Small Angles Full-Body Live Video Transcript
I explain how to do the various bodyweight-focused final workout in my Small Angles Full-Body program.
I explain how to do the various bodyweight-focused final workout in my Small Angles Full-Body program.
Note: This tutorial video was recorded as a live Facebook event. The text below is an edited transcript of the tutorial intended to provide members with a convenient means of referring to and further researching the topics and content detailed in the video.
Hey JYM Army, Dr. Jim Stoppani here, and today I'm going to do be doing a live workout. So now we're live on Instagram, we're live on Facebook—just waiting for a few more people to join in. Today I'm doing Workout 5, the final workout using my Small Angles Full-Body Training.
This is my Train with Jim series, so for those of you who aren't familiar with the Train with Jim series, this is my personal training program that I'm delivering to you every day so you get to literally train with me. You can be my training partner.
Now, the style of training that I am doing lately is full-body. So we're going to train the entire body—30 exercises—but today, we're doing all bodyweight moves to mix it up. During the week we've done four other Small Angle workouts, and the concept of the Small Angles is that you're doing variations of the same exercise.
So for example, with the push-up we're going to start with a decline push-up, then do a regular push-up, and then an incline push-up. For back, we'll do pull-ups, chin-ups, and inverted rows.
So three different versions of pull-ups here, all for bodyweight, and the concept here is that by doing these different variations you're targeting different muscle fibers within that muscle group. That way you're maximizing the number of muscle fibers you're using.
Let's get started right here—no time to waste. We're going to do decline push-ups. Now, with push-ups obviously you're stuck to your bodyweight, so the other thing I'll mention here is that the rep ranges are just going to be whatever you can do—the max reps that you can do—to failure or close to failure.
Now, with the push-up, when we do the flat push-up you're not using your entire bodyweight, and so there are ways to change what percentage of your bodyweight you're doing based on whether you have your feet elevated or your hands elevated. By elevating your feet, you're adding resistance from your bodyweight but you're also changing your body positioning.
With my feet up, here, and I do the push-up now it mimics more of an incline press than the standard bench press. So now I'm using more weight from my body because my feet are elevated, and I'm getting more of the upper pec muscle fiber. So this is a much harder move of the push-ups, so I'm going to do this first before doing standard push-ups.
So we'll take this to failure, or close there—just to keep this short, I'll stop short of failure, just to demonstrate. There are going to be a lot of unique exercises in this workout, so I'll focus more on instruction of the actual exercises versus the intensity of the workout. We'll start with the decline push-up to hit more upper pecs.
I'm just going to stop at ten there, we'll say I hit failure. Now, a question I'm getting is what's the rest period. Well, if we look back at our workout table here—we've completed the decline push-up, now we're going into the push-up. You could rest if you want, or you can do these as a triset where you're just going right from one exercise to the next to decrease time and increase your intensity.
After the decline, we move to a flat push-up. And remember, with push-ups you don't want those elbows flaring out. You want to keep them tucked in toward your sides to protect the shoulder joint, just like with the bench press—you want to tuck those elbows in.
So let's say I hit failure there on the push-up. Then I can go immediately into incline push-ups where, instead of having my feet elevated, now I have my hands elevated so now it reduces the percentage of my bodyweight. So now this is even easier than floor push-ups, and here I'm hitting more lower pecs because of the change in my body position. This mimics a decline press.
And so that's basically our chest workout for this workout. So we've completed our push-ups—our decline, our regular, and our incline—now we're immediately going to switch over and go into a pulling move. We went pushing with chest, pulling for back—so we'll head over right here to the power rack.
Here we'll start with wide-grip overhand pull-ups. Now, this is going to target more of the upper lat muscle fibers, just like the wide-grip pulldown. You're going to take a wide, overhand grip on the bar and then you're going to do pull-ups until failure. And again, just to save on time we'll say that I hit failure.
So now we'll move into—from an overhand, wide-grip pull-up—into a chin-up or a reverse-grip pull-up. Note the chin-up, because I'm turning my arms around, I'm going to be using more biceps. So it makes sense to do this after the pull-up when you're fatigued because you'll be stronger and still able to get reps. And again, just like with the push-ups, you could either rest as long as you want or move right into the next exercise.
