Even if you’ve been performing the best lifts and exercises for muscle growth, you may not be seeing all the gain you should be from your training. In this video, I’m going to show you the 6 best lifts you can add to your main foundational strength exercises to get much more from them. You have to remember, you are and always will be only as strong as your weakest link. The goal of this collection of movements is to show you how to strengthen those weak links once and for all.
We start with the deadlift. One of the hardest parts of this exercise is the initial break of the bar off the ground. It is literally why this movement is called the deadlift since this requires that you are able to perform this from a dead stop without momentum. The ability to do this well is going to depend on your ability to drive force into the ground through your legs and to have strength and stability in your upper back when you pull.
If you find that you are not able to drive through the ground with force, you will want to start incorporating heavy dumbbell lunges as an accessory movement in your leg training. The lunge forces you to have to push hard through the foot into the ground to not only drive the weights you are holding but your entire body back up to a standing position. You want to handle heavier weights than you are used to in order to get the most carryover to the deadlift.
On the other hand, if you are able to generate good force through your feet but cannot maintain the stability of your upper back through the initial pull then you need to do something about this. I found that the chest supported barbell row was one of the most helpful accessory exercises I could do to improve this. By removing the legs from the equation, I learned how to be able to pull heavier weights with just the strength of my back, so that when the legs were added back in as during the deadlift, I was able to pull significantly more weight as a whole.
The squat is another movement that can be aided with the right accessory lift. Here you want to figure out a way to strengthen your glutes since they need to be the main driver and initiator of the upward lift of the bar from the bottom of a squat. The weighted hyperextension is a great way to do this.
To improve your ability to do the overhead shoulder press you want to consider just how much your body will rely on your feet and legs if you give it a chance. Even if you are not doing a push press and are trying to be more rigid with your form by performing a strict press, the ground reaction forces initiated during any standing variation of the press is going to incorporate the legs too much. In order to get stronger in the OHP you would want to sit down and perform a Z press as shown to isolate the strength of the shoulders.
The video wraps up with discussions of how to improve scapular strength for the pullup by doing weighted scap pulls as well as the face pull for improving pretty much every lift you do. The main point is, there are big lifts that you should be including in your training in order to compliment the heavier compound foundational movements in your training. Doing them both will make your performance on the big lifts improve that much faster.
For a complete training program that not only trains you with the big lifts but shows you the right accessory exercises to take your gains to another level faster, be sure to click on the link below to head to http://athleanx.com where you can start training like an athlete today.
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Jeff Cavaliere M.S.P.T, CSCS
Jeff Cavaliere is a Physical Therapist, Strength Coach and creator of the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs and ATHLEAN-Rx Supplements. He has a Masters in Physical Therapy (MSPT) and has worked as Head Physical Therapist for the New York Mets, as well as training many elite professional athletes in Major League Baseball, NFL, MMA and professional wrestling. His programs produce “next level” achievements in muscle size, strength and performance for professional athletes and anyone looking to build a muscular athletic physique.
