Tag: athleanx
Ultimate Fitness Test (1 REP OR DIE?)
theguy 0 Comments Cardio Get fit Health Healthy Food
What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X.com. So, I was going to do an entirely different video tonight and something came across my desk that forced me to change my hand. You see, there was a recent poll that was done, or a fitness test that’s supposed to determine how long you’re going to live. 10 drills, or exercises that you’re supposed to be able to do to ensure a longer life. In that group of drills was this one particular one called the Standing and Rising Test. Apparently, this is one of the ones that causes a lot of problems for people. They sit there and they pass it around, and I’m going to show you what it is because I want you to try it. Whether or not you can, or can’t do it I think there’s a really big, important message that spawned off of this that made me feel so strongly about making this video.
It is: let’s raise our standards of fitness. You see, here’s what the Standing and Rising Test is: I’ll stand up out of frame here so you can see it. Basically, you’re supposed to be able to cross your feet, and without using your hands, your knees, or your shins you’re supposed to be able to lower yourself down to the ground here, and then you’re supposed to be able to rise up off the floor without using your hands, your knees, or your shins. Now, obviously that was easy for me. It’s not supposed to say “Look how good I am and how I can do it.” No! This is fucking easy because it’s supposed to be easy.
You see, we can’t let this be the standard of excellence. The fact that I could get off the ground without using my knees, my shins, or my hands? Good. Congratulations, Jeff! You’re a human being. If we were a kid, when we were babies we did that all the time. We made things look easy. Why is it that as we get older – and I mean even in your 20s – why is it that when we get older we start allowing people to tell us what’s normal for your age and what you can and can’t do.
You can’t use the excuse “I’m getting old. I’m too old for that shit.” Too old for what? To get off the ground by yourself? Without needing the Life Alert? “Help me, I’ve fallen! I can’t get up!” We need to be able to have much higher standards for what we do. So, try it out and see and test yourself in private. Again, if you can’t do it, here’s the thing: let it be a wakeup call. Let it be a wakeup call. This should be something that should be easy for you. If it’s not, you might have a problem with your lower body strength, you might have a problem with your balance, you might have a problem with coordination, you could have some orthopedic issues; your knees might hurt. I’ve got pretty shitty knees myself, but I was still able to get up. If those are the things; start working on them. You can. There are so many things you can do. At Athlean-X here, I try to train you like an athlete. Like a professional athlete. Even though I know you don’t make a living as a professional athlete, I try to train you like a professional athlete by giving you the same exact things that I let these guys that come and make a living off of being a professional athlete are doing.
I have high aspirations for you. You still possess the same levels and capacity for strength and balance and coordination and quickness. You have the same capacity, you’re just not allowing yourself to realize it. You’re trying to set these limitations up being either too old, or just not a pro. Let’s raise the standards. I hope you can all get off the ground and if you can, congratulations. I really am glad. I think a lot of guys watching this channel who followed me for a long time are going to be able to ace that test really easily, but if you can’t, again, not picking on you at all; but it’s a wakeup call.
It’s time to start changing your habits and doing some things. Again, even if you are able to ace this, that’s just a standard of well-below our standards. So we’re going to take you to that next level. We have so many challenges in Athlean-X to make sure that we take it to these extreme levels of fitness and we walk you through them and get you there step by step. If you guys are looking for that plan and to let me take you through and raise your standards then head to Athlean-X.com right now and get one of our Athlean-X training systems and work your way up.
From the bottom all the way up you’ll get better. That’s the key. Day by day. If you’ve found this video to be eye opening – again, this is what we’re setting as our standard of fitness excellence – leave your comments below. In the meantime, I will bring that video to you that I promised I was going to make. We’re going to do something on the shoulders again later this week; a really good shoulder training tip that you might not have been aware of. I’ll bring that to you in a couple days. I wanted to make sure I got this out to you as soon as this came across my desk. It was that eye opening for me. I’ll see you guys back here again real soon. .
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Crazy 5 Minute Cardio Workout – KEEP YOUR MUSCLE!
