 Last week I helped an engineer to move, position, and hold a giant extension ladder to install security cameras. It was quite frightening and grueling. One bad angle or faulty point of contact could lead to falling, serious injury, or even death from that height. It got me thinking… Points of contact are extremely important in maximizing your force production for a lift. Just as the top of the ladder needs to make contact with the building and the bottom of the ladder needs to make firm contact with the ground, your hands and feet are also points of contact with the barbell and the ground during a deadlift or clean. With the bench press, your back is a third point of contact with the bench. With the squat, your back is a third point of contact with the bar. Maximizing these points of contact during your set up is crucial to successfully lifting as much weight as possible.
There are two main points of contact for an extension ladder: the floor and the wall. If the base of the ladder is too far from the wall, its center of gravity will be compromised and it with slip. If the base of the ladder is too close to the wall, the ladder will be unbalanced and there is a risk that it could fall away from the wall. This is similar for how you grip a bar and position your feet for lifts. Could you imagine if the extension ladder were made to stand upright on its two “feet” without a second point of contact such as a wall? It would fall over without much effort. Another lesson to take away is how the length of the ladder changes its center of gravity. By extending the ladder, its mass disperses further from its center of mass. It becomes “top heavy” and unwieldy, very difficult to move without a second person. Likewise, you want a heavy weight as tight to your body and as close to your center of mass as possible. On a squat or deadlift, you want to generate force from the middle of your foot, not from your toes and not from your heels. This is where you are most balanced and most powerful. On a bench press, you want to bring the bar down rather low toward your lower chest or upper abs. This is where you can generate significantly more force because you have significantly more mass and thus significantly more kinetic potential there. In all of these lifts, you want your core--your center--to be strong and rigid like iron. We will talk about that in more detail later.
Your hand placement and foot placement on all lifts should be contingent upon and support your center of mass. The best example of a center of mass is the center of a black hole, where gravitational forces there are so great that not even light can escape. When you have a barbell in your hands on a bench press or deadlift, squeeze the bar as tight as you can. On the bench press, really push up and through your HANDS. On a deadlift, your hands are meat hooks. Hold the bar tight like your life depends on it, allowing the rest of your body to work. You’re only as strong as your grip allows. Simultaneously, focus on driving your FEET through the floor--through the earth--like its a leg press. This allows your legs and hips to do more work, saving your back some of the strain.
Turn the deadlift into a leg press with a stability component. Take a firm grip, tighten your core, and push your feet through the floor the way you'd push them against the leg press sled. You'll move more weight this way and save your back some of the strain. With the squat, you don’t have to grip the bar that hard. In fact, it is preferable that you use a thumbless grip on the squat and focus simply on balancing the weight on your back. Your hands are more like J-hooks or little stoppers. They aren't intended to "hold" any weight on the squat, just simply to help keep the bar in place. Your upper back should be the main contact point with the bar and serve as the shelf on which the bar sits.
Your feet are the other major contact point in the squat. When most people squat, they squat with their feet far too narrow. This forces their bodies into an anatomically disadvantageous position where they cannot adequately reach depth (get lower) and are forced to use more lower-back to come up out of the bottom. This is incorrect and also dangerous. Here's a simple trick for how to find your perfect foot placement. Remember how everything is contingent (dependent) on supporting your center of mass? Well, put your hands in a prayer position and squat down, moving your feet and knees about until they make room for your gut and your elbows. This makes room for your hips to operate, allowing you to use your powerful glutes and hamstrings out of the bottom of the squat. As you drive your feet through the ground, cue driving your hips up "against the bar." Together, the powerful muscle groups of the buttocks, legs, and back can accomplish much more than each of them separately.
Your feet and, by extension, your legs need to be wide enough and flared out enough to accommodate the sinking of your gut (your center of mass) down between them, this allows your hips to activate out of the bottom of the squat rather than being jammed up, shifting the force to the lower back. Most 700+ pound squatters use a much wider stance than the average gym bro for these reasons. With the bench press, like your other lifts, your grip width and foot width need to accommodate your center of mass (your torso). This means, you shouldn't have to push all the weight with your triceps/arms, your chest should also be able to contribute. To do this, take a moderate/medium grip on the bar with either your pinky or ring fingers on the power rings. This may be challenging at first, but in the long run you'll be able to touch your chest with the bar easier and use more chest and thus generate more force overall.
With the bench press, you need to drive your feet into the floor, drive your upper back into the bench, and push the bar away through your hands. We will go more into detail with that concept with the bench press later since it is arguably the most complex of the three lifts. Focus on these contact points, and your lifts will improve. 
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 When we talk about “working out” we’re typically talking about two different things: exercise and training. What differentiates the two? Exercise is typically what your doctor prescribes: anything that gets you moving more and that raises your heart rate. The intention is typically to improve your health-markers such as lowering your weight, your LDL cholesterol, your blood pressure, etc.. On the other hand, training is what athletes do: working out with the intention of performing better. So, the difference is in intent. The reason me and other strength & conditioning coaches are cynical about this subject is because we understand the importance of MINDSET. The mindset of someone who exercises becomes dramatically different from the mindset of someone who trains.  Can you imagine if in Rocky IV Rocky Balboa decided he wanted to run for exercise, lift for exercise, chop trees for exercise, and climb mountains for exercise? Ivan Drago would have killed him too. Instead, Rocky ran because he wanted to win, lifted because he wanted to win, chopped trees because he wanted to win, and climbed mountains because he wanted to win. So, he won, and was leaner and healthier as a bi-product of training. The same can be said for anyone in the armed forces. No U.S. Marine or Navy Seal exercises. Every single one of them trains. The problem with exercise is that it becomes arbitrary to most. What that means is that it typically becomes a circus of arbitrarily filling an allotted time with arbitrary activities without the intention of building and improving on those activities in the future. For example, someone who exercises may set out to run 30 minutes every other morning with the idea that doing so will somehow make them “healthier.”  Someone who trains would set out to run 30 minutes every other morning but try to do it a few seconds faster each time with the idea that doing so will make them “better” at running as well as healthier. As another example: someone who exercises may cycle through the same lifting circuit of bicep curls, tricep extensions, shoulder presses, and chest flys with a set of 15 lbs. dumbbells each and every upper-body day. In contrast, someone who trains will try to increase either the repetitions or weight of each lift on each and every upper-body day. The problem with the exercise mindset is Zatsiorsky’s Law of Accommodation or, as most people know it, the Law of Diminishing Returns. This means that when you do something continually, your body becomes accustomed to it and ceases to adapt further to the stimulus. In other words, if you don’t make a stimulus (like running or lifting) different and/or more difficult, you will cease to see positive changes beyond a base point.  If you can’t or won’t add weight (intensity) or reps (volume), you won’t make progress. You will simply spin your wheels and be stuck in fitness limbo. Yes, you may lose weight and lower your resting heart rate simply by exercising but when those improvements stall what are you left with? You are smaller, weaker, slower, less athletic, and less capable overall. I experienced these exact things when I lost 109 lbs. with diet, walking, and circuits with 15 lbs. dumbbells.
I don’t mean to denigrate exercise as doing something is better than nothing but if your intention is to get better and do better, you need to train. Effective training requires doing more than you were able to do previously. This is the principle of progressive overload, the most fundamental part of any training program. |
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February 2020
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