in between sets, but the idea is to give as consistent an effort as possible throughout the whole training session.

Create Your Baseline

Keep tracking rest times based on the changes in your breath and the effort that follows. Follow this over a couple of weeks with every training method you put yourself through, whether it’s weight training or conditioning bouts.

Now you have your average rest needed for a baseline to use across the board based on your biology and condition.

Create Your Training Plan

Remember that sometimes you can challenge your conditioning (both strength and endurance) by limiting rest. With a baseline that gives you concrete evidence of how long you need to make a full recovery, you can reduce your rest strategically to challenge and improve over time.

It’s also easier to make adjustments. Say you reduce your rest time by 20%, but you’re fighting to finish your training each week. You can adjust and make it only 10% until you adapt to this first.

Re-evaluate and Adjust

Keep following your baseline or adjustments every time you train for the length of a training cycle (3-6 weeks), but stay in touch with the feelings of your breath.

Then, test your ability to recover again. Now you can set and play with rest based on this new baseline.

Just remember, this isn’t always a linear advance. When you change complexity or style of exercise and movement or become stronger and can challenge yourself with heavier loads and implements, recovery requirements can change.

But always, you can check in with the breath.

The post Too Much Rest Or Not Enough? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Once I’ve taught someone what I call the foundation movements that teach skill and body control related to every type of movement and exercise, I’ll pick movements that are best for them given their ability, background, and focus on physical fitness.

If you instill these foundation movements firmly from the start, learning more complex athletic movement and exercises becomes more intuitive.

If you want to understand these movements and the principles behind learning them with this particular strategy, I’m offering a comprehensive course teaching the why and how. If you live in or around New York City, you can sign up and learn in person at my gym JDI Barbell or run through the entire program online.

Once I help my clients build a bedrock without holes, I choose exercises that are easy to process and progress quickly. It’s different for everyone, but I do like to see everyone practice a couple of exercises.

One of these is the push press. I’ve raised a few eyebrows by saying this.

What Is the Push Press?

The push press is thought of as a secondary lift for Olympic weightlifting. I haven’t exactly been quiet about my opinion that Olympic weightlifting movements are best left alone unless you specifically want to dedicate time to that practice.

I have some clients who do a traditional barbell push press, but with others, I prefer to have them use kettlebells or dumbbells to build more stability or mobility.

The best version for field athletes, beginners to weight training, or those with restrictions, is the landmine push press.

Why Do the Landmine Push Press?

When you learn the push press, you learn how you can and should move in one coordinated athletic effort to move something heavy.

To do this right:

• It will help if you create stiffness in your entire trunk to deliver the force created from your lower body, as it pushes into the ground, to your upper body, and then, to hoist the load sitting on your shoulders overhead.
• You need to maintain balance and pressure through your feet to complete this quick jumping action with enough force and accuracy to push the bar overhead in the right direction.

But pushing weights directly overhead can sometimes do more harm than good.

Some athletes can’t stress their shoulders in this position if they want to stay healthy and strong for their sport, and some of the rest are just trying to be strong and fit and need to work out flexibility limitations first.

The landmine push press works around all this.

Pushing at an angle puts the shoulder and elbow in a position that can still train a more vertical pushing pattern without the same stress and flexibility demands on the shoulder.

Who Should Do the Push Press?

If you have had shoulder pain when pressing overhead because of an old injury or just from inactivity, the landmine push press is the perfect tool.

While you should keep working to recover the shoulder complex’s full dexterity, training for physical balance means you need to build athletic strength in pushing movements besides the bench press.

As you rebuild and push weight directly overhead, which indicates you again have your full natural mobility and stability in every movement direction, you will still improve strength and ability with this exercise.

Do both until you’re ready for the traditional push press, and continue doing them as a variation to continue building shoulder health and strength.

What Does the Push Press Do For You?

Just doing a strict landmine press builds a good deal of strength with total stability.

The upper-back muscles that control scapular movement and the shoulder’s stabilizing muscles are called to keep the barbell’s path straight.

This is especially true because you’re only holding the end of the barbell in this exercise.

As you press, it’s free to move in every direction, and it isn’t easy to keep in place. So those stabilizing muscles really have to do their job. You also need to create just as much stability from your trunk to get the shoulder to maintain the movement’s integrity and push the weight.

When you add the push press’s dynamic leg drive, you learn to produce stability and strength quicker and more efficiently because the movement is quick and explosive.

