Deadlift Troubleshooting Using the Coach's Eye

Here's a clip I recently threw together using the extremely handy application, Coach's Eye. Today we are going to analyze a recent deadlift session of one of our adult clients, Conrad, and explain how we were able to use this video footage to help him take his deadlift from "good" to "better than good."

More of these "Coach's Eye Analyses" will follow on SAPTstrength in the future, should you all find them enjoyable and/or useful.

Thriving vs. Surviving

Survive and advance has become the motto of the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament.  However, I believe the teams that thrive, not survive, are the one’s that advance.  Surviving suggests doing just enough to get by, while thriving suggests owning an opportunity and being better off because of the circumstances.

The term survivor is used to describe many who have made it through adversity: cancer survivors, Holocaust survivors, and sexual abuse survivors to name a few.  While surviving is certainly the first step in overcoming adversity, perhaps thriving should be the focus.  Allow me to explain.

He is considered one of the greatest hockey players of all time.  In 1993 he had a streak with at least one goal in 12 consecutive games and was on pace to lead the league in points, when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer.  He missed two months of play and his team struggled.  However, on his final day of radiation he returned and scored a goal and an assist.  Even while missing two months of play he ended up winning the scoring title by 12 points.  Following his return, the team went on to win 17 straight games.  He went on to play for a total of eight more years, while coming in and out of retirement.  Today he is co-owner/chairman of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who have been one of the best organizations in sports during his ownership.  Mario Lemieux is not just surviving.  He is thriving.

In 1944, because he was Jewish, he was placed in a work camp in Auschwitz where he became inmate “A-7713”, which was tattooed on his left arm.   He was separated from his mother and his youngest sister, who were killed in gas chambers, while his father was beaten to death at a work camp.   After living in France he moved to the United States where he has written over 40 books (57 total in his life).  In 1986 he received the Nobel Peach Prize.  He has received the Congressional Gold Medal, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, and serves as a Professor at Boston University.  He received an honorary knighthood in London.  Elie Wiesel is not just surviving.  He is thriving.

Starting at the age of nine she was molested by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend.  The abuse eventually led her to run away at the age of 13.  From there she went on to earn a full scholarship to Tennessee State University.  Since then she became the host of her own TV show and became one of the premier interviewers in the world.  She is an actress, producer, businesswomen, writer, philanthropist and publisher.  She currently has her own TV network, magazine, and radio channel.  Lastly, she is a billionaire and one of the most powerful women in the world.  Oprah Winfrey is not just surviving.  She is thriving.

These examples are not meant to minimize the tragedies that each experienced.  All of them had to battle to get to this point in their lives.  Yet their ability to thrive in the face of yesterday’s adversity allows each of them to be great today.   The old saying, “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger”, certainly rings true for all of them.  So, when your time comes and adversity hits, as it does for all who live, how will you react?  Will you be satisfied with surviving and advancing or will you challenge yourself to thrive?  Surviving isn’t always a choice, but thriving is.

Set/Rep Schemes: Is 3x10 King?

We received a question recently about set/rep schemes (for SAPT-ers, those first two columns on your program sheet) and I thought it would be a fabulous blog post. "What's the right formula for number of sets and number of reps for an exercise? I'm so used to hearing '3 sets of 10,' is that right or wrong?"

Excellent question, especially since the coaches at SAPT don't really program 3 sets of 10 on a regular basis. Hasn't this been a burning question on your mind? Of course it has, so let us dive in.

First, a brief history lesson. The famous "3 sets of 10" actually came out of the brains of two fellows named Dr. Thomas Delorme and Dr. Arthur Watkins. They were the first ones to develop a structured weight training protocol based on progressive overload. They wrote a paper (1948), and later a book (1950-ish), detailing their research findings. One quote I thought was rather lovely:

“The number of contractions per bout is arbitrarily set at ten. If fewer repetitive lifts were required, the resistance could be increased. Whether ten is the optimum number for rapid increase in strength has never been established in terms of criteria other than the empirical practice of weight-lifters. It is probable that the number closely approaches the optimum.”

See? 3 sets of 10 reps is not set in stone; it's just the numbers the good doctors worked with and recorded their results. You can read about it here, if you want.

