The BEST Exercises for Each Muscle – Mike Israetel

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:50 Calves

01:39 Hamstrings

03:22 Quads

04:53 Abs

07:35 Glutes

11:39 Erector Spinae

14:00 Lats

15:33 Rear delts

18:20 Traps

22:16 My Online PT Certification Course

23:11 Pecs

25:57 Triceps

31:03 Biceps

Transcript:

Hard… Long… Yes! Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Like, take… I’ll take them all, goddammit… Not in the same session! The… the stimulus is just wild! You know the guys doing the fucking one armed shit, like just to here. And I’m like, why don’t you go higher? Why don’t you use more weight? …they’re like this, you know, like… I don’t… I don’t know what you feel at all. I don’t feel my hips or my dick coming out. I don’t know. Oh my god bro, that extra 3 inches, let me tell you. Am I right? It’s so big. It’s soooo big. You’re probably gettin pussy right now, big homie, you feel me? …into which you take the proximal edge… Skulls, incline variation… You can do eyes, nose, mouth, chin, throat… Moving to glutes… Oh, yeah!

Which exercise do you think… For body parts, let’s start with… Start on the bottom – calves, exercises that people should definitely try or exercise that you recommend most often. Calves are not the most exciting, I guess. -Calves are not the most exciting. Any kind of straight leg calf raise that unloads your spine is probably pretty good. So get on the belt squat, if you have one, go step off the ledge unrack the weight, get the belt going and go down really low off the ledge, hold for two seconds, come up about halfway until it feels easier, and then go back down. And I would do that like myo rep style or a very short rest breaks. I did that yesterday and like I’m not gonna be able to walk most of the rest of the day. It’s just like insane soreness for calves. So I say that’s a good idea. If you’ve been doing seated calf races with a bent leg, I think you just you’re going to get the first calf gains of your life doing this sort of thing.

What’s next? Hamstrings? A properly executed stiff legged deadlift is a very rare thing. And, a good morning as well. Same movement really. It’s just is the bar here or here. Because a lot of people will do them and they round their back which unlocks the hips, takes the tension off the hamstrings, they don’t go sufficiently low. So I would say a very good well executed stiff legged deadlift can basically mean that were 2 or 3 sets per hamstring workout. You can get all the stimulus you need, which is really cool. For quadriceps… -Let’s talk… what about the leg curl? Do you think it’s necessary to keep a leg curl movement in there for the short head of the biceps femoris for example? -So like, for beginners and intermediates absolutely not because no one’s going to be able to tell. Neither are you. And you can always start leg curling later in your career and just get, like, awesome gains for the first time ever. If you want complete muscular development and someone who would be stepping on stage, and time is a thing you can afford, I would say like, yes, it’s a very good idea to do some kind of leg curl.

What I typically do is if I train hamstrings twice a week, I will do one day where I do hinges and one day where I do curls. And I think it just checks both boxes really well. I would say it’s not the best idea to miss out on either one of those, unless you’re time constrained. And then just do whichever one fits all of your other goals and preferences better. So if you’re like a strength trainer and you want big deadlift and stuff… It’s probably not important for you to be doing many leg curls. But if you’re a person who just only cares about esthetics but you don’t have a ton of time, then I would say mostly leg curls versus hinges are better because they’re a better stimulus to fatigue ratio in many cases. At least, the total systemic and axial fatigue is quite low, they don’t take as much time to do, and they technically probably contribute to a more complete development of your hamstring, especially if you do them in a lengthened position, like a seated like curl with your chest propped forward like that.