Turning a strict upper-body focused press into a full-body push also makes it possible to load yourself heavier overhead.

The weight that may be too heavy to press just from the shoulders can be heaved overhead with the momentum created from your legs extending and quickly locked out.

All of the upper back and shoulder supporting musculatures can then learn new static stability, strength levels, and improved coordination.

How Do You Do the Landmine Press?

If you can find a landmine press holder, that’s great. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter all that much. You can wedge it in any corner where it won’t cause damage or set it up as I do here:

• Load the bar, pick up the bar by the head (the end of the sleeve where you load the weight), and cup both your hands.
• Place the head of the bar almost directly in your sternum.
• Place your feet somewhere between hip and shoulder-width apart and flair your toes out.
• Brace and dip your knees to a similar position as you would if you were trying to jump as high as possible, but make sure that your knees track out toward your toes and your hips come slightly back without letting your chest fall forward.
• Keep your balance on your midfoot and keep your chest tall, fighting all urges to shift your weight all towards your heels, or let your chest cave, or round your upper back.
• While keeping the bar’s head in your chest, drive hard through your legs, pushing both feet into the ground.
• Explosively extend your knees as you would for a jump, still making sure you’re pushing through the whole foot of both legs.
• As you come upon the balls of your feet from this explosive drive, shrug your shoulders. The barbell should fly off your chest a little.
• Without hesitation, keep your shoulders shrugged and quickly extend your elbows pushing the bar at a 45-degree angle (almost at the crown of your head).
• Try to time the end lockout of your elbows to happen at the very same time your heels touch back down to the floor.

What Are Your Options?

I prefer the landmine push press with two arms because of how much you can overload yourself with it, but single arm variations can be better for some people.

If you really need to recover balance in the body or work on single-side strength and stability to improve a nagging injury or reduce some glaring asymmetry, the single-arm landmine push is one of the best and safest ways to accomplish it.

Just place the head of the bar in one hand directly at the head of your shoulder and do the exercise the same way you would with two hands.

Both the single and double arm variations of this exercise are great at building strength with less risk.

The scapula moves in a position along the rib cage that keeps it in a more anatomically strong and stable position when you press with a neutral grip (thumbs facing up).

The angle at which you push the bar fixes you in a position where you can’t contort your body to grind through a rep that you really shouldn’t.

You either lockout smoothly or not at all.

However, you should do these over some matted area so that if you do fail a rep, you won’t hesitate to let the bar drop in front of you instead of lowering it in a bad position.

If someone hurts themselves doing this exercise, they most likely did so when lowering the bar back to the ground.

You can stay braced and squat to lower it to drop it at waist height with matting underneath.

When You’re Ready for the Challenge

Learning the timing for the push press is challenging, and it develops athletic ability. Transitioning to a push jerk can test you further.

The push press and push jerk are similar with one difference.

In the push jerk, you lock your arms out and receive the bar with your legs bent in a quarter squat.

The timing of the dip and drive is the same, but instead of ending with your legs straight and standing fully as you do in the push press, you use the weight to push you back into a quarter squat, then, stand from there, having already received the weight supported with locked elbows.

Not only is this going to challenge your speed of movement and coordination, but it will also let you handle heavier weights and build even higher levels of total body strength.

It cannot be easy to learn if you’ve never practiced it, but if you understand the basic principles of stability and balance, it just needs a little practice.

The post The Push Press To Save Your Shoulders appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We can use bodyweight exercises and something simple, like a medicine ball, for a great workout.

If we learned anything from our time in quarantine when gyms were closed, we learned we could make do without a gym. We can train to get stronger and more fit in our living rooms, backyards, or garages without machines or even barbells.

We can use bodyweight exercises and something simple, like a medicine ball, for a great workout.

The medicine ball clean and squats are powerful and athletic movements that you can use in place of individual barbell movements like deadlifts and squats.

Why Do The Medicine Ball Clean and Squat?

This exercise saves time by linking some basic compound lifts you’d normally do separately into a smooth movement.

It’s a practical way to train your general conditioning and develop strength and skill to move athletically.

This is a result of the dexterity you develop while moving through the clean and squat repeatedly.

Gripping and moving a heavy object that’s not easy to grab will build your ability to quickly stabilize your trunk, something you won’t always train doing conventional barbell lifts.

