April 2015 – Performance Edge

Repost: Turning Weakness into Strength in the Off-Season

by KYLE BROWN, CSCS

Some athletes feel that the off-season is a time to let their bodies rest, fall completely off their diets, and spend this time partying the night away with little sleep or regard for their health and fitness. Typically, they use the pre-season as a time to rebound and acclimate to the demands of their sport. Yet, even as a weekend warrior, intramural or club athlete, having a year-round game plan will keep you a cut above the competition and ready to hit the ground running in the pre-season. Moreover, focusing on your weaknesses in the off-season will bring a new and improved you to the field next season. Off-season training is not only the best time to recover from your sport physically and mentally, but it is also the perfect time to train to counteract all of the muscle imbalances inherent in playing nearly any sport.

The off-season varies depending on the particular sport, but in general terms, off-season refers to the weeks after the in-season and before the pre-season (1). There is a fine line between resting too much and too little in the off-season. Ideally, an athlete should take the time off their sport to mentally rest as well as not put their primary focus on training the main muscles utilized for their sport. Instead, after a short period of rest (referred to as an unloading week), an athlete should focus on cross training or working on their muscular weaknesses and imbalances to get refreshed without lowering their current fitness level. For example, some sports require one arm or leg to be utilized more or their opposing muscle groups are neglected (i.e., the quadriceps are working but the hamstrings are not utilized). Some of the benefits of working on muscular imbalances during the off-season include: preventing chronic injuries, creating symmetry in strength and coordination, recovery of primary movers, strengthening of stabilizer muscles, and prevention of detraining or overtraining. During the off-season phase, a combination of resistance training and flexibility work will create stronger, less inhibited muscles.

ν References 1. Bompa TO, Periodization training for sports. 1999. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics

Repost: Why Everyone Needs Core Training

Written by by NSCA STRONGEST LINKS and STUART MCGILL PHD

There is a lot of confusion about core stability, exercise, injury prevention, and performance enhancement. This is probably due to statements and opinion from people who have never measured stability. We have performed many experiments on stability mechanisms together with trials on pained patients and elite athletes that form the foundation for this short article.

Having worked with people who suffer from back pain and high performance athletes for over 30 years, I am often asked “to choose the most influential variable that links pain and performance.” My response would be an underperforming core.

Why is this? What is the core?

Core stiffness is essential for injury prevention and performance enhancement. Core stiffness is not optimized in body building exercises. Core stiffness requires dedicated training. A discussion of the core requires a 3-dimensional perspective. The spine is a stack of vertebrae that is called upon to bear loads, yet it is flexible. A design engineer will tell you that you cannot design a structure to be good at both.

A steel beam that is straight and stood on its end is stiff, and can bear loads that try to compress, shear, and twist it. So the beam can bear load but it cannot move. A flexible rod that allows movement will bend and buckle under load, but absorbs shock. Our spines do it all—they bend and allow the lungs to fill with air, and even allow us to dance.

The spine is this beautiful structure that is flexible and allows flowing movement, but requires a 3-dimensional guy wire system to stiffen and stabilize it when it is required to bear loads.

Analysis of the muscular system, together with its associated fascia sheets, reveals a clever guy wire system that creates balanced stiffness eliminating the possibility of buckling and injury. The concern is that modern living does not “tune” and train this guy wire system, and in many people’s cases, it lapses into complacency.

The greater the load that is placed down the spine, the greater the need for the musculature to stiffen the spine. How can this be? When muscles contract, they do two things: they create force and they create stiffness. Stiffness is always stabilizing to a joint. Thus stiffness prepares the joint to bear load without buckling. Failure to appropriately stiffen is the biggest cause of joint injury, although not the only cause.

On the performance side, “core stiffness” is mandatory. It is absolutely essential to carry heavy loads, run fast, and change direction quickly. It determines the rate of speed for movement of the arms and legs. There are those people who state they do not need dedicated core training because they lift and squat. Yet when I assess their strength and speed abilities, often I find they are unable to translate their strength to on‐field performance. Pointing out their weak links brings them to the realization that training the core is non‐negotiable.