The other thing with the pull-up is you'll notice my elbows go from in front of the body down to my sides. What I'm doing here is—that movement is hitting more of the lower lats, whereas the pull-up with the wide grip, my elbows are coming up to the sides to hit more upper lats. Here, I'm hitting more lower lats.
So I've done pull-up, the chin-ups or reverse-grip pull-ups, and now we'll go into inverted rows. Now, these you can set up on a power rack like this, or you could do them on a smith machine. But basically, your inverted rows you're pulling yourself to the bar.
The research on doing inverted rows—and I'll show you how to do this on the smith machine as well—is that with the inverted row, compared to a bent-over barbell row, as you expect the inverted row places far less stress on the lower back and actually increased lat fiber involvement compared to the bent-over row. So you get more lat involvement, less stress on the back, with inverted rows.
Now, with the inverted row, you're going to lower the bar down. The lower you go—it's kind of like a push-up. Remember, when I'm flat my resistance on the push-up is pretty much maximized compared to when I put my hands up and the do the push-up on a bench—I've reduced the resistance from my bodyweight due to the angle of my body. Same with the inverted row.
We're in an upside-down push-up position, so it's the same concept: The higher I am, the more angle my body has, the less resistance from my body, the easier it's going to be; the lower I go, the more flat my body is at the start position, the more resistance.
And then the same thing with the inverted row here as the push-up—if you put your feet up it then increases the resistance. So you can do it your feet elevated to increase the resistance or with your feet on the floor and do it that way. So that's your inverted row. Watch my video—I have several YouTube videos—demonstrating how to do the inverted row.
That's basically our three exercises for back. Then, when we get into legs with bodyweight moves, we're going to be one-legged step-ups. So we're going to start with what's known as a diagonal step-up. With the diagonal step-up what you're doing is maximizing the involvement of the quadriceps.
This is based on a research study showing that when you do a step-up with the feet pointed forward, you're really using a lot of glutes and hamstrings on this move. However, what we've found is that if you position the foot at a 45-degree angle or so—instead of straight ahead—and then do your step-up, you're using less glutes and hams, more quadriceps. So it's a good way to turn a step-up into a more quad-focused move, and it's a bit harder than doing it the standard way.
So we'll start with the diagonal, and again just for the sake of time, I won't go to full failure because I could probably do at least 20 here. So, left leg—you'll do all reps on each leg before switching to the other leg. Obviously, I'm limited on the number of reps I can do with my right leg.
Now, the step-up—since we're alternating legs—you really don't need a rest. Once you hit failure on the diagonal step-up you can go right into the standard step-up. Then switch legs—again, I'm not going to go to failure, we'll be here a while—except for this leg, after a few reps I'll hit failure. So we've done diagonal step-up—more quad-focused; we've done the regular step-up—more glute and ham; and now we're going to do the side step-up.
A good point is when you're pressing, remember regardless of how you're doing your step-up you want to be pressing through the heel. You guys notice when I do—you'll see me do leg presses, you'll see the balls of my feet will come up off of the leg press. People are like, "Aren't you supposed to be pushing with the ball of your foot?" No, you're supposed to be pushing through the heel.
So as you step up, you don't want to be doing anything like this where your heel is raised and you're pushing through the ball or the toes. You want a flat foot, but more so you're really focusing on pushing through the heel and then pulling your body up. So, regardless of—the diagonal, same thing—you're still pushing through that heel, not pushing through the ball or the toes.
And the same thing with the side step-up. With the side step-up, you're simply coming from the side and over, and as you would expect this is going to hit a lot of the adductor muscles—pull the leg in—but also the quads as well because it's a bit like the diagonal step-up. So, you'll do both legs going to failure, and like I said do those three different versions back to back to back because while the one leg is working, the other leg is getting a rest.
For those of you who are familiar with my full-body programs and the Train with Jim series, I typically break it up. So I did a pushing, a pulling, now we've done legs to give the upper body a break. Now we can go back to our upper body—we're going to go with shoulders, so we're going to do a pike press.