You can learn this pretty quickly and easily with this exercise if you understand the basics of balance, stability, and movement. And if you don’t, check out my course.

Doing a similar movement with a barbell takes more skill and much more dedicated time.

But with the med ball clean and squat, you can build full-body strength, improve endurance, and practice two basic compound movements.

Who Could Use These?

It’s a great choice for:

• Anyone who still can’t go to a gym
• Someone who prefers to work out at home
• Someone who doesn’t have space for a barbell and a rack like you would need to do back squats.
• Anyone who doesn’t want to worry about what surface they train on.

Even the heaviest medicine balls won’t do much damage to a floor if you drop them.

Medicine balls are sold in many sizes and weights. You can start pretty light and buy heavier ones over time, so you can slowly but consistently progress just like you would with a barbell when you’d add more plates.

They’re also great as an alternative for anyone who doesn’t quite like the idea of doing barbell lifts. Barbells don’t sit well with some.

Some have a movement practice where barbell lifts don’t quite fit in, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.

They can still do resistance exercises. Resistance doesn’t mean barbells or dumbbells; we need to remember what we’re really doing with barbell lifts.

It’s a loaded movement, and It doesn’t matter where or what the load is.

Maybe you’re more comfortable with the idea of hugging a heavy med ball close to your chest rather than balancing a bar on your shoulders. It may seem more intuitive to you.

And that’s just fine because exercises like this can do just as much good for you, maybe even more.

Target Muscles

I call this exercise a clean and squat to call attention to the two separate movements.

This exercise really trains three distinct movement patterns:

1. A deadlift or hip hinge pattern – We need control and strength in our hips and hamstrings to hinge over, brace, and deadlift the ball.
2. A quick upper body scoop or rowing – We need a strong grip and supportive back muscles to lift and pull close to our bodies, an object that’s difficult to hold.
3. A squat pattern – To clean the ball from the ground to chest height, we train a quick upper-body athletic movement.

That means we’re creating coordination in our body and developing timing.

We also train our trunk muscles in a way that a barbell or dumbbell often can’t.

Hugging an object close to your body and keeping your upper-back from rounding forward demands you completely engage your trunk, building stability and strength.

How to Do a Med Ball Clean and Squat

Place the medicine ball on the ground between your feet a little closer to your toes than your heels.

Make sure to set your feet wide enough to get down into the squat without your elbows hitting your knees.

Hinge over keeping your back flat just as you would in a deadlift.

You will have to drop your hips slightly lower than a conventional barbell deadlift to keep your hips from shooting up and letting your chest drop on the clean.

• Breathe, brace, grab, and go. As you stand from the squat with the ball in your hands, start by bending your elbows and using your upper back to pull the ball close to your hips.
• As you stand further, shrug your shoulders and shoot your elbows up, keeping the ball so close you feel it lightly brush against your body.
• Pause at the top before you squat to make sure your elbows are high, balance is set, and that you’re braced.

Complete the squat focusing on keeping your elbows high and making sure they fit between your knees at the bottom of the squat. Drop the ball if you can, or squat down and lower it with control.

Variations

There’s a couple of reasons you may want to change things up.

1. You may not have the mobility to get in a good position to pick the ball up from the floor. It’s lower than a loaded barbell would be. If that’s where you struggle, place the ball on a small box or something similar to raise the height of the starting position.
2. You may want to work your hip muscles a little more. If that’s the case, you can do the exercise from the hang. Deadlift the ball up with arms straight, then hinge over, floating the ball above the ground before doing the clean.

Keep It Smooth

A heavy medicine ball can be difficult to move. It’s oddly shaped and hard to grab. So it’s important to keep the movement fluid to keep from getting hurt. After you grab the ball, make sure you keep your back in a good position and drive it up with your legs.

The closer you keep the ball to your body, the more efficient the exercise will be.

Too much space between your body and the ball, and you’ll catch it in a bad position putting needless stress on your back.

For the More Experienced Lifter

If you’ve practiced quick dynamic exercises like this before, try doing a full clean instead of separating the movement.

You may want to rush into doing the exercise like this initially, but you should really see this as progression if you’ve never practiced other loaded movements like this.

We want to separate the two movements when first practicing these because of how important it is to make sure that we’re balanced and braced before going down into the squat with the ball at chest height.

It’s not easy to first relax the tension in your body only just enough to explosively shrug a ball upward and then immediately become rigid under its weight to reverse back into a squat.