-For quads you earlier, you already mentioned typically higher rep, very deep type squat movements? -Yeah. -That’s your fave? Yea, a fave. I would say one of my all time faves nowadays is a really good belt squat. A good belt squat where you come down all the way and sit for like 2 seconds at the bottom, and you come up 2/3rds of the way and come right back down slowly, do a myo rep style, so you get very close to failure, lock out your knees, breathe for 3 or 4 seconds, maybe 5 or 10, and then hit it again and again and again. Do like three rounds of that. Like, it’s actually possible to get a very good workout for many people with 1 set like that. And I think it’s, the axial fatigue is non-existent because the weight attaches at your hips. The systemic fatigue is quite low because it really just kind of is almost only quads at that point, especially if you sit in such a way that…. glutes, but if you sit with your knees going way over your toes, it also doesn’t do your glutes much. A little bit, but not a ton.

Also, your glutes leverage against your hips, which leverage to your spine. So if there’s a part of your squat, where are you going like this, glutes are involved, but if the belt is low on your hips, like, glutes don’t even really do much for that. It could be all quads or most quads, definitely some glutes. So, I would say belt squats are like a huge unlock that… I didn’t used to do them because I kind of thought they sucked. But when I, a friend of mine recommended that I do them a certain way, I tried, it was really good, I iterated on that, and I improved it in my own way, and I was like, okay, this is the best quad exercise pound for pound stimulus to fatigue ratio that I found for myself in a long, long time.

What about ABS? Is there even an exercise that you think most people should do for their abs? I don’t even know if most people should be training their abs. It really just depends on what they want. I like abdominal exercises. Like I like my women: hard, painful, long… -So which exercise would it be? -I like my ab exercises to be based on the same principles as all other exercises. I want them to be a relatively full range of motion with a very long lengthened component. I want them to be loadable, and I want them to be progressable, and I want them to be repeatable in a certain fashion. So I think actually a well-designed abdominal crunch machine with a select rise stack is probably one of the best ab exercises you could do. You could also hold weights and do like an inverted bench, 45 degree invert bench, those are quite good.

V-ups are decent. Roll outs, ab wheel roll outs are phenomenal, though they do tax your tricep long head and your lats significantly. Not a big deal, but like if you’re sore everywhere you’re like… It’s just, like, it’s a difficult exercise systemically. But, that ability to have the longest length concomitantly present the biggest tension is huge. Ab rollouts are a little bit difficult to progress. Though I will say, if you can do with what I consider very good technique, 20 ab rollouts, you’re like… I don’t know, we can run you over with a truck and your abs would be fine. But, so there you don’t really need external load in most cases, but I’d say a good resistance profile crunch machine where you really open up and you really crunch down, you really control eccentric and you really crunch down, I mean, I think that’s really, really hard to beat. I just, like, planks and all this fucking shit, I just think it’s such a goddamn waste of time for physique and strength people in most cases.

-Yeah, I like the… having the cable attachments with the rope putting it over your shoulders, and then, like a Bosu ball or any type of ball that you can really crunch over to get the range of motion, then use the cable stack, because you can do that in almost any gym. And good ab machines are quite a rarity in the gyms. -What do you do with your feet? -Just put them on the ground. If you get… if you get the right angles it usually works up to pretty high weights. -Okay. -But after body weights you would need some, something to put your feet firmly in place. -Yeah. I have, quite strong abs, and I have very short legs, so I just flip backwards. -Right. -But if you get a bench you put your feet under or a couple of plates, then that can be an excellent exercise for pretty much everybody. -Yeah. For most people, I think, if you dip yourself way to the front of the, the ball, the leverage, it’s usually all right up to around body weight. After that you do start flipping over a lot. -Sure.

