More importantly, a coach’s job is to help reduce injury both on and off the field. New York University Head Strength and Conditioning Coach and Assistant Athletic Trainer, Joe Mosher (M.Ed, ATC, CSCS, USAW) feels that:

“We have a duty to our athletes to provide them with a program that not only helps enhance their athleticism but also, and maybe more importantly, provides them with a higher level of injury resilience than they had before. I base everything on the idea that if my athletes are healthy and can compete, then they have at least some chance at winning, regardless of who we play. If they are injured and cannot compete then they have zero chance of winning. Even a one percent chance of winning is still better than a zero percent chance at winning.”

No matter how much stronger, bigger, and faster your athletes are compared to the opposition, if they aren’t healthy, they don’t play. Add these five exercises to your programming to give your athletes the best chance at staving off injuries and staying in the game.

Disclaimer: The content on Breaking Muscle is meant to be informative in nature, but it shouldn’t take the place of advice and/or supervision from a medical professional. While many of our contributors and experts have respected certifications and degrees, and while some are certified medical professionals, the opinions and articles on this site are not intended for use as diagnosis and/or treatment of health problems.

Eccentric Hamstring Slide

• What: Hamstring eccentric strength and posterior chain engagement.
• Why: Whether you are an athlete, runner, or fitness fanatic, your hamstring health plays a pivotal role in performance. The hamstrings are a critical component of force development for jumping, running, pulling, Olympic weightlifting, and strength training. Additionally, the hamstrings work to decelerate and absorb muscular force throughout the landing phases of the running/gait cycle and help to stabilize the knees and hips during open chained activity. Without proper hamstring health in both the concentric and eccentric phases of muscle actions, you could be leaving your athletes and clients open to nagging injuries, such as muscle pulls and strains and loss of training development.
• How: Perform this exercise either in the corrective or accessory segment of the workout. The key to doing these is to have controlled lengthening (eccentric) of the muscle, keeping tension and full range of motion (ROM) throughout the movement. Try adding these into your training regimen twice per week, for 2-4 sets of 10-20 controlled (2-3 second eccentric) reps.

90/90 Breathing

• What: This diaphragmatic breathing technique from the Postural Restoration Institute is great for teaching athletes and clients correct breathing and bracing during lifts and in life. Poor breathing techniques can create stiffness and pain in the neck, shoulders, pectoral muscles, lumbar, and anterior hip. This stiffness, combined with intense exercise, can lead to serious injury if left unnoticed.
• Why: The ability to brace and breathe through the diaphragm and abdominals is key to more stability and joint function in the hips, shoulders, and spine. By teaching athletes how to breathe under both non-stressful and stressful situations, they can improve performance and decrease the likelihood of injury during running, contact sports, overextended and rotational movements, and life.
• How: Perform this breathing protocol in the warm-up routine prior to resistance training. This exercise is a great way to mentally prepare athletes and clients to become more in tune with their breathing. More importantly, it gives them the core stabilization they need to perform optimally and safely.

X-Band Walk

• What: Glute activation, hip external rotation, and hip/knee/ankle stability.
• Why: Glute development is critical for hip health, which is a key player in deadlifts, squats, Olympic weightlifting, jumping, landing, and running, as well as power production and injury prevention. Additionally, the glutes stabilize the hip and knee joints, which tend to be susceptible to injury without adequate stability.
• How: Perform this movement either in the corrective or accessory segment of the workout. Depending on the band thickness and the position of the straps, the difficulty can be altered based on the athlete. The farther the bands are from the hip joint, the more resistance. Start with a few sets of 8-10 steps per leg, focusing on strong, controlled steps.

Marches and Skips

• What: Running, jumping, sprinting mechanics and leg drive technique.
• Why: The ability to create force is one thing, but most fitness enthusiasts and even some athletes fall short on the ability to apply maximal force using efficient movement mechanics. The result is decreased running speed, economy, wasting of energy, and an increased risk of potential injury. By understanding and engraining sound marches, skips, and running drills in warm-up sets and pre-competition drills, you can teach athletes to not only run faster, but also safer and more efficiently.
• How: Perform these drills in warm-up sets and/or pre-competition drills. It is imperative to teach the athletes to not allow knee extension as the leg drives upwards, and to maintain proper alignment of the base leg under the torso. Additionally, be sure to have the athlete actively pull the heel to the glutes with the hamstring, and drive his or her foot directly under the center of mass.

Arm Bar

• What: Scapular stabilization, rotator cuff stability, and shoulder awareness.
• Why: Whether you are a throwing athlete (baseball, football, softball, volleyball, tennis), weightlifter (snatches and jerks), or avid fitness enthusiast, scapular and shoulder stabilization are critical for optimal force development and injury prevention. The ability to anchor the posterior shoulder will increase the amount of force than can be controlled, decelerated, and ultimately produced at the shoulder joint. Additionally, Mosher states: “[T]he arm bar is a great shoulder disassociation exercise. It teaches the body to move around a stable shoulder. It also trains the rotator cuff in its first actual role of centering the joint as it moves through a full ROM. Lastly, it allows the athlete to develop thoracic mobility at the same time as teaching the shoulder joint to pack tight but still move independently.”
• How: Perform arm bars either in the corrective or accessory segment of the workout. The key to doing these is to have controlled stability of the shoulder as you turn your body. Make sure to keep the shoulder blades and abs tight, as you stay “stacked” through the upper/mid back. Try these out for 8-10 repetitions per arm, focusing on a brief pause at the top of each repetition.

The Proactive Approach

Take the time to address your athletes’ needs by including these fundamental exercises in their programming. This proactive approach will bulletproof your athletes from injury and keep them on the field and in the gym for years to come.

Learn more about injury prevention:

Programming for Injury Prevention: How to Keep Your Athletes Healthy

The post 5 Exercises to Help Athletes (Possibly) Prevent Injury appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

That’s why it’s a personal trainer’s responsibility to ensure your older adult clients, no matter what other goals they have, need to stand strong on their own two feet. Because you don’t want them to end up like one of the statistics below:

• One out of five falls causes a serious injury such as broken bones or a head injury.
• Each year, 3 million older people are treated in emergency departments for fall injuries.
• Over 800,000 patients a year are hospitalized because of a fall injury, most often because of a head injury or hip fracture.
• Each year at least 300,000 older people are hospitalized for hip fractures.
• More than 95% of hip fractures are caused by falling, usually by falling sideways.
• Falls are the most common cause of traumatic brain injuries.
• In 2015, the total medical costs for falls totaled more than $50 billion. Medicare and Medicaid shouldered 75% of these costs.

Plus, this loss of mobility makes it two-three times more likely that the older adult who suffered the fall meets their maker.¹

However, before getting into the exercises that prevent falls, let’s define balance and the systems within the body that govern balance.

Balance is ‘the ability to maintain the body’s center of mass over its base of support.’ Balance is both static (still) and dynamic (movement).

The systems that work to keep you balanced are:

1. The Vestibular system – is in the inner ear. This provides the brain information about the body’s motion, equilibrium and spatial awareness.
2. The Musculoskeletal system – skin, muscles, ligaments, and tendons send sensory information to the brain that makes you aware of your body’s position in space and when changes happen in your environment.
3. The Neuromuscular system – information from the eyes, vestibular and musculoskeletal systems travel via the neuromuscular system to the brain which then sends information to respond to changes in the environment via the central and peripheral nervous system.