Now, moving onto why we've expanded upon Drs. Delorme and Watkins' work. Subsequent research as led to insights on how muscles work and grow stronger. In the effort of remaning true to the KISS principle, I'll list a small snippet of the knowledge out there. Keep in mind that this is merely a scratch upon the surface of what goes on physiologically during weight training. (such as, energy systems used, hormonal responses and what types of conditions elicit the various physical responses of the body. It will blow your mind. Mine is continual blown up every time I read more about muscles. )

Ahem,

- As load increases, reps decrease and vice versa.

- As total exercise volume increases, intensity will decrease and vice versa.

- Muscles will adapt to the demands placed upon them (SAID principle).

So how does that help us coaches (and self-trained folks) determine set/reps. Well, as always, it depends.

If your goal is strength (which, by the way, it should be), you'll want to stick to lower rep ranges (1-5) with weights closer to your 1 rep max. I shall NOT be diving into percentages and what percentage matches with what rep scheme as I've found they're wildly different person to person. Generally, the closer you approach your 1 rep max, the less repetitions you can perform. As a coach, the exercises that stay in this range, typically, are the money-makers: squats, deadlifts, chin/pull ups, and presses.

If your goal is strength, which it should be, (no, this is not a typo. Strength is the KING of physical adaptations.) using the 6-8 rep range lends itself well to assistance lifts such as single-leg work, rows, pushups, anything-that's-not-your-main-lift, again, you can lift a heavier load for 6 reps than you can for 10, so... strength means picking up heavy things. This rep range affords a longer time under tension (meaning the muscles are working longer than say a 2 rep deadlift set), therefore building up their strength-endurance a bit instead of, say, a max-effort strength.

Now, this is not to say that you can't get stronger using the 3x10 protocol (assuming you're increasing the load), but it tends to only work for a little while, and it works best with beginners. In order for muscles to adapt to lifting heavy things, you have to impose that demand upon them by lifting heavy things. It would be more effecient to lift a lot of weight a few times than a little weigh a lot of times (this goes back to the energy system and hormonal response thing I mentioned earlier. This will be a future post... but for now, from a physiological standpoint, you'll get stronger faster lifting more weight a few times.)

Comic break.

Another reason, outside of the strength reasons, SAPT coaches use sets less than 10 is technique. We've found that having someone, especially a beginner, perform sets of 10 squats just ends up in fail. Form goes out the window as muscles get tired and attention wanders. There's a lot going on in the big lifts (chest up, butt back, toes up, on your heels, brace... etc) and it's difficult to keep it all in your head when you're first learning for extended sets. Thus, sets of 5, for our beginners, works out nicely. Our more experienced athletes stick with this rep range as they progress, well, because they're lifting heavier things.

Brain overload...

We do program sets of 10, but usually it's a corrective or mobility exercise, such as a facepull or wall slide, or sometimes we'll throw in some reverse crunches so our athlete's can "feel the burn."

In the end, we stick to the lower rep ranges to either practice technique (beginners) or elicit strength adaptations (experienced). As the smart Drs. said, the reptition number was arbitrarily set at 10. Later, research found that strong people lift heavy things a few times. The set/rep combinations are endless; train for strength, keep it simple, and have a fun workout!

Lessons of the Jaw: A Few Thoughts on the Body's Intradependence

As you read this, I'm either in surgery or in the recovery room. For those who don't know, I am having lower jaw surgery to correct a severe over (also called "open bite") and cross bite. That being said, blogging might be a bit spotty (more so than usual) over the next couple weeks, but I'm going to do my best. Seeing as this surgery has been on the forefront of my mind for quite a while, I thought I'd share a bit of the physiology connections I've learned over the past year or so. It's actually pretty interesting how dependent the body is on it's collective parts. So dependent that something up in my face affects the rest of my body rather dramatically.  We'll do bullet points because I really like them.

Lesson 1: Pain is sneaky. Sometimes the origin and/or cause is not where you think.

I've known I would need this corrective surgery at some point for quite a while now. About 3 years ago, I experienced severe and prolonged pain in my tempromandibular joint (TMJ), the hinge joint of your jaw that connects the lower to the upper. I didn't have the means to have surgery at the time and the pain receded a bit, so I put it on the back burner. Just over a year ago, I started having migraine/severe headaches in the front of my head that would last for days, even weeks. Medications didn't help. Then I started to have shoulder pain on my right side. This made me think something else was going on since I knew I wasn't doing anything that would aggravate my shoulder.

I popped over to this site and discovered that a tight sternocledomastoid can cause both pain in the head and shoulder. Sure enough, I had knots the size of marbles all along these muscles. Guess what? The SCM connects right up behind the ear, near the TMJ, thus a misaligned jaw (being used for thousands of reps per day) will definitely cause some tension in the poor ol' SCM.