theguy 0 Comments Cardio
It’s Black Friday you think the challenge of getting a hole in one of those doorbuster deals is hard what do you see what I have in store for you today with our Black Friday workout what’s up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx.com I hope if you had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday that you enjoyed it but it’s time to get back to work today and today as you might know here is Black Friday and the challenge that guys face or whoever it is that are jumping in line trying to get a hold of doorbuster deals as I said is nothing compared to what we’re going to put you through here physically I’m going to show you why because what we do is we incorporate challenges into the workouts that we do with athlean-x what do I mean by challenges I mean by actually giving you goals by giving you rep goals with time in order to be able to know that you’ve accomplished something but more importantly to see how you measure up against the best in the world to see how you measure up against yourself and others like yourself but also against the best in the world because if you want to be the best that you can be you should always try to shoot to be better than you are now and that’s the whole essence of athlean-x and why when guys follow workouts like this step-by-step in athlean-x they get the results they do so let’s take a look at just one example the type of stuff that we’re doing in the athlean-x system when we have burpees okay black VL ACK burpees but we have 25 we gotta do in 60 seconds you know pretty attainable when we start to add these up it gets much more difficult next we’re going for lion hop push-ups 25 in 60 seconds next add scissors we’re going to hang from a bar but I want to see if you can last all 60 seconds without dropping next chin-ups 25 and 60 seconds and then finally kettlebell or dumbbell single arm clean and press 10 on each arm in 60 seconds okay it’s all about challenging yourself so that you know you’re doing well because let me show you a quick quick example the difference when we do the Burpee itself if I said do burpees for 60 seconds which one’s harder this one you know I’ll probably get about seven out at that rate that’s not how we do it here and that’s not how I want you to do it so we’re going to start the clock 54 seconds now that’s a lot harder than as I said going at your own pace and thinking you’re going hard now you know you are next we have to do line hop push-ups so the ourselves in position pick an imaginary line on the ground for me it’s right here and I go over and back 25 a little break there 25 seconds home to the bar guys when you work out hard I always say you don’t have to work out long and that’s the point kick your ass yourself hard and you’ll get that intensity and the trade-off will be workout length so now as I approach the minute catch my breath now I’m going to go for my ab circles or scissor sorry for 60 seconds we’ll put this down the ground 69 easy guys next up the chin up 45 and admit it catch my breath you’ll notice this sequencing of these exercises is key we went from the Burpee which had a lot of chest involvement into another exercise with burpees are with collateral explosion upper body we work from a hanging exercise into another exercise hanging because we want to add up in a strategic way the volume in certain muscle groups whoo with 15 seconds to spare and lastly hit – or kettlebell or a dumbbell cleaning price now if we want if you have a cowbell you deal with your kettlebell I’ll demonstrate with a dumbbell sense or you guys will probably have those hey last one just clean it use the hammer curl set so there you have it guys the Black Friday workout yet another example of what we call athlean burst training being able to get your stamina you know going get your heart rate up by the same time preserve a muscle that you work so hard in the gym and your other workouts building that’s the essence of athlean-x and guys this is what everybody as I said in the beginning who follows a 90-day program has a step-by-step schedule and the right sequencing as I said so that you don’t burn out muscles when you’re not trying to you do when you are trying to okay you got to have an effort and a purpose and athlean-x is all about putting this type of training in your hands with me as your coach guiding you through if you like this guys head over to athleanx.com and grab the 90-day training program in the meantime i think i’m going to take every bit of the next seven days to rest up and come back and next week get a really cool workout based on I measure this magazine article that I just wrote until then.
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Chest Workout Tips for Size (HARDGAINER EDITION!)
theguy 0 Comments Get fit
Today we want to cover the chest. So we’ve had our Hard Gainer Edition, and our Hard Gainer Series here. Today it’s about exercise tips when you’re training your chest. Particularly as a hard gainer and this guy is starting to – he’s getting over the moniker now. He’s actually starting to become a gainer. As you can, too. But today I want to show you some of those tips you can apply when you’re training your chest that’s going to help you out, all right? We’re going to break it down to three parts. The first place we’re starting is the pullup bar. Okay, yes, I said pullup bar because again, we’re following suit with what we talked about before regarding hard gainers.
One of your biggest problems is going to always be activation. Remember the first time you ever did a dumbbell bench press, or a barbell bench press. You didn’t even know where the weight is in space. You’re doing your dumbbells and they’re kind of floating around. JESSIE: Right. JEFF: People tell you to bring them up together and you never really hit them in the same spot. That’s a proprioception issue. But there’s also a muscle awareness issue and one of the key points, whenever you’re going to press – and we’re going to have to press if we’re going to build your chest – is you’ve got to be able to press with the chest and not the shoulders.
We cover this in a video for our more advanced guys and as you can see it’s integral to what we do in this. It’s very important that you start now. So what I had Jessie do, and what I recommend you do is starting with some scap pulls on a pull up bar. On chest day, believe it or not, and just basically try to do a pullup without moving his arms. Without bending his arms. He gets up there and holds it for a couple seconds. The point here is we’re trying to activate his lower traps, get to the ability to be able to control the scapula, pull it down and hold it there. I’ll show you why it’s important in a second. A couple more. So I’d have him do a couple sets of this.
Six, seven, eight of them, held for a couple seconds each. Now come on down. We talked about how you want to ingrain it with what you’re actually going to do and that’s with actually pressing. So when we press, what we do wrong a lot of times as hard gainers, is we press and we lead with our shoulder, and we let our arm do the pressing. So let’s show what that looks like. As we press the arms are doing the pressing, especially as you’re trying to use heavier weights than you should. You’re pressing and letting your arm lead the way. That’s not what you want to do. You want to let your chest lead the way. So the arms have to stay back. The only way the arms can stay back, the shoulders can stay back, is by having an awareness of those muscles on the backside that you just hopefully woke up a little bit and made aware that they’re going to need to work. JESSIE: Scap pull downs.