-Moving to glutes. -Oh, yeah. -Best booty builder. -I mean, front foot elevated smith machine lunges are just really difficult to beat from an experiential perspective. When, like, you can get IOMS from them. Instantaneous Onset Muscle Soreness. When you do one set per leg, you’re like: “Oh, I got a cramp if I move. I got a lay down or some shit.” So it just… -What you think is up with that, by the way, the insane level of soreness that you get in the glute ham tie-in with those types of exercises. I think it’s because most people just don’t do them with a high enough volume and frequency to get used to them. I think it’s just a repeat bout effect. -But specifically the location, right? It’s like very, like, glute ham tie-in. -Is that the case? I don’t know, for me it’s just a whole glute. -I got like the insane… That’s also like the standard bodybuilding law, there’s not really a glute ham tie-in muscle, right? There’s just the glutes… -No. Yeah. Correct. Well, I will say, you know, we do have some data to support the idea of that longer length tension does hypertrophy you distally more and that’s distal part of the glute. And that’s, that’s kind of what it is, I’d say that’s probably something to do with it, but… You know like hip thrust are fine. Hip thrust suffer from a few theoretical problems, a few practical problems. So, you know, like one is that you have to load a fuck load of weight onto a bar.

Another one is that, you, the force curve is just backwards. It’s also an isolation exercise, so you just like training glutes by themselves, which is fine if that’s what you want. But a lot of times, like, why not train other stuff too. Front foot elevated Smith machine lunges train your quads quite well, they trainer adductors really well, and they train your glutes into the moon. And train your cardio and your ballsack really well too, because fuck that exercise sucks. And it’s embarrassing because you’re on the Smith machine with like 10s on each side and everyone’s like: “What the hell’s wrong with that guy? His legs are huge, right? He’s so weak!” and you’re like: “You try this, motherfucker!” And I usually do it after quads, so my quads are cooked anyway. So it really is just 10s on a side. It’s kind of embarrassing.

-What do you think is wrong with the force curve on a hip thrust? -It is very difficult at the top and at the bottom anyone can lift like 8,000 pounds. -Yeah, true… -And so… -I mean, Bret Contreras might argue that you get probably the highest active mechanical tension in the glutes at the top. So maybe it’s a good thing? You argue it’s too much probably? -I mean like if a force curve was half as extreme, that might be the thing. Also like active mechanical tension is nice. Passive mechanical tension also grows muscle also lengthened tension is so dominant now that it’s difficult to say like how much active tension at the top can counter that? Some. But is it not balance a thing? I’ll say this is where I’m like just currently pretty much by myself in the evidence base community with my bullshit proxies like pump and soreness and fucking shit like that. I do think I still going to win that debate in the end sometime. The pump literature has been very good to me recently. It correlates quite well with growth, we’ll see how that ends up. But I say, like if I do 5 sets of hip thrusts, I get a decent pump, I get a little bit sore, and it’s novel, I haven’t done it before. I’m like, okay, this exercise works.

Like, Menno, imagine doing five sets per leg of front foot elevated lunges for first time. Like you won’t come back to the gym. The raw stimulus magnitude is just incomparable. And so I’d say hip thrusts are very, very excellent by the best isolation exercises for glutes or near isolation exercise. And a lot of people like, yeah, the competitive aspirations or they already did enough squats, They don’t want their legs any bigger but they want bigger glutes, man, hip thrusts are… They’re just very difficult to beat. The variety of ways to rig them… Whoever makes the following machine first is going to make a substantial amount of money: Just make a cam leveraged hip thrust machine that makes it very difficult at the bottom, very easy at the top, I will fucking buy one and I will talk about it on the internet and you will sell lots of them. It’s just obvious at this point and no one’s done it yet. So I would say that is a very, very good way to go. And you don’t even have to have some kind of magical construction design. You just have a lever system that’s angled properly at the beginning and that’s it. So the barbell hip thrust is just… it just leaves so much to be desired. And if I have to put six plates onto something that’s on the ground and it’s not a deadlift, I’m just not doing it. -Yeah, a lot of people have that, it’s not time efficient. -Oh my God!