But if you’re ready for it, give it a shot with the heaviest medicine ball you can find.

The post The Barbell Squat and Deadlift Alternative appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We’re not perfectly balanced machines. One side of our body has more prominent organs in different places than the other side. We have a dominant side that will always be a little stronger and more coordinated than the other.

This uncomplicated exercise not only builds single-leg strength and coordination but also takes care of the instability of the hips that unavoidably creeps in after years of training heavy two-sided movements like squats and deadlifts.

We’re not perfectly balanced machines. One side of our body has more prominent organs in different places than the other side. We have a dominant side that will always be a little stronger and more coordinated than the other.

So, when we start training heavy two-legged or bilateral movements like squats and deadlifts, it would make sense that we’d begin to develop a bias to push harder, shift toward, or favor our dominant side.

It’s part of the deal in being a human being, and no measure of one-side focused remedial exercises or drills will make us perfectly balanced.

There’s no point in obsessing over this because we’re, by nature, imbalanced.

We should always concentrate on the foundations that are beyond every movement and exercise. If you’re interested in learning what these foundation principles are, check out this new course I’m offering.

When the Imbalance Is Too Much

Sometimes though, the gap between the sides and segments can grow a little too large. When that happens, we need smart exercises that train all variables to help move the meter back toward your baseline, a reasonable asymmetry.

The cossack squat demands you move in positions that can be difficult at first to do, but the movement itself is simple and straightforward.

It can be done anywhere with bodyweight or loaded in different ways with whatever kind of weights are available to you.

Why The Cossack Squat?

Any single-leg exercise can improve stability and physical awareness. What makes the cossack squat valuable is that you have the light support of your trail leg.

This support enables you to focus on controlled moving through the entire range of motion available to you while building more mobility and strength at the end of your range.

As you drop down, you’re moving at the limit of your hip and ankle range of motion. Just look at the picture above. I’m doing as deep of a squat as I possibly can on one side of my body.

We all tend to emphasize linear movements where we move straight up and down. If you want a big squat and deadlift, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you need to make sure that you’re moving in different directions and patterns of movement at least some of the time.

The cossack squat is an exercise you can add to the end of your workouts that gets you moving in a different plane.

It would be best if you moved through these different patterns to prevent pattern overload (injuries to your soft tissues from moving in only one pattern or limiting the free range of motion for too long).

It would help if you moved in these different positions to keep all of the connective tissue in the body healthy.

The longer we’ve been training, the more we may need this.

The older we get, the more we need to move in every possible way.

And the more we sit for work, the more we should move in every movement pattern possible.

Use Every Pattern of Movement

• Place your feet one to two-foot lengths outside of shoulder-width apart. You may have to adjust your feet wider. Play around with your stance to figure out what’s comfortable and strong.
• Ground the foot on the side you’re going to squat toward first. Push your big toe firmly into the ground and create pressure against the ground outside of your foot, directly below the outer edge of the ankle.
• You can turn your toes out at first but eventually work toward keeping them pointed straight as it will challenge your mobility and stability at new levels.
• Use your other foot on the opposite side to help you and push you into the squat.
• Lower yourself into the squat without letting your heels or any part of your feet lose contact with the floor. Some variations allow your toes on your trail leg to lift and rotate up but keeping them down is better to challenge your adductors mobility.
• Push off the foot you’ve squatted toward to push your hips up and back toward the middle.
• Without pausing, lower yourself to the other side, keeping the same points of contact and ideas in mind.

Weighted Cossack Squat

Usually, to add weight to this exercise, you’d hold the weight out in front of you to use as a counterbalance to keep you upright, or you’d hold it close to your body.

If you want to change it up, try holding a weight behind your head.

Holding a weight behind your head tests your dexterity to stay upright.

You’ll train the upper back’s strength and mobility, and your trunk will work even harder to keep posture and stabilize you. Win, win, and win.

Watch Your Limit

The point of this exercise isn’t to bend and fold yourself into a position that you can’t yet reach. It’s to find the edge of your mobility and stability in this motion and challenge it slowly, without losing posture and rigidity or compensating in some way.

If you consistently practice it, you’ll reach this bottom position, but your adductors, knees, and ankles won’t like you very much if you try to force it too soon.

Ready For More Difficulty?

There are a few different ways to load this exercise to make it more challenging. Holding a weight behind your head, which I already described, is one. Keeping weight overhead with arms extended is another.

