To provide balanced strength and power, MJP performance director Lance Walker takes future NFL star Ndamukong Suh through a Volume Combo targeting the big man's upper body.
About the Video
Ndamukong Suh is working in the gym to build his upper body strength. Each
upper body work out Ndamukong Suh works on is paired with another to push and pull the muscles.
TRANSCRIPT
Lance Walker: We need to do as much pulling as we do pushing. So one of the ones that we like is the land mine row, which is basically a novice way of doing a horizontal or a bent over row without putting as much pressure on their low back. So it's a horizontal pull. We're again looking for all the things that are the exact opposite that they just showed us on the
bench press. So all the retraction, all the bi's are now working, all the posterior delts now being drawn in, of course all the lats. Land mines, we're going to hit him with some volume with that. So we're talking about a minimum of three sets. They may get as many as five sets and we're really vamping up the volume. So you're in your tens, eights, maybe some heavy six's, but the tempo is really important to that lift.
So our tempos have slowed way down. We're now taking four times as long to lower that weight as we are two times to raise it back up. Coming off the weight dips we've noticed has been a big help for athletes to kind of further develop the
tricep and the pec at a different angle then they're used to training.
What I do with the dips is that puts them in a really difficult position to generate a lot of force. So it's a lighter weight. You saw guys' using 20 or 30 pound vests and the positioning of our hands precludes them from using some of those big cheats. Now they're really having to lay back on the tricep and some of that deep peck and some areas that they really haven't developed.
The dips were coming back into some lower reps. We were doing some six's and some fours and again the tempo is now a two, two, two tempo; very slow. We're not trying to see how explosive a guy can be, we're trying to put the tissue under some tension and we're not as heavy as I used to get with dips. It's a moderate weight. It's a combo so there's a push, there's a pull and then the off set of that is what we call the strap stretch.A lot of these guys coming out of these programs lack internal rotation on one or both of the arms. But in most cases what we're trying to do with the strap stretch is get the athlete to pull the hand that he's working internal rotation up behind the shoulder blades. Most places would just stop with that as the stretch.
That's just the set up position. The actual stretch happens now when you hold that position and we get an active isolate maneuver where we actually do some scap retraction with that. So now we're holding the position with the strap and now we're retracting our scapula. Strap Stretch is usually one set, you pull it up in the small of your back. You're going to squeeze your shoulder blade back for about 15 to 20 seconds.
For more with Ndamukong Suh, check out his
Snatch Pull 