How does core stiffness enhance limb speed and strength? Consider the pectoralis major muscle, which attaches the rib cage at its proximal end, crosses the shoulder joint, and attaches to the humerus of the upper arm at its distal end. When muscles contract they try to shorten. Consider the specific action here: the arm flexes around the shoulder joint moving the arm from muscle shortening at the distal end. But the same shortening also bends the rib cage towards the arm at the proximal end of the muscle. Thus, simply using the pectoral muscles would not result in a fast or forceful punch. Now stiffen the proximal end of pectoral muscle attachment—meaning stiffen the core and ribcage so it cannot move.

Now, 100% of pectoral muscle shortening is directed to action at its distal end, producing fast and forceful motion in the arm. In the same way, a stiffened core locks down the proximal ends of the hip muscles producing faster leg motion. A loss of core stiffness causes the torso to bend when sprinting, and a loss of speed (some force was robbed that should have been expressed in leg velocity).
Thus, a universal law of human movement is illustrated: “proximal stiffness enhances distal mobility and athleticism”.

Consider a 340-pound National Football League (NFL) lineman who is strength trained in the weight room on Olympic-style lifts and power cleans. His coaches believe he is well trained. Yet the athlete has back pain that limits training. Measuring his cutting speed, the ability to take five fast strides forward, plant a foot, and cut to the right, reveals his great weakness and strength imbalance. The pelvis drops on the swing leg side and the spine bends laterally. He reports a twinge of pain. All of his strength training has been performed with two legs on the ground. All of the pulls, lifts and presses never trained the core in 3-dimensions. The weak link is limiting his performance and causing stress and pain. Addressing this with loaded carrying exercises produced more lateral spine stiffness in his core. His pelvis and spine produce appropriate proximal stiffness (proximal to the hip joint) so that more velocity of all of the muscles that cross the hip joint works on the distal side of the joint resulting in faster leg speed. Further, the spine does not bend, the stress concentration at the joint is eliminated and the pain is gone.

This example demonstrates that the hip muscles were limited by a weaker lateral core. Specifically, the gluteal muscles on the stance leg were confined by the lateral core muscles on the swing leg side of the body—in this case, the lateral obliques and quadratus lumborum. Good training always addresses the elements that assist and potentiate one another throughout the body linkage. The core is home base for strength and speed. Proximal stiffness, or stiffening the core between the hip and shoulder joints, produces higher limb speed and force. Strike force in mixed martial arts (MMA), baseball, or golf, is governed by this universal principle: limb speed for throwing, running, and directional change is a fundamental athleticism. While proximal stiffness (the core) governs all of these athletic objectives it also reduces back pain and injury by reducing the spine bending when loads are imposed. The spine loses its load bearing strength as it is bent more away from its neutral posture.

So now we can answer the question of “what is the core?” Proximal stiffness occurs between the ball and socket joints (i.e., the hips and shoulders). It involves all of the muscles in the torso. They function primarily to stop motion and they should be trained this way. The core also involves the muscles that cross the ball and socket joints that have distal connections, such as psoas, the gluteals, latissimus, pectoralis, etc. There are many ways to train these in progressions to enhance performance and injury resilience. I have described these in my book, “Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance” (www.backfitpro.com). Every person will have different requirements; hence, each person will need guidance in how to create the best program for themselves.

Still not convinced that dedicated core training is mandatory? The most essential of human movements is the ability to walk. Children with paralysis of quadratus lumborum can hardly walk. The pelvis, if not stiffened to the lumbar spine with quadratus contraction, simply bends laterally so that the torso collapses with the stance phase of the walking cycle. Quadratus is an essential core muscle forming the lateral core. Some of us have enough athleticism such that extra training of the quadratus is not necessary. But the NFL lineman needs to train it to change direction quickly on the gridiron—ensuring that the lateral core is up to the job of creating a stiff base so the hip muscles can explode, producing maximum cutting speed. Here the training must incorporate loaded carries such as suitcase carries and farmers walks.

A final thought addresses the universality of core training. The exercise progressions that our scientific work has justified over the years to reduce the risk of back injury, and to enhance performance, are very similar to the progressions shown by colleagues around the world to reduce the risk of groin injury, sportsman’s hernia, and knee injury, particularly to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). All of us working in these areas converged on the same conclusion. No one can afford to neglect this building block of function. Core training to enhance stiffness is the foundation and underpinning of one of the most fundamental laws of human motion.

About the Author:
Stuart McGill, PhD
Stuart McGill is a Professor of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He directs a laboratory that investigates spine injury mechanisms, rehabilitation, and performance enhancement. As a consultant, challenging patients are referred to him from around the world, which includes people with very disabled backs to world-class athletes. Visit Dr. McGill’s web side, Backfitpro Inc., at http://www.backfitpro.com.

