Training During Finals Week

     In honor of the completion of finals week, I thought it only fitting to write a little about training while packing in as much studying as you can for tests. Right off the bat, I’m going to mention the goal of this week is not to hit personal records and push it so hard that you’ll be doing more sleeping than studying in the library (or your chosen place to study). This week is about maintaining what you have to the best of your ability.

     Planning is your friend here, and I cannot stress this enough. I’ve previously talked about the importance of planning in my post “Making Time, Being Consistent, and Having a Plan.” All the principles of scheduling out your week still apply, even for finals week. In addition to planning out this crazy hectic week, a self-regulating factor comes into play. This will determine how much training load and volume you will need. The goal is to do enough to maintain, not too little so you get worse, keep it short and sweet, and leave enough in the tank so you can spend your precious time and energy cramming all sorts of information into your head, till you go insane from looking at the same stuff over and over and over again. Sounds enjoyable, right?

     I think about this as the amount of stimuli you can handle in a day. You can also call these “stressors,” but I feel that word has a negative connotation associated with it. So for our purposes, we will refer to events consisting of training, studying, and other activities throughout the day as “stimuli.” 

     From the moment we wake up, each activity we perform carries a given amount of stimulus load with it. We can only handle so much of a stimulus before we need to recharge our batteries. Otherwise our performance, focus, and attention diminish. Some activities have very little and others have a very high stimulus load. I would classify training as having a very high stimulus load. It takes a lot of energy and can make you crash hard afterwards if you push it too hard in the gym and then go to study. It is therefore necessary to modulate your training load, so you can spend the rest of your time bombarding yourself with studying stimuli. Some modifications that I have found helpful are doing only my main lift paired with the most important of my injury prevention exercises, and lowering the training volume drastically. These techniques allow me to save some energy and put it towards studying. The amount or type of modulation necessary will be different for everyone, depending on how big your stimulus cup is or how well you can prevent it from filling (i.e. what your recovery methods are like). This is not black and white, which is why it’s so important to know yourself (self-regulating factor) and how much you can handle during the training session.

     To put this into a better perspective, and so I had an excuse to draw some fantastic artwork, you can think about the amount of stimuli you can handle in a day as an empty cup. As you expose yourself to activities throughout the day, the cup fills up (figure 1). When the cup fills up to the brim and overflows, your focus and attention go down (figure 2). This is generally the point when you want to pull your hair out because you’ve been studying too long.

 

Figure 1: A normal day with no excessive stimulus.

Figure 2: When things go wrong.

     Before you get into the bad zone, there are a couple of things you can do to help delay the overflow. The main principle is to get your brain to relax and take your mind off of everything for a little bit. Ways of achieving this can include napping, meditation, going for a walk, or watching funny YouTube videos, if you’re into that sort of thing, just to name a few. Take your pick, choose your favorites, and then get back to work. 

     I think this principle of stimulus modulation applies to other areas besides just studying for finals, especially when things get busy and hectic in your life. I hope these tips help with your studies and training, even though it may be a little too late if your finals are over. Perhaps some thoughts for future reference then. Best of luck with finals!

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

Squat Talk: Foot Position and Ankle Range of Motion

     As leg day becomes more and more popular for the gym bros of the world (among other gym goers), we’ll be seeing many different variations of squats. Some of these squats will be good, some will be bad, and some will be horrendous. In this series of squat talks we will deconstruct some of the important technical aspects of the squat that should be universal principles for whichever squat variation you choose.

     Starting from the ground up, let’s talk about foot position. Your foot position will depend on what type of squat you will be performing and, to some degree, on how much hip mobility you have. But to keep things simple lets split techniques into two categories: narrower stance and wider stance squat variations. Generally you will see a narrower stance in Olympic lifters and those who preach the “ass to grass” technique. As a side note, squatting “ass to grass” is not necessary for everyone. But before I go off on a tangent, let’s get back to foot position. A wider stance will be seen more for a powerlifting-type squat because this helps to shorten range of motion and hit competition depth. 

Now where does ankle range of motion come into play here?

     With these two variations of squats there will be different degrees of necessary ankle dorsiflexion that are needed. 

Side note: What is ankle dorsiflexion?

     Dorsiflexion is when the foot approximates with the shin/tibia (Figure 1). The opposite of dorsiflexion is plantarflexion. 

Figure 1: Dorsiflexion (left) and plantar flexion (right). 

Now that we understand dorsiflexion, how does it affect the squat? 

     When squatting with a narrower stance, you need more dorsiflexion to “hit depth” due to the combined knee and hip strategy required to complete the motion. A wider stance, by contrast, will use more of a hip-dominant strategy and will not require as much dorsiflexion at the ankle. Taking a closer look at a narrow stance squat (Figure 2), you can see that the knee needs to track over the foot in order to squat lower. This stance requires you to use both a hip and a knee strategy to get deeper in the squat. When ankle dorsiflexion is limited in this squat variation, you will either need to use more hip strategy or you will see the heels come off the ground to make up for this deficit.

Figure 2: Narrow stance squat. Notice the tracking of the knee over the foot and the amount of dorsiflexion needed to get in this position.

     With a wider stance squat, a more hip-dominant strategy will be used. Therefore, you will not need as much dorsiflexion to complete the movement (Figure 3). The biggest variable between these two variations is the amount of knee tracking over the foot, which will determine the amount of ankle range of motion needed.

Figure 3: Wide stance squat. Notice the knee location compared to the foot and the amount of dorsiflexion need.

     Everyone will fall into a position and variation that is most comfortable for them, with unique difference between one person and another. Squatting technique does not have to be of one extreme or the other, but the principles should remain the same. The amount of hip and knee strategy that you use will be a large determinant in the amount of ankle dorsiflexion that will be required for you to perform a quality squat. 

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

P.S. – I hope you enjoyed my fantastic stick figure drawings.