ATHLEAN-X™

If you want to get a bigger back you have to use light weights. That’s right. Heavy weights alone will not be enough to build your best back since using them exclusively will definitely cost you a chance to get a full contraction on your lats, a prerequisite for optimal back development. In this video, I’m going to show you two techniques you can use in your next back workout to help you build a bigger back fast. The importance of this lies in the fact that when we train with pulling exercises we tend to never reach a full contraction. This is because the hardest part of most pull exercises like a lat pulldown, one armed row or even a barbell row, is the end. Your highest effort is needed to reach a full contraction of the muscle and hold it for a split second. If you contrast this with a pushing exercise like a dip, bench press or shoulder press, the end of the exercise provides a moment of relief. Peak tension in these exercises occurs in the middle of the rep whereas the tension tops out in the end of the back exercises mentioned. That said, you can take advantage of these point of the rep by simply learning to lighten up on the weights and leave your ego at the gym door from time to time. If you include at least a few sets of max contraction lat work with lighter weights, you will see a fast increase in the muscle growth of your back. Along with the light weights you can also incorporate one of two techniques shown here to really ensure that you are getting the most out of every rep in your back exercises. The first is using one and a half reps. The use of this rep style forces you to eliminate any momentum and contract the weights down and back, as during the lat pulldown or one armed row. Perform one full rep and then return the weight half way, only to re-contract it again and bring it back to a complete squeeze. The next thing you can do is a fiber blast. This is where you get to the end of the rep on your back exercises and perform three pulsed reps at the end range. The idea here is that even if you haven’t reached a full contraction on the first attempt, the three additional pulses will help you build and recruit more muscle fiber activation to ensure that you do. Either of these techniques will work just as well as the other, however they are both reliant on the use of lighter weights. The key to the success of the methods and ultimately the growth you will see in your back and lats is getting used to including sets with light weights in your back workout. I do realize how uncomfortable this can be to some who have been trained to think that the only way a muscle will grow is with heavy weights. That is simply not true. Muscles don’t only grow through progressive overload of tension. They can grow throw more focused tension and that comes through a better overall contraction of the muscles targeted. For instance, if you want to get better lats you need to learn how to take the lat muscle through its full function and squeeze it as hard as you can at the end of every rep. For a complete workout program that helps you to not only build a bigger back but to get a more muscular physique from head to toe, be sure to head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. See how pro athletes train and how you can copy the same workouts and methods that they use to unleash the athletic body in you in the next 90 days. For more back workouts and ab workouts designed to get you stronger and ripped at the same time, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24

Some people think that supplements are a savior and will help you to overcome other shortcomings in your training and nutrition. In this video, I’m going to tell you the truth and show you 5 things that supplements will not do for you and why you need to be aware of them as you incorporate them into your overall fitness regiment. The first big mistake made by many is to focus too much on the supplement and not enough on the workout. In other words, if you feel as if your work is accomplished because you remembered to take your supplements you are in for a rude awakening. How do I know this? Because I made the very some novice mistake when I first began training. I thought that as long I took my protein (Hot Stuff specifically) that I would magically grow new muscles without caring much about my workouts, my form or even how I was doing each exercise. The opposite approach should be taken. Focus on how to make your workouts more intense and how to get more out of every single second you are in the gym and the supplements as an after thought or an adjunct to that hard training. Let the supplements help translate the high intensity and effort you put into your workout into something incredible when you remain consistent with both. Next, thinking that supplements will be a substitute or help you overcome a poor nutrition plan or bad eating habits is a major mistake. Your nutrition is where your aesthetic results start and stop. If you refuse to get your eating in check and think that you will just use supplements to help you outdo any of the bad you are doing with your poor food choices, think again. In fact, I always recommend that unless you are under 30 percent body fat, I don’t believe that you should be concentrating on supplementation. Beyond that, you also don’t want to get in the habit of thinking about your supplements as meal replacements. There is no replacement for a good sound nutrition plan that fills your body with adequate macronutrients and micronutrients as well as healthy sources of fiber. Liquid protein shakes are great to supplement a meal but not as a meal replacement for one of your big meals of the day. When used as a replacement, I recommend that this occurs in place of a snack and that even then, you are including other foods as well to help round out the meal (like nuts, fruit, etc). Another big mistake is to think that supplements can negate the need for other supplements. For instance, if you are taking a protein powder it doesn’t mean that you don’t need a pre workout. Now, if your goals in your training do not require an improved performance and energy or focus in your workouts then you may not need a pre workout at all. However, in either case, simply taking one does not mean that the other is unnecessary. When done right, supplements should serve a very specific purpose in the big picture and not overlap but compliment each other. Finally, even if you have your supplement game on point and your nutrition and training are locked in, you cannot automatically consider yourself healthy. I know many a guy that thinks this way and then proceeds to drink way too much on the weekend, smoke a pack of cigarettes a day or even use recreational drugs as a form of, well, recreation! None of these things will be able to be undone simply by the fact that you take the latest protein or recovery supplement on the market! If you are looking for supplements that put the science behind their selection and has truth behind every bottle (as far as what is in them and how much), head to http://athleanrx.com and check out the ATHLEAN-Rx supplement line. See why major le