Repost: Strength Training for Women- 7 Myths

Written on December 5, 2013 at 8:52 am, by SOHEE LEE, formerly of Cressey Performance

This much I know is true: I’ve been strength training for six years now. I can rock out chin-ups, pull heavy weight off the floor, and squat more than some guys I know. I drink protein shakes almost daily and sometimes take creatine as well.

This much is also true: I’m still small. I’m still petite. Still lean. My muscles aren’t big and, when fully dressed, no one has ever asked me, “How much do you bench?” And I’ve never been called “too bulky” in my life.

There are a myriad of myths regarding females and strength training – too many to count. Yet despite the growing number of women out there slowly converting to lovers of iron and ditching their cardio bunny ways, there are even more women who still believe that strength training is for men only, and that no proper lady would touch anything more than a pretty pink dumbbell.

I don’t blame them, really. We have certain celebrity trainers touting their 3lb dumbbell hour-long workouts to develop long, lean muscles – and others claiming that squatting with a barbell will make your thighs explode overnight. The celebrities themselves rave about these special methods – and we believe them, naturally.

My job today is to convince you amidst all the buzz that the grass is truly greener on the other (strength training) side. At best, I’ll talk you into getting under that barbell today. At worst, I hope to plant a single inkling of curiosity and that you will soon find yourself venturing over to the heavy weights.

Below I crush a number of the most common myths out there surrounding females and training.

Myth #1: You should steer clear of heavy weights because it will make you look like a man.

Ah, this is the King (or Queen) of all myths and is one that I am convinced will unfortunately never effectively die out.

There are a number of biological differences stacked against us as women. First and foremost, we only have approximately 5% of the of testosterone men possess. This means that the average male has twenty – twenty! – times as much testosterone than the average female. And given that testosterone is the hormone primarily responsible for muscle gain, we’re facing a major uphill battle if we are truly striving to look like The Hulk (1).

But, you claim, last time I lifted heavy for a month and I got thicker and looked gross! The culprit is very likely inadvertent increased caloric consumption that came along with the new change in exercise. What I mean is that typically, the culprit is increased bodyfat – not necessarily increased muscle mass – that is responsible for what many women call the “big and bulky” look. Often, increased bodyfat “coated” on top of muscle is mistaken for muscle mass, which turns many women away. Can you honestly tell me, though, that when you began lifting weights, your caloric consumption didn’t spike?

There’s this notion out there that after a tough workout, we need to fuel our muscles – which is true, but not to the tune of one large pizza and three protein shakes. It’s too easy to convince yourself that your body is all of a sudden devoid of nutrients and that you have to feed it at all times of the day. But when your body takes in more calories than is needed to maintain your current bodyweight, that’s when weight is gained in the form of fat mass and/or lean mass, depending on how you go about it.

If you can dial in your nutrition while simultaneously lifting hard in the gym, what will result is a leaner, tighter, stronger version of your former self.

Myth #2: Women can’t do pull-ups.

The word “can’t” implies that all females, regardless of how hard they try, are physically incapable of performing a single pull-up. But while it’s true that women tend to have less upper body strength relative to that of males, that doesn’t mean that all is lost. So what do you do when you have a weakness? You work on it to turn that weakness into a strength.

Simply put, the solution to weak(er) upper body strength is to improve it. In the gym, upper body pulling movements will help: think row variations (barbell rows, cable rows, inverted rows) as well as pullup variations (band-assisted, negatives, chin-ups). Working on your grip via farmer’s walks and the like will also help in this regard. In the remaining 23 hours of each day, work on nailing your nutrition, as decreasing bodyfat will help increase your strength proportionally.

Pretty soon, you’ll be banging out not just one rep, but possibly even double-digit reps, just like the First Lady of Cressey Performance does.

Myth #3: Protein powder is bad for women because it will make them huge.

There’s this idea floating around in mainstream society that protein powder is only for meathead bodybuilders who want to get yoked. So when a lady comes around and plops a five-pound tub of protein powder on the counter at Vitamin Shoppe or GNC, eyebrows are raised. She might as well be shooting steroids into her veins, huh?

As much as I wish this were the case (as it would make my job a whole lot easier), there’s nothing inherently magical about protein powder. It’s simply a portable, tasty way to get in some protein. Its biggest perk? Convenience. And perhaps taste.

