Greetings, loyal IHP readership! Here’s a video I recently recorded demonstrating an exercise I “discovered” this summer and have used for the past few months in my own workouts and programmed for clients while all of us have been working out at home. I call it the Reverse Turkish Get-Up Press, since it incorporates some positions in the Turkish Get-Up into a mechanical drop set, though I’m not exactly enamored with the name.
I like this exercise for a few reasons:
1) You only need a dumbbell, which is often a necessity for people during the pandemic.
2) With the mechanical drop set, you can achieve a high amount of fatigue and time under tension in the triceps, deltoids, and pectoralis muscles (i.e., pressing muscles), so it seems great for hypertrophy and strength endurance.
3) Depending on your mobility, you can incorporate trunk rotation, side-bending, and spinal flexion and extension—an oh-so vaunted tri-planar movement!
4) It allows people with limited shoulder flexion to still press at an incline without compensating via spinal extension.
In general, I program this exercise such that the trainee will perform 8-12 reps in the first position, with the goal being to prioritize hypertrophy. The reps the trainee performs in the next two positions varies from person to person, though the number of reps completed generally decreases from one position to the next as the muscles become increasingly fatigue. Of note, I prefer to avoid heavier weights with this exercise, especially when the client is first learning the technique, in order to reduce the likelihood of compensatory movements, subpar technique, and injury. Expressed another way, my clients and I are trying to get a pump with this exercise rather than set one-rep maxes. I’d love to hear what you think of the exercise, so feel free to try it out and write a comment to let us know how it goes!