Get your air! Breathing and Bracing for Powerful Lifts and Injury Prevention

Why do you need to brace your core?

First, let’s define “bracing.”

To brace your midsection in the context of lifting is simply creating 360 degree (circumferential for you intellectual types) intra-abdominal pressure. This will stabilize the spine and protect it from shear stress.

It is NOT sucking in your belly button towards your spine, as some trainers out there will say. That does not actually create nor maintain enough intra-abdominal (the core) pressure and not only will you experience power leaks, but it puts you at a greater risk of injury.

So, why do we brace?

1. Efficient power/force transfer- for example during a squat or deadlift your lower body applies force to the ground and that transfers to your upper body and thus the bar moves up (hopefully…). In athletics, your body will naturally brace during high-power activities such as sprinting or jumping. Learning how to brace and do it well in a slow setting, i.e. lifting, will transfer beautifully to the “faster” movements such as sprinting and thus, you have much more efficient movement (aka, you run faster).

2. Prevents power leaks- part 2 of creating a system for efficient force transfer is preventing leaks in that system. For instance, I see a lot of people’s upper backs (or lower backs…) round during a deadlift. This not only increases risk for injury (see next point) but it’s also a power leak. Some of that force that the lower body is applying to the ground is lost which limits the amount of weight a person can lift. It’s like watering grass in the middle of a hot day- some water still gets down in the ground but a lot of it is lost to evaporation and doesn’t actually benefit the lawn. The same thing applies here: there still force being applied to the barbell, but some of the power is lost in that leak.

3. Injury prevention- A stable spine is a happy spine. The intra-abdominal pressure created during bracing supports the spine while it’s under load/stress, such as during a back squat or the landing of a broad jump. Usually the reason why people hurt their backs is because they don't brace properly.

Bracing involves taking a big ol’ breath (but not just any ol’ breath as you’ll see below) and then clamping down on that air, squeezing all your midsection, and holding it throughout the lift (like you’re about to get punched or constipated). The holding part is usually not the problem, I’ve found, but the actual intake of breath.

Below is a video where I get a little more detailed on how to actually breathe in prior to bracing.

So there you have it! Breathe in to fill both your belly and rib cage, crush it, and hoist your barbell. If you want to read a slight more in-depth article, click HERE.

Deadlift Fine Tuning: The Setup

Here is a little before and after troubleshooting I did on an athlete's deadlift this evening. Check it out:

Your Fitness Questions Answered

Instead of typing out a super long blog that will take longer than I have time for, I figured I would just plunk all that information in one video for you viewing pleasure.

Highlights:

There are no hard and fast rules in the fitness world, the answer “It depends,” is totally valid.

If someone claims that it’s a “100% guarantee” they are either a) selling you something or b) ignorant of the vast differences in individual responses.

Individual physiology (i.e. body mechanics, muscle insertion points, how one handles physical and emotional stress) and biochemistry (i.e. absorbing and metabolizing nutrients), and outside factors (environmental stressors, sleep, job requirements, etc.) all affect how a person will react to various training and nutrition strategies.

The more we learn about nutrition and physiology the more we realize how much we don’t know.

Maintaining a healthy body composition is like a multi-tiered wedding cake: nutrition makes up the largest part, followed by strength, then cardiovascular work, and then, the icing, is your daily movement.

**I forgot to mention this in the video- rest and recovery are also key. Cake is good, but you can’t eat the whole thing every day. Space out your cake.**

General principles that we know work: eat lots of vegetables, pick up heavy things, run around, and move daily. The details of what that looks like for you will be completely unique to you.

Maximizing Performance: The Perfect Push-up

Ahh, the push-up. An exercise that is sorely under-appreciated and misunderstood.

What is the push-up? A bodyweight exercise known to dominate military bootcamps and a way for coaches to layer "punishment" onto their teams? Hardly.

If you want to learn more about the insane benefits of the perfect push-up, please look no further than here. You could consider this SAPT's definitive guide to the push-up.

In the meantime, check out this athlete's mastery of the movement:

Are Supplements a Good Idea?

Recently Consumer Reports had a lengthy article regarding the supplement industry. Here is the main article and here is a list of supplements to avoid.. The main take-aways were:

1. The supplement industry isn’t strictly regulated by the FDA, though most consumers assume that it is. That doesn’t mean that all supplements are a sham, but it does behoove the consumer to do the research. Groups like Consumer Labs provide information on content and safety of various brands.
2. When it comes to choosing supplements- again, do your own research- utilizing resources like Examine.com can help you choose both safe and effective supplements. The folks at Examine.com synthesize the available scientific research on given supplements and ingredients and they do a pretty darn good job. A little bit of digging can save you a little bit of moolah.
3. The “natural” label is on a bottle can literally mean nothing. Companies can slap that label on anything without any oversight from a governing body that defines what that term means (arsenic is “natural…).
4. Companies are required to print the ingredients (mostly, there are loopholes like “proprietary blend” that muddy the water a bit) on their bottles, however they don’t necessarily have to put how much of each ingredient is in the supplement. For example, caffeine could constitute most of an “energy” supplement even though the consumer may think their getting B vitamins, gensing, and green tea extract.
5. Consumer Reports, as an experiment, created their own supplement. They ordered the ingredients, the pill-making supplies (capsules and a machine that fills the capsules), bottles, and created labels all for about $190.00. Granted, any company that creates and sells supplements must have an FDA-approved facility (though, again, that doesn’t necessarily include the contents of said supplements) and I doubt bigger companies do such things, but it just goes to show that how easy it is for kinda anyone to make and market a supplement.

There can be a time and place for these guys, but make sure you have a solid diet first.

Quite frankly, eating a healthy diet with plenty of variety will go a long way to supplying what you need on a regular basis. I’ve written about it before, supplements can have their place within the context of a healthy diet- I’m certainly not anti-supplement- but they are to be treated as such, supplements not replacements. I simply urge everyone to be discerning consumers.

Common Deadlift Mistake: Hips Popping Up Too Quickly (aka: Beyonce Hips)

Here is a brief video of how to spot and correct a common deadlift mistake.

Main Points:

1. The hips should not pop up at the beginning of the lift; the shoulders and hips should rise at the same rate. If you or your trainee looks like Beyonce, then you're popping up too quickly. 

2. When the hips pop it turns the deadlift into an RDL or stiff-legged deadlift which can a) place more strain on the lower back and b) doesn't tap into the awesome power of the glutes and hamstrings (and we all want some o' that!). 

3. To fix: cue athlete to "pull chest to the back wall." It's akin to the "chest up" cue, but I like it better because it helps nail the shoulder-hip sequence more effectively than just cuing to pull the chest up. For me personally, it helps remind me to initiate with my glutes instead of my back and drive through my hips on the way up. 

4. Deadlifting does magical things.