Granted there are many exercises that will improve your client’s posture, balance, and cut their risk of falling and hopefully you’re training them. However, my criteria for choosing the best 5 exercises for fall prevention are:

• Biggest bang for your buck
• Simplicity
• No special equipment needed
• Improving the 3 systems above

The following 5 exercises will improve your client’s ability to stand upright and look the world in the face.

1. Squats

Squats are a part of your client’s everyday routine from the moment they wake up, till the moment they go to bed. Throughout the day, they have performed the squatting movement several times, possibly without realizing it.

For example:

• Getting in and out of bed
• When nature calls
• Picking something off the floor
• Standing and sitting from a chair

Strong legs are essential for your clients to stay mobile and prevent falls as they get older, and squats will help develop this leg strength. Strengthening the quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes will help them prevent falls and dominate life as they age.

Furthermore, squats strengthen the core muscles that make everyday movements like turning, bending, and even standing easier. Not only that, but a strong core can ease pain in your low back and make it easier to support their good posture.²

Hopefully, you know all this, and squats play a huge role in your older adult programming.

2. Half And Tall Kneeling Positions

It’s the central nervous system’s main job is to reduce the threats of physical harm (real or perceived) and being close to the floor reduces the dangers the CNS senses while training to improve balance.

Plus, if your client cannot keep themselves upright on the floor for any length of time with the tall or half kneeling positions, they haven’t much hope of doing it standing either.

Both these positions strengthen the glutes and improve core stability and hip mobility which are huge factors in their health and well-being.

Program the tall kneeling and half kneeling positions for 1-2 minutes each. When they start to feel comfortable, they can perform exercises from there to improve your strength, stability, and balance. For example, Half/Tall kneeling lat pulldowns, Pallof presses and Landmine presses.

3. Farmers Carries

Think of how many times a week your clients (or you) carry things in their hands. 2, 3, 4 or every day? Carrying and walking are fundamental human movements so, it makes sense to program these in your client’s programs.

Plus, farmer’s carries will improve:

• Posture – Trying to carry heavy weights in your hands with rounded shoulders is almost impossible.
• Breathing patterns – It’s hard be a chest breather when carrying around weights in your hands
• Shoulder stability – The rotator cuffs are working hard to keep shoulders in their sockets.
• Balance – Every step of the farmer’s carry is a single leg stance.
• Grip strength – which is important if you like pickles.

If there is anything off about your client’s gait, walking with weights will expose them so you can improve it. Programming wise, carries should be programmed early in the training as part of warm up or core training when your older adult clients have the most energy.

This exercise has a huge carryover from the gym to daily life and is a must do for every senior.

4. Head Nods

Where the head goes, the rest body follows and the inability to control the head position affects the way the rest of the body operates. Because the ability to hold your head up directly affects the way the vestibular system operates.

The vestibular system is the first sensory system in the human body to develop and all other sensory systems rely on the vestibular system. It’s why babies work so hard to hold their heads up. Without it, walking wouldn’t be possible.

So, strengthening the neck and having your clients head in a good position makes sure all their balance systems work in harmony to keep them upright and the best way to do this, is to program Head Nods.

Head Nods help improve posture and reduce the amount of shearing and compression forces on the neck. Plus, this reduces the amount of pressure on the cervical nerves as they exit the spinal column, allowing them to work better.³

This is a simple exercise that’s easily programmed into the warmup for 10-15 reps in the prone or six-point position.

5. Ankle Mobility Exercises

Ankles are the base, providing feedback on the environment and they’re the foundation of your balance, posture, and mobility. It’s the ankle’s job to sense and respond to the ever-changing environment from stairs, cracked and uneven sidewalks or walking up and down a mountain.^{4, 5, 6}

Ankle movement plays a starring role in this. The ankle, being the only joint near the ground, is the first joint to sense what’s going on and it sends those signals via the nervous systems to the brain for processing and a muscular response.^{5, 6, 7}

If your ankle mobility is lacking, the brain doesn’t receive good information to respond to your environment and loss of balance and falls can result.

Here’s a test to see if your clients have good ankle mobility.

If their ankle mobility is lacking, this is a great exercise to improve it.

Ankle mobility exercises can be programmed into the warmup or paired with a strength exercise that requires good ankle mobility, to improve the ankles and to act as an active recovery between sets.

Wrapping Up

The 5 exercises done regularly will not only improve your clients’ balance and cut their risk of falls, they will make them a stronger and more resilient person, ready to face the world head on.

References

1. J Am Geriatr Soc 2000 May;48(5):493-8. Mobility Difficulties and Physical Activity as Predictors of Mortality and Loss of Independence in the Community-Living Older Population. M Hirvensalo 1, T Rantanen, E Heikkinen

2. J Hum Kinet. 2018 Jun; 62: 43–53. Comparison of Core Muscle Activation between a Prone Bridge and 6-RM Back Squats. Roland van den Tillaar and Atle Hole Saeterbakken

3. J Bodyw Mov Ther 2016 Apr;20(2):409-17. The Contribution of Postural Balance Analysis in Older Adult Fallers: A Narrative Review. L Pizzigalli , M Micheletti Cremasco A Mulasso , A Rainoldi

4. Williams, VJ., et al. (2016) Prediction of Dynamic Postural Stability During Single-Leg Jump Landings by Ankle and Knee Flexibility and Strength. J Sport Rehabil. Aug;25(3):266-72.

5. Christiansen, C. (2012). Geriatric Physical Therapy, Impaired Joint Mobility. Chapter 13, pp 248- 262, Mosby Elsevier.

6. Gaur, K & Davinder, A (2014). Comparison of ankle joint range of motion on balance score in healthy young and adult individuals. Journal of Exercise Science and Physiotherapy, Vol. 10, No. 1, Jun: 25-30.

7. Spink, MJ., et al. (2011). Foot and Ankle Strength, Range of Motion, Posture, and Deformity Are Associated With Balance and Functional Ability in Older Adults. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, January Volume 92, Issue 1, Pages 68–75.

The post 5 Exercises For Fall Prevention appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If the muscle strain is severe, you could be out for months.

You’re probably thinking:

• “What caused the strain in the first place?”
• “Is there anything I can do to get back into play faster?”
• ”How can I make sure this doesn’t ever happen again?”

Pull your hammy? Strain your quad? Well, it looks like you are out of commission for a couple of weeks!

If the muscle strain is severe, you could be out for months.

You’re probably thinking:

• “What caused the strain in the first place?”
• “Is there anything I can do to get back into play faster?”
• ”How can I make sure this doesn’t ever happen again?”

You’re not alone. This article targets how muscle strains happen, what you should do to recover, and how to prevent future strains.

The Dreaded Muscle Injury

Your muscle is a pretty cool tissue. It has the ability to produce force and absorb force by physically changing its length. When you apply load to your muscle, your muscle has to absorb that load. As it absorbs, the muscle lengthens (eccentrically stretches). If the load is too large or too sudden, the cells inside your muscle tear. So, the more cells that tear, the greater the severity of your muscle strain.

There are two ways load is forced on a muscle: active and passive. What is a passive load? Think about when you perform a stretch. As you stretch the muscle you impose a force that is absorbed by the muscle as it elongates. If the load is too big or too sudden, your muscles will be stretched beyond their recoverable limit (back to its resting state).

Load can also be applied to your muscles actively, either from an outside force or from its own contractions. Think about when you run down the court on a break away in your basketball game. As you sprint at full speed your muscles must contract and produce high forces very rapidly and if you force the muscle to contract too strongly or rapidly, the resulting stretch of the muscle will be too great.

