Forgotten Exercises - Exercises people should do but don't

Posted by PredatorAdmin at 16:59 20/01/12

When you walk into the gym for your workout, you’re pretty much guaranteed to at least one of several things. First, someone is bound to be benching. If it’s a Monday (International Chest Day) you can expect to see a line of guys waiting to bench right after them. Second, someone is doing some variation of biceps curls. It doesn’t matter if its barbell, dumbbell, cable machine or some weird variety, they be curling. Of course if there are girls, the men will be doing curls. Or something. The third thing you are guaranteed to see is some sort of sit-up or ab-crunch variation.


Some of these people you see may have fairly impressive physiques. Chances are that one or two may have incredible physiques. But the rest (and likely the most) will simply be spinning their wheels. I hope that you don’t fall into this category, but the law of probability sorta dictates that you do. So let me run through four exercises that are seemingly forgotten but should be a regular part of your routine.


The real secret behind these exercises is not only how they can build muscle themselves (although they do and will), but how they contribute a massive crossover to your strength and ability in other exercises. This isn’t just about functional strength – as much as I abhor what that phrase has come to represent – but more specifically is about strength progression as a whole. When you are getting stronger over your entire body you are on the right path.


Front squats


Back squats are a rare sight in gyms at the best of times, but even rarer is the front squat. This is an exercise that recruits the shoulders and back significantly more than its back counterpart. I am not suggesting front squats replace back squats in your routine, at least not permanently. Either cycle them into your routine for a period of time, or do them in a separate leg workout (assuming you train legs more than once per week).


The front squat involves balancing the barbell on the anterior (front) deltoids and across the upper chest. This changes the biomechanics of the exercise quite extensively making it a much more radically different exercise to back squats than you may realise!


You don’t have to lean forward as much – in fact you can’t lean forward very much otherwise you lose balance. This makes the exercise great for developing stability and training all the muscles that go into stabilization. Because of the difference in lean required, guys with long femurs (a long femur-to-torso ratio to be specific) typically find it more beneficial to perform front squats rather than back squats as they are able to go deeper. Even if your femurs aren’t particularly long, if you struggle to hit a decent depth on back squats, front squats can help increase your mobility for hitting good depth.


The benefits don’t end there either. Some people with knee issues prefer front to back squats as they find it gives them fewer pain issues. And science seems to back this www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19002072. In fact, this study indicates that while you will generally be able to back squat heavier weights, front squatting a lighter weight can result in the same muscle activation with a lighter load.


The main reason people state for not front squatting is that it hurts their shoulders. This tends to be because they use the overhand cross-armed grip, which is good up until around 100-120kg, but after that can become quite restrictive. There are some pretty cool variations around, including the version that seems to be connected to Charles Poliquin where you use wraps but ultimately I highly suggest you start light and learn the clean grip. Over time your shoulder mobility for this will increase and it should become less of a pain. This is quite appropriate as it leads into the next forgotten exercise.

Cleans


The clean is one half of an Olympic lift you may be familiar with called the clean and jerk. Along with the snatch, the Olympic lifts are technically complex, so this isn’t something you should run straight into heavy weights with without practising the movement first. I am not going to instruct you on the fundamentals of the lift here, I am just preaching that you should be doing it. I highly recommend watching YouTube videos of elite lifters performing cleans, as well as reading websites with technique discussion. Another thing, it’s not that I don’t think you should be doing a full clean and jerk or a snatch. I just think that the clean is the simplest explosive movement to learn first. The snatch can come later, along with overhead squats if you have the shoulder mobility for them.


The clean is an explosive movement that can pack mass onto your shoulders, arms, traps and back. Not only that, the explosiveness it can develop in your hips (assuming you clean from the floor – more on this is a minute) can mean big things for your (front) squat and deadlift. And there are no better indicators of progress than getting stronger on your squats and deadlifts.


Due to their explosive nature, you may also find a set of cleans to be quite an incredibly cardiovascular workout. Cleans are not something you will want to do 12 reps with if your goal is to get bigger and stronger. A better rep scheme would probably be in the 5-8 range, but even then with the higher reps you may notice your form breaking down as you get tired. For explosive lifting form is impeccable. For this reason I prefer to lift in the 1-3 rep range if I am aiming to go heavy, but when I say 1 rep I don’t mean a 1 rep max. I do not recommend training to failure for this kind of lift.