If you want to grow bigger muscles you have to first learn the three options you have for doing it and then not get attached to any one. The biggest problem people have is that they get stuck on one particular method for building muscle and are afraid to explore other avenues for doing it. This happens because they see success with something and fear that veering from that will cause them to lose gains. In this video, I’ll show you the three main methods of hypertrophy and how you need to explore each of them at different times in your training if you want to reach your true muscle size potential. I will show you the pros and cons of each that wind up costing you the maximum amount of muscle mass that you can pack on if you dwell in one method at the exclusion of the other two. The three main methods of hypertrophy or muscle growth are progressive overload, metabolic stress and eccentric muscle damage. Each of these has their own benefits as well as drawbacks that tend to make them rely on each other for best results. We can start with progressive overload since it is the most basic of the three and is the one that you have likely been taught to pursue first when you initially began lifting weights. The concept behind progressive overload is either adding more and more weight to the bar to increase your strength on the exercises that you are doing or to increase the amount of work that you perform in a single workout over time. You can also keep the amount of workload the same in your workouts but increase the frequency of your training to hit your muscles more often and take advantage of the 48 hour cycle of muscle protein synthesis. The issue here is that this is not an endless road. You will ultimately hit a wall in terms of the strength that you develop or the size of the muscles that are performing the work. When you cannot add a single extra pound to the exercise what happens then? When your newbie gains are over and you cannot add another pound of muscle, what do you do then? If you make a mistake you may wind up adding more weight than you can handle and you either allow your form to fall to the point that the exercise is no longer effective or worse you wind up getting injured. What people will suggest next is to pursue more volume and frequency at submaximal loads. They argue that you won’t be likely to hurt yourself because of the lighter tension on the muscles and that the increased workout sessions will lead to an overload needed to build muscle. Here is where frequency comes back to bite you. While you may not see anything but gains for awhile, ultimately the result of higher frequency is overuse injuries that derail you over time. Here is where metabolic training becomes a savior. Not only is it a great way to train with injuries (since you can use lighter weights and in abbreviated ranges of motion) but you can use it to spark new gains because you likely never explored it enough the right way to use up all the potential gains you have in you from doing it. Finally, you can use eccentric training to put back the tension overload on the muscles that has been missing by using the exclusively lighter weights of metabolic training and cause your muscles go grow this way as well. The key is not falling in love with any one method at the exclusion of the others since here again this muscle soreness created by this can prevent you from seeing the increase in frequency and volume that you would want to use for max gains. If you are looking for a program that meshes all three perfectly so you can finally reach your true muscular potential, head to http://athl

Anyone that has ever struggled to build muscle has likely dealt with skinny legs and become frustrated trying to add mass. In this video, I’m going to give you 4 leg workout tips for mass that will help even the hardest of hardgainers to pack on size and start bulking up your legs in no time. The first thing that most guys with skinny legs get wrong is that they allow their ego and self consciousness get in the way of what they should be doing in their leg workouts. No doubt, it can be a bit intimidating to watch others around you squat multiple plates while you are struggling to lift even one big plate for clean reps. That’s ok. Everyone starts somewhere and if you choose to start further ahead of where you should be it is a mistake that is going to hold you back for years to come. Most guys with skinny legs will put more weight on the bar than they can handle in the squat and then proceed to crank out quarter reps. Not only is this robbing your legs of the stress that they can handle but you are doing this at the exclusion of doing the reps you should be doing to build bigger legs the right way. What you need to do is lower the weight to those that you can handle and get your intensity not from the heavier weights but from the high rep sets that you do in good form through full range of motion. The next thing the hardgainer has to do for his legs is learn how to properly push from the ground. There is no way that you are going to lift as much weight as you can in your leg workouts unless you learn how to push through your feet. An equal and opposite force is needed to lift the weight that is on your shoulders during a squat. There is no better place to learn this than with the deadlift exercise. The deadlift demands that you push through your legs during the first half of the left, beyond which point it becomes a pulling exercise. If you practice just the first half of the deadlift or combine it in one and a half rep fashion, you will build more strength through the legs off the floor. The will dramatically help you to increase your squat and lift heavier weights over time. Multi-dimensional leg training is also important to fully developed legs. Almost all of the leg exercises that hardgainers use only stress the legs in the sagittal plane. Squats, leg extensions and leg curl are all one plane exercises that don’t mimic the functionality of the legs and limit the amount of growth that can be had by training the adductors and abductors of the legs as well. Finally, I like to include exercises for the legs that are technically easier to perform than the squat and allow for someone just starting out to add weight faster. The Bulgarian Split Squat is a great exercise for doing this since it literally puts you in the right position to perform the exercise. The quads get loaded and the safety of the exercise is intact since you can simply dump the weights if you need to at the bottom of the squat without risk. For a complete program that hardgainers have used to build muscle and keep low levels of body fat, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. Build athletic legs and get ripped without compromising your long term health or gains by using the same program relied on by today’s top professional athletes. For more leg workout videos on how to add mass to your quads and hamstrings, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24