Like most injuries, some muscle strains are worse than others. Your muscle belly itself is composed of many smaller muscle cells. As the load applied to the muscle exceeds your muscle’s capacity to absorb that load, these smaller cells are stretched beyond their limits. The result? They tear—and the more cells that are torn, the greater the severity of the strain.

When the majority of cells in a muscle reach beyond their stretch limit, a complete muscle tear occurs. Not all cells in your muscles are created equal. Some muscles are more prone to strain than others. This is because muscle strains occur where your muscle cells transition into their tendon (the tissue that connects muscle to bone). This transitional region is prone to strains because the tissue in this area is neither quite as strong as the muscle belly or the tendon.^{2, 3} It’s a literal “weak link.”

Because most tears occur in the weaker transitional areas of muscle, we see more strains in muscles that have two joints (or two tendon connections to bones). This occurs in areas like your hamstrings (at your knee and hip) or your biceps (at your elbow or shoulder).

How You Can Recover Faster

Like the majority of your body tissues, muscle has the capacity to heal itself. But before you can get back to your game after a muscle strain, you need to understand how a muscle heals—and what that means for your recovery.

Your muscles will heal after a tear, but not through growing new muscle. Instead, your body uses what we call “foreign” tissue (or scar tissue) to patch in the damage. This foreign tissue is weaker and less elastic than the muscle tissue itself. Unfortunately, this means that the transitional area of your muscle just got a bit weaker. This is why muscles that were previously strained have a higher chance of re-injury.

If the strain is minor, your muscle will repair within three to six weeks. Fortunately with these injuries, if the muscles surrounding the scar tissue hypertrophies (or grows through strength training), your muscles will have no real loss of function/strength. For more severe tears, the reparation process can take several months.

Keep in mind that the dense scar tissue that results can impair future muscle function and contribute to future pain. What does that mean for recovery? The secret to getting back in the game after a muscle strain is to keep your injury site at rest while still keeping your body active. Like all injuries, allowing the angry tissues to calm down is key—this means staying away from activity that aggravates the area.

However, this does not mean that you should stop all activity. Athletes who completely rest after experiencing injuries like muscle tears actually increase their chances for re-injury. If you rest completely, your body will decondition.

This decrease in fitness means:

1. You will have a slower recovery time.
2. Your injured area will have decreased strength and capacity to handle loads in the future.

This is why athletes who train around their injury or “relatively rest” can improve recovery. Maintenance of conditioning with different modalities that do not aggravate the injured area has a crossover effect. Working the non-injured limb decreases the time it takes for the injured limb to essentially “catch up.” If you are suffering from a muscle strain, make sure you let your tissues heal while working your other ones to stay strong.

What About Stretching?

Let’s put our thinking hats on. If a muscle strain is just a bunch of small muscle fiber tears caused by too much load and too much stretch then if we stretch after a strain we will only add to the problem! In the acute phase of the tear, you need to let the tissues relax. This means that you have to leave them alone.

Work around the injury to ensure you maintain good blood circulation so that your body can do its thing. As the injury starts to heal and pain is reduced, we do want to regain our range of motion (ROM) at the site of injury. This is where a lot of old school methodologies like static stretching could play a part, but as we discussed in our previous article, improving a joint’s ROM will not reduce your chance of injury without gaining strength within that range of motion.

I’d like to be clear, static stretching will not make you stronger. Without strengthening an improved range of motion, better positions alone will not be enough to reduce your chance of injury.⁴

Luckily, as the authors of Strength and Conditioning for the Female Athlete explain, “every strength session an athlete does is a flexibility-strength workout.” This means through lifting, an athlete will not only return to her original baseline strength but become even stronger than she was before.

So, when can you stretch? Think of stretching as something that may help you reduce the sensation of pain. If you’re feeling tight, go ahead and do some stretches or foam rolling after your workout.

Here’s how to combat the three things that influence your chances of getting a muscle strain.

1. Little to No Warm Up

You have to make time to warm up. So what’s the recipe for a good warm up?

• Use lower intensity movements (aerobic) that aim to gradually elevate your heart rate.
• Practice of movement patterns to progress into full play.
• Think hamstring sweeps, inchworms, to high knees, to sprints.
• Think split squats, to bodyweight squats, to goblet squats, to back squats.

Body Weight Split Squat from Restless Athletics.

The goal of the warm-up is to not only prepare the body physically for movement but also mentally. When you practice the movements you wish to perform later at higher intensities, you improve your motor control.

2. Inadequate Strength and Mobility

Strains occur when your muscle reaches its threshold for a load. By improving your body’s capacity to handle higher loads, the better chance you have at avoiding a hammy strain next season.

Research has consistently demonstrated the positive relationship between athletes engaged in a properly executed strength training program and reduced injury risks. At the end of the day, we know injuries occur when the stress applied is too high. If we want our bodies to be able to handle these high stresses, we must prepare them better.

Strength training acts as a tool to reduce your injury risk simply because it improves your tissues ability to handle high loads.⁶ When performed with an attention to movement quality, the athlete improves her motor control leading to both improved performance and decreased injury risk. What we are saying is that the athlete with a higher work capacity can handle higher loads, do more work, recover better from that work, improve at a faster rate, and can reduce the chance of being sidelined.

3. Excessive Fatigue

So, I think we understand by now that strains occur when loads are too fast or too big. But what does fatigue have to do with it?

When muscles are continually loaded (like in a three-hour volleyball practice or all day tournament with insufficient recovery), they fatigue. When your muscles are fatigued, their elastic qualities, as well as those of your tendons, decrease. This means there is less wiggle room for your muscles to stretch. Less wiggle room equates to a higher likelihood they will tear.

When your central nervous system is fatigued (think that drained feeling), there is greater likelihood your movement patterns deteriorate. In addition, poor mechanics can contribute to improper muscle loading, also increasing the likelihood of strain.

So, how can you avoid fatigue? Fatigue is a necessary factor in making physical improvements. Your body fatigues as a result of being broken down, and your body cannot build back up for the better without first being broken down. Your muscles will always fatigue with increased volume of play: training, practice, or games. We can reduce this type of fatigue through recovery methods like ice baths and foam rolling. However, your body will naturally recover (and adapt) from fatigue with sufficient sleep and nutrition.

Nervous system fatigue is another necessary player in the improvement game. If you want to learn a new skill, you have to stress the system. Unfortunately, this type of stress is also felt through other aspects of our life—think school/work, social components, and other emotional factors that influence how you feel. We can reduce this type of stress through methods in addition to sleep and nutrition such as relaxation, massage, meditation, and even laughter.

Watch Over Your Muscles

If you load your muscles by stretching too hard or too fast by performing sudden intense movements, they can tear. The severity of this tear depends on the amount of load applied and the time your muscle experiences the load. With enough rest for tissue recovery, plus strength training for improved work capacity and strength, you could be back in action in just a couple of weeks. But beware—completely resting or jumping back in the game too soon could put you out for the season.

Strength training is key. You can improve your ability to handle these high loads by hitting the weight room. Remember, a stronger female athlete is more resilient to any force that comes her way.

References:

1. Heiderscheit, B. C., Sherry, M. A., Silder, A., Chumanov, E. S., & Thelen, D. G. (2010). Hamstring strain injuries: recommendations for diagnosis, rehabilitation, and injury prevention. The Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 40(2), 67–81.

2. Whiting W, Zernicke R. Biomechanics of Musculoskeletal Injury. 2nd ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics; 2008.