-What about, erector spinae? You think squats and deadlifts? That’s all you need? Do you do isolation work for them? -I mean, like, depends on for what? If you want to do, you know, bodybuilding- Yeah, absolutely. Like, there’s probably no reason to train your erectors for bodybuilding. I would say for overall health I’m increasingly more and more led to believe that dynamic movements for almost every joint are a good idea for preventative measures and for injury prevention, for overall robustness. So I love to do flexion rows of various forms. Cable flexion row, dumbbell, barbell… And that’s where you actually bend at the spine. Ever since I started doing that, like my spinal health, back health has just been like amazing. And I do like combat sport and so my back is always in very precarious positions. The thing is, if you’re very, very strong, just with a locked in posture and someone unlocks you or you bend down to pick up a cup and you pull something in your back because you’re never in spinal flexion. That used to happen to me all the time. I was a decent powerlifter and it still happened to me all the time. So I think some spinal flexion and extension is just a good thing. And for hypertrophy, for physique like rarely.

I have really cool like gnarly gigantic spinal erector so I kind of don’t want to lose them and sometimes want to make them bigger just because it’s sweet look. So for vibes yeah, you can do those. But I think having a spinal erector dedicated like… -Like back extensions. -Yeah, back extensions are just like just not a good exercise for so many fucking reasons. They’re not loadable very heavily unless you get the barbell out, then you end up hitting the supports. Fuck this. The force curve’s all wrong because it’s very easy at the bottom, very tough at the top. So on and so forth. So I think, and also like, why not train the rest of your back while doing it? So I just say just do a row with the back extension and there is a flexion row. I do love the way cable rows feel, with the full flexion, because actually, when you’re fully flexed at the bottom of a cable row, the angle of pull for your lats is even better. And so it ends up being just like one of the best all around back exercises that you can do. So I would say this is not very important if you’re doing bent rows and you’re doing stiff legged deadlifts and stuff, I think you’re totally good to go. With squats. your erectors are going to be big and strong. If you have struggle with some back stuff before, I would say starting very light high rep and moving up slowly in weight for flexion rows of various kinds or just like… or Jefferson curls… It’s just like one of the best things you can do for your back. -All right.

What about lats? -One arm crossed… I’m kidding. So for lats, man, I just every single time I get away from it, every single time I come back to it, just good old pull ups with any grip… So good, man, they’re so goddamn good. Whether do you want to do them body weight, whether you want to do them weighted… I would say get your chin to the bar, roughly, and then, especially in the bottom two thirds, really milk that eccentric. And you’re not going to able to do that many reps, it’s kind of embarrassing. But you like every time I just cannot beat the DOMS I get and the pumps I get from pull ups with any other back exercise. I’ve tried them all. Nothing compares. Assisted pull ups are awesome, but regular pull ups, man. There’s something special about them. And like, that’s just for me. Some people do them… -You mean pull ups or chin ups? Any grip. -I do not, as I never use the word chin up, ever. I’m not upset that you used it. I’m a little upset. -Convention is like it’s a chin up this way, pull up this way… -Yeah. It’s just like… The exercise to me is called pull up… -You pull yourself up. -Correct. I could even say it’s just called a chin up and then it’s various grips. Cause there’s neutral grip, overhand grip, wide grip, underhand and so on and so forth. There’s also like 45 angle grip which feels quite nice for many people. So I would say like there’s just no wrong answer on grips. It’s whatever feels nice to you. And a lot of them, the right answer is variation. You know, like if someone’s like, hey do you like, you know, blond girls or brunettes or… You would be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like, I’ll take them all, goddammit. Not on the same session because, you know, tend to get upset at each other if they’re in the same bed.

-What about, rear delts? You do them with your back training? Do you need to isolate them? -Yeah, you need to isolate them if your rear delts are lagging and you can do some rear delt work. That’s quite good. I would actually say one of my favorite exercises for rear delts is the Smith machine. You could do it with the barbell, too. In a rack, the Smith machine inverted row. So you get the Smith machine, you plank your body and you pull yourself and, pulling height can be here, it can be here, it can be here, can be here. Somewhere between here and here is where most people will find, especially if they bring their arms back. Dude, I get a fucking rear delt pump from that. I almost never get a real pump from anything. Also, you get a deep tension, high tension at the stretch. Easier at the contraction because the angle improves for you, vectors get easier and so it’s actually like a really good force curve. It also beefs up the rest of your upper back, which is dope. If you’re spending all of your time on, like, just a rear delts, it’s kind of weird. It’s fine. Then, you know, cross body or rear delt cable stuff is excellent. I hate the rear delt machine. It almost does nothing for me at all, you know, just it ends up being a back exercise. I would just prefer to do the elbows, elbows up and out, face pulls against a barbell. The leverage advantage. You know the TRX? You know what that is? The TRX bands? Those are actually excellent for it because again, they incorporate leverage advantage and with them you can start low and pull high or start high and pull low whichever way hit your rear delts better. I think that’s an excellent exercise.