The outer chest or pec muscle is one of those hard to develop areas that many guys become frustrated with. In this video, I’m going to show you how to build wider outer pecs that will stand at attention when looked at from the side. I will give you exact chest exercise techniques that you can use to broaden those pecs and give you a more defined look. Many will say that you cannot specifically target the outer chest, and anatomically they would be correct. The pec major muscle contracts all or none and there is no way to isolate a specific region of the pecs. You can however increase the development of the overall muscle by taking it through a full range of motion and increasing the length of time that the muscle is under tension during the exercises you are doing in your chest workout. When you look at the origin and insertion of the pec major muscle we have to look to the arm and the sternum. The pec originates on the humerus or upper arm bone and insert on the chest bone. In order to increase the amount of tension the pec muscle undergoes you want to increase the range of motion that it contracts through on every rep. This means, you want to safely move these two points as far apart as you can on every chest exercise. In the case of the dip, this is easy to see and more importantly feel. Most of us will perform the dip with our shoulders rounded forward. This limits the range of motion of the pec and most importantly decreases the amount of stretch that you will feel on the exercise. Shift your shoulders back into a safer position and stick your chest out and then perform your dips. This will increase the overall range as well as the tension that is applied to the chest muscle in its longest and stretched position. From here, you want to learn to now increase the time under tension on the muscle in the elongated position. This can easily be accomplished by holding the stretch position for a second or two on every repetition. This doesn’t always have to occur on just dips however. As shown, you can apply this to bench press, crossovers and even pushups as well. When doing bench press, it helps to not think about the motion of your hands moving up and away from your body during the rep but rather what is happening with your arms. When you concentrate on moving your arms down and apart and then back up and together at the top you will find that you get a wider arc and more range of motion on the pecs. Pushups can be done exactly the same way. Don’t just lower your body up and down during each rep of the pushup. Look to spread your chest as wide as you can on every descent and retract your shoulder blades. You will instantly feel the increased tension at the origin of the pec major. Remember once again to hang out a bit in the bottom most stretched position of the exercise and you will definitely see the results start to manifest in better outer chest development. If you are not only looking to get a better outer chest but want to get better upper and lower chest development, it’s time to start training like an athlete. Head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. Chisel an impressive chest and build a complete body in just 90 days with physical therapist and pro athlete trainer Jeff Cavaliere guiding your every workout. For more chest workout videos and exercises for your lower chest, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24

Bulging discs are one of the most common conditions that will derail your workouts quickly. In this video, I’m going to show you how to fix a bulging disc in your lower back without requiring surgery. In just 3 simple steps you are going to be able to get rid of the pain that is wreaking havoc on your training and making your life miserable. The first thing that needs to be discussed however are the terms used to describe the condition. Some people refer to a bulging disc as a herniated disc. In both cases, we are talking about a scenario where the inner disc material has protruded from the disc but has not reached a point of no return. The point at which the disc can no longer be repaired without surgery is more accurately called a ruptured disc. Bulging discs are a very common problem and one that we all might have to some degree if we were to MRI our backs. The thing is however, just because we may have a disc that is bulging does not mean that we will have symptoms. The only time it starts to matter is when the presence of the disc starts to become symptomatic and interferes with your life or workouts. The good news about disc issues however is that 98 percent of them are non-operative and solved with a dedication to just a few simple steps. One of those steps however is not stretching the lower back. This may come as a surprise to you, especially if you feel that your low back has become tight or sore as a result of your disc issues. Far too many people are told to lay on their back and start pulling their knee or knees up to their chest to stretch out the tight muscles in the low back. They may even be told to get on their knees and sit back on their heels to stretch out all of the muscles of the back. Both of these would be horrible advice because they not only aren’t treating the cause of the problem but they are aggravating the actual cause and making the disc protrude even more. What you need to do is focus on fixing the disc and recentralizing it through extension. If you can do this, the spasm that you are experiencing in the low back muscles as a result of the herniation will resolve once the disc itself is fixed. There are 3 parts to fixing this issue however and it starts with a decompression of the spine to allow for more room for the nerves that are being compressed by the disc protrusion. This can easily be done by hanging from a pullup bar with your toes slightly in contact with the ground. Let the pelvis drop and feel the spine open up. Do this for about 30 seconds to a minute and then proceed to step two if you need it or just skip to step three if not. Step two is a list correction. This is needed if you find that you are leaning to one side because of the pain of the protrusion. This can easily be done against a wall and will help to put the spine back in the proper alignment prior to moving on to the final step. Lay on your stomach with your hands under your shoulders. Press down on the floor and lift your upper torso off of it. Be sure to keep your hips in contact with the ground to avoid overextension of the lumber spine. Do this a few times a day and always within a zone of comfort. Before you know it, your disc will be centralized and your pain and symptoms down the leg and in the lower back should subside. You will be ready to start attacking your workouts again in no time. If you are looking for a workout program that puts the science back in strength and helps to injury proof your body from letting this happen again, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. For more videos on how to fix lower back pai

