CORE
Plank
- Elbows below shoulders, nose below the thumbs.
- Keep spine stacked, ensuring three points of contact: back of head, mid-back, tailbone.
- Knees can be straight, bent, or on the ground to adjust difficulty. The stack must be maintained regardless.
The plank is less about how long a client can hold the position and more about how well they hold their stack while doing it. A client who shakes and sags after ten seconds but keeps a perfect stack is doing better work than one who grinds out two minutes with a sagging lower back — always coach for quality of position first, and let duration follow naturally as that quality improves.
Reverse Crunches
- Lying on the back, hold a sturdy object behind you.
- Bend your knees and pull them towards (but slightly over) your head. This is the start position.
- Slowly start bringing the hips down, letting the spine come down one vertebra at a time until the tailbone touches, then immediately drive the knees back up.
Most standard crunches only flex the upper spine, leaving the lower abdominal region — the part clients most often ask about — comparatively undertrained. Working the movement bottom-up, one vertebra at a time, is what specifically targets that lower segment.
Side Raises (Machine, Standing)
- Place yourself sideways on an extension machine, with the top leg below the front pad, bottom leg at the back.
- Keeping the knees straight, start bending downwards in your sideways orientation as far as possible. Hold here for a second or two.
- Hands kept closer to the hips to make easier; extended overhead makes harder.
This is one of the few common exercises that directly trains the obliques and the muscles that stabilise the ribcage against side-bending — an area most standard ab routines (crunches, planks) barely touch. Clients who play racket sports or golf, where rotational and lateral core strength matters directly to performance, benefit disproportionately from including this movement.
Hyperextension
- Lie face-down on the extension machine, ensuring the hip pad is below the iliac crest to allow full range.
- Securing the legs on the foot pad, let yourself lower down to maximum depth. Feel a relaxing stretch.
- "Pushing your butt aggressively into the pad," lift your upper body as a single unit until the body is perfectly straight. Do not hyperextend beyond this.
Cueing the glutes to fire first, rather than yanking the movement from the lower back, is what keeps this exercise a spinal-erector and glute builder rather than a lower-back strain risk.
SHOULDERS
Unlike the hip or knee, the shoulder is built for mobility rather than stability, which means it relies almost entirely on surrounding muscles — not bone shape — to stay safely in its socket. This is why shoulder programming tends to need more exercise variety than most other body parts: a single pressing movement simply cannot train the many directions the shoulder blade and joint need to move and stabilise in daily life and sport.
Compound Side Raise Triset
- With a light dumbbell (2.5–5kg for most people), start by laying sideways on a bench set to 45–60°.
- From here lift the dumbbell in an arching motion, from the front of the body to behind it, maintaining tension throughout.
- After fatigue sets in, continue by bending, rotating, and placing the elbow on the hip at the back of each rep. This reduces difficulty, allowing more reps.
- After fatigue sets in again, start to overhead press the weight to further extend the set.
- These exercises can be combined or done on separate days, but work very well together.
Each of the three phases shortens the effective lever arm as the previous one fatigues, allowing the set to keep producing meaningful fatigue in the side delt well past the point a single strict lateral raise would have to stop.
Prone Y-Raise on Bench
- Setting a bench at 60° approximately, lie on your stomach with your knees on the seat pad.
- Holding dumbbells, lift them upwards and outwards around 50–60° to shoulder level — forming a Y shape.
- Hold for 1–3 seconds at the top. Lower, but not all the way, before repeating.
The Y-shaped path recruits the lower trapezius specifically, a muscle that most standard rowing or shrugging movements barely touch but which is heavily implicated in stable, pain-free overhead shoulder movement.
Seated Rear Delt Half-Raises
- Sitting on a bench, hinge your upper body down to 45° or lower. Rotate your hands so the thumbs and index fingers face downward.
- Lifting the dumbbells outwards and upwards towards the height of your ears, but only to the halfway point.
- Concentrate on this lower range without letting the dumbbells reach too high.
The rear deltoid is chronically under-trained compared to the front and side of the shoulder, largely because it cannot be seen in a mirror. Left unaddressed over years of pressing-dominant training, this imbalance contributes to the rounded-shoulder posture discussed elsewhere in this chapter. A useful rule: for every heavy pressing exercise in a programme, include at least one rear-delt-focused pulling exercise like this one.
Cable Lateral Raise
- Standing next to a cable handle set at a height lower than the hips, hold onto something sturdy with the free hand.
- With the working hand, pull the cable upwards and outwards, making sure the cable comes from roughly a 60° angle rather than straight to the side.