3. Tidball J, Salem G, Zernicke R. Site and Mechanical Conditions for Failure of Skeletal Muscle in Experimental Strain Injuries. J Appl Physiol 1993;74:1280–6.

4. Anderson, J. C. “Stretching Before and After Exercise: Effect on Muscle Soreness and Injury Risk“. Journal of Athletic Training 40.3 (2005): 218–220. Print.

5. Sargent, D., Clarke, R. (2018). Strength and Conditioning for Female Athletes. Mobility for Performance in Female Athletes. Marlborough: Crowood. pp 111-139.

6. Malone, Shane, Hughes, Brian, Doran, Dominic A., Collins, Kieran, Gabbett. Tim J. Can the workload–injury relationship be moderated by improved strength, speed and repeated-sprint qualities? Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport.

The post The 101 on Muscle Strains appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

By selecting the best exercises to build maximal strength and size, while limiting unnecessary stress and risk of injury, you can build a bulletproof body that will perform as well as it looks. Unlike ‘pre-hab’ exercises which are often used as assistance exercises to help prevent injuries, a ‘joint-friendly’ approach deals with how to better select your heavy lifts. In this article, you will learn why selecting the right exercises is the key to you training longer and harder.

This approach is contrary to training with the purpose of beating up your body with the hope to look good in the short-term, but little thought over your long-term goals. We could say that joint-friendly training is simply to train smart and plan for the future.

Common Misconceptions

In many fitness circles the idea of training for longevity and functional movement looks something like a circus act or a gymnastic routine. Unfortunately, this has developed more through popularity as a fitness craze, rather than an evidence-based approach to training.

In reality, joint-friendly training is not taking every exercise to a Swiss ball, or swinging around on a functional training rig, nor is it sacrificing heavy barbell presses for push ups. Joint-friendly training is about selecting the most appropriate exercises to achieve your goals while paying attention to injury risk and wear and tear on your body. It is identifying the risk versus reward of the exercises that make up the backbone of your training program.

How useful an exercise is should be determined by its raw effectiveness in helping you hit your end goal while taking into account the biomechanics of what is happening at the joint. It has nothing to do with the tools you are using and should have no bias towards a specific style of training.

The rules are simple; choose the right tools that will help you achieve your desired goals (strength, muscle size, performance, fat loss), and select the exercises where the risk versus reward makes sense.

The Beat Up Bodybuilder

If your training is very short-sighted, you will be sacrificing long-term gain. That is an inevitable fact in most walks of life, not just when it comes to training. This is your story over the next 5-10 years, so be sure to choose the smart path.

Looking back as a beginner you may have gotten some results, so there was no need to question the methods used and you continued to train in the same way. Because you were so indoctrinated in this training style, you believed it was the best (and only) way to train.

Your icons trained in this way, which supposedly validated its effectiveness. Your training style became your religion, and you became a devout follower. No matter what anyone else says, or what science tells you, your approach is the best.

Eventually your body got beat up, and through a series of injuries (and pain) you change your training. You stick to what you know, and you continue to select the same old-school routines, but you go lighter for higher reps. You then experience less pain because you are using less weight and you now have a greater focus on technique. You may also start spending half of your workout warming up and doing specific mobility exercises.

Often the right balance is never found until it is too late. By looking at things from an evidence-based approach you can see how to achieve your physique and strength goals faster while being able to train harder and longer.

They Key to Becoming Bulletproof

The real key to becoming bulletproof is exercise selection. With a few minor tweaks to your current training style you can get bigger and stronger, for longer.

First off you should start thinking about the strength of your smaller less superficial muscles. You can’t be all ‘show’ without the ‘go’! Injury specialist Chris Stankiewicz weighs in:

“There is a huge range of motion available at our joints. Training in linear patterns constrains the full movement of the joint and has the potential to over-train your larger muscle groups. Training in a more functional way will not only recruit the smaller stabilizing muscles around the joint to injury proof your body but will also increase your strength and performance with more traditional gym exercises, too!”

Secondly, we should learn how to make smart exercise decisions when we are trying to hit larger muscle groups and produce as much force or muscle activation as possible.

Barbell lifts for example are excellent tools that can be used for a variety of goals. However, because of the fixed stiffness of the bar the joints are often not as free to move as they should be. The same could be said for doing chin ups on a fixed bar. They can be a good exercise but there is limited freedom of movement around multiple joints, resulting in sheer forces in the elbows that cause wear and tear over time.

This is not to say you should cut barbell movements or chin ups from your program, on the contrary they can be excellent movements. But there needs to be the right balance in your program of risk versus reward. The reward is based on your goals, and the risk is based on the potential long-term impact that exercise has on your body.

As an example, a barbell bench press has massive reward to a powerlifter or someone training for the NFL scouting combine. It is also a good overall builder of upper body strength and size. But for the latter there are equally as good choices to build up your upper body while being a little more shoulder-friendly.

Overuse of fixed-plane machines can be another problem. This is because they fix the direction your body is moving in. Machines serve a purpose for building muscle but fall short in many other categories. They undertrain the stabilizer muscles, while potentially exposing certain joints to unnatural positions.

Getting the right balance of exercises is the key to any good program in the long run, and there are a few simple changes you can make to your routine to feel an immediate difference.

Put It to Practice

Always consider the cost-benefit ratio to you of any given exercise. Ego aside, if you cannot justify the risk versus reward of an exercise you are using right now, then why are you using it?

Get out of fixed plane and sagittal plane movements. Include more exercises in the frontal and transverse planes where you are most likely much weaker. For example, more lateral and rotational movements.

Include more unilateral movements. That is not to say you should be balancing on one leg all the time, but a few times a week throwing in some single-arm or single-leg work will allow greater focus on strength imbalances and working some smaller stabilizer muscles in the hips and shoulders.

Do not neglect the muscles you can not see. Those little muscles provide stability around your valuable joints, and a support system for your bigger muscles to do their thing. Focus on your pulling muscles a little more to ensure good balance of strength in your shoulders, as well as posture.

No amount of stretching or pre-hab will undo the damage of a poorly designed workout. Choose better exercises to start off with, then use pre-hab and targeted mobility work to further bulletproof your body.

The best time to start training smarter is today, the second-best time is tomorrow!

The post Bulletproof Your Body appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“Hello?”

“Dude! I just fell and completely screwed up my wrist! It’s so bad.”

“Jeez. What were you doing?”

“Skateboarding.”

“Michael, you’re 50.”

Just as I was about to prepare my first meal of the day, I get a call from a frantic client.

“Hello?”

“Dude! I just fell and completely screwed up my wrist! It’s so bad.”

“Jeez. What were you doing?”

“Skateboarding.”

“Michael, you’re 50.”

I’ve been working with this client over the past few months. He came to me because he struggles to put on weight and wanted to start building strength and muscle mass. As a 50 year old musician, he didn’t have a history with fitness. I realized that it was critical to build his foundation and some body-awareness first.

Michael is the type of guy who likes to try different hobbies and fully immerse himself into them, with not much attention given to anything else during the hobby’s lifespan. This is both a strength and a tragic flaw for him.

After building up some basic core strength and focusing on his posterior chain, I added in basic calisthenics—push ups, pull ups, and dips. More slowly than he wanted (they all want it immediately, don’t they?), but as surely as I knew he would, he started to gain strength and muscle growth. He didn’t believe it for weeks, but I saw it.

Then, almost overnight, his strength and mobility made significant gains, as well as his self-esteem. Yet almost just as quickly, he suffered a sidelining wrist injury, due to a second hobby he’d recently picked up, skateboarding.