If you want to build huge shoulders then you need to know how to hit every head of your delts. In this video, I’m going to show you how to build bigger front delts, middle delts and rear deltoids without using any weight at all. Too often, we find ourselves thinking that weights are the only way to build big shoulders. That isn’t the case. If you have the bodyweight exercises for delts in your arsenal you will be able to get the job done even when you’re not training in a gym. To start, you have to understand the concept of relative motion. It isn’t always necessary to focus on the moving limb during an exercise to see what part of the shoulder it is working. For instance, when you perform a side lateral raise you are moving your arm away from your body while holding onto a dumbbell. What is really going on is abduction at the shoulder joint. If you apply this same move to an immovable floor however, you can get the same thing to happen at the joint. You can get resisted abduction to occur by rotating your body away from the arm that is fixed on the floor. Look closely and you will see that the same amount of abduction is occuring in the shoulder and that the muscles of the middle delt are working to accomplish this just as they would be in standing. Just because the arm isn’t actively moving away from the body doesn’t mean that you cannot get the same effect. Simply move your body away from your arm and your middle delts will be on fire and you will have a new way to build huge shoulders without always needing to rely on dumbbells or heavy weights. Next, you can apply the same concept to your front delts. Now the front deltoids are commonly worked in many popular shoulder exercises and even non-shoulder exercises. The important thing is to look at the motion of the arm is it is raised out in front of the body and overhead. This same movement pattern can be replicated into a bodyweight equivalent with the exercise I show you here called the pushaway press. Here, you are using the fixed floor once again to serve as the resistance for your shoulders to push and contract against to propel your body backwards in the opposite direction. Again, the same pattern is happening in the front delts and the motion at the shoulder joint is the same. The resistance is determined by how low you position your body to the floor. Either way, you will quickly see that you do not need weights to build big shoulders if you start using this shoulder exercise. Finally, you can apply the same concept to building your rear delts as well. Normally, the reverse dumbbell fly is the standard exercise of choice when building up the back of your shoulder. Again, this exercise depends on using weights. What if you don’t have access to them however and still want to get huge shoulders? Enter the reverse iron cross. Lay down on your back on the floor with your arms outstretched and your fists pushing into the ground. Lift your back up off the floor just far enough to clear your upper traps and elbows. Hold for a brief count of 2 to 3 seconds to really intensify the contraction of the delts. You will quickly see that this again becomes a great alternative for building big shoulders when you don’t have access to any equipment at all. If you are looking for a complete bodyweight only workout program to build bigger, wider shoulders, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN XERO program. See how fast you can build your body without any equipment at all and start training like an athlete today. For more exercises for shoulders and shoulder workouts to build massive delts,

Bulking and cutting is one of the most classic methods of adding muscle as fast as possible. The theory is that by eating in caloric excess you are providing your body with an abundance of nutrients from which you can add lots of muscle along with some obligatory fat. Once you reach the size you want, begin cutting and dieting to lose the excess fat and end up with nothing but lean muscle gains. What happens when all doesn’t go to plan? In this video, I’m going to show you one of the biggest mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to bulking that people overlook. The limiting factor in how big you get and how fast is never going to be about the number of calories that you consume but rather the host of other things that matter much more than a simple food threshold. For instance, if you want to build muscle you have to start with the right genetics. You can cram tons of calories down your throat all you want but if you have the muscle building genetics of Pee Wee Herman you are not going to be happy with the end result. Likely you will just wind up being skinny fat and without any appreciable amounts of muscle. The same can be said for the distribution of muscle fibers in your body. Someone that is predominantly type I or slow twitch muscle fibers is going to have a much harder time adding muscle to their frame despite the fact that they are cramming down the calories. Now there isn’t anything you can do about either of these two things since they are determined by your genes. That said, there are other factors that are very much in your control. What you are doing in your training is key to these. If you are not bringing enough intensity to your workouts or if your workouts are either too long or too frequent and not providing enough opportunity for recovery then again the amount of calories you eat will not overcome your mistakes. Recovering from your hard workouts is always going to be a much more important factor in muscle growth. You may say that food intake is part of this process and you would be right, however sleep and training frequency are also parts of the equation and can dictate to a much larger degree the success you see in your muscle building pursuit. Again, if you are meeting the requirements of getting in enough calories, adding excess with the thought that you will speed up the process and add more muscle more quickly simply isn’t true. So instead of focusing on the amount of food you eat, worry about the quality. Aim to meet your daily requirements based on your activity level and then focus the rest of your efforts on the things that are more directly impactful on your muscle growth. Limit your body’s cortisol by resting more, keeping stress to a minimum and training hard but not long. Supplement with good high quality protein and muscle building supplements. If you are looking for a program that gives you an eating plan day by day along with step by step workouts and supplement suggestions, head to http://athleanx.com and choose the right ATHLEAN-X Training System for you. If you are looking to add size then you will definitely want to look into the Max Size program for building muscle fast. For more videos on why you should never bulk and cut and how to get ripped muscle and keep it year round, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24

