Weights and Stuff: Athlete

Friday, June 16, 2017

How to Deadlift: The Set Up

In previous posts, I’ve discussed foot placement and hand placement/grips when setting up to deadlift. In this post, I’ll go over how to set up for the deadlift before you start to pull the bar off the floor.

First, you want to place your feet and hands correctly on the bar. These placements should serve as reference points for the rest of your set up. After getting your foot and hand placement right, you want to optimally position your body in order to pull the bar off the ground, with the best mechanical efficiency possible. To do this, you want your shins to be relatively vertical, your hips to move back, and your torso to lean slightly forward (figure1). The deadlift is referred to as a “hip hinge” movement pattern. This is not a squat, which is a knee-dominant movement pattern. A hip-dominant pattern like the deadlift requires you to use your glutes and hamstrings (a.k.a. your posterior chain) more than you would during a squat, which is more of an anterior chain movement, utilizing the quadriceps muscles to a greater extent.

Figure 1: Deadlift setup

Relatively speaking, your hips will be higher at the start of a deadlift than the lowest point that your hips reach in a squat (figure 2). When deadlifting, your hips only need to get as low as necessary to get your hands on the bar. Once you are in this position you will need to gather tension throughout your body before you start to pull the bar. This will allow you to better hold your position when you're lifting the weight, preventing you from rounding your back, tipping forward onto your toes, or compromising your deadlift position in some other way, shape, or form.

Figure 2: Deadlift compared to a squat.

In order to gather tension in your body, you need to first set your lats. When setting your lats you need to imagine pulling the bar into your body/towards your shins. Doing this will help activate your lats and keep the bar close to your body later on when pulling the bar from the floor.

The next step to gather tension in your body is bracing your core. This is sometimes referred to as a Valsalva maneuver. A note on the Valsalva maneuver: if you are a healthy normal person and do not have high blood pressure, performing at Valsalva maneuver is not incorrect. In fact, it is the body's natural way of achieving spine stability as a protective mechanism so we don't injure ourselves. You can brace your core by breathing into your stomach and contracting your abdominals in order to create spinal stability and tension through your torso.

The next step is to slowly start to pull on the bar. This should not be an aggressive or violent motion that pulls you out of your position. Doing this should allow you to start to turn on musculature that you have not turned on yet, helping you hold a better spine position and keep you aligned to lift the weight.

By this point you may not feel the most comfortable globally throughout your body. You're attempting to pull a relatively heavy weight off the floor while keeping your spine stable and lifting a weight that will help you get stronger, grow more muscle, and improve your physical performance.

Now you're ready to start to pull, the actual act of lifting the weight. We will go over this in the next post so stay tuned.

As always, thanks for reading!

Ryan Goodell, PT, DPT, CSCS

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Sunday, January 15, 2017

Box Jumps: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Box jumps offer tons of benefits-so many that I incorporate them into my training regularly. However, I often see people either performing them incorrectly or attempting to use them as something that they are physiologically not.

Starting with the good, box jumps can be incorporated into a program with many different variations. They’re a great way to develop explosive power and to get triple extension. Triple extension is simultaneous extension of your hip and knee as well as plantarflexion at your ankle. Another benefit is that landing on a box, after jumping, takes out the impact landing force (eccentric loading) from falling back down to the ground after the jump. Simply put, the box is just a safe landing place to shorten the distance between you and the floor after you’ve reached the peak height of your jump. The box height is irrelevant because the INTENT to jump as high as possible is what matters the most. The intent to jump as high as possible will create a neural response to activate as much muscle as possible to jump as high as possible. When performing the box jump, you are attempting to adapt a neural response within your body’s system to jump higher. Now that that’s been explained, let’s get into the other stuff.

First, let’s take a look at a properly performed box jump to have a reference point.

The fact that jumps are an expression of explosive power means that they are not to be used as a “cardio or conditioning” tool. You can see this rule being broken when someone is bouncing up and down on a box like in the video shown below.

The above action completely defeats the purpose of a box jump. The landing mechanics of these cardio box jumps are normally not great, either. Taking energy systems into consideration, explosive and powerful jumps use the creatine phosphate system, which is in charge of supplying instantaneous energy to the muscles when performing the jump. Also considering the neural factors, in order to adapt the nervous system to stimulate high amount of muscle fibers rapidly in a short period of time synergistically, box jumps need to be performed one at a time. Bouncing up and down on the box does not cause a maximal voluntary neural drive for every single jump, nor does it tap into the correct energy system to produce powerful jumps for each rep. If you are attempting to perform multiple jumps, you are better off performing them on level surface standing in place (i.e. squat jumps) or jumping forward for 1-5 reps.

The height of the box is yet another thing to take into consideration. If the box is too high, often people will not triple extend completely. They cut their triple extension short in order to flex their hips and tuck their knees in order to get their feet on top of the box.

Below is an example of full triple extension.

A major contributor to this problem is ego. Everyone wants to jump on the highest box possible, right? Check the ego and use a box height that is appropriate for you. Remember, the box is only a safe place to land following your maximal effort jump. Now, if you are competing in a box jump competition, of which I don’t know any, then by all means jump on the highest box possible.

With all this being said, what does a normal set or pace for box jumps look like?

Box jumps are a great tool to use in your programming, just use them correctly. Train smart, my friends.

Hope you enjoyed this article,

Ryan Goodell, CSCS