If you have a decent training program, you're likely doing some variation of the squat, deadlift, overhead press, and pull-up or row. What's missing? The exercises that help you become more proficient at these lifts.
Here are four exercise that'll increase your mobility, improve your balance, and strengthen your underused muscles.
The sumo plié squat is an excellent way to gain mobility in your squat and train your glutes and adductors to fire simultaneously.
The relationship between the adductors (inner thigh muscles) and glutes play a huge role in stabilizing the knee when squatting. Your adductors pull your leg in toward the body and your glutes are responsible for hip extension, abduction, and external rotation.
When your adductors are overly tight or weak and your glutes aren't firing properly, your knees will cave in under a heavy load. This generally happens when these muscle groups aren't in sync and you have improper timing when recruiting the glutes or adductors.
This will help prevent your hips from shifting during the deadlift, which is common. Most of us have one leg that's stronger than the other, so compensation will naturally occur under a heavy load. If you're not sure what this hip shifting this looks like, here it is:
To avoid a hip shift, strengthen your hinge pattern unilaterally to reduce muscular imbalances. The one-arm, one-leg RDL not only strengthens your glutes, hamstrings, and spinal erectors, but also improves pelvic stability and balance.
It'll help your overhead press. The overhead press requires lots of mobility through the thoracic spine to get the bar into a proper finishing position.
You drive the bar up and backward, then fully lock out the elbows with the bar above the head. Many people can't get into this position because they lack the mobility or kinesthetic awareness to create upward rotation and elevation of their shoulder blades.
The pike push-up addresses a lack of mobility because you have to press yourself back toward your legs to complete a rep. This forces your shoulder blades to upwardly rotate and elevate when completing the press.
The mid-back is often neglected during pulling exercises. Too often, people overuse their upper traps when rowing or their biceps when doing chin-ups. This decreases the amount of strength they could actually get out of their lower traps, rhomboids, and lats.
To get your back to grow, you need to make the line of pull easier and work your muscles from a different angle. The 45-degree inverted row allows you to focus on squeezing your mid-back, which is necessary if you want to get good at chin-ups and rows.
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