The biggest problem with exercise right now is it became cool to train hard…
It’s cool to be doing muscle ups, olympic lifts and max effort conditioning work.
You know what’s not cool though?
Warming up, training the fundamentals and accessory work.
You know what’s even less cool than that? (or at least it should be)
Doing the cool things but never making progress because you laid a shitty foundation.
What we find when we speak to people about their training and why they haven’t got the results they’re after is that they completely skip the fundamentals.
They don’t warm up properly…
They don’t practice the fundamental movements to help the advanced skills…
They don’t touch their accessory work
For today we’re going to stick to covering the 3 movements that should be in everyone’s program. These all help develop the foundation for higher level skills and keep your body healthy.
These movements are:
- Push-ups
- Inverted Rows
- Deadbugs
We will explain why each of these are valuable and how to progress them further.
Push-Ups: The King of The Upper Body Press
Here’s how most people’s progression goes with push-ups;
- Can’t do them
- Start getting a few
- Get a solid 10+ reps
- Never does push-ups again
Yes, at some point a regular push-up becomes too easy, but that doesn’t mean you should forgo push-ups all together.
The push-up provides too much value as a full body movement integrating core strength, coordination and upper body pressing. I know plenty of strong guys that can bench over 100kg… but can’t maintain quality positioning on a push-up.
So what do you do when push-ups become too easy? Start using harder variations of the movement. Placing the hands in rings, manipulating tempo, elevating the feet or holding one foot off the ground all increases the difficulty of the movement and teaches context through movement variation. Plus you can still add chains, bands or weighted vests to manipulate load.
Inverted Rows: The Key To Strong Healthy Shoulders
You won’t find many guys in gyms doing inverted rows any more. Like push-ups; people get kinda strong and then straight up ignore them. The problem is most of the movements they replace them with to train the upper back don’t offer the same benefits.
The power of the inverted row comes in the integration of the upper back while maintaining midline position. Most other back exercises do very little to tie the shoulder, lat and core together.
So why don’t many people use the inverted row?
One of the big problems again comes with how to apply progression to the inverted row once it becomes too easy for many guys. The first thing we look to add is pauses and tempo manipulations… elevating the feet, add chains or weighted vests and vary grip positions.
There’s endless ways you can vary these up. It comes down to using your imagination but ensuring you only take small steps forward.
Many people try to come up with hard variations only to go too far… Hurt themselves or make it too hard to actually get the intended adaptation out of them.
Deadbugs: The Ultimate Forgotten Core Exercise
When it comes to core work everyone wants the exercises that make their abs feel like they’re working. This leads to most people choosing exercises like sit-ups, crunches and russian twists.
While these exercises are awesome given the right context. The main role of the core is to resist and control movement of the spine first. This means the most effective way to train the core for strength, performance and health is stabilisation movements.
The Deadbug focuses on maintaining a neutral spine under the control of the core. Then adds complexity by moving the extremities of the body away from the centre. Like the other movements you can add complexity to keep allowing for progression.
A simple way of making these more difficult is to straighten your legs out, adding a kettlebell or taking more body parts away from the centre.
How To Add In These Undervalued Exercises
The easiest way to add these in is to stick them into your warm-ups or in your accessory work at the back end of the workouts.
Focus on controlling your body and keeping your midline engaged throughout your movements. Like everything in fitness it’s not about doing the work, it’s about how you do the work. So ripping your way through the reps isn’t going to help you get the job done.
The biggest thing here is the best of the best still focus on drilling the fundamentals, so when we are trying to become our best we should be doing the same!