Of course there are variations which I ought to clarify here. The full motion of a “clean” is to pull the bar from the floor, catch it into a full front squat and then get yourself out of the hole. The “power” clean is exactly this, only you explode up as you catch the bar, without the full front squat. As you may have guessed, as the weight gets heavier a power clean becomes harder to do and the full front squat aspect of the lift is required in order to get the weight up. Lastly there is the hang clean. This is where you hold the bar standing straight up and simply pop your hips to get the bar up to catch it in the front squat grip. Obviously the weight used on hang cleans tends to be a lot less than the weight used in full or power cleans. I mention this because this (the hang clean) is the exercise I think you should begin with in order to master the form. Once you have it, move into power and full cleans.


While you may see some professional bodybuilders doing front squats, you pretty much never see any doing Olympic lifting. Like I say, it’s a forgotten exercise.


Would it help convince you if I mentioned that Arnold did cleans?


Loaded carries


Loaded carries are pretty self explanatory. Pick up something heavy and start walking with it. This variation is called the farmers walk. While this may sound more like strongman training, it is another exercise that can do wonders for your calves, traps, shoulder complex, trunk and of course your grip. There are other variations of this, such as the one-armed farmers walk. This is where you perform the exercise with a weight in one hand but not the other. As you can imagine, this makes for an excellent core workout! But my favourite variation, along with the basic farmers walk is called the rack walk.


If you don’t have specific farmers walk equipment, simply use dumbbells. Pick them up and start walking. Do 2-3 sets of this, or until your forearms are screaming. Once your grip is so exhausted that you simply cannot hold onto anymore, select lighter dumbbells and do rack walks (kettle bells are usually used for these but dumbbells are just as effective). A rack walk is where you clean the dumbbells up onto your shoulders where they can rest. Once again, get going. This allows you to give your grip a bit of a rest but continue to work your calves, core and shoulder complex.


I realise that many of you reading this can already imagine yourselves feeling like idiots pacing around the gym with dumbbells in your hands. The first thing I say to that is man up. Who gives a crap what other people think? Then my next suggestion would be a constructive one. This involves goading other guys at your gym into a friend competition of “who can farmers walk the furthest.” If there’s more than one of you doing it you’ll feel less foolish. Additionally, next time you train the exercise on your own you can tell people you are training for the next contest.


Alternatively, get yourself outside the gym like this guy.

Decline dumbbell extension


The last exercise I want to highlight is quite different from the other three I’ve discussed. The other lifts are all compound movements that can involve heavy weights. This exercise, however, is less about the weight used and more about working the actual muscle. Upper body exercises tend to be the one area most lifters rarely skimp on, and when it comes to working the triceps I see a lot of cable movements, a lot of kickbacks and a lot of EZ-bar “skullcrushers”. I am not a fan of kickbacks, but over the years I’ve come to realise that every exercise has its place somewhere, at least for a short period of time. Skullcrushers are something I see getting done a lot, but I also see them getting done wrong a lot more. This is an exercise where you work against gravity the most by locking your upper arms and hinging at the elbow. Most of the skullcrushers I see involve hinging at the elbow for half the rep and then moving the upper arms back for the rest. This moves a lot of stress off the triceps and places it onto the deltoids and lats to some degree. This is far from ideal.


Before continuing I should clarify that benching presses (ideally close-grip) and parallel bar dips are kings when it comes to building the triceps. I’m going to assume that everyone reading this is fully aware of this fact.


Rather than performing the skullcrushers on a flat bench I suggest using a slight decline. You will find that this causes you to clock your upper arm more naturally while placing the stress onto the triceps on a better plane. Next, exchange the typically-used EZ-bar for two dumbbells held in a hammer grip. It is right about now that I can stop referring to them as skullcrushers since you bring the dumbbells down to either side of your head rather than directly over it. If something should go wrong, you can drop the dumbbells and not have to worry about messing up your money maker. Because of this there is a lower risk factor involved with this variation. Once you’re in place the rest of the exercise is performed exactly how you’d expect it to be. If you’re struggling to envisage this, click this link for an instructional image www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Triceps/DBDeclineTriExt.html.


So there you have it. Four exercises that I’m going to predict you aren’t doing but by all accounts probably should be. Remember that form is impeccable and strength progression (via progressive overload) is key.

Author: Rob Clarke

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