If you want to get more out of every triceps exercise you do in your triceps workout then you are going to want to do what I’m showing you here. In this video, you’re going to learn the tricep master tip. This is the single best tip that you can apply to your tris that will allow you to get them to gain more muscle mass without costing you extra time in the gym. First it helps to start with some anatomy. The triceps muscle is composed of three heads, the long, medial and lateral head. The long head of the triceps is the one that provides the most bulk to the belly itself and is the one that helps to fill up the shirt sleeves the best. In order to work the long head and get it to fully contract you must take your arm behind your body at the end of the rep and get complete extension of the elbow. It is important to note that not every exercise has you finish with your arm behind your body however. This is ok. What it does underscore is how important it is to not forget to complete the extension of the elbow so you can maximize the contraction of the other two heads of the triceps. Here is where we tend to miss the mark. Mostly, this is because we have been taught that it is a bad thing to “lock out” our joints into extension. That is simply not true. Taking a joint to full extension is never a bad thing as long as you don’t have any pre-existing condition that would preclude you from doing so (like bone chips in the elbow). The only time locking out is a bad thing is when you add velocity to the process and lock out forcefully without a controlled contraction. In the case of the triceps muscle, as long as you are smoothly completing the extension and taking the elbow through its full range of motion you are not at risk for doing damage to the joint and are actually putting your triceps in their best position to respond to your training. The master tip ensures that you complete every rep of every triceps exercise by extending your elbow fully. This can be applied to the dip, triceps extension, pushdowns, or even close grip bench presses. If the exercise allows for the arm to also be extended back behind the body as well then you should take advantage and make sure you do that too. Full contraction of the long head of the triceps is always going to give you a more complete triceps squeeze because of the highest involvement of all three heads of the muscle. If you are not sure if you are extending enough you can always do the technique that I share with you here. Back off about an inch at the end of every repetition and then contract again and attempt to take your elbow into even more extension than you just had. This is a great way to get as far as your joint is going to allow you while also making sure not to overextend or jeapordize the health of the elbow because the speed has been removed. If you try this triceps workout master tip you should feel the difference instantly. The thing that the master tip should provide is an instant ability to do it with no extra equipment, it should work right away and it should be felt like no other tip before. If you try this and feel what I’m talking about and are looking for more ways to get more out of every workout you do, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. For more triceps exercises and workouts for bigger triceps, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24

Here are 8 arm exercises you have never done. Use them to build bigger arms by providing your body with a new stimulus for growth after you have long adapted to the staple arm exercises you have used in every arm workout. There is nothing magical about these bicep and tricep exercises other than the fact that they are going to force you to use your arms in ways you likely haven’t felt before. Often times, this is enough of a spark to get you out of your training rut and kick start your gains again. In this video, I’m showing you four arm exercises you can do at home and four that you can use at the gym with equipment. In each category, I’m giving you two for your triceps and two for your biceps. You do not have to use all of them in a single arm workout, in fact doing so would likely be too much volume especially if you do your staple arm exercises as well. Choose just one or two and mix them into your workouts accordingly and feel the difference they make. First up are the weighted arm exercises. Here I show you something called an Eccentric Incline DB Curl. The benefit of this movement is that it helps you to overload the biceps in the eccentric portion of the movement with more weight than you could generally curl out of the bottom of the incline curl. We know that the biceps muscle is stronger eccentrically than concentrically and can therefore handle heavier loads in that portion of the lift. Done traditionally however you are limited by the strength in the concentric portion of the exercise. Do it as shown here however and you get the best of all worlds and greater biceps mass gains. The elevator cable curl is another great biceps exercise capable of adding size to your arms. The key here is that it allows you to keep your wrist bent back slightly to maximize the activation of the biceps and minimize the dominance of the forearms. Lift your hands straight up to the ceiling for the entire movement and be sure to get your shoulder lifted as well to complete the full contraction of the biceps. Triceps pushdowns are one of the most commonly performed arm exercises for your tricep muscle however there are different ways you can do them to promote all new gains. The first is the rowing tricep pushdown. Here you want to stand far enough away from the machine so that you have to row the hands into the chest to start. From here, forcibly contract the triceps as hard as you can and pull your arms behind your body. This will not only engage the long head of the tris but also involve your back muscles in a synergistic way to intensify the exercise even more. The rotational pushdown is an athletic variation of the triceps cable push down that gets the lower body involved to increase the power output of the exercise. Rotate through your foot and drive the arms down to the side to get the core working together with the triceps and increase the amount of weight you can press down. Once again, the long head of the tricep muscle will get an added hit because of the arm traveling back behind your body into extension. If you prefer to use just your own bodyweight you can do that as well with the 4 biceps and triceps arm exercises shown in the second half of the video. First is the pendulum inverted chin curls. This will allow you to get your shoulders flexed while curling up your own bodyweight for a powerful contraction. You do not need any fancy equipment to do this. Use a simple broom stick and the back of two pieces of furniture to do the same thing I’m showing you in the demonstration. Wide elbow wall pushups are a lateral head killer that starts with your hands overlapped against a wall

