First off, I had to throw the pic of me and Clint in to get even more of your attention.
I love giving articles names like this, must be from writing for the fitness magazines for so long. It gets your attention and makes you want to read it to see if you are doing stupid exercises.
Let me begin by saying a stupid exercise is better than sitting on the couch, maybe. In reality, all exercises have some benefit but I look at the risk versus reward to determine stupidness.
I am sure if I go through my video files I will find some doozies from over the years. I am not going to do that, instead I’ll get right to it and why I think they are dumb.
In no particular order, here are the Top 5 stupidest exercises ever:
(OK, a few aren’t exercises, but rather concepts.)
1. Behind the Neck Presses:
This is just dumb. The carryover you get from Behind the Neck Presses is minimal compared to a real press. The risk of catastrophic shoulder injury is maximal.
Your shoulder is in a very precarious position in this exercise and one wrong move and you are kaput.
It is even dumber when seated.
Stick to a real Press done standing.
2. Leg Extensions:
I hate them. So much so that we do not and will not ever have a leg extension machine.
Sure a lot of bodybuilders and regular people love them for isolating the quads but I am not a fan.
They present a high amount of shear force on the patella and can be very dangerous. If you want to smash your quads, do some Front Squats or some TKE’s, or a leg press or the Power Squat or some Pistol Squats or a thousand other ones.
3. Upright Rows:
Again, another bodybuilding staple and many can do it without injury. However, in the form I see it done most of the time, my shoulders start to hurt.
Stick to High Pulls.
4. Doing All Isolation Work (concept, not an exercise):
We see this all the time, especially when the kids come in with a program the football coach wrote out or when they read an article in the latest muscle mag.
Spend the bulk of your time on big exercises. This is a concept. Big lifts utilize more muscles than small ones eliciting a larger growth response. Seems simple right?
If you want to get big and strong spend your energy on big lifts like squats, presses, bench presses, rows, deadlifts, pullups and the like.
Sure, you should do some isolation work but that should make up a smaller percentage of your time.
5. Doing stuff that is above your pay grade (concept, not an exercise):
The other night I saw something that gave me the idea for this article.
There was a kid spending 10 minutes setting up banded rack pulls. I know he has about a 225 deadlift……
Let’s just assay the he ended up with almost zero band tension on the bar and was doing rack pulls from the knee with a grinding 185. He then did about 5 mobility exercises between sets.
Sure, this is better than sitting on the couch but if he chose wisely he would have gotten much more work done in much less time with something else.
Yes I know I sound like I am bashing people, but I am not. I am trying to be helpful.
If you deadlift 225 at 200 pounds bodyweight wouldn’t you be better suited working your ass off at basic exercises instead of advanced exercises that you are not prepared for?
For example, maybe 5 sets of 5 deadlifts followed by some deficit pulls for a few sets and a shit ton of Glute Ham raises and maybe some sled dragging?
Stick with basic exercises if you are not an advanced lifter. Save the advanced stuff for when you are advanced.
I am off the soapbox now.
Choose your exercises wisely. If you don’t know how to choose, hire a coach. If you can’t afford that, use a site like this. You can post a question and get a bunch of answers from actual experts for free.
Let us help you.
That’s all I have time for now. This new building stuff has me all jacked up in the time management department.
Oh, and one more thing, good luck to Carlos Moran of Team TPS.
He is lifting in the 198's this weekend at Boss of Bosses 2.
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