CategoriesMiscellaneous Miscellany

Miscellaneous Miscellany Monday: Oscars!, Deadlifts, and Myths of Stretching

1.  Raise your hand if you stayed up last night to watch the entire broadcast of the Oscars.

*Sheepishly raises hand*

Yes, I stayed up till just past midnight to see 12 Years a Slave win Best Picture and to watch director Steve McQueen and company be handed the statue by Will Smith.

I know it’s borderline silly to spend 4-5 hours of my night watching a bunch of attractive, rich people who make their living pretending to be action heros, real-life heros, icons, and pirates celebrate other attractive, rich people and hand one another a golden statue.  Especially when there are so many other pressing issues going on around us.

Even so, I’m a firm believer that movies and film offer all of us a sense of release and escape. Whether it’s calling a “time-out” from worrying about a mid-life crisis or a recent break-up, or even if it’s just two hours inside, away from this insane Polar Vortex, movies give us everything from joy and happiness to awe and inspiration.  Not to mention there are a select few that do a bang-up job at scaring the bejesus out of us and making us destroy the back of our pants.

What’s more, as someone who loves (LOVES film), I can appreciate the hard work and talent it takes to do what those people do.  Whether it’s sitting there and reveling in the cinematography of Gravity, the costume/set design of The Great Gatsby, the unabashed “holy-shit-I’m-really-uncomfortable-watching-this-but-this-is-what-happened-so-suck-it-up-Tony” realism of 12 Years a Slave,  the side boob and overall “cleavaginess” of American Hustle, or the breakneck speed and cadence of Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks’ last scene in that movie is one of the best acted scenes I have ever watched), I’m always appreciative and thankful for the movies.

So what can I say:  the Oscars are my SuperBowl – albeit without the large pizza and pretzels on the side.

Lisa and I sat down at 7PM to watch the pre-show festivities, although to be honest I’m not really as much of a fan watching and listening to the fashion mumbo-jumbo. It’s all Elvish to me.  I was actually sitting on the couch reading during that portion of the telecast, but I was listening to Lisa’s commentary which was hilarious.

In fact, I was thiiiiiiiiis close to starting a #shitlisasayswhilewatchingtheoscars on Twitter, but I elected not to

All in all I was very pleased with the show.  Ellen was Ellen, and there were a handful of times Lisa and I broke out and laughed our butts off.  How bout those pizzas!

I fully expect that random pizza-delivery guy to have an agent by now, and to have his own reality show greenlit by summer.

I can’t say I was surprised by any of the winners.  I was secretly hoping that DiCaprio would somehow snake out a win for Best Actor for his role in Wolf of Wall Street, but I knew that either McConaughey or Chiwetel Ejiofor (you know, the guy who’s name no one can pronounce) were the favorites.

Spoiler Alert: McConaughey won.

I was happy to see Jared Leto win, and was really happy to see Alfonso Cuaron win for Best Director (Gravity).

And, OMG, can you freakin believe Helium won for Best Live Action Short??????  (<— Yes, that’s sarcasm).

All in all, as always, I loved every second and can’t wait till next year.

2.  This is really out of character for me, and I know this is going to raise a few eyebrows, but I watched a Tracy Anderson DVD over the weekend wrote an article on deadlifting for Men’s Health last week.

You can check it out HERE.

3.  And since we’re on the topic of “stuff I’ve written,” I also contributed to a piece last week on Stack.com titled 13 Fitness Challenges That Will Destroy You.

They won’t literally destroy you – that’s a bit much – but it stands to reason they’ll offer a change of pace to your routine if you’re looking to add a little variety.  Check them out!

4.  I received a question recently that I felt would be better served answering here since I’m able to reach more people on this blog and I’m sure many reading have toyed with the same topic.

Q: Tony, where would static stretching fit into a week of working out? Do you recommend it on recovery days, or a specialized flexibility training day? Post-workout? Before bed?

