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Kneel while holding a rope attachment on a pulley at eye-level. With the sides of the rope held next to your head, push your hips forward, extending your hips and stretching your abs at the top of the movement before flexing at the waist, squeezing your abs as hard as possible at the bottom of the movement. Return to the starting position. – Eric Bach

As you press the barbell, the weight load actually gets lighter. Since you're getting stronger as you extend your arm (due to creating a shorter lever arm), it makes sense to add a band for accommodating resistance: the band creates a continually greater resistance challenge as you continually gain a mechanical advantage. If you're in a split-stance, then you'd anchor the band underneath your front leg. If you're in a parallel stance, you'd anchor the band underneath the same-side foot as the arm you're pressing with. Sure, in a parallel stance you can anchor the band underneath both feet, but doing this pulls the bar more towards the midline of the body, which can make it harder to control. – Nick Tumminello

The explosive pushover makes you generate maximum force, stabilize, and continue to generate power under fatigue. These are a great finisher for two or three sets to failure at the end of your workout. – Eric Bach

For this triceps exercise, tighten up and set your ego aside. Drop down to the tall kneeling position, and use a slightly longer rope. (If you don’t have access to a long rope, place two ropes on the same cable setup.) From the tall kneeling position, your torso angle will stay constant and your range of motion and tension at the bottom is increased to contract harder. Harder, more calculated contractions lead to gains. – Dr. John Rusin

This is a great biceps and biceps brachialis exercise. It provides plenty of work for the forearms, as well as smaller muscles around the hands and wrists. It finishes with the kettlebells in an extended lever-arm position, allowing you to place constant tension on the arms throughout the movement. You'll need to drop the weight by about half of what you'd typically use for hammer curls. But the combination of lighter loads and constant tension will leave your biceps screaming at the end of each set, producing muscular pumps and cellular swelling that's harder to get with other exercises. Because of the lighter loads, kettlebell hammer curls work well with moderate and higher rep ranges of 8-15 reps for 2-3 sets. Just remember to keep your wrists locked in neutral position throughout. – Dr. Joel Seedman

Dumbbell incline curls are a bodybuilding staple. The simultaneous stretch and overload they provide has been scientifically shown to maximize micro-trauma and muscle damage, causing significant levels of hypertrophy. Unfortunately, when doing this exercise with dumbbells, there's very little tension above the bottom half of the movement. The biceps relax at the top of the curl. Due to their unique loading mechanism created from the hanging weight, kettlebells provide adequate tension and stimulation not only in the bottom and mid-range positions, but also in the top contracted position. In fact, this incline kettlebell curl variation exploits all three major mechanisms of muscle growth:

• They emphasize the elongated eccentric and stretched position, which produces muscle damage and micro trauma that's critical for growth.

• Their semi-awkward nature and hanging position requires high levels of muscle activation, which produces significant amounts of mechanical tension and muscle fiber recruitment.

• Because of the constant tension throughout the movement with little relaxation of the biceps, this exercise creates an occlusion-effect to the surrounding musculature. As a result, there's an incredible amount of blood flow, muscular pump, intramuscular volumization, cellular swelling, and metabolic stress, all of which have been linked to muscle growth.

Do incline kettlebell curls at a 45-degree bench angle using a variety of loads and rep ranges including heavy weights (4-6 reps), moderate loads (8-10 reps), and lighter loads (12-15 reps). One to two sets in each rep range will lead to incredible gains in biceps size. – Dr. Joel Seedman

There comes a certain point when pull-ups and dips just won't get you the gains they used to. Once that happens adding more and more reps won't build strength or muscle. But these two training methods will. When this happens, the first thing to do is manipulate tempo. This method works with standard parallel bar dips or ring dips. – Tom Morrison

This variation keeps you from fully straightening the arms at the bottom or curling excessively high at the top. That prevents you from dumping the load. This creates enormous tension on the biceps because you're locked into the sweet spot of the movement where there's maximal activation and no relaxation. It also promotes optimal shoulder positioning and postural alignment, which is something most lifters struggle with when training biceps. Because the load is unstable and vulnerable to falling, you have to keep the shoulders retracted and depressed throughout. Besides improving spinal mechanics, this eliminates the possibility of the shoulders becoming overly involved in the movement.

Another noteworthy feature of this exercise is the way it optimizes wrist mechanics. Many people lack the ability to keep the wrists locked during curls, which can produce strain on the surrounding connective tissue, tendons, and ligaments. This variation requires you to lock the wrists in order to create a solid platform for the weight to rest on. When these mechanics are transferred to heavy free-weight curls, they'll produce stronger and more efficient curling mechanics, leading to greater overload and size gains. Lastly, this is one of the most unstable biceps curl variations you'll ever perform. Any cheating or swinging will cause to dump the weight.

