If you pick the right exercise you should feel good almost straight away. This means you feel stronger, more flexible or generally better afterwards. This happens because you are either waking up a sleeping / weak muscle or improving your mobility. The following exercises are not that well known but very effective at what they do. I learnt them from various sources. There is an exercise to help your overall flexibility, another for your ankle stability, one for your glute strength & a couple for muscle growth and aesthetics. You can watch a video of these exercises down at the bottom of this page or on you tube>>.
Side-lying Breathing – I am in the closing stages of a 4 month course on posture and rehabilitation techniques. Some of the exercises I really found helpful were those focused on expanding the ribs through breathing in certain positions. One of these is side-lying breathing, to do this:
-Lie on your side, knees towards 90′ and make sure there is a small gap between your side and the floor.
-Exhale fully until you feel your side muscles engage.
-From here, breath in by expanding your ribs in all directions
-Repeat for 8-10 breaths
Due to the position you are in, you should feel the rib cage expanding.
Step Foot Pronation – This will help you if you have weak ankles. Over pronation is a common ankle issue, yet rarely do we train the muscles involved. This can be easily done on a step. I use this with most clients if they have injury issues. To do it, simply;
-Stand on a step so that the inside of your foot is along the edge. Position your foot so your big toe is hanging off the step along with some of your inner heel.
-Now slowly lower your foot downwards, then pull it backup to the starting position to strengthen the pronation muscles. Do this for 5-20 repetitions, add a weight if necessary.
Banded Hip Internal Rotation – Most people are familiar with the banded glute exercise where you walk like a crab with a band around your knees. This is a good exercise but it trains external rotation of the hip. The other motion at the hip, internal rotation, is rarely trained and you will probably find you are very weak in the motion.
-Get a band and put it around your ankles
-Lie on your front and bend your legs
-From here, pull (rotate) your legs apart, while not moving your legs outwards. To help with this, you can squeeze an object together between your knees.
Shoulder Shrug (Not the normal trap shrug) – While the previous exercises are more about health & function, sometimes you just want to the body to look strong. One of the most important muscles for this is your deltoids (shoulders). However, they are not always so easy to engage, especially with a heavy weight. I learnt this shoulder exercise off my own coach back in my bodybuilding days, former world champion Mark Krah.
-Using a band or a dumbbell, ensure your arms are away from the body and hands in neutral grip position.
-Keeping your shoulder blades down (the opposite of a normal shrug aimed for the trapz) lift your hands upwards while keeping them away from the body.
This should get the shoulders burning and over times allow you to chisel a strong looking physique.
Drop Sets – The latest research shows you can build muscle anywhere from 4 reps to 30+. The key to development is the ability to reach those last few reps of the set where the muscle contraction slows down and peak mechanical tension is reached. The problem with this is that it either hurts a lot of takes a large amount of mental focus. As we usually not that switched on when exercising, using drop sets is a good way to reach that threshold. To do a drop set;
-Take the first set to failure as best you can, then immediately do another set of lifting with the same movement but using a lighter weight, when fatigue is reached do another set with a lighter weight once more.
For example, you do 12 reps at 60kg, you immediately follow this by 9 reps at 45kg and finally another set at 30kg for 10 reps. For body weight exercises just make the movement easier such as press up on toes, press up on knees and finally box press ups.
What Does This Mean For You
Try some of these exercises and see how they work for you. I have found all of these to be beneficial for me and for my clients.
Photo – The different exercises mentioned above, for a video of these then watch here>>
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