In our last training newsletter, we had the first four “Exercises that Cause the Most Injuries.”
If you missed it, they’re preacher curls, overhead presses, deadlifts, and bench presses. I’ve done all of those over the years and sustained my share of injuries; however, I was never unlucky enough to have to go under the knife for joint repair. I still have recurring pain, however.
Here are the remaining four:
#5: Squat. Another powerlift with high cost, low benefit. Spine compression is high with heavy squats, plus, your torso pitches forward, putting more resistance on your glutes than your quads. One last point: Because you’re involving the glutes, which is a hip flexor muscle, you shut off one of the quad group, the rectus femoris, a hip extensor. So you’re essentially not training 20 percent of the quadriceps group with barbell squats. That’s due to reciprocal innervation.
#6: T-bar row. This puts your lower spine in danger if you start trying to heave mega poundages. While this exercise can provide good stretch overload to the middle traps for unique development, it’s much safer to use chest-supported exercises, like incline dumbbell rows, featured in the Old Man, Young Muscle back workouts as an add-on move to the ideal exercise.
#7. Dips. Both parallel bar dips and bench dips (pictured below) overstretch the shoulder joint as your upper arms travel back behind your torso. Also, both of those exercises are front-deltoid-head dominant, not doing all that much for chest or triceps as most believe.
#8. Behind-the-neck pulldowns. This one is cringe-worthy. Not only are you getting the upward pull on your shoulder joint at the top, which can damage the tendons and connective tissue, you’re torquing your shoulder joint to the rear so the bar doesn’t hit your head on the way down. This, along with behind-the-neck overhead presses, helped me almost need shoulder surgery.
If you’re younger, you may want to consider dropping all or at least some of these for more ideal exercises shown in the Old Man, Young Muscle ebook. Your joints will thank you as you age. If you do choose to go heavy or get a little sloppy, have a good orthopedist on retainer and a gurney standing by.
Get Your Efficient Mass-Building Handbook: For complete mass workouts that include Speed Sets, the ideal exercise for each muscle, and the best stretch and contracted add-on moves, get your copy of Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
