Any of you guys out of boredom or sheer inspiration ever make up your own exercises ?
For me I came up with the idea to combine 4 exercises into a grueling multi-monster set… Using a barbell it goes something like this:
10 reps bent over barbell row,
followed immediately by 10 reps clean and presses, then completed by 10 deep squats… then racking the weiht to do bench press… 3 or 4 sets, around 135 lbs. on the bar.
It is very intense and really puts you through the grinder but is great when you’re focused and short on time… The looks I get from doing this are pretty funny.
I’m trying to get into a flow by incorporating overhead squats with the barbell held at shoulder’s length overhead… but I find my lower back takes too much of a beating when I go mental like that…
Another variation is on the high/low pulleys on a cable stack; I use the high AND low to create a cross effect on chest flyes… sort of a diagonal flye, if you will; really feel the burn across the pecs…
Any of you guys/gals have any exercises that you just made up and got good results from ? I’d love to hear them and possibly work them into my routines to mix it up…
I think John Davies has one on here called The Bear. It combines the clean followed by a front squat, followed by a push press or jerk, followed by a back squat, followed by another push press/jerk, back to starting position. That’s one rep!! He has his athletes do sets of 6 of thos bad boys.
I made this up today. I took my couch and picked it up ten times. Then did 20 squat thrusts. then i picked up the coffee table and dragged it across the floor for 10 trips. Then I did 100 box squats with just my bodyweight. Anybody else see what Im getting at?
The Bear goes way, way back. Coach Davies is the latest in a long string of popularizers. Even so, how many of us would have heard of the Bear were it not for the Coach?
S-lifter,
Anyone who read Javorek articles, went through boot camp, played football, or other organized sports (squat thrust, jumping jacks, mountain climbers, star jumps, repeat a couple hundred times then barf and do it some more).
I don’t like most of these types of complexes because you can’t use enough resistance to stress your muscles or your nervous system.
That said, when I was a lowly bodybuilder, I used a superset of bent rows and deadlifts that is guaranteed to pack meat on your back. I would use a heavy rowing weight, like only 3-4 reps, making sure to squeeze the bar to my body at the top, then as soon as I was done rowing, I would deadlift the weight until failure. Not very scientific, but it worked.
Let’s not forget the lateral raise high pull, where you do a lateral raise but with so much momentum your delts are just along for the ride. But damn, you can use some big weights!
ACTUALLY, I do have a “neat” little trick I normally do inbetween set of heavy deadlifts to relax my CNS…
See, I take about… five or six mat and stack them up onto each other to make a huge “cushion.” Then I hop onto a bench and jump off that bench, do whatever flips or splits in the air, and comfortably land onto the mats. Best for active recovery days too ^^
I like to “jerk” a barbell overhead with about 130% of what I can military press, and then perform controlled excentric lowering of the bar. It can be traumatic for the rotator cuffs though, but for me it’s a darn good excentric.
LOL at your responses… Especially GOldberg’s… Irregular object lifting is cool but as another reply stated, “you are only limited by your imagination”.
haktOne: Did you write a book about those exercises or something? I see just about everybody in my gym doing one or more of them… I can’t believe how popular they are! I think it’s cool that I finally found out who started the hip-flexor bicep curl. I’m gonna tell all the punk kids at my gym that they’re just haktOne wannabes!