What I generally say to people is I almost always treat rear delts like I treat front delts. I almost never train front delts on purpose. I almost never train rear delts on purpose. Because if you do proper full range of motion back training, bro, if you look at an anatomy book and you look at any back exercise… Pull ups. Tell me rear delt… If you had a tear, like a fucking avulsion in your rear delt, you could do pull ups? No fucking way. It’d be the most painful thing in the world. Oh shit. It looks like they contribute a very large fraction of the force. A lot of people just forget, like like like this… Like… Well, hold on a sec… What other function is part of the delts? To do this. And this. And so you’re doing like 18 sets of rear delts anyway all the time. If you need extra – dope, but what I like to do is for my shoulder volume, all of my shoulder volume, almost all of it, I like extra on the side delt because the side doesn’t get much from pushing and pulling and also the side delt has by far the most visual appeal. Like if you have big rear delts like yeah, it looks cool, if you have big front delts, you look strong, if you have big side delts, like you probably gettin pussy right now, big homie, you feel me? You can’t bat the pussy away, man. It just keeps following you everywhere. -It’s funny, even for rehab there’s research that compound exercises, which anything that pulls the elbow back will train the rear delts, are just as effective as all the standard rehab type external rotation and stuff. -I don’t even know. Don’t even get me started on that shit.

-What about traps? Do you isolate those more? -On an as needed basis. I almost never isolate them. I went through a phase where for, like a year and a half I isolated traps, and they got bigger. -Which ones? Middle, lower, upper? -Upper. So because like, so with the way I row with a low angle rowing like mid traps is just not a problem. And so lower traps definitely not a problem. Upper traps could use more work, but honestly like the way, if you do a lot of side delt training, especially with dumbbells and machines and cross body, I mean, like your traps are working. -Do you actively shrug? -No, but what I do is I try to focus on completing the movement with good execution, and I try to focus to make sure that I can feel it in my side delts, you know, like the “elbow up” cue like, pulling with your side delts. But I never, ever, ever try to de-emphasize my traps.

And I think that’s a critical problem that many people run into, because the overall neural drive, you can get into a muscle or, he’s going to be limited by your bandwidth mentally of doing 50 other things and be like, okay, do your laterals, focus on your delt delts – okay, focus on not using your traps – okay, focus on your 2017 tax returns, think of all that and what was your first girlfriend’s favorite food? You’d be like, I don’t even fuck I’m doing anymore. You’re not going to get high neural drive. So what I usually tell people is focus on your side delts in side delt training, your traps won’t take over, they will contribute like they’re fucking supposed to. Like when you have people squat, do you tell them focus on your quads? Or do you tell them don’t focus on your glutes? I don’t even know how the fuck to do that. How do you not focus on something? It’s fucking insane.