But really, the average scoop of protein powder will yield 20 to 25 grams of protein.

I will say this, however: protein powder is typically ingested in liquid form. Since liquid calories are much easier to take in than solid food, the calories can quickly add up – so you need to alter the rest of the day’s nutrition to account for the calories you’ve already taken in with these shake(s). Just like any other food, if protein powder is consumed in excess, then yes, it can make you gain weight.

Myth #4: All the fitness models and fitness competitors are on steroids; the average woman could never achieve that look.

Before I go any further, I will qualify this point by emphasizing the fact that yes, there are very few people out there who are able to maintain a lean, stage- or photoshoot-ready physique year-round. I’ll also argue, however, that that’s not because it’s impossible. Rather, many choose to switch over into the offseason, during which time they likely intentionally put on some weight in an effort to make improvements to their physiques and dial even sharper than before come next season.

But all of that aside, here’s a cool fact: we all have abs. They’re there. That six-pack? Yes, you’ve been sporting it. The only thing separating them from showing themselves off to the world is a cozy coat of fat.

If you’re looking to achieve the look of a bikini competitor or fitness model, chances are good that you have most, of it not all, of the muscle mass necessary to start off. This is great, because all that means that is you have to lose bodyfat in order to unveil that coveted physique. Easier said than done, I’m aware, but think of it as an art. Over a period of several weeks and months, you’ll chip away at your body, slowly uncovering the sculpted arms and curvy legs you’ve been after.

Myth #5: When you work out, your fat will transform into muscle.

Oh.

Very creative.

Unfortunately, the body doesn’t quite work this way. What it can do, however, is shed and gain bodyfat, as well as strip away or pack on muscle. And while these two processes may be related, they are not one and the same.

Muscle is active soft tissue that is responsible for creating physical movement. Body fat, on the other hand, serves as an energy reserve for the body and helps cushion our joints and organs as well as maintain the integrity of healthy skin and nails.

So while it may seem as though fat magically turns into muscle when you begin training, the truth is likely more along the lines of, you’re losing bodyfat, or you’re putting on muscle (or both).

Myth #6: You should switch up your training routine every week to keep your muscles guessing.

I recommend a minimum of four to six weeks on any given training program before moving onto something different. By this I don’t necessarily mean utilizing the exact same exercises for the same reps and sets week after week. There are multiple ways to go about implementing progressive overload besides increasing the load on the bar: varying speed, shifting body position in relation to the load, changing stability, and so on.

With that said, sticking to the same program gives you time to become better at the prescribed exercises by providing more opportunities for repetition.

I know what you may be thinking. “But I need to confuse my muscles and keep them guessing!” Unfortunately, muscles do not get confused, nor do they participate in guessing games. And if you’re afraid you might get bored, then I ask you, what is so boring about making improvements from one workout to the next? What’s dull about going to the gym and lifting 10lbs more than the week prior or to mastering perfect technique?

Myth #7: To lose fat, you need to crank up the cardio.

Actually, doing more cardio is the best way to… do more cardio. Doing it for the calorie burn will ultimately leave you disappointed, cranky, and tired.

This may be a hard pill to swallow, but steady-state cardio burns surprisingly fewer calories than you’d think. One study found that it takes an average of 86 hours’ worth of aerobic exercise to lose 1 whopping kilogram (2), and a meta-analysis revealed that steady-state cardio in and of itself is not an effective weight loss therapy (3).

I don’t know about you, but I can think of about a thousand other more useful things I could be doing with those 86 hours than peddling away on a bike.

Rather than steady-state cardio, then, interval training is the way to go. Other names for this include metabolic conditioning, circuit training, or high-intensity training. These short bursts of high intensity activity alternated with periods of active have been found to produce equal, if not better, results as traditional steady-state cardio with just “a fraction of the time commitment” (namely, 0.75 hours versus 13.5 hours [4]). This is likely due to the increased excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), or energy expenditure in the time following the workout.

Where do we go from here?

I hope I’ve demonstrated to you that women can lift heavy weights and perform metabolic conditioning workouts with great success. And, as long as they dial in their nutrition, they can absolutely achieve a strong, lean look without bulking up.

About the Author

Sohee Lee graduated from Stanford University in June 2012 with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Human Biology. She now trains clients in New York City, and in an online context.