Lesson 2: The suboccipital muscles are really, really important.

I also had pain in the base of my skull on a regular basis, thanks to irritated suboccipital muscles. I trolled around to find some information and perhaps home treatment to help manage the pain symptoms. I came across fellow strength coach, Patrick Ward's post here. Readit, seriously, it applies to everyone. It'll blow your mind how important those little muscles are to your overall health.  Patrick Ward goes into the implications of tight suboccipitals and their effect down the stream, such as posture in general and neural control over postural muscles. I found it interesting that "voluntary trunk control" was one of the muscle functions affected. Guess what? I struggle with bracing my right side. I know that sounds weird, but I can not get as "tight" on the right side without really thinking about it. Might be why I have a collapsed disc to the right side?...

Lesson 3: It's seriously all connected.

Then I came across this paper (you don't have to read the whole thing unless you're super-into-science and research papers) that linked symptoms of TMJ dysfunction and jaw pain with the suboccipital muscles. Check out pages 13 (yup, I have all those symptoms, including impaired vision) I should also note that I've suffered from vertigo since I was 13, so perhaps, once my jaw/bite is corrected and those muscles are no longer strained, I might see a decrease in symptoms.  Page 15 which connects hypertonic (too tight) neck muscles with TMJ muscles dysfunction and pain, and 17 describing short cervical muscles and posture and how they research has found correlations... craziness. Upper cross syndrome, a posture <--- description used by those in the health field, is either a creator of tight neck muscles or the result of tight suboccipitals. It's a bit of chicken-egg questions, but either way, they tend to coexist. So, if you have a hunched posture, try massaging the base of your skull, that might help loosen some things up!

Lesson 4: Pain eventually conquers proprioception

We recently had an in-service where we learned about the neuromuscular implications of injuries in regards to training athletes. The main point I retained was, if muscle tissue is acutely damaged, such as a sprain, or chronically irritated, such as repeated spraining of said ankle, the muscle spindles, which reside in the tendons, will no longer respond accordingly, much like Ariel responding to her father's command to stay away from land... Poorly.

Muscle spindles are proprioceptive organs that control the stretch-reflex, for example when the doctor taps your knee and your leg kicks forward a bit, the muscle spindles are rapidly stretched (when the mallet hits your patella tendon) and they respond by sending a signal to your brain to flex the quads (thus, pulling your knee into a bit of extension).

So, damaged muscle tissue, specifically the muscle spindles and especially chronically damaged tissue ("damaged" doesn't necessarily mean an acute injury, but a chronic posture, like your shoulders slumping and your neck protruding forward as you peer at the computer screen) tend to lose their ability to provide valuable feedback to the body in the form of proprioception (where your body is in space i.e. balance). Instead, pain signals are sent. This is bad on two fronts: 1) it hurts 2) lack of proprioception means loss of muscular control, be it voluntary or involuntary.

I don't know too much on how to restore muscle spindles and transfer them back to being proprioceptive and not pain oriented, but I do know that a) removing the irritaing stimulus (in my case, setting my jaw in the correct alignment) b) improving tissue quality through manual therapy (professional or at home) and c) retraining the muscles to move how they should (i.e. standing up straight instead of slouching, or going back to the ankle example, walking without a limp or favoring the ankle).

Lesson 5: Implications for training.

Another random fact, there's a correlation with a cross bite and scapular winging (the shoulder blade sticking up instead of laying flat on the rib cage). Winging impairs overhead movement, messes up the rhythm of the humerus and shoulder girdle and makes picking and lifting heavy things a bit problematic. I've done just about every exercise under the sun to fix my wing, to no avail... maybe surgery?

Anyway, as a coach, just by looking at my own situation helps me work with our athletes here at SAPT. If at first the basic, usual cues don't fix a problem, like "pulling yourself to the floor" during a push up to fix a winging scapula or "crack a walnut" to prevent knee pain during the squat, then, maybe there's an underlying issue that demands a different approach. Maybe some dedicated soft tissue work is in order to correct a nagging pain or it might be severe enough to refer out to a physical therapist or doctor. Whatever the case, if after working with an athlete diligently doesn't solve the problem, probably time to delve a bit deeper. (and check their bite! Kidding.)

When You're Feeling Beat Up

If you’ve been training for a while, you’ve surely had those days, maybe even weeks, where your joints are crankier than usual, your shoulders and back are sore, and you get out of bed to realize gravity turned it up a notch.