JEFF: Exactly. So now let’s see with those scap pull downs. So here, you press out and you lead with the chest. So this is doing the contraction, this is staying back. Okay, so pressing that way. In as hard as you can, press. There you go. So I have him do some presses standing up in the air, just like that. You can see, even his posture is improving because we’re working on these things. Now we take it over to the bench press. Okay, so the bench press. It’s not an exercise that you want to avoid at any level. Especially as a hard gainer because it’s going to help you to start building more of that size. But you’ve got to do one thing for me, Jessie. You’ve got to do one thing for me, too. You’ve been doing one thing for me and that is, you’ve got to get over the small plate phobia. See, there’s nothing worse than heading to the gym and then getting ready to bench press and then all you can do is this: on the end of the bar.
Because you’d do anything to have people be able to see that big, 45 pounder on the outside so that even that girl is staring at you at the other side of the gym, at least she sees 145. She could imagine that there’s two, or three stacked on the inside of it, but you just want to get to the point where you can do the bigger plates. The biggest mistake is people doing that and not being able to – they’re monkey fucking the plates and the bar and they can’t get any good reps out. You’re defeating the entire purpose and that’s why your chest isn’t growing. So you have to start with a weight that you can control. But there is a way that you can incorporate heavier weights. It’s actually going to be necessary for neurologically waking up your muscles a little bit to help them feel more comfortable and confident in handling heavier weights. So what we do is we take the pins and we set them up high. I’m not concerned about depth, I’m not concerned about anything. What I want to do here is get a weight here that I’m going to adjust by 20% from what Jessie’s going to work with.
So if he’s working with 115 what we’ll do is we’ll get him up to 135 – again, a weight that he’s not going to try to lift because he’s not going to be able to do it so well since he’s just starting out. But instead what I want him to do is get comfortable with the weight in his hands. A touch up. So we get in here and all I want him to do is un-rack it. So for a few times he’s just going to un-rack and get it up over his chest. He adheres to the same principles of the chest, just up nice, holds it for a couple seconds, brings it back down. Again, a weight that he’s not necessarily comfortable repping out with. Do another one. He starts to feel more confident with the weight. Okay, put it down. Now after doing a couple of the un-pinnings here, now what he has to do is do one set. And I don’t care how – again, with the pins nice, and high – I don’t care how many reps he winds up doing. When he winds up failing, he comfortably is going to come down to the pins.
Eccentrically feel the weight all the way down. Get comfortable feeling what that weight feels like. Come on down. So now he’s going to lift up, gets in position here. Go ahead. And press up. There you go. Nice. All the way. Down slow. There. Okay, press, press, press. Down slow. Good. So that’s all he has to do. Do a rep, or two, or whatever it is to feel comfortable with that weight and then we’re going to go into his working weight. So now what I do is take his working weight, which is now instantly going to feel lighter because neurologically he’s commanded the weight that was heavier, he’s convinced himself that he can handle it. Maybe he’s not capable of handling it for full sets of reps, but from a confidence standpoint he can handle it. So now we get in here and now we do our working sets with this weight, which he could be in the six to eight rep range.
We’re trying to build strength here. But it’s a weight now that’s 20% less than what he just did and neurologically he turned himself on. That’s it. I won’t make you do the whole set. Just one more. It even feels a bit light from – go ahead, come on up – like the same way that a baseball player who would swing a donut on the end of a baseball bat would then go to the baseball bat itself and he neurologically turned that on. All right, we’ve got one more step here. Again, critical for getting hard gainers to start unlocking more size. Okay, last thing. Now we’re on a dip. Now what we want to make sure that you know how to do, and we could do this easily with the dip, is not just train to failure, but to learn how to take and train through failure. We talked about that. Again, as a hard gainer we tend to not understand what our true limits are and that usually holds u back. So on this exercise we can train him to failure, and then through failure by just using a band.
You can put a physio ball, push it inside this captain’s chair setup. But you just take a band, you press it down here, and you let it hand right in front of you. Now what Jessie’s going to do, he’s going to dip and then as soon as he reaches failure, where he would normally jump off the bar we’re going to teach him there’s more that you can do. There’s a drop set that you can do. You can actually extend failure. Take it to failure again via this band assisted dip. JESSIE: So just putting my knees on there. JEFF: Just put your knees on there. So go ahead. We’re going to keep them behind the band at first. Okay, adhering to all the proper principles of the dip. Shoulders stay back, he leads again with the chest. He’s squeezing here from the chest. He’s not shrugging his shoulders. We cover this in a lot of other videos. Keep going. I want to see you go all the way to failure here.
All right, one more if you’re there. Okay now put the knees right in. Get inside there. Now you’re going to go down and rep them out. We just took 60lbs off his bodyweight. Adhere to the same principles. Push all the way up. All the way up, all the way up, all the way up. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Okay, good. And down. So it could be another rep, or two, or three, but those are the productive reps because those are when he’s most fatigued. Those are when he would have quit and would have left them on the table. As a hard gainer we need to activate. We need to learn ways to feel heavier weight so we can get more confident in it and then we need to figure out ways that we can take it through our limits.
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