Practice What You Preach

I’m not one to knock trying new things just because a person is aging. I landed my first back tuck at age 32. But he had never skated in his life and was out there with the kids trying to hit jumps. More importantly, it took away from his initial goal, and he was an emotional wreck. We spent a lot more time on core and legs, but he couldn’t do any upper body work. In the mirror, his muscles faded away just as fast as his confidence did. My job shifted more into the “therapist” role of personal training.

As fate would have it, I suffered a wrist injury at the same time. It initially happened boxing, but was compounded by many muscle ups, and moving my furniture into a new house —we’ll simply call it an overuse injury. It was not as severe as Michael’s and I probably could have toughed it out, but I saw it as an opportunity to practice what I preach, for once.

It was not easy. My muscle ups had been getting super clean, and I really wanted to be able to play with the athletes I was hosting at a competition in Sacramento in a few weeks. But instead of being stubborn, I took two weeks off, completely off, from strength training. I used it as an opportunity to focus on areas I’d been neglecting—my speed and cardio endurance (sparring for the first time in 10 years showed me how out of shape I was).

I spent two weeks playing soccer and cycling. It was tough at first, my capacity being at around 30 minutes of maximum output. But each day I started to go faster and longer and that holiday weight I gained started to shed. At the end of the two weeks, I peaked with a 7v7 soccer tournament, playing two straight hours of soccer (pro matches are 90 minutes). It was tough, but at 35 I was outlasting the 18 year olds and I felt good about that.

After a Sunday of rest, Monday came and it was time to get back to work. I was worried that I had lost the progress on my muscle up, straddle planche, and front lever. But as I grabbed the bar and pulled, not only did I not lose my strength, I felt lighter and therefore stronger. I floated straight up and over the bar with ease. It was clear that my rest had allowed me to grow.

No Pain, No Gain

Coincidentally during this period of time, I’d been reading Principles by Ray Dalio, legendary investor and founder of the largest hedge fund in the world. In the book, he talks about first, second, and third-order consequences. He says, “People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.” The similarities to my client’s (and my) situation were clear.

The first-order consequence of his injury was that he hated life on the sideline. He was depressed and only focusing on the fact that he couldn’t continue moving forward as quickly as he wanted. He was overweighing it. I spoke to him every day to get him out of this mindstate. I wanted him to focus on the second order-consequence of the injury which was that he would heal and be able to stay stronger in the long run, instead of “working through it” and potentially damaging his wrist more seriously.

Like me, he saw improvements in his weaker areas during this time. His posture got better, he figured out how to activate his core, and he completely stopped complaining about the pain in his lower back (a previous problem area). He thought we were just biding time with any exercises we could until his wrist healed, but I knew that strengthening these areas would then lead to the third-order consequence—he would have a stronger core and be able to control his body much more, making his exercises have better form and be more effective. Not only would his body properly heal so he could have longevity, but he would actually come back stronger. I experienced the same thing when I built up my endurance and lost extra weight.

The old adage “no pain, no gain” is nearly accepted as myth nowadays. But maybe, just maybe, a little pain can help you gain. As Dalio says, “pain gives you direction,” and if used to stay focused on your long term goals, and not the first-order consequences, I’d say that is a gain. After all, the real goal in almost anything should be longevity and lasting results.

This can be best summed up best by my friend Dan John, who says that the keys to success in the “Three F’s” (fitness, finance and … um … relationships) is the same: you need to give attention to them a little bit, often, and over the long haul.

The post No Pain, No Gain Needs to Make a Comeback appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Research in the Annals of the Academy of Medicine examined 506 cases of overuse injuries in young athletes. And found that the knee joint was the most affected joint, while the hip was the least affected joint for overuse injuries.

Osgood-Schlatter Syndrome is usually the result of overuse and stress on the knees. This stress can cause minuscule fractures at the tendon on the tibia. The bone will then try to repair by creating more calcium which causes a noticeable lump under the knee. Growth spurts can also lead to the development of Osgood-Schlatter Syndrome as the muscles try to keep up with the growth of the bones creating stress muscles and tendons of the of the knee.

Coaches must have an understanding of the etiology of this common condition when working with younger athletes in sports and athletic programs. Implementing balanced programs grounded in empirical data and preventative measures can aid in creating an appropriate training program.  Coaches should also have a knowledge base on the symptoms associated with Osgood-Schlatter Syndrome, and be able to make appropriate recommendations to athletes and referrals to appropriate medical liaisons when needed.

The post What is Osgood-Schlatter Syndrome? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Injuries suck, and while it might seem like a lot of time-consuming work to do all of the stuff you’re about to learn, getting injured can keep you out of the gym for months at a time. Sadly, I’ve noticed that nearly nobody does that’s needed to prevent injuries to a sufficient extent or with any consistency.

I learned this lesson the hard way, as I failed to listen to my body, which resulted in me getting seriously injured. I struggled with crippling tennis elbow in both arms that prevented me from doing upper body exercises for 18 months. So take it from me: all of the time and effort you put into injury prevention will pay off tenfold.

Luckily, most injuries in the gym are quite easily prevented. You just have to avoid the following 10 mistakes.

Inadequate Warm Up

An inadequate or non-existent warm up is one of the primary factors leading to injuries in the gym. We all know how important it is to warm up our muscles, joints, and connective tissue before a gym session, yet we’ve all skipped our warm up when we’ve been particularly short on time. We knew that skipping our warm up was not a good idea, yet we decided to compromise in order to save what, 10 minutes?

That hurried shortsightedness can cause us a lot of pain and frustration, and can cost us a lot of money. And ironically, a lot of time out of the gym, too. Don’t compromise when it comes to your warm up, even if that means cutting your workout short. After all, you can always hit the gym another day. But you might not be able to do that if you got seriously injured because of skipping your warm up.

What to do instead:

Include a 6-10min general warm up routine before every single workout session. The goal of warming up is to get your muscles, joints and connective tissue ready for some serious action. More specifically, you want to stimulate joint lubrication, increase core temperature and blood flow to local tissue, and activate neuromuscular coordination and stabilization.

Your warm up routine should also prepare you mentally for the tough workout ahead, and by the end of your warm up, you should be in a mental state primed for focused action. Depending on your training program and the muscle groups you’re going to be training that day, you’ll want to customize your warm up to focus more on those muscle groups and their corresponding joints.

Incorrect Exercise Technique

Poor technique is another common factor that leads to injuries in the gym. The only reason more people don’t get injured from their bad form is because they’re still too weak to damage their connective tissue.

What to do instead:

Injuries due to incorrect lifting technique are easily preventable. Focus on learning the movement with proper form using just your bodyweight first, and only once you have it down, add an external load like a barbell.

Even if you don’t have access to a great personal trainer, in today’s day and age, you have all the information you need about proper technique at your fingertips. A simple Google search will bring you countless articles and videos detailing how to properly do any exercise in your training program. Study all you can find, and start with very light weights, if any at all. The point in the beginning is to program your nervous system to execute the movement properly. It is not to stimulate muscle growth or strength—yet.

Only perfect practice makes perfect. When you’re learning a new movement, make sure to execute every single rep as perfectly as you can. You do not want to learn a new movement incorrectly, as that can not only lead to injury, but it is also very hard to unlearn bad habits once they are formed.

Too Much Weight

This mistake is closely related to the previous one. If you’re a more experienced athlete, what you’ve probably noticed is that even if you have the correct technique of an exercise down, your form will break down at some point as you add more weight.