The way you sleep can have a direct impact on the muscle gains you will ultimately see from your workouts. I’m going to show you how 8 popular sleeping habits are possibly interfering with your ability to build muscle and remain injury free. Don’t be embarrassed if you wind up finding out that you are doing at least a few of these. The important thing is that I’m here to help. The first thing that you want to do before you even get into bed is stretch. Now I’m sure you’ve heard that it is not good to do static stretching before working out but do you know why? The reason is twofold. When you stretch before lifting you are interrupting the stored motor patterns that your body has to make movement efficient and memorable. This means, with the new muscle length provided by the stretching your bench press movement will not match up with the one that is stored. This leads to awkward pressing and an increase likelihood of injury. The second thing that occurs is that the increased length disrupts the overlap of muscle fibers and interferes with the strength of contraction. If this happens, you can expect to see a decline in your strength levels and force output at the exact worst time that you would want that to happen, just before your workout. Next, you want to be sure you adjust the sheets at the end of the bed before you even get in it. Why? This is because the tightness of your sheets will directly impact the tightness of your ankles in the long run. When you lay in bed your ankles will be pulled down into plantarflexion because of the sheets that are tucked in to the end of your bed. If you stay in this position for say 8 to 10 hours, you can guarantee that your calves will get tight and your ankle will lose mobility over time. Try squatting with bad ankle mobility and you will quickly see your leg gains go down as you no longer can descend low enough in the squat. The health of your shoulders is paramount to a big upper body. Just ask anyone who has ever injured their shoulder what it meant to their ability to lift and make gains in their chest, arms and back not to mention their delts. The key is to limit the tightness that is likely to happen just by avoiding common but bad sleeping postures. If you lay on your side with your hand under your head, make sure you don’t do this on top of the pillow. You can see instantly how this internally rotates your shoulder and leads to tight posterior shoulder capsules. If you place the hand under the pillow however you can dramatically change the situation and actually help to restore some lost external rotation. The same can happen when you lay on your stomach. Your arms get internally rotated at the shoulder to support your head on the pillow. Even worse however, your low back takes a beating as you compress your lumbar spine and adaptively shorten your lumber paraspinal muscles. This leads to the all too common low back pain. The best way to sleep is either on your back with the sheets loosened at the end of the bed or on your side with your legs straight and a pillow between your knees. Either way, you are minimizing the damage that you are doing to your body for extensive periods of time every night and giving your body a better chance of making pain free gains in the gym. Finally, upon waking make sure you immediately start the rehydration process by drinking two 12-16 ounce glasses of water. You have just gone a long period of time without drinking any water so you will want to get this in you to provide the environment for muscle gains. And of course, never underestimate the value of good sleep. Cortisol will be

