Above is a howlingly good video guide to the medicine ball complex. But before you get stuck into the ball work, you need to bang out a load of pull-ups. 'Why?' you ask. Because the pull-up is the king of the upper-back builders and will balance the pushing work you’re doing on the bench so you don’t end up hunched over. It’s also a good way to keep track of your relative strength: if your max pull-ups figure stays the same but you’re putting on weight, then you’re getting stronger.
‘I don’t like people doing weighted pull-ups until they can do 12 clean reps unweighted,’ says strength and conditioning coach Zach Even-Esh. ‘If you can’t do that, try “greasing the groove” by doing multiple sets of a few reps, say three or four every 30 seconds for five minutes.’ Check out our pull-up form guide, if you want a simple guide to the bog standard pull-up.
How to do the workout
If you’re already fairly decent at pull-ups, aim to do between three andfive warm-up sets, and then do three serious sets (or ‘work sets’) witha weight that’ll challenge you even for a low number of reps. ‘Lifters with less experience should do a lot more volume to put muscleon, so I’d aim for lighter weights and higher reps. It’s like a carengine – you need to make the engine bigger before you can soup it up,because if the engine’s small you can’t really do anything,’ says Even-Esh.
Once you've done the pull-ups it's time to move onto the medicine ball complex. 'This is a classic metcon workout,' says Even-Esh. 'It may be short but it's a killer. The idea of the workout is simple: do ten reps of all the exercises back to back. That's one round. If you've still got something left in the tank, cycle through the complex again.'
Next up:Beast Workout day 4: lower-body