Now, a pike press is basically a difficult push-up because it's for the shoulders. What you want to do is you can set up a bench, you can use an exercise ball, you could use this platform that I have—what you're essentially going to do is create a 90-degree angle between your torso and your lower body and your goal is to do basically shoulder presses—upside-down shoulder presses.
Once we're done with the pike press, we're going to go right into a dive bomber push-up. The dive bomber push-up is great for the shoulders, as you'll see the movement here. The dive bomber push-up starts—you're going to start in the normal push-up position, but then what you're going to do is arch, stick your butt up like a yoga move, and now you're going to start from this position.
Now here what you're going to do is you're going to use your arms to lower your body, and then you're going to push your body up and then back. So now you can see that what I'm doing is—particularly on this move right there—is I'm using a lot of shoulders. And because I fatigued my shoulders with the pike press, you shouldn't be able to do many of these because they're a hard version of the push-up, particularly after doing chest, back, and then the pike press.
That's your dive bomber push-up. From here—so, we've done the pike press, dive bomber push-up—now we're going to what's called the doorway lateral raise. You can do this in a power rack as well. It's just a static move—you're simply going to stand in a doorway or your power rack, and you're going to finish off your delts by pressing against the sides as hard as you can like you're starting a lateral raise.
You're going to try to hold it for at least 20 seconds, or for as long as you can while truly pressing as hard as you can. You really want to maximize the force you're putting here, and really start feeling it fatiguing in those middle delts.
Remember, this used to be an old trick we used to do as kids because once you really hold it for long it's almost hard to keep your arms down—your arms just float up after a while. But if you try that following the pike press, the dive bomber push-ups, your delts are going to be on fire after.
Now, let's get into traps. With traps, it's easy to do lower trap work with your bodyweight, which is basically straight-arm dip; that's going to hit the lower traps. How do you hit the upper traps—which is a shrugging move—how do you hit them with your bodyweight? Well, it's all about body position.
I'm drinking black coffee. So, normally—it's about 2:15 right now. For those of you who know, I don't eat until 4 o'clock and I haven't eaten today, but I'm a huge proponent of training in your feeding window. But today I'm training outside my feeding window. That's fine once in a while—I have a tattoo appointment tonight, so I have to get out early.
That means the only time I can train is outside my feeding window—during my fasting window—so I'm still drinking black coffee. But by the time I'm done I'll probably have not much more than an hour before it's 4 o'clock—and I might even shorten it, start at 3:30 or 3:00, and then just shorten my feeding window which normal goes until midnight to 11:00 or 11:30. So, still drinking black coffee, which is one of the other reasons why I'm using this workout more for demo purposes than for true intensity purposes.
The inverted shrug is just what it sounds like: You're literally going to take your body, turn it upside-down, and do shrugs. Now, you could do this on a smith machine, because if you're going to—you can't do it on a pull-up bar unless you've got a very high gym. If I come up here and try to do my inverted shrugs, I hit the ceiling so I can't really get into position. So unless you have cathedral ceilings in your gym it's difficult to do.
So what you have to do is lower the bar, because you're going to be upside-down. So you have a couple options: You could do it on the smith machine, however as I'll show you here my smith machine is problematic because what you're going to be doing is essentially this, okay? And doing your shrugs.
But here, what's going to happen is your feet are going to swing down. So, while you can get used to supporting yourself, an easier way to do it is to have a rack where there's a bar right here and that'll support your feet. In a power rack—at least mine, where we have the pull-up bar at the top—and then we can take another bar and put it on.
What you're going to have to do is set it up for your own ceiling height and for your body length. And so, here's how we're going to do this. Here, now, you see what happens? Now the back of my legs are supported, so now I can be completely straight, completely vertical, and now I can do inverted shrugs.
That's your inverted shrugs. It'll be difficult for a lot of people to do, but if you've got some acrobatics in you and some flexibility it's a lot easier than it looks and it's an amazing trap pump—my traps are on fire just from those few reps.
Next we're going to go into what I call an inverted row shrug, and here—just like the inverted row for back—you're going to be in a more horizontal position, so when we do our shrug here—which is just going to be this short move, straight arms—we're hitting more of the middle traps.