Because a cable keeps constant tension throughout the entire range — unlike a dumbbell, which goes slack near the bottom — this variation loads the side delt hardest exactly where a free-weight lateral raise loads it least.
CHEST
Dumbbell Flyes
- Lying on the back, grab dumbbells and push them straight overhead.
- Now slowly bring them out to the side until you feel a nice stretch in the shoulder and chest area. Hold for 1–3 seconds.
- Bring dumbbells back up overhead to the starting position.
Because the arms move through a wide arc with the elbows only slightly bent, this exercise places considerable stretch load on the shoulder joint. Start with genuinely light dumbbells — far lighter than a client's pressing weight — and only lower to a depth that feels like a comfortable stretch, never one that feels like the joint is being forced.
Cable Chest Press
Form is identical to a standard dumbbell chest press, except the cables must come from behind rather than from the sides — which would create a fly pattern rather than a pressing movement.
BICEPS
The biceps cross both the elbow and shoulder joints, meaning the angle of the upper arm relative to the torso changes which portion of the muscle is emphasised. Spider curls (arm hanging in front of the body) bias the shortened range near full contraction, standing curls train through the middle range most people associate with "a curl," and preacher curls emphasise the lengthened, stretched position at the bottom of the movement. A well-rounded arm programme rotates through more than one of these across a training block.
Spider Curl
Lying face-down removes the ability to swing the body or use momentum from the hips, which is why this variation is often the most humbling for clients who think they know their curl weight from standing versions — expect to use noticeably lighter dumbbells here than in a standing curl.
- Curl the dumbbell while lying stomach-down on a 45–60° incline bench.
Standing Curl
- Curl the dumbbell while standing. The most fundamental bicep exercise.
Watch for two common faults here: swinging the torso backward to help the weight up (which shifts load off the biceps and onto momentum), and letting the elbow drift forward away from the body as the weight rises. Keeping the elbow pinned gently at the side throughout the rep keeps the tension where it belongs.
Preacher Curl
- Curl the dumbbell while leaning on a preacher bench. Ensure the elbow angle does not cause discomfort.
The preacher bench fixes the upper arm in place, which removes any ability to cheat with body momentum and places significant stretch on the biceps tendon at the bottom of the rep. Because of this tendon stress, this is not usually the first curl variation to introduce to a brand-new client — build a foundation with standing or spider curls first.
BACK — One-Arm Cable Row Bench
- Setting a bench slightly less than 90°, place cable height in accordance with the body part being targeted.
- Higher for lats, lower for mid/upper back.
Bracing the chest on the bench removes any ability to cheat the pull with body English, so constant cable tension and a fixed torso isolate the target back muscle far more strictly than a standing free-weight row would.
TRICEPS
Pulley Pushdown
- Put cable at the highest setting.
- Use a rope attachment and pull downwards and outwards.
- Bend over slightly to increase range of motion.
- Keep the elbows near the body but no need to squeeze them in.
Splitting the rope apart at the bottom of the movement (rather than keeping the hands together) adds a small amount of extra triceps contraction at the point of full elbow extension, which many clients find helps them feel the target muscle more clearly.
Overhead Triceps Extension
- Put cable at the lowest setting.
- Face away from the machine and lean over while holding onto the ropes.
- Push ropes upwards and outwards until arms are fully extended.
- Bring ropes back down but only bend elbows to a comfortable point. This exercise is best done with well-warmed elbows.
This variation stretches the long head of the triceps — the only one of the three heads that crosses the shoulder joint — far more than pushdowns do, which is why it targets the size and shape of the back of the upper arm rather than just pressing strength.
FOREARMS
- Rotations with dumbbells or plates
- Pinch grip holds
- Dead hangs — can be done in any hand orientation. Feet can touch the ground if full hanging is too challenging.
Forearm and grip training is frequently skipped entirely, yet it is one of the most transferable qualities a client can build — every deadlift, row, farmer carry, and pull-up variation is ultimately limited by how long the hands can hold on. Two or three short sets of dead hangs or pinch grip holds at the end of a session is a low-fatigue, high-return addition to almost any programme.
CALVES
The calf is made up of two distinct muscles that respond differently to knee position — training both, in both a straight-leg and bent-knee position over time, produces more complete lower-leg development than either alone.
Leaning Calf Raise
- With hands on a wall, walk feet backwards until you feel the heels are going to rise.
- Keeping the body straight, lift the heels up and then down to the maximum stretch.
Tibialis Raise
- Back to the wall, feet are walked forward away from it. Lift the toes up and down for repetitions.
- The further the feet from the wall, the tougher the exercise.