That’s simply because you always have a weak link that will give out first. That’s normal. But in chasing bigger and bigger poundage, a lot of guys disregard their form breaking down, which puts them in a very vulnerable position.

What to do instead:

If you feel that you’re reaching the point where your form is starting to break down and your weak link is giving out, stop. Better safe than sorry. Keep your ego out of the gym, and lower the weight or cut the volume.

The portion of the movement where your form starts to falter will indicate where your weak link in the movement lies. Make sure to do specific work for your weak link to strengthen it, so you can build strength safely and consistently.

Skipping Mobility and Soft Tissue Work

If a muscle is tight and stiff, it and the surrounding joints and tissues are vulnerable to injury. That’s why having proper mobility is imperative for staying out of trouble in the gym.

How many of us dedicate time for stretching and soft tissue work on a regular basis? I am as guilty as anyone of not doing it consistently enough, and that’s one thing that might have led to my injuries.

What to do instead:

Dedicate time (outside of your workouts) specifically for stretching and soft tissue work. Do this once weekly, at the very least. You want to make sure that your muscles have proper length and are not tight and stiff. Address any trigger points you might have in order to prevent myofascial pain. Foam rolling and massages using a lacrosse ball are great tools for that.

Developing Muscle Imbalances

As you probably know, muscle imbalances can cause some pretty nasty injuries. The role of our muscles is to initiate and control movements of bones. That makes them our best shock absorbers. In order for our muscles to carry out those functions, they must work in groups referred to as agonist and antagonist. The first initiates the movement, and the second controls the movement. For example, during a dumbbell curl, the agonist is the biceps and the antagonist is the triceps.

But if a muscle fatigues because of prolonged physical activity, then it is no longer an effective shock absorber. Muscle imbalances are caused by weakness, lack of flexibility, or poor endurance in either the agonist or antagonist.

For example, hamstring muscle tightness coupled with quadriceps weakness often results in anterior knee pain, because the tight hamstrings increase the compressive forces on the kneecap. Those compressive forces would usually be offset by a pair of adequately strengthened quadriceps muscles, but the combination of weak quads and tight hamstrings leads to knee pain, and maybe even to a more serious injury down the road.

What to do instead:

The best way to fix muscle imbalances is through stretching and soft tissue work on tight muscles, and strength training for weak muscles.

The reason why muscle imbalances are so common is because the average trainee goes to the gym to work on their “show off” muscles like chest and arms, and disregards other equally important but not so visually impressive muscles like the rotator cuff muscles. If you’re in this for the long run, and you want to be healthy and strong in older age, then you need to pay attention to and strengthen all muscles, instead of just doing curls for the girls. Don’t neglect any part of your body, and you’ll stay away from muscle imbalances and associated injuries.

Bad Spotting

These are the ones that go viral on YouTube. Bad spotting is another factor often leading to injury. Your spotter is the person that’s supposed to help you push yourself beyond your comfort zone, while still staying safe. That’s why you can’t afford to have your spotter disengaged and unfocused.

What to do instead:

Find a spotter who will take the responsibility seriously. If you don’t have a dedicated gym buddy and you’re just grabbing a random person in the gym, you should also make sure to instruct them on how to spot you correctly, just in case they don’t actually know.

If you get stuck, a good spotter will help you just enough to finish the rep, without yanking the weight off of you in an abrupt manner. That is, unless you’re completely out of it, in which case you overestimated your strength.

Overtraining

Overtraining simply means training beyond your ability to recover in a timely manner. As such, many people in the fitness industry say that there is no such thing as overtraining, just “under recovering.”

In this case though, what I’m referring to is overuse injuries caused by too much of the same movement pattern. The truth is that some types of tissue recover much slower than others. It might take your muscles around 72 hours to fully recover from a tough workout, but some connective tissues may take longer.

Overuse injuries are often caused by repetitive motions over a prolonged period of time. Micro-tears can accumulate in tendons and ligaments. And once injured, tendons and ligaments take a very, very long time to heal. I’m talking months, and in some cases, years.

What to do instead:

Even the best exercises can cause damage if used to excess, which is why you want to periodically cycle through different exercises for the same muscle group. That way, you can stay away from repetitive movement patterns, and from overuse injuries. Again, make sure to do soft tissue work and stretching for tight muscles, as that can reduce the wear and tear on the corresponding joints and connective tissue.

Poor Nutrition

Eating junk will only increase the stress that your body has to endure, and that can be a factor contributing to injury. Very low reps with heavy weights, coupled with severe dieting, don’t mesh together too well, either. Your body needs the necessary energy and materials to repair itself, and if you train very hard and don’t feed your body accordingly, you’re inviting injury.

What to do instead:

Give your body what it needs to handle the work you’re asking of it. Make sure to eat a healthy, balanced diet and cut out the junk food. Also, save the super low reps with heavy weights for periods of growth. Not only will handling your nutrition help prevent injuries in the gym, but it will also make you feel better and healthier in your everyday life.

Poor Recovery

Far too many athletes train hard, and then completely disregard their recovery. They don’t have the habit of drinking enough water, don’t get enough sleep, and overdo it on the weekends. Then they hit the gym hard again on Monday, and their form implodes or they strain a muscle because it wasn’t ready to go again.

What to do instead:

A big part of proper recovery is nutrition and soft tissue work, which we already covered. But there are other important contributing factors:

• Sleep: You need to be getting at least 7.5-8 hours of quality sleep, every single night. If you’re not doing so, you’re not really serious about your fitness goals. Simple as that.
• Drink: Get in the habit of drinking 3-4 liters of water per day.
• Rest: Maybe this sounds crazy, but you need to actually rest on rest days. Far too many trainees can’t seem to sit still, and instead make the mistake of engaging in physically demanding activities even on their rest days. Active recovery in the form of walking, very light cardio, diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, etc., is great, but don’t overdo it, or you’ll defeat the purpose.

Lack of Focus

A lot of trainees do their sets mechanically without thinking, instead of focusing on proper form and maximal muscle contractions.

What to do instead:

Leave your phone in the car. Once you start your warm up, you should get in the zone and focus on making some serious progress. You’re investing your time into this, so you should strive to make the most out of it. Forget about your problems at work, forget about what you’re doing later that day, and zero in on your workout. For serious lifters, that’s the best part of working out anyway. Lifting is therapy.

Shortcuts Make for Long Injuries

Let me restate this: injuries suck.

They hurt, they’re inconvenient, and they rob you of months or even years of training time and progress. Make sure to follow the guidelines laid out above, and live to lift another day. All the effort is definitely worth it, in the long run.

The post Never Get Injured in the Gym Again, Please appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If you’re reading this, your body is capable of tremendous adaptation. There are no inherently dangerous exercises. There are only exercises, movements, and positions that your body is or isn’t equipped to handle.

Your body is made to move. It’s built to solve problems in complex environments, often requiring you to move your spine out of neutral, take your knees past your toes, or lift with your back rather than your legs. None of these actions is necessarily bad, unless your body can’t handle that given demand.

We have to remember that injuries are simple math equations. Injury = Demand > Capacity.

If your body doesn’t work like a body should, then doing natural movements like squatting and crawling will set you up for injury. Rather than unilaterally label these movements dangerous, the emphasis should be on building a more capable ape.

So how do you know if a movement is safe for your body? There’s a simple checklist.