If you want to build twice the muscle, you need to start including elements in your training where you use half the weight. In this video, I’m going to show you how to build more muscle mass with lighter weights. This is not just about lifting light however. Instead, it is about working out with heavy weights and light weights at the same time. Let me explain. The technique shown here is called offset loading. I demonstrate it on some of the more popular exercises like shoulder presses, side lateral raises, bench press, tricep extensions, dumbbell curls and lunges. The key concept is that you want to use dumbbells of differing weights to perform your sets. In general, you choose the heavy weight (that is equal to what you would use for your 8-10 rep max on the exercise) and a lighter weight (equal to half of what the heavy weight was). The focus then becomes on how you move these dumbbells through space as you perform each of the exercises. The first obvious benefit of this however is the effect this will have on your core. With one side being much heavier than the other, your core muscles will have to contract strongly to keep your body upright and not tilting to one side. This occurs even on the exercises that you are laying down on like the dumbbell bench press. This is just the bonus however, since the major focus here is on using this lifting technique to build more muscle. So, the next option you have is in how you are going to lift the weights. In general, you have three choices. You can either lift the lighter weight at a slower speed to keep pace with the heavier weight or lift the heavy weight at a faster speed to keep up with the faster traveling light weight. Each of these will have a different impact on your training that you will want to be aware of. First, let’s discuss the light weight moving slower. This is great for when you want to teach your muscles more control. Muscular control and command is a key element of hypertrophy. It not only demands more time under tension on the working muscles but it is an asset that pays dividends in hypertrophy as witnessed with the legs of a male ballet dancer or olympic gymnast. Both of these athletes represent the epitome of muscle control. By having to slow the lighter weight down, you are forcing your body to become more deliberate the the muscle contraction occurring in the target muscle. You can opt instead to attempt to move the heavier weight at more explosive speeds, to that of the lighter dumbbell. This is an incredible way to tap into more Type II muscle fibers and work on the fast twitch fibers to elicit hypertrophy and muscle gains. When you add the element of increased speed of contraction, you are working on power. The more powerful you become, the stronger you get and the bigger you get in almost every instance. Try this if you aren’t accustomed yet to training for power and you will notice a quick burst in size gains. The third option is one where you can get very deliberate with the movement of the weight to isolate and burn out the target muscle. This involves taking what would have been your lighter weight and making it your “heavy” weight and then cutting that weight in half to become your light weight. Here you perform each of the exercises listed above with a very slow pace and a very defined contraction. You’ll be amazed at how heavy a weight starts to feel when you use this technique. The cool part is however that you will find that due to the neurological wiring of our bodies, the heavier weight can be taken along for the ride and lifted with this same level of effort just by l

Low back pain is by far the most common source of discomfort we deal with. The irony is, a lot of times what we feel is rooted in the lower back is actually caused by muscles not in the back at all. In this video, I’m going to show you how the glute medius could be the real cause of your back pain and a quick exercise you can do to relieve your discomfort instantly. Once gone, I’m also going to show you a few additional exercises you can do to make sure your low back pain never returns. The gluteus medius is sandwiched between the glute maximus and minimus and lies in and around the hip area. The role of the muscle is to abduct your hip or lift your leg out to the side in either standing or side lying and to keep your pelvis level whenever you take a step. Prolonged sitting during the day as well as an unequal weight distribution when standing are two of the most common reasons for this muscle to get weak and imbalanced. You can quickly test to see if you have the makings of a weak glute medius by standing with your feet shoulder width apart and lifting one foot off the ground. First take note whether or not your opposite hip drops significantly. If it does, this would indicate a glute weakness on that side. You would repeat with the opposite foot as well. When you do this you would also want to see if you had to dramatically shift your weight to one side just to lift that foot off the ground. If you do, this would indicate that you have an unequal weight distribution when standing and it would be especially troublesome when squatting. To fix this quickly, you will want to lay down on the ground with your affected side on top. If your right lower back was bothering you then you would want to lie on your left hip. From here, take your thumb and place it on the area most sore. You should feel that this is going to happen just to the outside of the bony prominence of your pelvis. From here, push to hold back the trigger point and start flossing your leg down and in front of you and then back and up. Your hip should be extended and then lifted into abduction towards the ceiling (being sure to point the toes down to keep the glute medius in focus). Do this about 10 times until you feel the tension in the muscle release. Now, you can burn out the spasm in the trigger point by getting into the fully contracted position of the glute medius muscle and holding as long as you can. Generally, because this muscle is often very weak, this may not be any longer than 30 seconds to a minute. Once you cannot hold it any more you will stand up and you should notice an immediate relief of the pain on that side. This is the quick but not permanent fix for this problem. Since the underlying cause is weakness in the gluteus medius muscle you will want to back this up with some exercises for your low back that you can do a few times a week. I show you three options for this. The first is the hip bump against the wall. The second is called the sack swinger, and can be done with a dog leash if you don’t have a formal dip belt. The last is actually doing the same movement that you did for the treatment, but this time as a strengthening exercise for your low back. Whatever you do, just be sure you are consistent. You will also see that as you relieve the tension in this muscle that your squat performance improves as well. Your depth should be increased and any low back pain that you felt by doing the exercise should be gone since you will now be able to do them with equal force through each leg. If you are looking for a program that puts the science back in strength in every workout, head to http://athleanx