A: As with anything: it depends. Not a sexy answer, but it’s the truth.

Stretching for the sake of stretching isn’t necessarily a good thing. While their intentions are in the right place, I see many people flopping on the stretch mat at local commercial gyms doing what they deem as “stretching,” but all I really see is a complete waste of time.

Stretching IS important – as a society it’s crystal clear that we sit a lot, and as such things tend to get adaptively short or stiff.  This is something that definitely needs to be addressed, because if it isn’t one runs the risk of developing muscular imbalances that not affects posture but can lead to pain or injury down the road.

The thing is:  the vast majority of people tend to stretch what they’re good at or what feels good.  What’s more, people tend to get into positions thinking they’re stretching one muscle, when in fact they’re not even close. Does this one ring a bell?

Many would recognize this as a hamstring stretch.  Wanna know what I see?  A lower back stretch.

Moreover, you could argue whether or not traditional stretching actually does anything?  Doing a few 30-second stretches here and there won’t really mount to much.  If a tissue is truly short it has lost sarcomeres  In order to really make a difference, you need to increase the series of sarcomeres and that takes A LOT more than a few 30-second stretches.

In fact if you asked Bill Hartman how much stretching it actually takes to make a difference, he’d say you need to cumulatively hold a stretch anywhere from 20-60 minutes!

Of course, that’s not practical for most people.

This isn’t to say that some stretching isn’t better than no stretching……but rather just to give some people a semblance of expectation management.

And then there are other factors to consider.  Someone who scores high on the Beighton Laxity Test certainly doesn’t need to go out of his or her way to perform a lot of static stretching.

Another thing to consider is HOW people stretch.

One key factor that many people tend to conveniently gloss over is alignment.  Stretching the hip flexors is an often targeted area for most people, and rightfully so.  Because we tend to sit in flexion all day, it stands to reason many people need a crowbar to “un-glue” their hips.  To counteract this many will opt to stretch, like this:

Notice the massive extension pattern and anterior pelvic tilt she’s in?  This isn’t really accomplishing anything other than to run the risk of developing femoral anterior glide syndrome (where the femoral head is literally jammed forward.)

Unless this person cleans up he starting position – brace the anterior core, squeeze the glute of the trailing leg, getting, encouraging more posterior pelvic tilt and getting out of extension – she can do this stretch for hours on end and really not accomplish anything.

Now all of this isn’t say that I’m poo-pooing on stretch altogether.  It DOES have its place, and it DOES serve a purpose.  But I just feel more people need to be cognizant of what they’re stretching and more importantly, HOW they’re stretching.

I feel stretching before a training session is best.   What good is it to stretch before bed when you’re just going to lie down anyways?

I’d rather see people address tissue quality, mobilize, stretch, and then “cement” that new length with appropriate strength training.

Again, the idea is to encourage more “neutral,” get into more optimal alignment, and then train.

The order I prefer is this:

Foam Roll—Dynamic Warm-Up—Dedicated Static Stretching—Lift Heavy Shit

After rolling out, you’d hit up your standard dynamic warm-up (THIS or THIS may help), perform some static stretching to help lengthen the tissue (for most people hitting up areas like the glutes, hip flexors, lats, and pecs would be ideal), and then go…..you’re a free bird.  Fly fly away.

Go lift something heavy.

CategoriesUncategorized

Deadlifts: From Suck to Sick

Okay, not that I had any qualms or regrets with writing the pregnancy post the other day, because I was more than happy to do it; it’s something that had been running around in my head ANd I wanted to address it for a while now, and a topic I wanted to tackle sooner rather than later; and more importantly, I feel it’s a message that’s going to help a lot of people down the road.

But lets be honest:  it was definitely something off the beaten path from what I normally write, and I’m sure there were a fair number of people who read the title and immediately high-tailed it in the other direction.

So, to make up for it, I wrote an article not too long ago for T-Nation that went live yesterday on what else….

[Drumroll please…….]

