25 Exercise Tweaks for Bigger, Better, Safer Lifts

Barbell Curl

Do only the top halves of reps, going from halfway to contraction. This is when the biceps are most activated. Performing barbell curls seated (so each rep begins with the bar hitting your thighs) makes certain you do only upper-half reps.

Deadlift

Pull the bar from power rack supports set at knee level or slightly lower. The greatest advantage of deadlifts, which is that they work a wide variety of muscles, is also their greatest disadvantage if you’re doing them primarily for your back. By starting each rep a little higher up, you’re working your lower-body less and your back more.

Elliptical

Most elliptical machines allow you to move backward. Take advantage of this. Going through the motions in reverse will better work your hamstrings and glutes. Alternate some backward elliptical work with forward work.

Preacher Curl

Use chains. Doing so adds resistance to the top half of the movement where it is otherwise lost as gravity’s pull lessens. Alternately, perform preacher curls on a machine with a vertical weight stack, which provides consistent resistance throughout each rep.

Front Raise

Tense your glutes to lock your lower back and legs and prevent cheating. This is simply the most effective way to stay tight. Near the set’s end, you can progressively loosen the tension on your glutes to get more reps. This works with most standing exercises: dumbbell curls, side laterals, etc.

Rope Pushdown

At each contraction, separate the rope ends as far as possible with your palms facing down. This better targets the triceps lateral heads. It also makes you switch from a parallel grip throughout much of the movement to a palms-down grip at contractions, effectively giving you two pushdowns in one.

If you’re accustomed to doing rope pushdowns with a parallel grip throughout, you’ll likely need to lighten the weight to maximally separate the rope ends at contractions.

Dumbbell Curl

Do these as fast as possible, alternating arms. Slow down as you approach failure. Increasing speed is a technique that can be applied to many exercises, but it’s especially effective with isolation lifts like dumbbell curls. This will better stimulate fast-twitch muscle fibers. Try preceding or following this quick exercise with a slow exercise, like preacher machine curls, to focus on slow-twitch fibers as well.

Pushup

Push yourself entirely off the floor with each rep and then catch yourself and return immediately to the floor. Doing so adds explosiveness, which carries over to weighted exercises, too. And it’s a great way of adding a degree of difficulty to a simple exercise.

Crunch

Hold your arms up as if reaching for the ceiling and slightly forward throughout each rep. Most people put their hands behind their heads, but crunches are already easy enough without tugging to help you get up. By reaching up, not only do you stop tugging, but you also use the weight of your arms as resistance.

Hold up a resistance ball or a weight plate to make crunches even harder.

Cardio

Alternate time on the treadmill or stationary bike with time on the StepMill, elliptical, or rowing machine. The StepMill should be low-intensity while the rowing machine should be high-intensity.

Alternating intensity is superior for fat burning, and this has the added advantage of imparting variety throughout your cardio session to keep you alert and to stress different muscles. In an uncrowded gym, you can do a circuit, working your way through four or more unique machines, each used for only a few minutes at a time.

Squat

At the bottom of each rep, sit briefly on a box or bench before rising. Unlike a standard squat, wherein you reverse your downward momentum to upward, you begin your ascent each time from a dead stop.

This works your lower body in a different manner and may help you stay more upright, stressing your spinal erectors less. Box squats can also accustom you to hitting parallel or below on regular squats.

Calf Raise

Pause for four seconds at the top of every rep and contract your calves as hard as possible. Most people never give their lower legs—which are accustomed to low-intensity, high-rep work (like walking)—the stimulation they really need to grow.

Leg Curl

Throughout every set, flex your toes (as if standing on your tiptoes). This puts your calves in a weakened position by keeping them tensed and, in turn, forces your hamstrings to work harder.

Dumbbell Shoulder Press

Instead of standard dumbbell presses, with your elbows flared out, perform Arnold presses to recruit all three heads of your deltoids.

To do so, begin with your palms facing backward toward your face as you hold two dumbbells. Press them up and simultaneously rotate them outward, allowing your elbows to flare out, until your arms are fully extended in the top position. Slowly reverse the motion as you lower them back down to the starting position.

Lying Triceps Extension

Perform on an incline bench. Doing so allows the bar to clear your head for a full range of motion and prevents you from putting the “crush” in “skull crusher.”

Pulldown

Pull the bar down as fast as you can and then resist its ascent, taking five seconds. Altering pace can be applied to many exercises.

With pulldowns, a training partner can easily apply extra pressure to the bar during the negative reps.

Hack Squat

Keep your feet under your hips, as if squatting on the floor. Most people place their feet forward, which shortens the distance they need to bend to get their thighs parallel to the platform.

This allows them to use more weight, but it also works their glutes and hamstrings more and their quadriceps less. To target your quads and put them through a greater range of motion, keep your feet under you.

Bench Press

Follow each full rep with a half rep, going only halfway up. The bottom halves of bench-press reps work the pecs more than the tops, so doing one-and-a-halves places a greater emphasis on the pecs but also allows you to stress your upper body through full ranges of motion.

This technique can be applied to many moves, like squats and curls.

Upright Row

Hold dumbbells with your palms facing your sides, and raise your elbows as high as possible while keeping the weights at your sides. This better targets your medial deltoids than a barbell upright row.

As an added bonus, it puts less strain on your wrists. The tendency, however, is to turn this into more of a shrug. Use a weight you can properly handle, resist bringing your traps too high too fast, and instead focus on raising your elbows up and out as you bend your arms.

Leg Press

Use one leg at a time. Going unilateral forces you to focus more on the muscles of each thigh, and you can get fuller ranges of motion. As an added bonus, you need to load only half as much weight.

Seated Wrist Curl

Let the bar roll down your palms and into the cradle of your fingers at the start of each rep and then curl it back up into your palm before curling your entire hand up. This strengthens your grip.

Expanding the short wrist curl movement won’t rob much strength from the rest of the lift, so you should do at least some of your wrist curls with these additional “hand curls.”

Leg Extension

Point your toes in, so that your shoes touch, to focus more on your outer quads. Point your toes out to target your inner quads. If you don’t have a preference, alternate a set with toes in with a set with toes out.

Overhead Press

Take an underhand or a neutral grip. Whether done with a barbell or a log-press bar or on a super squat machine, pressing with your elbows in front of your body instead of flared out to your sides better isolates your front deltoids.

Machine Crunch

Follow two fast reps with one slow rep. This forces you to stay focused instead of going through a set on autopilot, so it’s especially effective for short- range, high-rep exercises like machine crunches.

Rear Lateral

Keep your arms straight. Technically, this is a reminder for proper form, but bending your arms will enable you to use more of your back to move the weight, taking the tension off your delts. With that said, you can bend your arms as the set progresses to eke out a few extra reps.