Joints Come First

When it comes to identifying safe movements, it helps to start with the joints. A good rule of thumb is, can you actively move your joint into the position needed to make this movement possible? If we look at the squat, you can check that your ankles, knees, and hips can actively pull into the necessary angles. If you can’t control this range of motion unloaded, then you don’t own that range.

Loading your body into that range with weight is asking your body to do more than it’s currently capable of. You’re forcing it to work overtime in a job it doesn’t know how to do in the first place.

Hold the Line

The next demand to check off your list is the ability to maintain position in an isometric contraction. If you can pull into position for a split second and then collapse into muscle cramps, do you really own that angle? In Functional Range Conditioning, we use isometric loads to increase neural drive and force tissue adaptation within the target range of motion.

The ability to ramp up an isometric contraction is critical to your ability to load the movement down the road. For example: can you pull your knee to your chest and hold it there? Can you increase your voluntary contraction even more? Not as easy as it sounds.

Own the Descent

The next checkmark on your list is the ability to slowly control the eccentric portion of the movement. Can you slowly lower into a squat? Can you control yourself down into the bottom of a push up?

We often bounce our way through movements and overemphasize getting the barbell off the ground, or hurling our chins over the bar. Own the movement on the eccentric portion, and you’re in better shape to control the concentric portion of the movement.

If you can check each of these boxes, then this exercise is likely one that your body can handle. Load it intelligently, and let your body recover. That’s safe progress in a nutshell.

If you can’t squat yet, how do you get there:

The Definitive Guide to Owning Your Flat-Footed Squat

The post You Aren’t as Fragile as You Think appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Every rep, every set, and every workout produces wear and tear on your body. If you’re a hard-training athlete, you’re past the point where you need to worry about exercising for health. You need to make sure your training doesn’t interfere with your health.

If you stay in the iron game for long, you’re eventually going to get hurt. It’s unavoidable. Even if you’ve stayed healthy for years, one bad rep or even a slip or fall outside the gym can leave you with a nagging injury.

Every rep, every set, and every workout produces wear and tear on your body. If you’re a hard-training athlete, you’re past the point where you need to worry about exercising for health. You need to make sure your training doesn’t interfere with your health.

Fortunately, there are more than enough ways to ward off nagging aches and pains before they become serious injuries that keep you out of the gym. To do so, you’ll need a little know-how, a little patience, and the willingness to try some different things.

Pushing through the pain may work for a little while, but it will come back to haunt you. Try these approaches instead.

If bench presses hurt your shoulders and you aren’t a competitive lifter, why are you doing them? [Photo credit: Andrew Blight | CC BY 2.0]

Preserve Your Shoulders

The shoulder is the body’s most mobile joint, and that mobility makes it the most vulnerable.

Just like gadgets with lots of moving parts, your shoulder has all sorts of intricate muscles, ligaments, and tendons that can fall apart if they’re used incorrectly.

Unless you’re a powerlifter or strongman who has to do certain exercises for competition, the best thing you can do for your shoulder health is to avoid the movements that hurt it the most.

For some people this is the bench press, though it’s not as dangerous a move as some would have you think. For others, it’s dips, incline pressing, or overhead pressing. There are plenty of pressing movements you can use to build your chest, delts and triceps, so don’t force a painful exercise.

Aside from exercise selection, upper back placement will be a lifesaver for your shoulders. No matter what type of pressing movement you’re doing—flat, incline, whatever—you need to have your scapula retracted throughout the entire range of motion.

Doing so will keep your rotator cuff muscles safer, and your chest will be in a position to do more of the work.

Stronger Glutes to Protect the Low Back

Lower back health is worthy of an article all its own. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t recommend anything for a slipped disc, herniation, or any other serious condition.

However, I can tell you what’s saved my lower back and the backs of plenty of my clients: glute work.

Your glutes and lower back tend to fire at about the same time during squats and deadlifts, and if one is weak, the other has to compensate. If you’re rounding your back during squats and deads, take the weight down, arch your lower back, and teach yourself to fire your glutes first and foremost.

Your strength will progress much more quickly and consistently in the long run, and you won’t have to deal with a sore lower back nearly as often.

Keep the Weights Reasonable for Your Knees

Knee health is a big issue for longtime athletes and taller lifters. I’ve read all sorts of articles that claim that your knees “should” be just fine no matter how heavy or how often you squat, as long as you’re using a certain form. I call BS.

We evolved to survive, not to build comically huge legs and a massive squat. If you do the work necessary to get the numbers you want, your knees are going to be at risk.

Still, you do want those numbers! To protect your knees for the long haul, train in phases so that you’re not always squatting stupidly heavy.

Don’t bother maxing out or hitting super-heavy doubles or triples, either. Unless you’re a powerlifter in the last stages of prep for a meet, there’s simply no reason to go that heavy. Sets of about five reps are great for getting stronger, and sets of around ten reps for building size.

In fact, the quads respond better than almost any other body part to moderate weight and high reps. Of course, you have to get progressively stronger to increase that “moderate” weight.

But throughout much of the year, you can make insane progress on your legs by training with 60-70 percent of your squat max for lots of perfect, controlled sets and reps.

Experiment With Your Squats for Happy Hips

The hip joint is similar in structure to the shoulder. As with pressing movements, one of the best things you can do for hip health is to find the squat variations that cause you minimal joint discomfort.

For most lifters, this means using a moderate or close stance. If you’ve got a long torso, your lower back is more likely to be a problem area. But if you’re long-legged, squatting will put more wear and tear on your hips (and knees) due to your long range of motion.

A high bar position will also keep your joints in better shape. Though you’ll have to use less weight than if you went low-bar, the extra range of motion will provide just as great a stimulus for your quads and glutes.

Unless you’re competing in powerlifting and need the biggest squat possible, this will probably be your best bet for consistent, pain-free progress.

Don’t Overload Your Elbows

If your elbows are bothering you, first look to things other than the pressing movements as the potential cause. Are you doing super-heavy skull crushers? If so, stop.

Arm training should not be as heavy as squatting, pulling, and pressing, since your relatively small elbows have to take almost all of the load. Keep your skull crushers and other extensions light, in the 15-20 rep range, and use dips and close-grip presses for the heavy work.

Believe it or not, the way you squat could be what’s killing your elbows when you bench.

Ideally, you’ll be driving your elbows forward when you squat to promote the correct torso position. But if your hands are close together, and you’re shooting your elbows forward, all of those surrounding muscles and tendons are being stretched to the max. The solution? Widen your squat grip.

Train for the Long Term

Ultimately, any of these approaches won’t do a thing to prevent injury if you still try to power through workouts while you’re hurt. It may make sense once in a while, especially if you have a competition coming up or if you’re about to take a week or two off.

But for the most part, you need to approach each training session with a long-term mindset.

If your shoulders are killing you today, you could rest, recover and come back strong next week or you could go HAM on bench and put yourself out for the next few months. Which one sounds better to you?

Achy shoulders holding your training back? Time to go to school:

Simplifying Shoulder Health for Strength Athletes

The post Training Should Not Interfere With Your Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Injuries occur for many reasons and I am not going to take the time to explain every single possible scenario, as that would be impossible. Instead, I’d like to focus on three factors that need to be in balance in order to prevent injuries: flexibility, mobility, and strength. These three qualities are the foundation for anyone looking to become more athletic, from the seventy-year-old grandmother to the 22-year-old elite athlete. They are the base on which you build your success. When one of these three factors is out of balance, it makes a very inviting environment for an injury to occur.