Deadlifts!

I know, I know – I write about deadlifts about as often as a bear shits in the woods, and I promise this will be the last one for a while. No, seriously….I mean it this time.

Nonetheless I feel there are a number of tips that can be gleaned from this article, so check it out and let me know what you think.

I can just smell the testosterone rising.  Enjoy!

It’s no secret that I love deadlifts. I try to write about other things that inspire me – squatting, pull-ups, seeing Nadine Velazquez naked in the first 5 minutes of Flight – yet I’m constantly drawn back to the mighty pull like a jacked-up sockeye salmon returning to its pristine natal waters to spawn.

Fortunately for me, if the amount of email I receive asking about improving deadlifting performance is any indication, the majority of T Nation readers feel the same way.

So what follows are a few lesser-known tricks and tweaks that you can use to quickly improve your deadlift technique and bust through plateaus.

These tricks won’t turn you into Andy Bolton over night, but they could, to steal a line from Dave Tate, take you from “Shit to Suck” – which is still pretty good.

And, if you play your cards right, maybe even from Suck to Good!

 

Continue Reading…….

 

 

CategoriesUncategorized

5 Coaching Cues: Deadlift

It’s no secret that I love deadlifts.  They rank right up there with Star Wars, my mom, oatmeal, and old GI Joe re-runs  And while I feel the deadlift is one of the more beneficial movements out there in terms of improving performance, muscle growth, and even posture….it’s still something that a lot of trainees have a hard time perfecting.

I give people all the credit in the world for doing them………

….it’s just many don’t do them properly.

Moreover, it can be a very intricate and complex movement to master, and as much as I try, attempting to cover every nook and cranny into one 1200 word blog post is about as easy as quantum physics.

That said, below are some of the more common coaching cues I gravitate towards when attempting to teach it to others. While it’s not an all encompassing list by any means, I do feel the ones highlighted serve as a solid foundation and work wonders in terms of “cleaning up ” technique.

Maybe even yours!

Push the Hips Back

Developing a proper hip hinge pattern can be a cumbersome endeavor for a lot of trainees, as many want to “squat” everything.  The conundrum, it seems, is that there are a lot of trainees and personal trainers (sadly), that feel deadlifts are the same thing as squats.

Einhorn is Finkle and Finkle is Einhorn!!!!!!

While I could sit here and write a five-page dissertation on why this is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard, lets just agree on a few things:

1.  Squats are generally considered more “quad dominant,” while deadlifts on the other hand, are considered more “hip dominant.”  I’m not a huge fan of this distinction because you can easily make a squat more hip dominant in nature (think box squats), but for the sake of brevity, it’s a relevant talking point.

2. Squats generally start with an eccentric loading phase, while deadifts are almost purely concentric.

3.  And, most important of all, regarding trunk, hip, and knee angles, significant differences between the lifts are readily apparent.  In a nice summary titled Differences in the Squat and Deadlift in the Journal of Pure Power (V.5, Number 2, April 2010), the scientists noted that squats produced a more linear relationship between the hip and knee angles, “illustrating a more synergistic and simultaneous movement.”

The deadlift, however, showed three distinct phases defined by dominant joint action at the knees during lift off, the hips with the barbell at knee height, and both knees and hips during lockout.

So, in summary:  a deadlift IS NOT A SQUAT!!!!!!!

Capiche?  Good!

Back to the topic at hand:  the hip hinge.  This cue comes into play throughout the entire movement, from the set-up to the descent.

In terms of the set-up, I like to tell people to stand up right against the bar and to then push their hips back (as if there were a rope around their waist and someone was standing behind them pulling the rope back).  Essentially, one would be performing a romanian deadlift – feeling significant tension in the hamstrings – until their hands are able to grab the bar.

Many trainees make the mistake of breaking with their knees and “squatting” down to the bar. This is wrong.  Instead, think about pushing the hips back.

