Power Smoothies For Strength Training Recovery and Delighted Tastebuds
It's hot and muggy outside, who DOESN'T want a delicious and nutritious smoothie? It's a perfect end to a hard workout, too. Here is a video dredged from the SAPT vault of Steve, my wordsmith Husband, as he provides instructions on how to make the perfect smoothie. (He's the real Smoothie King.) Trust me, you'll love it!
If you listen carefully you can hear his parent's cat plaintively meowing in the background.
4 Safe and Effective Ways to Work Out with Cranky Knees
I had the opportunity to write another article for Breaking Muscle. If you have cranky knees and you still want to train, this article is right up your alley!
If you’ve been training for an appreciable amount of time, you’ve probably acquired a tweak here or a twinge there that you now have to train around. Whether it’s an old sport’s injury or a that-was-dumb-of-me injury, it’s now something you have to take into account when hitting the iron.
Create Your Own Workout - Part 3: To Isolate, or Not To Isolate?
We've touched on the importance of placing a major emphasis on compound movements rather than isolation exercises when writing your programs in Part 1 and Part 2. To start out today's post, let's review a couple of definitions:
- Isolation Exercises: Movements that incorporate a single joint and target the musculature that performs the given joint action. These are generally lower skill movements such as bicep curls, lateral raises, and hamstring curls.
- Compound Exercises: Movements that incorporate more than one joint. These movements are more complex and activate a wide variety of muscle groups such as squats, deadlifts, and KB swings.
We want to be as efficient as possible when designing our weight lifting routines. No one wants to spend more time than they need to in the gym, and choosing exercises that will give us the most bang-for-our-buck will help us reach our goals faster and more effectively.
Compound movements help us do just that. They target a large amount of muscle, inducing an anabolic training effect that is much more potent than that of localized strength work, while also mimicking movement patterns that every human being should perfect and strengthen. Taking this into account, exercises such as the squat, deadlift, pullup, and pushup should make up the majority of our strength work. We should never be programming isolation exercises as the "main lifts" of our program. This is how you spin your wheel and make little, if any, progress in the gym, just like the people in the video below:
Are isolation exercises worthless?
I don't think "worthless" is the correct term, but, in my opinion, isolation exercises are very, very, very optional. There are a few instance where they may be useful.
- For bodybuilding purposes isolation exercises can be useful for bringing up lagging muscles. If you have poorly developed biceps, then throw in some bicep curls at the end of the workout. The extra work will be useful, but if you're not already performing rows and pullups, then you might as well go home and eat a cheeseburger. The compound movements absolutely must be in place before layering on isolation exercises.
- To activate a muscle with poor tone or motor control. For a physical therapist or personal trainer who uses a protocol such as NKT, we often find muscles that exhibit poor function. For some reason or another, the wiring in your body is malfunctioning, preventing the nervous system from effectively communicating with your muscles. This is often the case for the gluteus medius, a muscle on the back and outside of your hip responsible for hip stability, abduction, and rotation. The reason behind this faulty wiring will need to be saved for another post, but a glute med activation drill in this scenario may serve you well
- For ego purposes or simply for enjoyment. I'm not gonna lie, bicep curls are kinda fun. Plus, they give you a reason to wear tanks such as this one:
Strength or Speed- Is It One or the Other?
Last Friday I wrote a post about the equation F = ma (force = mass/acelleration) and used one of our athletes as an example. He's a decathlete, quite tall, fairly skinny, yet moves heavy-ish weights like it's nothing. The reason, in part, is that this kid lives for speed. He is actually the Flash in a high schooler's body; he has an ability to generate a decent amount of force quickly.
The bulk of his training on the track is on the "speed" side of the "speed-strength continuum."
Hold up, the what?
No, it's not something from Star Wars. Instead of droning on and on for paragraphs upon paragraphs, Eric Cressey has an extremely helpful video that explains it succinctly. He's a pretty smart fellow, so I recommend you watch it. He uses a baseball player as an example, so if that's your sport, I definitely recommend you listen!
To recap:
- Can apply this to any sport- including weekend warriors
- Absolute strength = high load, low speed; absolute speed = low load, high speed. The other components are gradients of the two ends with an inverse relationship between load and speed.
- Every sport requires power (force output over time; or how fast you can move a load). Strength is the foundation of power so you can make tremendous gains in power output by increasing strength.
- Athletes (non-lifters) spend most, if not all, of their time on the absolute speed side, so adding in absolute strength work (i.e. strength training) will not only increase their power output, but allow them to capitalize on the other components of the continuum.
- Ideally, us strength coaches want to bring people more towards the center- though people's genetics will pre-dispose them more to one end or the other.
- Athletes who do not strength train will eventually find themselves tapped out, injured, and unable to utilize their speed because they don't have the strength to back it up.
- Strength is KING. (Well, he inferred that...)
How Does This Apply to You?
Let's talk about our decathlete for a second. The majority of his sport and sport practice is in the absolute speed/ speed-strength end of the continuum. As his coach, I'm going to train him more towards the absolute strength/ strength-speed end. Why? How much faster will he be if he can produce more force each rep? This is easily accomplished by increasing his max strength.