And it’s a big problem because you end up like using 5 kilos instead of 10 kilos, and then you end up just like… oh, the fucking… you know the guys doing this fucking one armed shit, like just to here. And I’m like, why don’t you go higher? Why don’t you use more weight and like fucking: “My traps take over.” And I look at their physique. I’m like: “What traps, motherfucker? You don’t even have any goddamn traps.” And here’s a really good news. If you are working on your biggest side delts that you can and you train them normally your traps will get almost as big or bigger than you’ve even wanted, and that’s amazing. You never have to train your traps. I’ve literally seen men in the gym, guys that are trying to isolate their delts, like with all this crazy shit to get the traps out and then they do shrugs later and I’m just like, did you misunderstand how… it just baffles… that baffles me…

-In general, I think there’s a myth in bodybuilding circles that if you get more activity in one muscle group, it must come at the expense of another and research very clearly shows that’s not the case. -Opposite. You know, often case is like really strong triceps can push your pecs to go to limits they wouldn’t be able to before because like you can get the concentric up with more triceps than you’re supposed to and on the eccentric it’s all pecs and your pecs like, dude, I can’t even do this anymore. You can really push your muscles super hard. Do some people have a mind muscle connection problem with a certain muscle? Yes, but don’t worry about the other muscles. Literally don’t think about the other muscles. Think about your pecs. don’t worry about what your triceps are doing. Think about pushing through your pecs. Then you might get a little bit of better result. But like the whole “this other thing is taking over”… Usually it means you need to focus more on the muscle.

Here’s another thing. It means your technique might use some work. You imagine someone doing very close grip bench and be like: “I just feel it in my triceps?” Like, oh no shit, motherfucker. Widen your grip a little bit. Some people like… Oh, I’m just getting catty. I don’t, I don’t want to be all negative. But some people like, will talk about mind-muscle connection and feeling a muscle, and you’ll watch them do an exercise of their doing this shit and you’ll like you shut up. What are you doing? Have you ever seen Jared Feather train? When you train like Jared you get to talk about mind-muscle connection till you’re blue in the face. If you don’t train like that, at least start training in a way that externally I can tell you’re like trying to do something organized. Like, I should be like, man, I can’t. I don’t really feel my back in rows and you watch them do rows and they’re like this. You know, like, I don’t I don’t know what you feel at all. I don’t feel my hips or my dick coming out. I don’t know.

Speaking of triceps and pecs, what are your favorite exercises for those? -So for the pecs, this is like an exercise most people won’t run into. But cambered bar bench presses are just like GOATed beyond recognition. -For the extra range of motion. -Oh my god bro, that extra three inches, let me tell you. Am I right? It’s so big. It’s so big. -But about the bench press now… -Say it again. -We’re talking about the bench press. -Oh, for sure! I… There’s nothing big in my life I would ever say about. So, it’s now 3.5in. The, the stimulus is just wild because, like, on all the technical grounds, like, it’s a very stable movement, it’s a very loadable movement. And it’s very, it’s movement’s easy to replicate technique wise. And all of a sudden it’s a three inches extra insanely difficult eccentric. It just blows your pecs into the moon. So I’d say that’s great.

I would say properly executed incline dumbbell presses into which you take the proximal edge of the dumbbell and you touch it to the proximal edge of your bicep or the distal edge of your front delt. Make sure you hear that correctly. I am talking about touching the dumbbell like three inches deeper than your pecs. Because guys do dumbbell press and they stop here. Sometimes they don’t even touch their pecs and I’m like… Every time we have someone on RP, we’re training, We’re like, watch this, we teach them the technique And after one set they’re like, “Oh, oh, holy shit! My chest.” Like, yeah, that’s that’s like pretty straight forward. So those are good exercises. Deficit push ups are amazing. For some folks that want overall chest development and respond well, slightly lean forward dips are actually quite good. I love bench presses. I think bench presses are amazing for the chest. And almost everyone… I know some people don’t like them and I totally get it. Almost everyone that doesn’t like the bench press, or incline press for pecs is almost always doing it wrong. Like they’re not arching or contracting. They’re not controlling the centric, they’re not pausing. Like, of course your fucking shoulders hurt. But they think some of those core movements are just really tough to be.