Use this either as a technique enhancer at the beginning of your arm workouts (2 sets of 5-8 reps) to help groove proper curling mechanics, or as a finisher (1-2 sets of 10-12 reps) to annihilate the arms with continuous levels of growth-inducing tension. – Dr. Joel Seedman

If the SSB back squat wasn't hard enough, flip the bar around and enter the SSB front squat. This variation will smoke your quads and help those who (because of injury, lack of mobility, or discomfort) can't do front squats with a regular barbell. The front load also forces you to have a stronger contraction of your abs and it's a great option for those who struggle to control their anterior pelvic tilt and lower back extension when squatting. – Michael Sirani

An easy way to increase the eccentric or negative loading (without having to get someone to push down on the leg curl during the negative part of the rep), is to do the concentric or lifting part of the rep with both legs, then the lowering part with one leg. After you hit failure with the single-leg eccentrics, continue the set by using both legs and a controlled eccentric. Alternate legs on each rep. Make sure to do the eccentric portion in a controlled fashion to take advantage of the overloading effect. Don't just let your leg freefall when lowering the weight. Do 4 sets of 8 reps on these. – Paul Carter

Whether you're performing reverse lunges, walking lunges, or Bulgarian split-squats, hinge at your hips and lean your torso slightly forward at roughly a 45-degree angle while keeping your back straight. At the bottom of each rep, the dumbbells should be on each side of your front foot instead of by your hips, which is where they'd be if you were performing this exercise in the normal manner with an upright torso.
Here's why: Leaning your torso forward increases the recruitment of the glutes and hamstrings. Doing this places less force on your knee joint and therefore demands less activation of the quadriceps. Note: If you're targeting the quadriceps, then skip this variation. Integrate both torso positions into your lower-body training. That said, placing an emphasis on performing these exercises with a forward torso lean can be especially helpful to females since women are more quad-dominant than men, tend to have weaker hamstrings, and therefore may be more prone to knee injury. – Nick Tumminello

Combine the Romanian and sumo deadlifts, which you'd do with a more narrow stance and a more upright torso.

Here's why: For many, the hybrid deadlift is a smart substitute for traditional deadlifts. Why? Two reasons:

1. The wider stance is easier and more natural for the majority of lifters to do while maintaining the alignment cues.

2. This starting position keeps the barbell closer to the hip joints than the conventional style, which provides a shorter lever arm. This helps you get a greater mechanical advantage while placing less overall stress on the lower back.

One study did a biomechanical analysis of straight bar and trap (hex) bar deadlifts and found that the trap bar deadlifts placed less overall load on the lumbar spine because it also involves a shorter lever-arm. However, not everyone has access to a trap bar. – Nick Tumminello

If you want to increase the size of your quads, your best bet is to manipulate the knee angle and center of gravity location associated with compound movements like squats, lunges, split squats, etc. Ditch the old "knees behind toes" cue. Let your knees track over your toes every time you lunge and squat when targeting quads. – Ian Padron

Bands around your neck will naturally bend you forwards and cause the pecs to get into a very deep stretch. They'll also create more tension at the top of the rep (accommodating resistance). – Paul Carter

The front squat requires you to keep your upper body more upright. A forward lean will result in not being able to hold the bar on the front of the shoulders. – Christian Bosse

Clean pulls are the best way to build your traps. You can use a wide grip and change the variation to a snatch pull. You can do them from a variety of rack heights. And you can do them with a pause at the top (for half a set or the whole set) to increase trap activation. – Amit Sapir

1. Lay down on your back with your feet and lower legs fully supported on an elevated surface like a bench or box.

2. Allow your hips to move to around 90 degrees flexion, and your knees to bend at 90 degrees as well.

3. From this position, place a foam roller or ball between your knees and keep contact with the roller between your knees at all times. This contact does not need to be maximal, but minimal effective dose of adductor control to keep position.

4. Once you're in this position you'll need to tap into parasympathetic (restful) breathing, using an extended inhale, pause for a few seconds at the top, and lengthening out your exhale as long as possible. You want this breath to be coming primarily from your belly expanding at 360 degrees in order to allow some carryover on its effects more locally at the iliopsoas group, which is very close anatomically to the diaphragm and secondary respiratory muscles surrounding the abdominal cavity. Spend a few minutes here (without texting or talking) and just focus on your breath.

5. The next step is to use your hands on either side of your pelvis and to contact the inside of your hips (where a portion of the deep hip flexors are located) lightly with your fingertips. Your index and middle fingers should sink down behind the front side or your hip bone (ASIS) and maintain constant 5/10 subjective pressures. Continue to breathe here as you keep contact, and stay here for another few minutes. – Dr. John Rusin

This may be the hardest quad-dominant exercise that you ever do. Lifters spend most of their time moving weights "fast" and getting into the hole quickly. Make yourself slow down and control the tempo of your lift, even if it means your 400-pound squat becomes a 185-pound one. Tempo squatting is a great way to stimulate hypertrophy in your slow-twitch, type-I fibers that are often neglected in the gym. So here's how to do it:

1. Set up with the weight considerably lighter than you'd do for your regular squat.

2. Set a timer for 40-60 seconds and keep constant tension in your lower body by pulling yourself down into the hole and not pausing at any point during the lift.

3. Count 3 seconds up and 3 seconds down throughout the entire minute, and you'll feel a quad burn like never before. – Michael Sirani