When you load the bar up with 70% as you work up you get confused because it’s heavier than it should be. Did you miscalculate? Is it the wrong bar? Wrong plates? Are you using 70% of your deadlift max for your single-arm bottoms-up kettlebell floor press?

When you rule out all other factors, you may come to the conclusion that you’re probably just beat up from the training you’ve accumulated. This is especially true if you’re an athlete. It’s important to train hard at practice and train hard in the weight room, but you also have to remember to take note of how your body is reacting to all of it. Here are some tips for those dark times when your body is beaten and walking up the stairs feels like max effort step-ups.

Deload

I don’t believe that everyone needs to schedule a strictly consistent deload in their programming (e.g. every 4th week) but they certainly have their place. I see more benefit in scheduling a deload with specific regards to competition. However, sometimes an unscheduled deload is necessary if you feel super banged up. Rather than stay at home drag yourself to the gym and hit a few movements with lighter weight, for a FEW sets of a FEW reps (50%-75% for 3-5 sets of 3-5). You don’t have to hit 10x10 just because you’re going light. Deload weight AND volume.

Cut Back on Assistance Work

Does your training log tell you to do 4x8 Bulgarian split squats after your back squats? Cut it to 2x8. Or 2x5. Or 0x0. Rest assured, your beloved assistance work isn’t going anywhere, so cut back on it for a session or two and hammer it hard when you come back fresh.

EAT

Eat.

Epsom Salt Bath/Contrast Shower

Try some new recovery techniques! The idea behind an Epsom salt bath (basically soaking in a tub of magnesium sulfate) is that magnesium will soak into your body through the skin, restoring a huge list of body cell functions in the muscles, nerves, and other soft tissues. Magnesium is also inhibitory to the muscle cells, which will help you relax.

Contrast showers are (in my opinion) not as relaxing. I think they are actually pretty brutal. Enjoy a few minutes of a nice warm shower, then quickly slam the dial from H to C and suffer through 30 seconds to a minute of an ice-cold blast. Repeat several times. It takes some discipline, but you will be rewarded with increased blood flow and recovery throughout your whole body.

Soft Tissue Work Whip out the foam rollers, PVC pipes, lacrosse balls, and go to town. Or pamper yourself with a visit to a reputable ART practitioner. Or do what I do and go to Brookstone to sit in one of those super massage chairs until somebody kicks you out.

With Spring sports starting up, all you athletes know what you're in for: Months of hard training, tough competition, lots of fun, and your body taking a pounding!  Just keep a handful of strategies to help you dust off your shoulders and get back in the game when you get beat down.   Those of you with try-outs this week, best of luck!

You're Doing It Wrong: Split Squats (lunges) and Knees Edition

I haven't done one of these posts in a while so I thought it was high time we had another "You're Doing It Wrong" post.

Diving right in, a common complaint we hear at SAPT is knee pain during split squat or lunge variations. Typically it's pain in the front of the knee, though sometimes it's on the sides as well.

*Disclaimer* Please remember that I'm not diagnosing anything and if these general fixes in this post don't help your knees feel better, I'd say there's probably an underlying issue that needs more digging either from a coach (for the easy, common problems like tight or weak glutes) or a therapist of some sort (assuming the coach refers you to someone if your pain is outside of their scope of practice).

Ok, so two of the most common errors we see during split squat/lunges are:

1. Pitching forward into the front knee with the shin angle less than 90 degrees to the floor. Typically, the front heel rises off the floor as well, thus limiting glute involvement in the movement (mostly of the front leg). Glutes don't like that; they like to be involved with exercise so don't leave them out!

2. Shifting too much of the body's weight to the back leg and crumpling into a ball of poo in the back. The front shin will often drift past 90. Again, this position takes out the glutes' involvement and puts too much emphasis in the quads. This causes more pressure to be exerted on the knee joint, which makes it cranky.

Here's a video to distinguish the two errors, followed by a correct split squat. Note that these form corrections carry over to the lunge variations as well.

So how do you do it right?

1. Keep a 70/30 weight distritbution of front to back leg.

2. Keep your front heel down and push through it (as if you were squishing a bug) as you straighten your legs.

3. Squeeze your butt and abs (hmmm.. that sounds familiar.)

4. Don't let your front knee stray over your toes. Your knees will be happier that way.

That's it! Follow those simple guidelines and split squats and your knees should work together like the Harry Potter Trio!