16/01/2020
I see so many guys in the gym making these same 6 mistakes using gravity incorrectly that makes the exercises useless. Here they are:
Do You Have a Problem with Gravity?
It seems rather obvious that to build muscle, you have to push directly against gravity. But we found 6 popular movements that defy that law—and they’re worthless as a result!
By Bill Geiger, MA
Sure, you may have avoided physics in high school but that doesn’t mean you’re altogether unfamiliar with the fact that accidentally dropping a 25-lb. plate means to move your foot, fast. But sure as an apple falls to the ground from a tree, all too many bodybuilders unknowingly fail to account for gravity in any number of exercises.
How so? Well, when you lie on a bench press, you push more-or-less directly upward; aside from a seated machine, you wouldn’t dream of sitting upright with free weights doing the same bench-press motion directly forward! Gravity is pulling your dumbbells downward, so your real fight is with your front delts to hold them up—not unlike a front raise! Not a great chest builder!
In the spirit of showing you some of the bigger mistakes we found gym rats making that would make Sir Isaac Newton gasp, here are six that caught our attention.
1. Weighted Body Twist
We know what you’re trying to do—build and strengthen your obliques—but the problem is that holding a heavy weight doesn’t negate the fact the resistance of air is still pretty negligible. Whether you hold the weight close to you or away, it’s the shoulders that are working (rather isometrically). That’s why we do cable wood chops, which in fact allow the resistance to come from across your body and thus better target the obliques! Some gyms also have seated rotary machines in which your rotate at the waist against resistance You’re no Don Quixote, so stop tilting at windmills.
2. Multi-Joint Barbell Curls
Just about all of us, in an effort to bring the weights higher when curling, allow our elbows to creep forward away from our sides. Just watch other folks at the gym and you’ll see what I mean. But that not only recruits the front delts in this now-multi-joint movement, but all too often enables you to position your elbows directly below your hands—stacked, if you will. When that happens there’s almost no tension on the biceps via gravity, but the front delts are going through a workout to keep your elbows (with weights) in position. If you instead lock your elbows by your sides, that can’t happen (or use cables, which minimizes the problem by changing the direction of pull).
3. Dumbbell Kickback (Dave this was shot incorrectly in a recent article so let’s make sure you understand what I’m looking for.)
Just because you can take an exercise further in the range of motion doesn’t mean you should. In the bent-over position when doing dumbbell kickbacks, your working-side elbow should be locked by your side, upper arm more or less parallel with the floor. As you lower the weight on the eccentric motion, go no further than the 6 o’clock position; that is, when your forearm is pointing directly downward. If you go past this point you start raising the weight up (which is an arm-flexor movement, working the biceps and brachialis), and when you finally reverse direction the triceps are gaining momentum working with gravity, not against it. The problem is highly accentuated if you do the exercise from a semi-standing position and your elbow drops significantly (upper arm no longer parallel with the floor). That’s pretty much a hammer curl.
4. Rotator-Cuff Exercises with Dumbbells
We’ve called this one out before and we’ll do it again here. The direction of the line of pull is critical to work your muscles, and with rotator-cuff movements (whether internal or external rotation), it must be coming from across your body. Read that again: across! When you’re just standing there with a dumbbell at your side, gravity pulls downward! My physical therapist calls this an isometric biceps curl! Fix it by doing the movement on a cable (adjust pulley to waist height) or using a band (again coming from across at waist height). If you’re lying on your side on the bench, it is possible to do external rotation with a dumbbell.
5. Svend Press
I stumbled across this “chest” gem while perusing the Bodybuilding.com library and it’s horribly overrated. At best you get an isometric contraction (which is of some benefit for the inner pecs), but because you do the movement standing, it misses just like the weighted body twist. (There’s a reason you don’t do dumbbell bench presses from a seated position as mentioned in the intro!) In fact it’s the shoulders that have to work to keep your arms (and weights) elevated. However if you did this lying on a flat bench or possibly even incline bench, you could turn this into a winner. (And would someone tell Svend to put his name on another exercise?)
6. Underhand Crossover with Dumbbells
Don’t Waste Your Time with This Chest Move
Recently I saw a couple of guys trying to mimic the cable crossover from the lower pulleys, a great single-joint upper-chest movement, instead standing with dumbbells. While we can admire their creativity and effort, unfortunately it’s a complete whiff on pec day. Let’s see why.
Start with this experiment: Drop a plate accidentally and it heads straight toward the floor – and hopefully misses your foot. Grasp a D-handle attached to a lower pulley, pull it out and release it. Where does the handle go? It snaps back toward the lower pulley as the plates crash down on the weight stack.
While this doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy, it illustrates an important difference: Gravity always pulls free weights toward the floor, but with cables the direction of the pull always comes from the angle at which the pulley is set. Here, effectively, gravity is coming from the side! True, the weight stack falls to the floor, but the position of the pulley determines the angle of pull, which can be used advantageously in designing your chest workouts.
Let’s not forget the idea of building the fullest muscle possible is to hit it from multiple angles, which is why you do bench presses from flat bench, incline, and decline positions. In each movement, you press directly upward against gravity, but it’s the angle of the bench that enables you to manipulate the how the pectoralis is targeted.
What’s more with cables you can further fine tune the angle of the pull not just in terms of how near or far you are from the pulley position, but also where the pulley is set -- from high to low or anywhere in between. This feature makes cable exercises distinct from their free-weight counterparts in which the direction of the pull never changes.
So what’s going on with the standing dumbbell version of the cable crossover? (Typically, remember, you stand a couple of steps forward of the imaginary line connecting the pulleys.) For one, the lower pulley setting means the line of pull is coming from the side, back and down, but not directly down. What’s more, if you re-positioned the pulleys to their top-most position, the angle of pull changes to the side, up and back, which targets the lower region of the pecs more effectively.
While the scooping motion of a low-pulley cable crossover effectively hits the pecs because you’re working in a plane more or less perpendicular to your body as we stated above, that’s not what’s happening when you do the exact same scooping motion with dumbbells. The muscle getting the biggest workout here – regardless of whether you’re using an underhand or overhand grip with the weights – are the front delts. In fact, raising any weight in the front plane of your body with free weights is considered an effective front-delt exercise. While there might be some minimal isometric chest activity, far better alternatives are on the cable, as well as acutely inclined benches.
