Since I’ve started the Smolov squat program I’ve been doing a lot of upper-body bodybuilding exercises. Bench press followed by incline dumbbell bench, followed by drop sets of push-ups – I can feel the pump just writing about it! However, in order to stay balanced and keep our shoulders and upper back healthy, we need an antagonistic movement so we don’t end up walking around like humpback, unable to raise our arms over our heads. But that's a while down the road.I like a good ol’ fashion bro-sesh as much as any other lifter. You can also ride it all the way up to metabolic stress-based schemes that can exceed 50 repetitions.Īs the weights get heavier for stronger lifters, two medium resistance bands, or a heavy single band, may be required. Train this movement in the traditional hypertrophy rep scheme between 8-15 reps at minimum. By recruiting the right muscles and minimizing compensation from other muscles, you'll limit unnecessary stress on the wrist, elbow, shoulder joint, and spine, and put it squarely where it belongs.
Remember, a key tenet of pain-free training is maximizing muscular targeting while minimizing joint stress. With this setup, expect the loads you are used to using on the cable stack to be reduced by 25-50 percent right away. This makes you dial in proper technique, constant tension, and muscular recruitment of the rear delts and upper back-and only those muscles. But in the hands-free variation, the bands will pull and lengthen if the movement becomes too quick, forceful, or uncontrolled. One key drawback of rope cable face pulls is that you can lean against the weight with your body, allowing you to cheat the movement without even knowing it. This small change allows you to have more freedom of movement, giving you access to both internal and external shoulder rotation more that the more common rope setup would allow.Īnother benefit? It keeps you seriously strict. This way, you can take away the need for your hands to grip during the face-pull movement at all. So here's the solution: Place a medium resistance circular band on the cable setup, looping each end of the band around your wrists. This makes it ideal for warm-ups, but also for beginners, people coming back from injury, or anyone who doesn't have a lot of equipment. One thing I love about the traditional banded face pull is that it offers more resistance at the tail end of the movement where the hands are close to the face, and less at the front side of the movement where many of the muscles of the upper back, including the posterior deltoid and teres group are weakest.
So, for anything to improve on either of them is a tall order! I see both of these performed in the gym daily, and I program both of them in the All Access guide Unstoppable: The Ultimate Guide to Training Through Injury. This variation is basically a combination of the best parts of the two most common face-pull variations: the banded face pull, and the cable rope face pull. After 18 months of beta testing this simple yet highly effective face-pull variation, I can definitively say this is the best variation that you've never done.Ĭheck it out. So, what could possibly make it better? One simple change that you probably didn't see coming, but that you can do without having to buy any extra equipment other than a band (which, seriously, you should already have).