5 Exercises You Should Be Doing

Continuing on from my last post - I decided to do write one on exercises that people often neglect in their training. I think these 5 exercises are hugely important for a well rounded program and should be taken very seriously. With that being said, incorporate these in to your program!

1) Deadlifts. Squats are widely considered the "king of lower body exercises". Don't get me wrong, squats are awesome in terms of lower body development, but they are what is called a "quad-dominant" exercise. This means that most of the movement revolves around the knee joint and emphasizes the quadriceps muscles.
Our society spends way too much time sitting on our butts, and never end up using them. That's why we need to incorporate "hip dominant" movements that emphasize your glutes and hamstrings. We need balance in our workouts - if your quads are a lot stronger than your glutes and hamstrings you can end up with various types of knee injuries.


Its simple. Bend down, keep your back in its natural arch, chest high, and lift. No other exercise works as many muscles as the deadlift. Use it and its variations (Romanian deadlifts, single leg deadlifts, trap bar deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, snatch grip deadlifts, etc.)

2) Pushups. Theres something about pushups that guys hate: they're not as "cool" as the bench press, they're deemed a "sissy" exercise, they're "too easy".

Pushups offer tremendous value in terms of core stability, scapular stability, and upper body strength. Why not just bench press? In correct bench pressing technique you shoulder blades should be pinched together to give you a good stable platform to push the weight away from you. The bench press is a great exercise, but it doesn't let your scapulae (shoulder blades) move freely the way it does in a pushup. This means you completely neglect the rotator cuff and the serratus anterior. What the heck is a serratus anterior? It's a relatively small, but important muscle located under and to the side of your chest that help protract (push forward) the scapula. It also helps you rotate your scapula in order to raise your arms overhead. Neglect this muscle, and you set yourself up for shoulder injuries down the road.


Check out this guy's shoulder blades. The medial border of the scapula is "winging out" because his serratus anterior isn't strong enough to keep them in alignment.
If you can do regular pushups well, try out decline pushups, weight pushups, pushups on a stability, ring pushups, band resisted pushups, spiderman pushups, and even 1-arm pushups.

3) Face Pulls. Here's an amusing look at our evolutionary process. Desk jockeys, students, college fraternity kids who bench press every time they set foot in a gym screaming "it's all you!!!" in your ear when you ask them to hand a bar off to you - all share that common hunched over, rounded shoulder posture.



How do we counteract this? Pull more, stretch more, and push less. That means more rowing variations in your workouts, stretch your pecs and lats, and bench press less. One type of pulling movement that I particularly like is the face pull with external rotation.

Take a rope handle, grab it with a neutral grip (palms facing towards each other and pull the rope towards your face). Conventional face pulls are pulled towards the upper chest, but by bringing it higher up you get some rotator cuff work as well. Couple that with the strengthening of the scapular retractors and the rear delts and you get a great exercise for shoulder health and improving postural alignment.

4) Single Leg Training. I decided to group this category together because I couldn't pick just one. By focusing on only bilateral movements, you neglect key stabilizing muscles in the hip, knee, and ankle. This means not only are they are key in preventing injuries, but they're also great supplements to add strength to your bilateral movements.
Progressions are key in single leg training. Throwing lunges into a beginner's workout will literally cripple them from the massive eccentric loading placed on the muscles. Start with split squats and move on to reverse lunges, forward lunges, rear foot elevated split squats, walking lunges, and single leg squats. Progressions are different depending on the population, but nothing irritates me more than trainers making their new clients do a million walking lunges with weights when they can't even do a single stationary lunge.

5) Pallof Press. And any other core stabilization exercise. You see gym goers all the time hammering on their lower backs with rotational exercises - twisting and turning violently with cables. The core is used mainly as "anti-rotators". Here's a quote from Shirley Sahrmann in her book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes:

"The most important aspect of abdominal muscle performance is obtaining the control that is necessary to:

(1) appropriately stabilize the spine,

(2) maintain optimal alignment and movement relationships between the pelvis and spine, and

(3) prevent excessive stress and compensatory motions of the pelvis during movements of the extremities."

Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes, p. 69.

When training the core, your mid-section should not move! I'm not saying that cable chops are bad, but most people do not know how to perform the movement correctly. Rotation should occur at the hips and shoulders - not the lower back. Also, how do you expect to create rotation when you can't even prevent it? The key to core training is to perturb the core by manipulating the upper or lower extremities. Here's an awesome exercise developed by physical therapist John Pallof.

Set up a handle a little lower than the bottom portion of your chest. Keep a nice athletic stance (feet shoulder width, butt back, chest high) and press the handle away from you. Your obliques have to work especially hard to maintain alignment.

Feel free to ask questions! What blog topics do you want me to cover in the future? I appreciate any and all feedback!

Train Hard,

Jason