But there’s something else you can do to test your mobility and stability that doesn’t necessarily require any weight.

Choose the side you’re squatting toward and place a small plate or similar flat object under that foot. Do your chosen number of reps and then switch sides.

Just by elevating your foot a few inches, you’ll be fighting to maintain position while you lower into a deeper position.

The post The Cossack Squat: Reclaiming Your Baseline Balance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So, we do corrective exercises that focus on building strength and stability for the muscles and patterns that would supposedly keep this from happening.

We all know we shouldn’t look like we’re bowing to worship the gym floor when we do a barbell back squat. That’s a lot of what you see at gyms, though.

So, we do corrective exercises that focus on building strength and stability for the muscles and patterns that would supposedly keep this from happening.

These are usually simple and single-joint exercises that work on only one side of the body at a time. But sometimes, and more often than not, we can develop what we need by just spending more time in the positions we want to improve.

If you want to learn all about the principles behind this, check out my online course starting in a couple of weeks.

Addressing Posture and Position in the Squat

Moving through positions is what the 1.25 squat does best.

It keeps you moving through the positions that are frequently harder to maintain.

More time practicing the bottom positions of the squat means we have more opportunity for sensory learning – feeling the muscles that contribute to a movement where and when they should.

The continuous controlled movement from the bottom of your squat to a quarter standing, back down to the base causes you to maintain the type of balance and posture that creates a great squat.

It’s better than just doing more straight reps because of how challenging it is to lower into that second squat without resetting at the top like you usually would. It helps you feel any shift in the pressure of your feet and the tilt of your torso.

The Benefits of the 1.25 Squat

Some exercises are just variations for advanced lifters who need some new kick to get stronger.

It does that, but it’s also great for inexperienced squatters.

It can be a focused movement practice for anyone trying to make their squat pattern fluid and strong. And, it can be a way for someone who already has an ingrained good squat to strengthen their quads and glutes while they work on the skill of keeping ample tension at a depth of their squat.

The 1.25 squat doesn’t just strengthen and train the coordination of the muscles that do the moving.

It provides a condition that naturally trains the stabilizing musculature of the trunk. Muscles like the abs, obliques, the transverse abdominis, and the erectors stiffen the spine.

Posture breaks down, and squats fall apart because of a lack of control over these muscles during the most challenging part of the movement (reversing from the bottom to standing back up).

With this exercise, you train this capacity for tension better because you spend most of your time in that part of the movement.

How To Brace, Lower, and Hit Your Squat

Set up under the barbell and walk out just as you’d do for a standard squat, Take your breath, and make sure to focus on creating a proper brace. You’ll need it to stay rigid for this extended rep.

Lower into your squat and once you hit your depth, come up a quarter of the way to completely standing. Think of coming up 3-5 inches above parallel.

Immediately go back to the depth of your squat and then stand up entirely from there. That’s one rep.

Make sure not to pause at any point.

• As soon as you reach depth, come up.
• Once you feel like you’re 3-5 inches above parallel, immediately go back down.
• When you reach the bottom of your squat for the second time, stand up completely without hesitation.

Don’t do more than five reps on this exercise, and be aware of how much weight you use.

The focus is on the quality of the movement, posture, tension, and feeling the muscles working well in one coordinated effort.

Don’t worry if you’re coming too high or not high enough on the quarter rep. If you’re going in-and-out of the bottom of your squat twice, you’re doing the exercise correctly.

Change It Up

The point of this exercise is to make sure the right muscles are working where they should and to increase stability in the movement where you’d often lose it.

The muscles of the upper-back aid in creating a structure and posture that you need for a solid squat, so a 1.25 front squat can be a significant variation to this end.

Front squats require that you keep tension in your upper back and keep the chest from falling forward because if you don’t, you’re dumping the bar on the floor in front of you.

Rotating 1.25 front squats with back squats will improve the posture and muscular coordination for a strong squat.

Challenge Your Squat Technique With Pauses

This exercise can be pretty tricky, even if you have a lot of experience.

But if you’ve been training with them, try adding pauses.

Pauses force even more control to keep tension in these positions because you’re spending even more time at the bottom.

Using a one count pause at the bottom of the squat, again after you rise a quarter of the way up, and then also the second time at the bottom is plenty to challenge and advance you for some time.

The post How to Keep Yourself Upright During a Squat appeared first on Breaking Muscle.