Month: December 2019

2019 has been a great year, a productive one, an enjoyable one, and certainly a memorable one. However, mistakes were made, goals weren’t achieved and not everything went to plan.. This is what I learned.

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If your nutrition is in order, you’ll have no problem putting on muscle mass with almost any type of workout program. That said, not all training programs are created equal. In other words, just because one program can produce muscle growth, doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient.

So, if you’re not progressing as quickly as you’d like, then there may be a chance that it is, in fact, your training program that’s holding you back.

In this video, I share 7 obvious signs that your current training approach sucks and how you can fix it to achieve better muscle gains.

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References:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25932981
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27102172/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30558493
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25853914
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12436270

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If you have been told that being able to touch your toes is a good barometer of your overall fitness and flexibility, then you need to watch this video. Here I’m going to show you why you not only want to stop trying to touch your toes and instead do the move I show you as an alternative. All you have to do is look at the implications this position has for hiding postural flows and imbalances and you will see quickly why it’s something you will not want to keep doing to help you feel more flexible.

It starts by letting you test yourself. Can you actually touch your toes? Many people will be able to, but many more will not. Even if you cannot, I can make it much easier for you if I tell you to be sure you roll your butt underneath you before you attempt to bend down. This will place a lot less of a stretch on the hamstrings making it easier for you to fold.

The issue with this modification is that many people do this naturally anyway in order to cheat their way to their toes. This really isn’t giving them any valuable information regarding their own flexibility and the health of their posture. In fact, it’s doing them a disservice by convincing them that they are more flexible than they really are and therefore allowing them to shrug off doing anything about it.

When you slump forward to touch your toes you are actually initiating much of the range of motion through the thoracic spine. You are flexing forward into severe kyphosis in order to achieve the hands to the toes position. This is only reinforcing a bad tendency for having slumped posture. It gets worse from there however. The low back is forced to round and the pelvis is thrown into a posterior tilt. This is the exact position that someone who is aged and has lost all semblance of good posture will adopt.

Even more, the shoulders themselves slump forward and are lacking any kind of scapular stability. All of these issues combined are a recipe for disaster when it comes to proper posture and the insinuation that being able to get into this position of hands to toes is in some way a good thing is misleading to say the least. Instead of being obsessed with whether you can still touch your toes I’m asking you to try something else.

Stand about 3 foot lengths away from the wall and reach forward with one leg until you can prop your toes up against the wall. Immediately, you should feel a stretch on the calf of that leg and likely already the hamstring. From here, reach your hands up against the wall slightly over shoulder height and place your palms flat against the wall.

Simultaneously walk your hands up the wall while leaning your chest in. The goal should be to ultimately touch your chest against the wall without any care towards whether you are bending down or forward. You are simply supposed to reach your chest forward. If you cannot get there, don’t worry, this is normal. You will however want to work towards getting your chest closer over time. Hold this position for 30 seconds to a minute and don’t forget to repeat on the other leg to balance out both hamstrings.

The benefit to this position rather than the slumped forward posture that bending over to touch your toes places you in is the fact that you can maintain thoracic extension while at the same time keeping your pelvis in an anterior tilt. This position of the pelvis is going to place a higher demand on the hamstrings, however in doing so, will reveal any tightnesses in them that you will want to address rather than hiding them by simply allowing your pelvis to roll back during the stretch.

This is just one example where old school methods of measuring and working on your flexibility are not helping you. If you really want to get to the bottom of your postural flaws and figure out ways to improve your forward head, rounded shoulders and slumped posture be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at the link below and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when it’s published.

If you want to get a complete workout program that will get you strong, lean and muscular while at the same time helping you to fix bad posture and muscle imbalances, be sure to head to athleanx.com at the link below and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System that best matches your current goals. Start training like an athlete today and stop overlooking the important things in your workouts.

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The serratus anterior is one of the most overlooked muscles of the body and should be a staple in your core workouts. The serratus anterior muscle is a fan-shaped muscle located on each of your sides, right on top of the ribs. It functions to protract your shoulder-blades, and assists in upwardly rotating the scapula. This muscle plays a role in improving the aesthetics of your core by improving abs definition, obliques definition, and lower chest definition (for boxer abs). But more importantly, it plays a critical role in stabilizing and facilitating proper movement of our scapula. When weakened, it can lead to unwanted movement within the shoulder joint and the shoulder blades, such as scapular winging. To mitigate this, I’ll show you 3 of the best serratus anterior exercises to add to your ab workout to develop your serratus anterior and get it to start firing properly.

Let’s start with the push-up plus.

By performing a “plus” component, where you protract your shoulder blades at the top of the pushup position by pushing your hands into the ground and slightly rounding your upper back, the activation of the serratus anterior increases by about an additional 50%. And of all the serratus anterior exercises in your workout for abs, the push-up plus elicits the lowest upper trap to serratus anterior activation ratio, which is important because most people with a weak serratus anterior can’t properly activate it; they will tend to overcompensate with their upper traps.

Since the push-up plus can’t account for the upward rotation of the scapula (another serratus anterior muscle function), you’ll need the serratus jabs. To start, set up the resistance by either using a band looped around a fixture or a cable system, and you want to set it up at a low angle. Then, get into the starting position with your arm by your side and all you’re going to do now is perform an upward punching motion which can be broken down into 2 distinct phases. Phase 1 simply involves you punching forward, and then phase 2 involves the active protraction of your scapula at the end of the punch. Then, come back to the starting position with your elbow stopping by your side, and then repeat the movement. Gradually increase the repetitions and/or weight used to continue to further develop your serratus anterior as it gets stronger overtime.

The last of the serratus muscle exercises is the wall slides. It involves even greater arm elevation than the previous exercises, meaning that it helps strengthen the serratus anterior in overhead positions which will again more effectively carryover to your overhead lifts and can help with the common symptom of shoulder pain when the arm gets in overhead positions. A helpful cue is to think about bringing your shoulder blades out and around you as you slide up the wall. But you want to avoid shrugging your traps up excessively and letting the upper traps takeover. To progress this exercise overtime, you can simply stand further out from the wall and lean into the foam roller more.

If you currently experience overhead shoulder pain or scapular winging for example, what you’ll want to do is progress from exercise 1 to exercise 2 to then to exercise 3, since the overhead demands increase throughout each of these exercises.

If there’s no pain and you simply want to better target this muscle, simply throw in a couple sets of each of these exercises 1-2 times per week into your current ab workouts or after your main workouts. Doing so will not only drastically improve your core strength and abs definition, but will also have a host of benefits in terms of improving your overhead stability, strength, and long term shoulder health.

For a step-by-step science-based program that shows you how to train all of these key muscles within your weekly routine, such that you can lean down and improve your muscle definition in the most effective way possible, then simply take the analysis quiz below to discover which built with science program is best for you and where you’re at right now:

https://builtwithscience.com/bws-free-fitness-quiz/gender?utm_source=Youtube&utm_medium=Video&utm_content=Descriptionbox&utm_campaign=SculptserratusanteriorDec292019

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STUDIES:

WEAKENED SERRATUS ANTERIOR
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17193867
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10569366

PUSH-UP PLUS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14977678
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242944/
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Normalized-EMG-data-a-SA-b-PM-c-SA-PM-ratio-NP-neutral-position-IRP-internally_fig3_264034572
https://www.jospt.org/doi/pdf/10.2519/jospt.2003.33.5.247

SERRATUS JABS

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19194023

WALL SLIDES

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17193867

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After spending 3 years living London I’ve decided to make the move and switch up base camp to Dubai.

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