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- One of the most underrated exercises for your entire upper body and a move that's gonna hit chest, shoulders, and back, and a lot more abs than you think is something called the dumbbell pullover. Now, this is an old classic move and it's a bodybuilder move, something that Arnold Schwarzenegger really used to love. The dumbbell pullover though requires a lot of technique in order to get the most out of it, because we have to understand how to really control our abs, we have to find a safe shoulder position, and we have to make sure that the move is for us. How do we do all that? We're gonna show you right now. In order to do a proper dumbbell pullover, we have to be able to get into a good overhead position without having to overarch our back. If you can't find an overhead position, so what Brett's gonna do, he's actually gonna get into more of a profile stance so you can see this. And what he's gonna do, he's gonna put one hand on his ribcage and he's gonna raise the other. And if you cannot keep your ribcage down and find something close to a general good overhead position while keeping your ribcage down, the dumbbell pullover just may not be the move for you. There are a lot of other lat moves and a lot of other total body moves you can go to instead. Because if you can't find that with no load, things aren't gonna be great as soon as we start to load that with weight. Assuming you have a good position, now we're gonna start to understand how the dumbbell pullover works. And we have to first understand the main muscle group that it's hitting. It's gonna gonna hit a lot of things but the thing that we're really focusing on is this idea of shoulder extension. And that is the job of our lats. Now, normally, our full range of shoulder extension is going to take us from this nice overhead position to our elbow being behind our torso. We're not gonna get that range of motion on the dumbbell pullover. Instead, we're focusing on the very top of the motion but we get to load that and we get to get a really good stretch on our lats. So Brett is gonna set up on the bench. There are a couple ways to do this. What we're gonna show you now is a version of the dumbbell pullover that's gonna challenge your abs as well. So he's gonna think about getting his shoulder blades onto the bench. He's gonna try to get his shins perpendicular to the ground, 90 degree angle at the knee. And then he's gonna really squeeze through his abs and his glutes, nice and tight. He's thinking about keeping a completely parallel line from his shoulders through his knees. And that's a position he's gonna maintain as he does his pullover. I also want you to think about keeping your ribcage down. From there, Brett is gonna raise the weight overhead and he's gonna set his shoulder blade, so he's gonna try to drive his shoulders into the bench. And then this is the key position in order to get the most out of our lats. Our lats are very powerful when our shoulders are externally rotated. So he's going to drive the pits of his elbows forward. And he's gonna maintain this position as we do the pullover because now he's really turned on and reinforced that good lat technique. Now, he's gotta maintain all of this tension as he slowly lowers this dumbbell backwards. As he's doing this, he's thinking the entire time of trying to drive his elbows up towards the ceiling. He's going down as far as he can go. This is his max range of motion. Once you start to feel your triceps go, then that's it. And then, he's gonna pull it right back over. The key things here are, one, making sure that when you're in that bottom position, the pits of your elbows should be pointed towards the ceiling. Don't let your elbows flare out. That's not necessarily a great shoulder position, even though it can help influence a little bit more of a chest contraction on the pullover. But when you get started, you've gotta make sure that you can really own that tight external rotation and be in control. The other thing you wanna make sure to do is not bend at the elbows. It's really convenient on this pullover for Brett to bend his elbows. Now, he's actually lessened that lever on his lats which are the key thing that we're trying to hit in that backwards position, so we wanna keep our elbows long, we wanna keep our arms long as much as we can, and not let those elbows bend, don't off load this load to your triceps, but keep it all in the lats. What you're gonna see people do very often is they're going to pull far in front of them, but what's happened then, once we get past this perpendicular angle, suddenly, yes, you are sort of continuing to drive your shoulders into extension, but there's no tension on your lats because gravity is off of us. So think about pulling only as high to about a 91 degree angle relative to torso. We want our wrist, our elbow, and our shoulder to, if anything be stacked, even though you get a break in that period or be ever so slightly tipped back. That way, we still got tension on our lats. Last thing we wanna think about, we wanna really be aware of our ribcage position as we're doing this. So Brett is thinking about keeping that ribcage closed the entire time. Let's pause in this for a very brief second. So this is a great position of anti-extension. Now, when that dumbbell is long, your abs have one job, and that's to make sure that your ribcage stays closed. That helps make the dumbbell pullover not only a back move and a chest move and a shoulder move, but that is that moment when this gets to become an abdominal move too. So that's how you want to attack it. Now, one other version of the dumbbell pullover that you're gonna see very often, and this is a version that was popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger and by body builders, is a version of the pullover where we're going to drop our hips. And what this does, it actually does have value, we're gonna get to move into a position called thoracic extension. A lot of times, if you think about how we exist just in everyday life, we wind up in this rounded position and we've forgotten to really arch our back, we've forgotten the mobility that our thoracic spine is capable of. So when anybody winds up, when they start to drop their hips then we're getting that benefit of we're getting to train a little bit of thoracic extension. We get to work on that position. The key to this though, you've gotta keep in mind, it's a very advanced version of the pullover and it relies on one thing. You've gotta have, and you've gotta be able to move through your thoracic spine. If you can't dominate cat cow, if you don't understand the positions of cat cow, then you shouldn't be doing the pullover with the hip dip because all you're gonna do is you're gonna place more stress on your lower back, because you're gonna wind up dipping your hips and relying on your lower back instead of relying on your thorac spine, which is what we're trying to get that good stretch on and create that good mobility on. The one key thing you wanna think about in the dumbbell pullover is not getting the reps up too high. This isn't something where you need to be doing 12s and 15s, especially because we wanna really, really appreciate and take our time on that eccentric, on lowering into that position and exploring our shoulder range of motion. So think about keeping this to 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 10 reps, make them quality reps, take your time as you're doing them, and make sure to really squeeze those elbows on the way up. Get this in your workouts though, especially if you wanna really grow those lats. You're gonna have a ton of fun with this. (bright music)

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