“Pull” the Chest Tall

Pulling the chest tall encourages the trainee to get into t-spine extension, which in turn demonstrates that he or she can resist shear loading of the spine.

Once someone’s hands get to the bar, I usually like to say “use the bar to pull your chest tall.”  Meaning, they’ll literally use the bar to set themselves into proper position.

Taking it a step further, if I’m standing directly in front of them and their shirt happens to have a logo of some sort – a team logo, a New Balance emblem, a picture of the Jonas Brothers (don’t worry, I won’t judge) – I want to see that logo when they set up.

The chest shouldn’t be parallel to the floor, but rather more upright.  An adjunct to this would be to think “chest tall, hips down.”  So, as one pulls their chest tall, the hips will come down simultaneously. From there, they’ll be in a solid position to pull.

“Stiffen” the Upper Back

This could arguably be the most crucial of the bunch.  As I noted above, resisting shear load is kind of important when deadlifting.

Pulling a bar off the ground with a rounded upper back is a recipe for disaster, but unfortunately, it’s par for the course whenever you walk into a commercial gym.

Using the cue “pull the chest tall” is often helpful, but sometimes trainees don’t have the kinesthetic awareness to “feel” what their back is doing.  You can tell someone to arch their back, and they’ll think they’re doing it, but it will still look similar to the picture to the right.

To “stiffen” the upper back, I may just tell them to place their shoulder blades in their back pocket and to “set” their shoulders in place.  Truth be told, this cue often works in unison with pulling the chest tall.

As a pair, those two cues should place an individual in a solid starting position to pull (see pic above in the previous section).

Tuck the Chin

Too, as much as we’re concerned with keeping the entire backside in a neutral (arched) position, we also need to be cognizant of neck position.

If you watch a vast majority of people set up to deadlift, you’ll invariably see them end up looking up or straight ahead, cranking their neck into hyper-extension, kinda like this:

Please, stop doing this.

I like to tell people to find a spot that’s roughly 10-15 feet in front of them, and to keep their eyes fixated on that point throughout the entire set.

Another cue I like to use in this instance is “your head should follow the hinge.”  In other words, during the set-up, your entire back side – from head to sacrum – should make a straight line.  Oftentimes, during the lockout, people will still think I want them to look straight down, which isn’t the case at all.

During lockout your head should be upright and your entire backside should still make a straight line (you’re looking 10-15 feet a head of you).  Then, on the descent, your head will follow the hinge.  As you push your hips back, your head/neck will still stay in line with the actual hinge.

I think that makes sense. If it doesn’t, too bad……;o)

Hump the Bar (Hips Through)

Another common mistake that many trainees make is not “finishing” the movement.  At lockout, you’ll often see one of two scenarios:

1.  No hip extension what-so-ever, and they don’t squeeze their glutes at the top.

2.  HYPER extension – because they’re not using their glutes, they substitute lumbar extension for hip extension……….and their spine cries.

It’s a double edged sword in both scenarios, because in each instance the glutes don’t come into play at all.

Luckily there’s an easy fix. As one comes to lockout, simply tell them to squeeze their glutes and “hump the bar.”

For those in the former (no hip extension), this will serve as a vital cue to use.  Squeezing the glutes at the top will provide more posterior pelvic tilt and help to finish in a more optimal position.

For those in the latter, however (hyper extension), because their glutes don’t fire properly and they’re compensating with excessive lumbar extension, you may need to take a more of hands-on approach and show them where to stop.

Either way, in both cases, squeezing the glutes (humping the bar) will bode in their favor.

And Now You’re (Hopefully) Less Sucky

There are numerous cues I like to use when teaching the deadlift, but these five tend to be the ones that stick out the most.  Sure, we can talk about taking slack out of the bar, foot placement, not destroying the back of your pants, and other more pertinent cues…..but like I noted above, the five above serve as a fantastic foundation and will set a lot trainees up for success.

Have your own cues you find useful?  Share them below in the comments section!