This is mimicking that incline prone shrug, so you're focusing on just squeezing those shoulder blades back and together to really focus on using the middle portion of the traps. So what I've done now is with the inverted shrug I've hit the upper traps, with the inverted row shrug I hit middle traps—next up on the list is straight-arm pull-up.
Now you could either do the pull-up or straight-arm dip here. Remember, the straight arm dip, instead of using your shoulders and chest and triceps to lower your body down, you're going to keep your arms straight and simply allow your body to drop—with arms straight—and now you're going to use your lower traps to pull your body up.
However, you can do the same thing from the pull-up station. If you want some variety from the straight-arm dips, here you can do straight-arm pull-ups, which is basically the same thing—you're using your lower traps to simply raise your torso as high as you can before you start engaging the lats and the biceps by bending at the elbow.
You're simply going to hang—about a shoulder-width grip or whatever's comfortable—and simply try to use those lower traps to pull your body up. Just a small movement, and that's it. So try that compared to the straight-arm dip version.
Now we're done with traps—we've hit upper, we hit middle, we've hit the lower—now we're going to move into calves. So with the calves what we're going to do is one-leg standing calf raises. Like I said, we're limited to bodyweight, right? For those of you who have access, you don't have to do this bodyweight version, but I would still recommend giving it a try because a lot of these moves you can do when you're on the road and you don't have access to a gym.
You'll find that when you do the one-legged calf raise, if you don't really support yourself by holding onto something—you're just using your fingers to sort of balance—you'll find it's a lot more difficult than you really thought.
So what you're going to do is we're going to do one version where the body's just straight up—pretty much, I'm just using my hands to balance myself—and you're going to go to failure with one leg, then you're going to switch to the other. You go to failure—and again, like I said, for time purposes I won't go all the way to failure because I'd be doing about 20 reps here.
We're going to do them with the body completely vertical. Once you've completed that round, now what you're going to do is what I call the leaning back calf raise. So what's happening here is—versus if I'm straight up—remember, I don't have a platform underneath my feet, I'm just using the flat ground—but when I lean back into the move I'm changing the body position slightly.
What you'll notice here is when you're going to lean back you'll notice that you engage the calves completely differently, even though it's a shorter range of motion because we're leaning back here. You'll notice—if you're someone who does calves and you say, "I never really feel it in my calves," you're probably using a lot of the deep underlying assistance muscles and not really activating the calves as best you can.
This little move here, even if you did this with two legs just for the feel of it, you'll really notice a difference in your ability to contract the calves and feel the calves. And because we're leaning back here, it's increasing some of the resistance that I'm getting from my bodyweight, but also like I said because of the body position—remember this is Small Angles—it's changing the way those muscle fibers are being activated.
So we'll do leaning back to failure, then we finish the round of calves with leaning forward. Now, this is going to reduce your resistance, which is why I'm doing it as the last exercise, but because I'm leaning forward now I'm increasing the range of motion so I'm getting a bit of a stretch at the beginning of the calf raise.
Here, it's not only activating the calves a bit differently but it's reducing my resistance from my bodyweight and when you stretch a muscle before you contract it, it can contract with more force so I'm able to get a stronger contraction, which I'm going to need after doing three sets because of the fatigue.
Alright, so like I said I'm going to keep this quick and talk more about the exercises than actually worrying about going to failure. So now we've done our calves. What I've done here—again, as you'll notice—I've stuck the leg exercise in here before we now go back to the upper body, where I'm going to go to triceps, and then biceps, and forearms, and we'll finish with abs.
For triceps, what we're going to be doing is close-grip push-ups, and I'll do these actually with the smith machine. I'll show you—for those of you who are familiar with my triceps ladder, what we're going to be doing here is three versions of the close-grip push-up. We're going to start in the hardest position and then we'll progressively get easier.
As I said, when your body is flat on the ground with the push-up it's pretty much maximizing the resistance compared to hand position—if I go higher on my hands, I'm going to lessen my body resistance. The only way to increase resistance is to raise my feet, but since these are close-grip push-ups for the triceps and the triceps are probably a bit dead from the work we've already done, you're probably not going to need to increase your resistance here.
