It’s Not Just Lifting Weights

     If you lift or play sports at a competitive level (or have in the past) you will probably be able to relate to this post. Every once and a while you get someone who will ask “Why are you so into lifting?” or “Why are you so into training?” For the longest time the answer was hard for me to put into words. You don’t know exactly why you do it, but deep down in your gut you know it’s something that you almost have to do.

     When looking at it from the outside in, I can understand that it seems strange. You don’t technically have to do any of it. You don’t have to go train or practice five, six, or seven days a week, at predetermined times. You don’t have to push yourself to physical exhaustion, gasping for breath, or putting something on your back that could potentially crush you. The whole concept is a little bit crazy. Or is it?

     It’s not just the lifting the weights and the training. One way I explain this to people who ask why I train the way I do is by comparing lifting to martial arts. For some reason this analogy tends to click for people. A person who practices martial arts doesn’t just do it to fight and hit stuff; they also do it for the discipline and mental toughness that come with the process. I do the same thing, but with lifting and training instead of martial arts. Training builds discipline and mental toughness, teaches consistency, and motivates you to achieve something that is difficult to do. It teaches you to invest in yourself for the future. It doesn’t happen in a day, a week, or even a year sometimes, but it teaches you to keep working toward a goal. It is a mentality. A resiliency. A discipline. Just some of the side effects include getting bigger, faster, and stronger. I’ll take that medicine, please. These attributes carry over to things outside of the gym, too. Schoolwork, projects, your job, and anything that requires the previously mentioned skills, can benefit from your dedication to training.

It’s not just lifting weights. There’s a lot more to it than that.

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

Shoulder Health During Training

     After my most recent powerlifting meet, I encountered a little bit of shoulder pain. Coming up to the final push when training for a meet, you sometimes need to work through a little bit of discomfort to get competition-ready. After it’s over, however, it is imperative that you address any aches and pain you may be feeling. As a former baseball player, shoulder pain has never been a completely foreign experience to me. During my baseball years, there were a number of precautions I learned to take in order to keep my shoulders healthy.  By doing so, I was able to continue training, lifting relatively heavy things, and throwing. Now, after six years of powerlifting, two meets, and (add how many years you’ve been training) years of lifting maintaining long-term shoulder health is still something I consider essential.  Nobody likes having to deal with nagging shoulder problems, so here are some things that I have been doing to keep the shoulders healthy:

1. Fat Bar/Fat Grips – Anything that requires a large grip handle, especially with pressing motions. Since a thicker bar is harder to get a good grasp on, a fat bar/grip makes it harder to get good force transfer into the bar. Especially in pressing motions, like bench press, it disperses the weight more throughout your entire hand. This does not let your line of force (the bones of the forearm, which should be perpendicular to the bar) act at ideal a mechanical advantage with the bar. When this happens, you cannot lift as much weight. Lifting less weight means the intensity (% of your 1 rep max) will relatively go down, but you will still get an adequate stimulus to maintain strength, and even get stronger. 

2. Higher Reps (Use less weight) – Again, this takes some of the intensity off the shoulder and will give it a better chance to recover from getting hammered on by heavier weights. Plus, who doesn’t like to get a nice pump in doing some high rep work?

3. Decrease the Range of Motion – This goes especially for pressing motions. In a bench press, the anterior (front) part of your shoulder has more stress put on it the closer the bar gets to your chest. Some of the things that I do for this include pressing variations like board press and floor press.

4. Assisted/Accommodating Resistance – I use these to take some of the pressure off the shoulder in the bottom of the range of motion, when coming off the chest. This can be done with the use of chains and bands depending on the set up. But the premise of this is to take some of the load off your shoulder when you are coming off your chest, in a bench pressing motion. I would recommend not overloading the top of the motion if you are going to do this, meaning that as you bring the bar to your chest the weight will unload and as you bring it back up the bar will load again. At the top of the movement you wouldn’t want to be working against 100% of you 1RM even though you can handle that weight when finishing the pressing motion without a problem. 

5. Scapular Work – All the scapular muscle work you can muster till you can’t lift your arms anymore. External rotations, Y’s, T’s, W’s, scarecrows, push up plus…the list goes on and on. The most important, however, is the external rotation work to help take some of the strain off of the rotator cuff muscles for when doing other activities. When I do this, I focus on the quality of how my scapulae (shoulder blades) are moving. I want to really feel the contraction instead of just doing it for reps. Scapular work might be tedious, but this is something I would consider a necessity for keeping them shoulders healthy. 

6. Soft Tissue Work – This is one of my favorites. I could do it for hours. Rolling out the pecs and hitting trigger points in the upper traps is something that I try to do at least every day before I do any upper body work.   

7. Thoracic Spine Extension – This is a movement that is often overlooked. Looking biomechanically at the shoulder, if you reach overhead toward the celling, your thoracic spine needs some extension to assist you with the motion. It does this in the very last bit of shoulder flexion (lifting your arms up strait in front of you). This little bit of extension gives us those extra couple degrees of flexion and shoulder mobility to reach up and get your protein powder jug from the top shelf. I foam roll my back to loosen things up a little bit and stay mobile, plus I like to crack it. 

     All of these things in combination will assist you and give you a better idea on how to keep those shoulders happy so you can keep making them gains!

After Your Athletic Career

Those of you who have previously played or are currently playing a sport, whether at the high school, college, or professional level, probably know that eventually it comes to an end. You may not be skilled enough to move onto the next level, or you may get hurt or retire on your own terms. I personally played baseball ever since I can remember, and finished my career playing division one baseball for four years at The State University of New York at Buffalo (aka SUNY Buffalo, aka UB). Following that I moved on to graduate school to study physical therapy, which I’m still doing. Towards the end of my baseball-playing days, I started diversifying my interests and hobbies. This way, I was able to avoid the pitfall of losing my athletic identity and not knowing what to do with myself when it was all over. 

              This loss of identity is something that I have seen occur to other players who have invested so much of themselves into the sport, and have not worked on other things outside of that bubble. When it comes time for their athletic careers to end, they do not know what to do because they cannot identify themselves with anything other than their sport. These people are always talked about in relation to the sport they play (Jonny the football player, Sally the soccer player, etc.) and do not associate themselves with other activities.

              Now you can argue that if you don’t give 100% to the sport, you definitely won’t make it to the professional level. While this may hold true, professional-level sports are only for the 1% of the 1%. Even for them, it has to end eventually. 

              Losing your athletic identity can be devastating for those who have nothing to fall back on. We’ve all run into the guy reliving the glory days of his past athletic career in high school or college. This brings me back to the point that you must have other hobbies and interests so you can take all that productive energy and determination to succeed and focus it on other paths. For me, it was physical therapy and training for powerlifting. I also believe that because strength and conditioning plays such a vital role in athletics, many athletes do end up continually competing in strength sports such and powerlifting and strong man, or endurance sports like marathon running and Ironman. Imagine all the possibilities you have, as a former athlete who has developed the skills and drive for excellence that can be carried over to other things in life. Sounds like you’d be pretty good at whatever else you set your mind to with that level of determination and drive. This is just something to consider as the end of your playing days draws nearer, as sad as it might be to think about. Set yourself up for future success by developing other talents that you can pour yourself into after your athletic career, whether they still revolve around the sport (without playing it), or are entirely different endeavors.   

Ryan Goodell, CSCS