The best chest exercises are not determined by the ones you can lift the most weight on but rather the ones that work best for you. In this video, I’m going to show you the 8 best chest exercises to help you build a bigger chest despite using bench press and dips for years. Many people think that these staple chest workout moves must be included if you want to develop a big chest, but the reality is they do not work best for everyone. That said, the eight chest exercises shown here are ones you can try if you feel like you have hit a dead end in your chest development. Beyond that, these can be done as activators before your chest workout that will help you to get even more out of the bench press and dips later in the routine. The key is first to understand why these two big exercises may not be working so great for you. It comes down to the anatomy of the chest and how it prefers to contract. The biggest motion that the pecs are responsible for above all others is horizontal adduction at the shoulder. This means, taking the upper arm and driving it across the chest. Ideally, you would want your chest exercises to incorporate the motion so that both arms could almost cross over each other or at least the midline of your body if you want to get a maximal chest contraction. We can do that with the first exercise shown, the twisting pushup. Here, no equipment at all is needed to help you get more from your pushups. Instead of just pushing straight up and down you can twist your body as you do and get a relative adduction at the shoulder which will help you get a better squeeze and contraction. Since your hands will be fixed on the ground as they are in a regular pushup, the twisting of the body will draw the arm across and help you get better results from doing this. The plate squeeze is an awesome chest exercise that can be used as an activator before your chest workout or at the end as a finisher. The key is to squeeze the plates as hard as possible together and not let them slide apart. The chest contraction you feel here will be insane and well worth the inclusion of this move in your chest workout. The Db chest pullover is a variation of the classic dumbbell pullover, except this one will target the upper pecs as opposed to the lats. Instead of flaring the elbows and trying to pull the weight all the way up over your chest, restrict the range of motion a bit and squeeze the hands together to get the weight up. This will light up your upper pecs and really help you to recruit this often hard to hit area much better. Floor flys give you a safer way to overload this common chest exercise. The problem with the traditional fly exercise is that it places your shoulder joints in a compromising position. Some will say to just drop the amount of weight you use here and you will have no problems. The issue is, you will be leaving gains on the table by doing that. Here you can get the best of all worlds while having the floor to support your use of heavier, muscle building weights. The variations of chest crossovers give you an obvious way to get not just one arm, but both, across your body and experience a strong chest contraction. Whether you do the 3D cross over or the X cross, both of these are going to help you to get great chest activation and even better chest growth over time. The UCV raise and Cavaliere Crossover are two final exercises you can do with a single dumbbell for your chest that are going to help you to blast your pecs at any point in your workout. The key is to hold each rep for a split second in the contracted position if you really want to increase the intensit

Dumbbell bicep curls are one of the most popular biceps exercises performed in the gym or at home. The problem is, it is also one of those arm exercises that is most commonly performed wrong. In this video, I’m going to show you the best way to do the standing dumbbell curl for bigger biceps and some other added benefits you may not have been aware of. First we need to start by looking at what is not optimal about the standing alternating dumbbell curl. When you alternate your arms during the reps you have a period where one of the arms is resting. This is taking the tension off of the biceps for the 2-3 seconds that it takes to perform the rep on the other arm. If you are training for metabolic hypertrophy, this brief period of rest is enough to sap all of the benefits of that form of training and is therefore something you want to avoid. The next thing is that by alternating your arms during the movement you are sacrificing a great deal of core involvement that you could be getting by not doing this. Think about it. When you curl the weight up, the momentum of the load wants to tilt you backwards and make you lean back with the weight. The only thing that helps you to prevent this is the stabilization and contraction of your abs and core to not let that happen. If the load that you are lifting is in just one hand, you will only be having to control half of the weight. In this example I am curling 30 pound dumbbells. My core will only have to contract hard enough to control the thirty pounds. If on the other hand I lift the two dumbbells at the same time, then I will have to work that much harder in order to control the 60 combined pounds that are in my hands. Finally, there are often times many muscle imbalances that are developed by performing your dumbbell bicep curls in alternating fashion. If you are training for strength but one side is weaker than the other you might see that your arm struggles more to get to the top. At the same time, you might find that you simply cannot move the weight at the same speed that you can on your stronger, more powerful arm. Both of these are problems but not easily seen when you are doing them one arm at a time. If on the other hand you switched to the simultaneous standing dumbbell curl you would notice right away when the imbalance exists. Simply watching as one dumbbell was curled faster and more unevenly than your weaker side would give you instant feedback that you needed to correct the strength imbalance. Forcing the dumbbells to move together is a great way to overcome whatever disparity exists and even out the development of your biceps. The same goes for the tension problem. By forcing the dumbbells to move together, there is constant tension on both biceps throughout the entire exercise. This makes for a move more capable of creating hypertrophy and for getting those biceps of yours bigger. Finally, the core becomes instantly more active and responsible for holding you steady when you switch to the double arm movement. Now you can do one other alternative and that is to alternate the direction of the arms during the movement but to make sure you are doing them at the same time yet again. Here you get the same benefits of the tension and imbalance correction but you sacrifice a bit still on the demand of the abs since only one dumbbell is moving up at a time. In fact, you might cancel out the demand a bit because the other is counterbalancing and moving in the opposite direction. Either way, the standing dumbbell curl is best done when not alternating the arms while performing it. Now don’t get me wrong, even performed th