Lets start with the easiest factor to address: strength. Strength is a relatively easy skill set to attain. A basic strength and conditioning program followed several times a week under the guidance of a trained professional can improve your level of strength quickly, especially if you already practice a sport that promotes the development of strength, such as Brazilian jiu jitsu or wrestling.

The second factor is mobility, which is the ability to move a limb or joint through a full range of motion with control. Mobility work is voluntary and requires strength to perform the action, while flexibility is usually a more passive skill that involves static holds to elongate the body’s muscles. Both mobility and flexibility are important skills for any athletic person to possess, but unfortunately the development of these skills is often neglected during training. The more mobile an individual is, the more easily and freely they can execute their intended task. Whether it be throwing a roundhouse kick, passing guard, or just picking up a bag of groceries, greater mobility will always equal improved performance.

Every person is going to have unique mobility issues. To combat them, I highly suggest meeting with a professional and educating yourself on how to properly treat your specific condition. Some of the more common mobility issues I see frequently at the gym involve impingement of the hips and shoulders. Both jiu jitsu and muay Thai place heavy demand on these joints and the muscles that surround them.

One great way to improve mobility is through myofascial release and various exercises specifically designed to target the proper movement of a joint or limb. Below are two ways to increase the mobility of your hips and shoulders.

1. Myofascial release for the shoulder girdle

Start laying on your side with a foam roller placed above your hip. Slowly roll up towards your shoulder while applying pressure onto the roller. When you feel tightness, stop, take a few deep breaths, and rock side to side to loosen up the connective tissues. Then continue your way up into the armpit. Once you reach the armpit, slowly roll a few inches from side to side to grind out any tension hidden in surrounding musculature. Repeat on the other side.

2. Myofascial release for the hip flexors

Start lying on the ground with either a lacrosse ball or a PVC pipe placed in the middle of your thigh. Slowly roll up towards your hip while frequently stopping to rock back and forth to grind out the tension. Once you reach the hip, roll onto your side and apply pressure to the TFL (tensor fasciae latae) located between the front of your hip and your glutes.

The third factor is flexibility, which refers to the range of motion in a joint and the length of the muscles that cross the joints. The specific sport or activity you like to do will determine the optimal level of flexibility you need. Remember flexibility should be treated as a goal and something to be trained and improved with time. Granted, if you’re so tight you can’t touch your toes, rhythmic gymnastics might not be the sport for you, but just because you are naturally tight doesn’t mean you can never attempt a sport. Below are two stretches that can can increase the flexibility of the hips and shoulder.

1. Stretching the chest and shoulders

Start by placing your hands and knees on the ground with one elbow resting on a Swiss ball. Allow your chest to fall to the ground while reaching away from your center with the supported elbow. Think about creating separation in your shoulder socket while holding the stretch. Hold the position for 45 seconds, shake the arm out briefly, then repeat on the same side.

2. Stretching the hip flexors

Assume the same stance as you would for a split squat, with one knee resting on a pad for some added comfort. Flex your glutes and slowly press your hips forward while maintaining the contraction of the glutes. Hold the contraction for five seconds. Relax the glutes and allow the hips to fall forward. Repeat two or three times until the hips have ceased forward movement once the contraction is released.

Practice these stretches several times a day and see how your flexibility improves. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below.

The post The 3 Non-Negotiable Elements of Injury Prevention in MMA appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Later that night and into the next day my back was really bothering me. Thinking it was just “muscular strain” and being a young kid, not knowing any better, I was in the gym the very next day squatting. Needless to say, this was a big mistake. What exactly was the mistake? Well, there were several. Not listening to my body, pushing through pain, and being too stubborn to take any time off from my training, just for starters.

About two months later, I ended up having surgery on my low back at level L4-L5. Surgery is not fun and injuries are not fun. I had a quick surgery because I had an extreme disc herniation that required immediate action. Here I was a nineteen-year-old kid and I was totally immobile within a few weeks of sustaining the initial injury. To be transparent, it was hell.

I can’t tell you how hard that was, because not only did I kiss my training goodbye for the entire summer, but all I could do was lie flat on my back for the next several months due to the worst, most constant pain you could imagine. I had sciatic scoliosis with pain in my back that radiated into my right leg. I couldn’t even stand up straight because of the pressure on the nerve root causing constant, severe pain, regardless of body position. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through, but there were actually many great things that came from a really bad situation.

The surgery was successful and I came back strong to compete in bodybuilding again. Today, I’m fitter, stronger, and train at a higher level than I ever have in my life. I also demand proper biomechanically efficient lifting technique – from myself and the people I work with. It was out of that bad experience that I eventually became an orthopedic physical therapist and have many helped others to successfully rehab from and prevent injuries like mine.

It was through that experience that I always teach that the most important goal of every single training session must be to minimize the risk for injury. Preventing injury has to be the primary goal of each and every training session, because if we injure ourselves, there is no training, especially with spine related injuries.

How do we minimize risk of injury? There are several ways to do this, but here’s three simple strategies to use:

The most obvious way (excuse the bluntness here) is to not do “dumb stuff.” What does that mean? It means really focusing on ourselves, knowing our limits, and listening to the signals our bodies tell us when there’s something going wrong. Be honest with yourself and don’t do things you know you shouldn’t do. Yes, train hard and push it to the limit, but understand and really know that limit. Something I have asked myself in the past is, “Would my injury have been as bad if I had not been in there the next day squatting?” That’s something I’ll never know the answer to, but what is important is that I learned from it. I totally admit that’s an example of doing “dumb stuff.” These days, I am extremely focused on paying attention to how my body responds to each training session and making sure my technique is rock solid.

The next thing we need to do is to make sure we understand what good movement is. Not only do we need to understand good movement, we need to make sure we have a baseline of good movement before we do certain lifts like squatting, snatching, or pressing. By understanding proper movement and the biomechanics of exercise technique, whether with a barbell, kettlebell, our own bodyweight, or anything else, we will minimize risk for injury. If we understand the physiology of human movement and apply that to our lifts, so that we lift with maximal safety and efficiency, we will optimize our training in every way possible. We must assess if we have a proper baseline of movement and pre-requisite mobility, stability, and motor control to perform certain lifts. In other words, we have to establish a baseline of quality movement before we lift heavy things or our risk is increased.

And, finally, we need to be constant learners. We need to constantly refine our techniques and improve our skills. Injuries are very common, but surprisingly very avoidable by using proper technique and not getting sloppy with our form. Whether it’s spine, shoulder, knee, ankle, or wrist, we need to make sure we understand how our bodies work and how to use key principles during training sessions. Key principles such as spinal stabilization, muscular tension, and optimal joint positioning, to name a few.

Each of these areas goes much deeper and requires much more education and training, of course. Ultimately, good and safe movement requires fundamental understanding and the best way to do this is to obtain good coaching. Then, constant practice will be required to reinforce and build motor control patterns that become conditioned and automatic over time. A great coach can help you to improve your skills and see the things you can’t. This is invaluable. You can constantly refine and improve your skills to train safer and more efficiently, no matter your level of experience.

So, no matter what you’re training goals are, whether you’re training for competition, strength, conditioning, weight loss, fat loss, muscular gain, or whatever it is, the most important thing to remember is that minimizing the risk for injury is the most important training goal in every session.

Don’t do “dumb stuff,” understand and practice good movement skills, and constantly learn and refine your techniques. Train hard, but always train smart and continue your journey safely.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Parents, coaches, and strength and condition professionals should monitor the number of sport seasons played by high school athletes and assess these athletes health and wellbeing often. Researchers also recommend that high school athletes consider taking at least one season off from a sports program each year.

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