A good press machine is excellent, one that allows you to go really deep, like, that Atlantis machine and things. A lot of… you’ve been around the world, training…. You ever trained on Technogym equipment? -Yeah. -Is there a way we can get the United Nations to, like, cease and desist like Technogym from, like spreading their equipment all around the world? -There’s a few manufacturers that are extremely popular for no reason, that to me that seems related to the quality of the equipment, like force curves are terrible. -Terrible. -Range of motion is not good. They just don’t fit well. The movement. So it feels like a little bit awkward. -Yes. It’s like, I’ve done some of their like lat pulldown stuff and I’m like, I’ve never been able to feel elbow pain on a lat pull down until now. And no lat pump. Like how did you guys do it? -They have some okay… They have some okay machines, but… -That’s one hell of a compliment. –

What about triceps? You need isolation work? -Yeah, yeah. Like if you want the biggest triceps, you are behoove you to do isolation work. -What type? Push downs? -So I love skull crushers. The barbell or Smith machine or inverted skull crusher, All to me the same class of movement, are amazing because they have almost the perfect force curve. Especially if you do inverted skull crushers because they’re easier at the top. Way harder at the bottom. And, just by leverage. So I think skull crushers are excellent. I think most people who say they don’t get a lot of skull crushers or their elbows hurt are doing the movement in a way that’s not good for the body, they experiment with different things. Skull crushers. To me, it begins… so there’s a spectrum from close grip bench all the way to overhead behind the neck extension. It’s a full spectrum.

So you can do incline skulls. You can do skulls to a bench behind you. You can do skulls to your actual skull. You can do eyes, nose, mouth, chin, throat. That’s actually one of the best exercises I have ever taught anyone. My arms are slightly too big to do it at this point, but. But can you guys see’em, that’s right, that’s right. If you can do this it’s so unbelievable. Get a spotter. But do skull crushers. So unlock at your elbows, I would generally do a false grip because it seems to be easier on the elbows, in my experience, unlock, and then in basically a straight line, come down to where you gently touch, like, open your chin, gently touch and pause for one second with the barbell touching your throat. It’s a deficit. Menno, it fucks people so bad. And it’s just it’s just going to annihilate you. And like that class of movement, deep skull crushers, amazing.

Push downs are awesome. I don’t like rope push downs because like they emphasize the contraction, which is the least useful part of the movement and the stretch is kind of always like eh. If you do push downs, I do like people to do the Jared Feather technique where they stay upright and as they bring the bar up, they pull their elbows back to get a deep stretch. I don’t like push downs out front. They’re cool. People are like, yeah, but fucking long head like, yeah, dope. There’s like 18 other ways to train your long head. One of them is just all back movements train your long head quite well. All pulling movements. The other thing is overhead work. I don’t do overhead work for my triceps anymore. Mostly because, I just got big enough to where like…

You almost never see, like, like national level guys and pro level guys doing overhead, behind neck extensions. And you’re like, is it just a bro thing? And the reality is they just can’t put their arms there anymore. Like it just doesn’t work. I used to do them for a long time. -They’re too big. -Literally just too big. There’s too much stuff in the way. I did them for a very long time. Some of the very flexible guys can do it, and it’s always a beautiful thing. Unfortunately not in the cards for me, but I did them for years. I did them with a straight bar, I did them with EZ bar… EZ bar standing overhead extensions where you focus on… Your elbows can actually flare any way you want. It’s a decent cue to flare them forward, at least on the way down. Make sure your elbow is pushed really far ahead of you, so it’s like in a squat… You don’t want to squat back and down for your quads, you want to squat forward and down. And so in an overhead extension, you actually want your elbows to move forward as you come down as opposed to back.

Now, back work great too but if you move them forward and down, you actually get the peak tension exactly at the peak stretch. And keep them nice and close. Like sets of 15 to 20. EZ bar… Just annihilation. It’s an amazing exercise. Fucks your long head up, fucks every head up. So overhead extensions with cables, with barbells, with EZ bars are awesome. So we have: skull variations, push down… So actually, to use the better anatomical procedure: push downs, skulls, incline variation and overhead. I would do some combination of all those rotated through the years. And I would say for most people, for full development, have some kind of movement that’s either a push down or a skull, one part of the week for triceps or a few of the days, and then one or a few of the days have some kind of overhead movement that you do. And I think it really squares away everything.