So we're going to do what's called—you can do a diamond push-up, where you put your hands together, but you really don't need to go this close. If you watch my video on the close-grip bench press I talk about research showing that as long as your hands are about shoulder-width apart and no wider, it's going to maximize triceps involvement. There's no benefit of going any closer in the hands because that's going to increase wrist stress without adding any value to the triceps.
Really, doing a close-grip push-up where your arms are about shoulder-width apart is ample for this. You don't have to go any closer. What you really want to make sure you're doing is keeping those elbows tucked in and really focus on the extension with the triceps versus using your pecs and deltoids here. So let's say you take that to failure.
Now you're immediately going to go over—you don't have to use a smith—you can use a bench—but you want to have three different elevations. You're going to do flat, then you're going to have a bit higher one so that once you've hit fatigue on the regular close-grip push-up—by going to a higher level here with the hands, it reduces the resistance from the body and now you can continue doing reps to train the triceps. Then once you hit failure on that level, you can raise it a few notches again, reducing your bodyweight and now you're going to take those to failure.
So now we'll call the triceps complete. We're going to stick here for the biceps because now we're going to do the biceps ladder. Many of you should be familiar with my biceps ladder, which is basically bodyweight curl. So we have three different positions and again, just like with the push-up, the more angled my body is the less the resistance—the more horizontal my body is, the more the resistance.
On the biceps ladder, for those of you who have done this brutal exercise—this is tough, unless you've got really strong biceps—in the lower positions, don't worry about doing a clean rep. It's more about the negative, control on the lowering. The first set in the low position you won't be able to get many, and you'll probably have to use a lot of body English, if you will, to get yourself up there.
But once you do, what you really want to focus on from here—so it's going to look like this—you see that? Even for me, it's tough to do. So what you want to do here is get your body up in that curl position and then slowly lower yourself to really get the negative part.
Once you hit failure there, you're immediately going to raise the bar—and again you can do this in a power rack as well it just takes a little longer to do, you won't be able to move as quickly—but once I've raised it, now I'm reducing my bodyweight making it much easier to do the curls. And then once you've hit failure there you're going to raise it once more and that's your biceps ladder.
Now we've done eight different muscle groups. We've done the biceps ladder at the low position, the medium, and the high—now we're going to move right into forearms. So what can you do for forearms? I should really say this is forearms-slash-grip. We're doing more grip training here than really forearm training when we're talking about bodyweight.
So the first exercise, you'll see here it says inverted wrist curl. "What the hell is that?" you might be asking yourself. Well, let me show you. You're going to get into an inverted row position. How high you go depends on your grip strength or forearm strength. And what you're simply going to do is use your bodyweight as your resistance. So you're going to start holding the bar with just the fingers, and the goal here is to squeeze your hand to a closed fist and then allow it to open again—close, open, close, open.
Like I said, the lower I position the bar, the more horizontal my body position is, the more resistance I'm going to get. And it's a pretty impressive pump that you can do. After we've done the inverted wrist curl we're going to go into what's known as a gorilla hang. If you did your inverted wrist curls properly, your gorilla hang is going to be pretty difficult because your forearms should be fairly fatigued.
All that a gorilla hang is is simply hanging onto a bar with—you want to grip it, we're going to use a closed grip here—and all we're going to do is simply hang with one arm. That's pretty much it—until your hand slips off, and then you're going to switch. Once you hit fatigue on those, you're then going to go into dual-hand gorilla hang and basically, you're just going to hold this for as long as you can.
If you want, you can try doing a couple of those inverted but you should be pretty dead by this point. So holding on should be hard enough, and again while it won't work much of the forearms other than the fact that you've got a static hold, it will work your grip strength.
We're going to finish the workout with an ab-core workout. We're going to be doing planks here. With the side plank—I'm currently barefoot; it's pretty uncomfortable, on concrete, to do a side plank barefoot—you want a shoe that has some sole on it. So I'm going to put shoes on for the moment just to demonstrate the side plank.
Now in the side plank, as the name implies you're going to get on your side and your goal here is to basically create like a 45-degree angle or whatever, depending on your height, from the feet to shoulder. However, here you've got a couple options: You can just stay here and hold it as long as you can; if that's too difficult you could put an arm up, try that.
