I hope you have found the last few blogs informative, now tonight I will carry on with the effective strength exercises for Push, Pull and rotation. I will start with Push Exercises.
Push Exercises.
The most effective push exercises are without doubt, the Push up (Press up) and the Overhead Press. The push up can be seen here, in fact I have written a whole eBook on the exercise, which is entirely free on my website (you must register to get it, it’s all free)
The Overhead press:
This can be done in 2 different forms.
- Lifting a resistance overhead
- Lifting your body weight in a handstand position.
The overhead press using an external resistance.
You can see an image here
It is important when you are lifting anything overhead, that you know how to get rid of the load, should you get into trouble. It is a simple case of either, stepping backward and pushing the load forward with your arms, or stepping forward and releasing the load backward. Do not try to get control of the load, it is not worth it. Let go and start over is a better option.
The best way to lift a load over head is as follows.
First of all, you need to learn what it feels like to be tight; this will be helpful in all you’re lifting.
- Go to a doorway and stand in it
- Put your hands up under the door-frame
- Standing directly under the door, push upward as hard as you can.
- You will feel everything tighten up; this is how solid you should feel when you lift weights
- You will also feel that you are being pushed downward into the ground, now this is the key with lifting overhead. Don’t think of pushing the weight upward, but think of it as pushing yourself away from the bar (just like in the door-frame) you will see that you remain tight throughout your lift and will be able to lift heavier loads above your head once you have cracked this. Be aware, it takes practice, but don’t give up as it is rewarding when you know how to do it.
The Handstand Push up.
I don’t know many people that can just get into the handstand push up and start knocking out reps, so you will need progressions if you are going to go down this route. However, if you take your time to learn this movement it gives fantastic strength rewards. Click here to see how to progress to the Handstand Push up.
Pulling.
The best bodyweight pulling exercises are the Chin up and the Pull Up and also the Horizontal or Decline row.
They are great exercises for increasing your pulling strength. Other resisted exercises that are highly effective are:
- Bent over Barbell rows,
- Bent over Dumbbell rows,
- Single arm rows
- Isolated Lat rows.
- Face Pulls
All of these exercises are great for increasing your grip strength as well. I recommend learning the chin up and Pull up first though. You can find progressions for these exercises here.
Rotation.
Rotation is extremely important to daily life and especially sports performance. Every movement to do with locomotion needs a strong core, which is where you are mainly affected by rotational forces. If you can’t resist the forces of rotation, you will not be able to walk or run efficiently, so rotation must be trained in 3 types of muscular contraction, Isometric, Concentric and Eccentrically.
To train rotation, rather than do hundreds of crunch type exercises, look to doing some of the following.
- The Wood Chop
By doing these exercises you will find that your core strength really goes up a couple of levels, not only will you have a strong core, but you will also find that all your lifts increase to. Do not over-train the core though. All the exercises that I have given you over the last 2 blogs, will be working your core quite hard if you are doing them correctly. I would not suggest doing more than one out and out core/rotation session more than once per week.
A final word on strengthening movement. If you have trained using machines or mainly isolation exercises, when you start to use Barbells, Dumbbells and other types of weights to train movement, you will find it hard to control at the start. This is quite normal and you should expect this, it won’t take long for your nervous system to adapt, so stick with it as the results are well worth it in the end.
I hope that these articles have got you thinking about the way you train, if you are an isolation person or a machine addict give them a go.
All the very best
Steve
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