Dips are excellent, but dips are one of those things like, like in the RP Hypertrophy App we have dips as a tricep exercise, but there’s some nuance there because it does hit your chest. It’s kind of like, oh, it’s kind of more 50-50… There are ways if you plank your body very vertical and when you’re dipping, instead of taking your shoulders and putting them really far forward, which is more chest you actually, this is really difficult, you break and then you let your elbows slide back, but keeping upright. It ends up making like this arm angle at the bottom and it’s fucking brutal. You’re like, oh, I can do 10 dips. Like everyone’s looking at you at the gym. Like this guy is an idiot. In regular dips he could put 225 on and go for forever. Those kinds of dips where you really extend your elbow out, phenomenal for triceps. What I like to do is, for many people to get quite strong, do like 5 sets of overhead extensions or push downs or skulls, and then go do 4 or 5 sets of dips. Holy shit. Like you’re going to do sets of 5 to 10 dips, and every set is going to be like your muscles just burning alive. And it’s all really good.

-And then finally, the muscle that all the bros have been waiting for, the guns – biceps. -We did chest already, didn’t we? I’m an idiot. The biceps. So, like, at this point I’ve become like a trillionaire, spoiled bicep exercise enthusiast to where like, if you pick me up in a Mercedes and it’s not a Rolls Royce I’m like, oh, I’m sorry, sir, I’m waiting for my vehicle. And you’re like, I am the vehicle. I’m like, no, there’s been a misunderstanding. I’d never set my foot in one of these. So like barbell curls and shit, cable curls, like they fuck, they’re dope and they work, they’re effective, so they’re great. Feel free to use them.

But once you’ve tasted the nectar of inclined curls with a very deep incline, lying curls, on a bench or what… probably my favorite all time bicep exercise… I’m not saying it’s the best, just I love it. Free motion behind the back curls. So really Bayesian curls, but with two arms at a time. And, just basically like the attachments, you step forward and you get the supports to basically be orthogonal to you here so that the cable is pulling back exactly at the bottom. Here you go really far behind your back. I actually did that line curls yesterday, my biceps are sore as fuck. And you pull really far back and then you come up and curl. At the very top here it’s super easy, which is exactly what you want. And you can back up rest for a second, keep going with myo reps. Easy to set up, easy to warm up for. I mean, it’s just like God’s exercise for biceps and it fucking looks lame. But god damn does it screw you up in the best possible way. And because it pulls your elbows back for you and everything, it’s actually, I think, amazing for shoulder health and elbow health because it really stretches the dog shit out of everything. So that.

If you don’t have one of those free motion machines, I would say doing dumbbell curls, lay down on a bench and then take dumbbells, come out here, go all the way and up and down… Phenomenal, because the lengthened situation is amazing. The stretch situation is amazing and all of a sudden it’s just a great movement and very easy to do. Myo reps with is not systemically fatiguing. That’s another thing. You lie down and do bicep curls. Like you can do that until you’re blue in the face. Like when you get strong enough standing barbell curls are kind of annoying because like, I don’t know, do you get, like, I get my back gets tired from doing standing barbell curls pretty heavy. I’m just like, ugh… -Yeah. I’m not a big fan of barbell curls in general, -Which is a backwards force curve for hypertrophy. -You don’t get full range motion. You can, if you push your elbows forwards, it’s a little bit better, but then you actually do feel your core a lot with heavy weights. -Yes, yes Jared does that… The Jared curl like that but also like yes, you’re now you get the length and tension, but you’re no longer getting the stretch because you’re actually getting less stretch. And so it’s kind of like you could, you can you can rig curls to be good. Or you can do line curls or behind the back curls and just get like, amazing results. Yeah.

-Mike Israetel, everyone!