Or you can do what's called side plank with a reach through, where you're going to take this arm and tuck it under and then come back up. You want to just hold these for as long as you can, then you're just going to switch sides and do the same thing on the other side.
Now, once you've gone to failure with the side planks, the next move is called bird dog plank. Here, what you're going to do is you're going to get into—instead of the plank position like this—you're going to get into a push-up position here. What your goal is to do here is to alternate—and this is difficult due to my knee, I can't really stabilize myself well—but what the goal here is to do opposite leg and opposite arm—back down, opposite arm, opposite leg out, and down—and keep switching back and forth and holding. Like I said, I can't really do that one well because of my knee but do that to failure.
Once you've hit failure with the bird dog plank, you're going to move right into a standard plank and take that to failure. Because you're moving through all these three exercises—I'm not going to failure so right now this isn't very difficult—but by the time you get to this plank position you should be fairly fatigued, and you likely won't be able to hold the plank like you normally would for whatever, 90 seconds to 2 minutes.
And that's our workout. That is basically 30 bodyweight exercises that you pretty much can do anywhere except for, you know, the pull-ups—you need a pull-up bar, the inverted shrugs and whatnot—but a lot of these you can use when you're on the road. And like I said, even in the full gym—even if you have a full gym the way I do, using—like I said, the inverted shrug—the whole point of the Small Angles is switching up the way you do exercises, whether it's the grip you have on the bar during curls or presses, or you're doing the bodyweight shrugs versus standard barbell shrug.
Even though it's the same movement—whether you're upside-down doing it with your bodyweight or you're holding a barbell—it's going to be quite different, and you'll feel the difference. And it's that difference, the little small angles, that really leads to big gains because you're maximizing the number of muscle fibers that you're using in that muscle group.
For those of you just joining in, I just ran you through my final Day 5 workout in my Small Angles Full-Body Training. This is my Train with Jim series. These are my personal workouts that I do every day. I'm bringing them to you on social media, you get to follow along and each week we change up the technique that we're using to keep the progress coming.
Next week, we're going to be moving into German Volume Training, and if you're wondering how are we going to do German Volume Training, which is 10 sets of 10 reps, for full-body—that would be 10 sets of 10 reps for 10—we're not. Variables of training need to change, so that includes training frequency. Even though I'm a huge proponent of full-body training for maximizing fat loss and results, it's not always proper to do full-body training. And in the case of German Volume Training where you're using a lot of volume for each muscle group, you can't train the entire body.
I mean, you could, but it's really not realistic to have the time or the energy to be able to do that every single day. So next week, we'll actually take a break from full-body training and we'll move into a two-day split where we train half the body one day, the other half of the body the other day, and we'll do six workouts so we'll be hitting each muscle group three times per week. So we're still doing high-frequency training, just not every single day.
It's my Train with Jim series, guys. Check it out. I deliver it to you for free—completely free—Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You get to learn new techniques that you can then apply to other workouts and, by the way, if you post your photos or videos—however you want to do it—of you doing the workouts—you don't have to include every exercise—but if you do that routinely and post it to the JYM Army Facebook group page or your Instagram and you hashtag #TrainWithJim, I'm watching. Every week, I contact one of those JYM Army members and let them know that this is the week that they proved best out of all the JYM Army members that they kept up with me, with my workout, and I reward them with free JYM Supplements.
So every week, somebody wins a JYM System—every week—of Pre JYM, Post JYM, and Pro JYM, or a JYM Support Stack of Vita JYM, Omega JYM, and ZMA JYM. So if you want to win free JYM Supplements, get results, and learn training techniques—oh, and follow my personal program—Train with Jim, guys.
So today we're finishing this week's Small Angle Full-Body workouts. The weekend, we get two active rest days—stay active—and then on Monday, we'll pick up with German Volume Training for the week. So next week's challenge is going to be 10 sets of 10 reps with one minute rest periods. German Volume Training. It's brutal, but brutally effective.
Thanks for tuning in, guys. If you have any questions just post your questions here. I will post this workout onto my Facebook page so you can go back and watch it. Post your questions, and then in the comments section I'll get you an answer.
Thanks, guys. As always, stay JYM Army Strong. Have a good weekend.
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