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Here’s one of my favorite advanced medicine ball drills demonstrated by Pittsburg Pirates baseball player Austin Meadows. Essentially this single leg RDL med ball chest pass is targeting a number of different biomotor qualities including power output, symmetrical loading, lower body stability, postural alignment, foot and ankle mechanics, posterior chain strength, and full body motor control. This is also a progression of the more traditional double leg version I stole from expert strength coach Dr. John Rusin. Make sure you master that double leg version before progressing to this.

There are several benefits of performing this movement in a single leg fashion. First, it’s quite easy to rely on one side of the body when performing explosive power movements. If one side tends to dominate on this version, you’ll immediately noticed a loss of balance and stability as the asymmetrical force will produce rotational torque on the core and lower body.

The single leg version is also very conducive for reinforcing optimal postural alignment. If the shoulders round over or the lifter loses proper spinal alignment this will also disrupt posture al alignment making it feel very difficult to stabilize your body particularly when producing high power output.

This is also one of the best stabilization movements as it crushes the posterior chain as well as the foot and ankle complex. If you really want to assess and expose any movement aberrations and imbalances, this drill is perfect. Any form of muscular dysfunction makes it nearly impossible to perform these with high power output and motor control. Oh and just in case you were wondering, yes, if it feels difficult to produce high power output from a single leg position that’s because you need to work on foot and ankle strength.

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The power hang snatch is a great speed and power movement for the hips and lower body as it teaches triple extension of the hips, knees, and ankles. Try to not let the feet overly flare during the catch. The athletes demonstrating that here is flaring and splitting the feet slightly more than I typically like to see however the hip extension is very powerful.

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The ab walkout is a great core exercise that also targets the triceps, lats, and chest in a very similar fashion as the pullover movement. Try holding in the stretched position similar to an eccentric isometric as this will produce greater strength and hypertrophy as well as muscle function.

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If you're looking for a simple yet highly effective exercise to warmup your squat or deadlift try this simple plate squat drill. It's also a solid finisher that can be used for high reps to crush the legs at the end of an intense lower body workout. I use this quite a bit with my athletes before we perform heavy deadlifts and squats as the side loading helps groove the appropriate neural blueprints before overloading the movement pattern. Here's one of my awesome clients Matt Jordan performing these in an eccentric isometric fashion elevated on a bench as we used this as a high rep lower body finisher. Besides being very easy to teach and useful for engraining proper mechanics, the side loading is also very low back friendly similar to a trap bar.

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Knuckle pushups are an excellent diagnostic tool for self-assessing your pushup mechanics. Because your placing significant stress across the knuckles, it’s critical all force vectors are perfectly vertical into the ground to avoid hand discomfort associated with wasted horizontal or lateral forces. This can only happen if mechanics, body positioning, and joint stacking are spot on. For example, if the lifter’s hands are either too far in or in back of the body or if the elbows tend to drift outward this places undue stress on 1 or 2 particular knuckles and finger joints making the movement feel highly uncomfortable and almost damaging. However if all components of technique are perfectly dialed then equal stress is placed across all knuckles causing little of any discomfort. In fact with proper mechanics you should be able to perform these weighted on fairly hard surfaces with little if any discomfort as there is equal and balanced tension distributed throughout the entire hand and surface area. As an added bonus this can be invaluable for teaching proper punching mechanics as it reinforces the idea of landing a perfectly directed punch with the force-impact spread equally across all knuckles.

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This quadruped bird dog row using the dumbbell pinching method is an excellent movement for improving horizontal pulling mechanics, shoulder function, spinal alignment, and posture. The combination of bird dog quadruped position which is highly unstable, combined with the intense grip activation creates significant concurrent activation potentiation (muscular tension). As a result it improves body mechanics, spinal rigidity, muscle activation, and eliminates energy leaks. Here's one of my NFL athletes Fernando Velasco showing how its done.

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Performing Bulgarian squats using the chaos band method is in incredibly effective lower body exercise that literally taxes every muscle of the lower body and core. Here I have Pittsburg Pirates outfielder Austin Meadows performing them using an eccentric isometric protocol as we prep him for this upcoming season. The combination of the eccentric isometrics combined with the instability of the oscillating kinetic energy does wonders not only for targeting the quads, glutes, hamstrings, but also for teaching proper body mechanics. In addition, these are tremendous for improving foot and ankle mechanics particularly when performed in barefoot or minimalist footwear conditions.

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The vertical pulling movement is one of the most critical movement patterns there is. Unfortunately lifters often screw this up by either incorporating excessively heavy loads on pulldowns or using pull-ups and chinups before they're mechanics are locked in. I'm a huge fan of using the basic lat pulldown to re-train the vertical pulling motion in a controlled and systematic fashion. This also allows lifters to use lighter loads to hone in on their technique. In contrast bodyweight such as pull-ups or chin-ups is oftentimes too intense for the athletes to master their body mechanics. For almost all of my athletes I make sure they've mastered the basics with lighter lat pulldowns before moving to pull-ups or chin-ups. Lat pulldowns are also an excellent option for larger athletes. Here are two of my NFL lineman Fernando Velasco and Cordy Glenn instilling proper vertical pulling motions on the lat pulldown by using moderate loads combined with eyes-closed eccentric isometrics and additional pausing in the contracted position. You'll also notice how I don't have them touch the bar to their chest as that would represent excessive range of motion and faulty mechanics.

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If you really want to maximize the effectiveness of REI’s in terms of movement mastery, rate of stabilization development, and kinesthetic awareness try performing REI’s with bottoms up movements in an eyes closed fashion. Once you’re able to successfully do these with at least 50% of your 1RM overhead dumbbell press (if your max weight is 80 lbs. on dumbbells then you would use 40 lb. kettlebells) then your overhead pressing as well as a majority of your body mechanics will most likely be mastered to the maximum. Read the full article HERE.