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.

And of all the people who you see lifting in gyms around the world, most are self-taught. The vast majority of people lifting are not learning to lift but are self-taught or are tagging along in group classes where there is limited supervision or support.

Most people don’t know how to pick up a heavy box off the ground without straining their back so, why do we think that most people understand the nuances of barbell, kettlebell and, even, dumbbell movements?

And of all the people who you see lifting in gyms around the world, most are self-taught. The vast majority of people lifting are not learning to lift but are self-taught or are tagging along in group classes where there is limited supervision or support.

Sound alarmist? Do the math. There are nearly 40,000 gyms in the US, and nearly 65 million members. Take into consideration that a place like Planet Fitness can have 1,400 outlets and 10 million members, and you could have 5,000 CrossFit type gyms with less than a million members in total.

The point is that in the greater scheme things, of the 65 million gym goers maybe 1.5 million are getting the best instruction in barbells and kettlebells, and some level of personal attention. Out of every 100 people you see in a gym, maybe 3 of them really know what they are doing.

The YouTube and Instagram Fitness Revolution

You kind of know all this yourself. You can see it on social media. All those videos and posts about the right way and wrong way to do stuff. ?or ?, You can’t miss them. Some can be woeful and, no one needs to get another lecture on knees over toes in squats.

Unfortunately, that’s what we are stuck with for two reasons: getting qualified coaching and training is costly and not within the reach of the vast majority of trainees and anyone can become a trainer which means that there is no quality control in the fitness industry. Another wrinkle is that celebrity is a currency and celebrity trainers on YouTube and Instagram hold sway over very large audiences.

On the positive side, the explosion in fitness content on social media has opened people up to Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, fitness sports, strongman and many other strength practices that would normally be seen as very specialized. You wouldn’t see anyone doing a deadlift in a Crunch gym a few years ago.

On the negative side, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, fitness sports, strongman and many other strength practices are all very, very technical.

They require a serious amount of time to be devoted to learning and understanding correct form and safe practices. They’re not for everyone either. You can’t be a casual strongman or Olympic lifter.

Lifting Heavy Stuff Needs Brains

If you want to learn how to clean and jerk properly, increase your deadlift without increasing your medical insurance, swing a kettlebell, or just figure out the reason why your arms don’t go above your shoulders in a dumbbell lateral raise, you need some intellectual curiosity or mindful movement.

A lack of curiosity or interest in learning the mechanics of a lift is a failure, as is a lack of understanding about how your body actually responds and works in any given movement.

For untrained individuals, feelings of mobility restrictions and tightness in the body may be simply because the body isn’t adequately braced, tension isn’t distributed properly, or the body feels imbalanced as the center of mass descends into a squat.

The Secret To Your First Squat Is Feeling Great Doing It

If you truly have ambitions in Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting or strongman then find the people who do it properly. These are hard, esoteric sports that are great to look at, and can make you feel very strong quickly, but they are not for everyone.

They are sports. Most of the best coaches don’t know what to do with casual practitioners when the main goal of each discipline is to win at competitions.

It’s not like you pick a partner and play a game of tennis. Sure, you can judge your own performance over time by looking at how far you push your own records, but that’s not the culture.

They are also highly technical sports where, without proper instruction or coaching support, you will probably end up hurting yourself. If you are the one person who learned how to snatch off of YouTube and can hit 100kg, you’re the exception and I’d need to see the proof of your progress without external support.

• The best lifters in the country have coaches.
• The wealthiest CEOs in the country have coaches.
• The best coaches in the country have coaches.

7 Steps To Find The Best Coach For You

Fitness sports, like CrossFit, are an incredibly mixed bag of disciplines done at speed. They don’t make for easy viewing for traditionalists but they have a following. If that’s what you want to do then you better have a coach who is proven in each discipline or a few of them that have expertise in individual aspects.

You think indoor rowing is easy? Maybe it is on the surface, but it is highly technical. Granted, you can do it casually, but if you want to get the most out of it, you need to understand the mechanics of the form and be able to deliver on that knowledge.

I taught myself how to type when I was at college. I placed my fingers one key over than recommended on my left hand but that didn’t matter because I practiced enough that I could type out my work really quickly. So, I decided I wanted to see how fast I could type and I tried to relearn touch-typing to improve my speed.

Turned out to be the hardest thing I could do because of what one offset that I adopted by myself. That’s typing. You know what that would mean if it was 20 years of squatting with your left foot at an angle that wasn’t optimal.

You wake up at 40 and realize that squatting hurts and someone smarter than yourself points out one simple adjustment that could have saved you half a lifetime’s pain. We are not always the best judge of ourselves.

This is a post from Coach Daniel Bell. He should make it into a maxim – Drive a hundred miles, 2-4 times a month, if you have to, but make it to that coaching session.

You don’t have to hammer away alone in your garage—at least not all the time. And you’ll get to talk to your coach face to face. If you are ready to level up, email rubbercityweightlifting@gmail.com

A post shared by Daniel Bell (@rubbercityweightlifting) on Mar 4, 2020 at 2:01pm PST

All lifts are technical.

The post All Lifts Are Technical So Learn to Do Them Right appeared first on Breaking Muscle.