The 3 best functional exercises to pack functional muscle onto your legs, chest and back that you’ve never seen before (and how to do them at home without equipment to get you out of the hurt locker).
Here is a video version of this “3 Best Functional Exercises” article:
The squat is functional if you’re doing it right and bent over rows and chins and all that stuff is functional… if you’re doing those 3 exercises right.
I don’t know about bench press. I’m having a hard time justifying bench press these days. Other than just raw pressing power. Because you could have a really good bench and then get on your back and slightly out of groove doing jiu jitsu or bouncing and you grab a guy off at a weird angle and easily tear a pec or a bicep.
But I don’t find that’s the same with these next exercises i’m going to talk about.
So the exercises I’m talking about, you may recognize from where they become popular -Matt Fury’s combat conditioning.
Matt Furey did the the hindu squat, hindu push-up…What’s that actually called a dand I think.
So what’s the third one? It’s the back bridge or wrestler’s bridge more accurately put. Sometimes called wheel pose in yoga. The name just depends on how you do them and whether you have hands supported or not.
Although Matt Fury became known for those exercises, they’ve been around forever and it’s not even just indian wrestlers that do them.
I mean almost every culture has done some form of a push-up or a deep knee bend. They are usually on the toes to be honest with you.
We’re taught now, to squat you know, with the heels on the ground and and the shins nearly vertical. It hasn’t always been that way.
I wanted to tell you about those three exercises because you may not have heard of them unless you’re into the bodyweight scene.
What i’m aiming to do with the website right now raymondburton.com is to aim towards… Well, i’m 45 now and I’ve done a lot of lifting of different kinds and I seem to always feel my best when i’m doing some sort of calisthenics to get my body working right. Then, adding in resistance training as I see fit. But not making weight lifting the cornerstone of what I do.
Where I’ve gone wrong is when I’ve got my body working correctly… you know once I’ve decided, “Wow, I’m dinged up I can’t get into a squat without my knee feeling like it’s going to explode.” Or, you know, taking like four or five motrin a day just to deal with back pain, all that sort of stuff, or a torn bicep all those things.
Everybody has their own list of injuries, but where I’ve gone wrong has been when you get your body working right and then you completely abandon what was working for you for the sake of something that you think is gonna be better.
So you know, I’ll have a solid program of say hindu squats, pistol squats, nordic curls, you know chin ups, dips push-ups, archer push-ups, archer chin-ups… all that kind of stuff. All the variants. Getting that wrestler’s bridge going and getting to a place that’s pretty good for me and then going great.. my body feels amazing… now I need to put on 10 pounds of mass.
I drop it all and then I start on a power lifting program. I hit deadlifts multiple times a week and then all of a sudden, right back on the pain train again. So too much too much volume, too much intensity and too much frequency. Then also abandoning the full range of movement resisted exercises that the calisthenics are so good for.
So yeah… just thought i’d mention that.
Let’s see, did I deliver on what I said I was gonna deliver on? The three exercises to pack functional muscle onto your legs chest and back you’ve never seen before? You may have seen them before.
Chances are you haven’t seen them before depending on what you’re into.
Here’s the good news if you haven’t heard of those 3 exercises before and you’re in the pain, in the hurt locker, or in the pain zone. You have just found a way or a method to restore yourself back to being athletic. That and being able to get on the mats again or in the ring whatever your choice… and or on the battlefield if you’re still in service. These three exercises are the answer.
The big problem is just seeing the movement at its fullest iteration, trying it and feeling like it’s absolutely going to destroy you. And it probably will if you’re really banged up. But that doesn’t mean that you should abandon it. You just need to do close approximations. Modifications and regressions on those exercises because the actual exercise itself becomes the fullest display of your potential movement capability.
At least the movement goes very far in excess of what most people have available to them for movement ability. So I can show you some different variations of different things if anybody has a certain ache or pain.
You can ask below any post or youtube video.
Another great exercise that I haven’t mentioned… a bonus exercise which is kind of a gateway drug into all the other lower body stuff is the shin box.
The shin box is really kind of an essential thing to even getting your wrestler shot. For shooting in for a single or double leg takedown. The penetration step.
The shin box in of itself, if you spend time on that, can get you closer to a lot of the the knee and hip functionality you need.
There is that a lot of the stuff that you may be feeling wrong about and not understand how to fix. THAT’S OK!
Like say your foot, ankle ,calf cramp, knee junk pain, hip problem, and all that. You know all that pain could even be coming from your lower back. It could be coming even from your middle back. The pain could be coming from the fact that you don’t even have any thoracic mobility.
But you don’t need your physiotherapy ticket to fix yourself.
My personal workout routine lately is to mix Matt Furey’s royal court with Nicks time volume training. Here’s a video with more on that:
I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going – After this video I got home and did the circuit as described. It was more challenging for me than I thought…. so there is MUCH room to grow in capability here.
Again the routine is: The Royal Court – hindu squats, hindu pushups and wrestlers bridge done in a 3 rep fashion for AMSAP in 15 minutes.
Here is Nick Nilsson’s Time Volume Training Routine: http://RaymondBurton.com/TVT
Here is Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning: https://www.mattfurey.com/combat-conditioning/
Related and last 3 Videos:
More On Time Volume Training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ_HHr1gYRM
Top 3 Exercises For FUNctional Muscle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP_KmVwcaJU
Fall Asleep Before Your Wife Finishes Scrolling Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA9N4CM_qug (more rest, more recovery)
A lot of these things are almost like light switches and electricity where you don’t really need to know about cervical spine, thoracic mobility… you know lower lumbars and the nerves that come out there. Or how they radiate down and how what they affect you.
You don’t even really need to know that stuff as long as you know that if you flip the switch the light comes on. Well a lot of the movements in and of themselves are that way. So you know, if you’re doing the wrestlers bridge and you’re doing some of these shin boxes and deep knee bends and hindu squats and a bunch of other stuff… you can fix yourself over time.
These things will work those issues without you actually knowing what you’re doing… and can solve your problems for you.
So ask me any questions you have below. I hope you like the video/article and I hope you like the scenery if you watched the video. I wish I could show you more but I didn’t want the camera bouncing around. It was a beautiful, beautiful morning down in Braeside side by the river.