My 3 Favorite Ways To Use the "X3 Bar" to Build Strength on The Go

Hey, I'm Ben Greenfield. You may recall the time that I interviewed the inventor of something called the X3 bar. His name is John Jacquesh, and he invented this bar as a portable way to get a really good workout in, especially a strength training workout in while you travel with a minimum effective dose of exercise. Now, of course, you can also use this anywhere. Your home, your backyard, your basement. So I'm out here in my backyard. And one question that I've gotten about this X3 bar is, do you just have to use it for bodybuilding type of moves like bicep curls or tricep extensions or something like that? And the answer is no. And furthermore, I don't even like to mess around with those moves. I like to do some of the full body sequences using the x3 bar. So just so you can see how this thing works, I want to show you three of my favorite moves moves to do on this. And before I do, I want to emphasize something because I've gotten some questions about the system itself. First of all, the bands. John specifically sourced these to provide you with resistance to the entire range of motion. And they're incredibly high quality compared to the cheapo elastic bands that you get from a lot of sporting goods stores or from Amazon. So please know that not all elastic bands are created equal. Furthermore, what it comes with is this bar that looks like this. And this actually rotates in a similar way as those super expensive barbells that you use for Olympic weight training at the gym. But it allows you to have the equivalent of a barbell. And I can fit this into my backpack when I travel or check in with my luggage. And it's super duper portable without me having to carry a frickin barbell. The other thing that's important because I found that when standing on the elastic bands for some of the standing exercises, the elastic bands pinch my feet. But it comes with this platform that you can actually put on top of the elastic bands so that you're not having to like grip the bands with your feet or have the elastic bands, God forbid, like snap out from underneath your feet, which really sucks. Trust me, that has happened to me many a time with my elastic band workouts. So the first exercise I'm going to show you with this is a deadlift. And what I do is I simply double up the band underneath the platform and I'm using one of the larger bands for this one. Because the deadlift I want a lot of weight on and I simply stand on the band. I get into my deadlift position. I hold this bar and then I stand.

That's the equivalent of about a 350 pound deadlift.

With just an elastic band. No plates, no weights, no bars. Do one more.

I'm not pretending this thing actually is really heavy, but it's just this one single band. What I just demonstrated that to you with was their thickest x3 band. So that's the thickest one that comes with it. It's used for those heavier lifts. I've also done these in the sauna, by the way. I use them in my sauna so you can get heat and lifting at the same time. Okay, the next exercise that I like is the squat. For the squat, I don't double up the band. I just have it just like this. And what I like to do is a front racked squat. It's another one of my favorite kind of more full body exercises. And again, the bar makes this so nice because the band doesn't pinch my hands when I'm doing the squat. And the way that this works, I put the band onto the bar like so. And then I drop down into a squat position here and I rack it like a front squat. Now, from here.

I can get the equivalent of a heavy front squat at the gym.

The other thing that you could do as you begin to get exhausted is you can move through partial range of motion. Which I also like about the bands is they work really well to exhaust a muscle.

After you've gone through that full range of motion. Okay, so the deadlift and the squat are two exercises that I like. And then the last one I want to show you is basically a chest press. But before I do, please know if this looks like it's some big heavy exercise for an athlete or something like that, or a serious exercise enthusiast. I mean, they come with a bunch of different resistances like this one. So you don't have to be super strong to use this. You can be a beginner exerciser and this works great. So I'm going to get rid of the platform for this last exercise I'm going to show you. And this one's a really good one for the chest. I like this because unlike the bench press, you get a lot more core activation. So the way that you do this one is double up the band and it goes behind the body like so. So I'm doubling this up here, gonna double it up here as well. And then what I do is the. The bar goes in front of me. Oops. And the band goes behind me. There we go, like that. And it looks like this. So I'm basically trapping that bar on my back. And from here you probably guess what I'm going to do. This is basically a really good variation of the chest press. So I go full range of motion.

You can see how this bar makes it so much better than just trying to do this with the band.

But then what you can do to burn the muscle out, and John really recommended this to me when I podcasted with him, is you finish up with partial range of motion reps and you just go through as many as you can and you get this amazing pump. So those are just three of the several dozen exercises that you can do with the X3 bar. And again, it's just the platform and it comes with several different elastic band resistances and then the bar. So it's a really cool system. It's brilliant. Super high quality elastic bands. You can do a whole bunch of different exercises with it. So if you look underneath this video, I'm going to link to, number one, my podcast with John that really delves into the science behind this and how it was developed and even more tips on how to use it. Number two, I'm also going to link to the X3 Bar website and I'm going to put a discount code with that link so you can get a big fat discount on this thing because John negotiated a really good one for us. So look underneath the video for the links. Leave your comments, leave your questions. Thanks for watching and have a great workout.