Think about it this way: the high striker game at fairs-
If you can swing the hammer quickly, you'll have a good amount of force behind your hammer (remember, F=ma). Now, if you increase the weight of the hammer while maintaining the same speed, you're going to have a LOT more force upon striking and you'll probably make that bell ring. Apply that analogy to our decathlete: strength training will give him a bigger hammer.
On the other end, if I have a powerlifter in here who is stalling on his lifts, I would take a few weeks to work on the speed end- again, referring to the high striker analogy, increasing the speed of the hammer swing. This way when he goes back to training on the strength end, he'll be able to produce more force overall.
If you're reading this and don't have a coach to look out for you, (why not? ;) )think about where you spend the most time on the above continuum. If you're an field/court athlete, it'll be on the speed side, if you're training resides mostly in the weight room, probably strength side. Take some time and train on the other end of the spectrum for a few weeks. You'll notice improvement in your performance pretty quickly.
If you're a fast person, training strength will only make you faster; if you're a strong person, training speed will only make you stronger!
Why A Skinny Teenager Can Lift More Than You
Yesterday, I watched one of our high school athletes deadlift 215 for a fast set of 4. The kid is 6' 2" and only weighs around 160-ish. Now I know that 205 isn't a terribly high number given his bodyweight (in the grand scheme of the strength world), but this kid has only been deadlifting with a barbell for 2 months, coming 1x/week (so 8 total sessions). From that perspective, it's decently impressive. (We, of course, did not let him start deadlifting right away- we worked on his movements for 3 months leading up to allowing him near a barbell.)
Back to my point- this kid moves 205 like it's nothing and yet looks like a bean pole. How is this possible you ask? By this li'l equation:
F = ma
Force = mass x acceleration
Let's back up a bit. What is force, first of all? (sadly, not THE Force...) Force is the capacity to do work or cause physical change- typically in the form of exerting strength or power upon an object.
Well, what is strength? Strength- for our purposes here- is defined as: a muscle's ability to generate force against physical objects (i.e. weights, the ground, their own bodyweight, other people.) The obvious example is in a weight room: how much weight is on the bar. A less obvious example: vertical jump height is based on how much force a person applies to the ground.
Strength can also be expressed in the form of the speed of movement: how fast someone can run is dependent on how much force is applied to the ground at each step. (Also at play in all these examples, the rate of force development- how quickly someone can produce high force- is key. I wrote about it HERE and don't forget Part 2.) This is precisely why we focus on making our athletes stronger!
Strength, the ability to produce (high) force, is the foundation for all other athletic attributes.
The goal of strength training is to get stronger, or put another way, to increase force output. The more force an athlete can produce in competition will increase his/her speed, explosiveness, ability to knock the stuffing out of the opponent...
Which brings me back to the equation; force output can be influenced by both the mass of the object being moved and the speed with which is moves. In training, we can foster increases in force output by one of three ways: increasing the mass of the object, increasing the speed with which is it moved, or both.
Back to the initial question: how can our 160lb athlete move that 205 so effortlessly? The "a" part of the F=ma equation- acceleration- for him is incredibly high. If you read the rate of force development post (shame on you if you haven't, don't you want to be smarter today?), you would infer that he can produce enough force fast enough to hoist that barbell. Our 160lb athlete, by the way, is a decathlete (and a pretty darn good one) and doesn't know the meaning of "slow"... or "medium" for that matter.
This kid lives for speed. His ability to recruit high-threshhold motor units- the ones responsible for explosive power- is stellar. If you're finding your weights have stalled, try taking a few weeks to work on increasing the speed of your lifts (that rate of force development post will come in handy...).
My goal as his strength coach is to train him on the absolute strength part of the continuum, more on that next week. That's called a teaser.
Bench Press Tips: No Spotter? No Excuse!
The Bench Press. The King the of Jungle when it comes to lifting weights, right? Well, in my humble opinion that title belongs to the squat, but there really is one question that rules them all when it comes to exercising your manliness... "How much do you bench, bro?"
The bench press really is a great lift, however, it's not for everyone. If you have a serious shoulder/elbow injury, if you're an overhead athlete, if you're incredibly kyphotic, it may be in your best interest to avoid the lift and the prioritize pulling movements for a while. But, if you can bench, bench away!
The bench press allows for heavy weights, progressive overload, and will gain you a ton of respect with the bros of the world if you can put up some serious numbers. It's a compound, multi-joint movement that will increase anabolic hormone release, improve bone density, put some hair on your chest, and strengthen, not only your muscles, but your ligaments and tendons too!
One of the excuses I typically hear for not bench pressing is "Well, I don't have a spotter." 1. You should never attempt a weight that you know you can't lift. It's dangerous, stupid, and will lead to no gainz. Remember, the weight room is for building strength, not testing it. 2. There's a very simple fix if you do find yourself in a hairy situation.
You don't want to end up looking like this....
Instead try this. It's a little tip I picked up from the man, the myth, the legend, Jonnie Candito.
See you next time!
