 Buakaw Banchameck, a champion muay thai kickboxer with an unbelievable record of 249- 24. frequently kicked over banana trees to strengthen his shins and strikes In Thailand, muay thai kickboxing is a lifetime commitment for its practitioners. From a young age, practitioners wake up early in the morning and undergo a rigorous routine that involves kicking heavy bags, banana trees, even metal poles, deliberately damaging the shins so that they will heal, becoming denser, stronger, and harder over time. And the shins, miraculously, do! Also, the nerves in the shins deaden, causing them to hurt less over time (although pain never fully subsides). Furthermore, motor patterns and “muscle memory” are acquired and retained. This is all done for one purpose: to be able to kick hard enough and kick long enough to win one fight after the next fight after the next fight.  Dina Averina, who has dominated rhythmic gymnastics with three world championships, was trained from a young age along with her twin sister, Arina, to maximize her extreme genetic potential in the realm of mobility and flexibility The same can be said for rhythmic gymnasts in Russia who endure grueling stretching sessions from a very young age to make their joints and muscles pliable enough to contort their bodies into superhuman positions. The goal each session is to stretch farther and hold these positions longer until they become second-nature to the individual. Screaming and crying are not uncommon during these sessions, and many in the United States would consider this child abuse. These are extreme examples of the progressive overload principle: doing more and more each day so that you can achieve more and more each day.  Milo of Croton was a pseudo-mythological historical wrestler in Greece who lived during the 6th century. He is said to have carried a baby calf until it grew up with him until it was a full-grown bull, by which point he had achieved unrivaled strength and musculature. The progressive overload principle is crucial to your success as an athlete. Human beings have a remarkable, God-given, evolutionary advantage to adapt to different stresses by becoming stronger and faster, increasing their stamina, and becoming more resistant to injury among other things. We acquire these adaptations through the course of our training, by doing more and more progressively over time. “More and more” to a strength athlete can mean more weight lifted (intensity increase), or weight lifted for more reps (volume increase), or the same weight lifted for the same reps but with less rest between sets (endurance increase). It can mean running faster or for a longer period of time for an endurance athlete. The human body is capable of several incredible adaptations including increasing muscle size, increasing bone density, accessing more and different muscle fibers (I, IIA, IIX), increasing Vo2 max (the ability to use oxygen), increasing tendon and ligament strength, and much more. This sounds absolutely amazing, doesn’t it? It almost reminds you of a little Japanese fight anime called Dragon Ball. In Dragon Ball, a humanoid alien race known as the Saiyans possess the ability to recover from hard training and near-death experiences by becoming exponentially stronger (like, able to destroy planets, stars, and galaxies stronger). This “zenkai boost” (as it’s known) gives them an advantage over other beings who may start off powerful but whose power levels generally stay the same unless the plot calls for it to change. Afterwards, the Saiyans sleep a lot and eat a lot, so much so that it’s comical. It’s compelling and all, but you are not a Saiyan and this isn’t Dragon Ball. You don’t recover and become exponentially stronger overnight, and if you truly pushed yourself that hard you’d either regress (begin to lose your gains because your body’s recovery mechanisms can’t keep up) or you’d actually die, and there are no Dragon Balls to wish your sorry carcass back to life. Seek Jesus.
Saiyans in the Dragon Ball franchise train a lot, eat a lot, and sleep a lot. If it makes you feel better, you’re more like 3% Saiyan. We take much longer to recover as human beings than these fictitious characters do. However, we DO recover, and we are capable of an incredible adaptation known to the former Soviet Olympic athletes and coaches as “supercompensation” (“super” as in “a lot” and “compensation” as in “making up for”). Supercompensation means that your performance capacity after training is higher than your performance capacity before it. Your body makes up for struggling with a stress (i.e. running, lifting, stretching) by adapting to it so that it doesn’t struggle with it as much the next time. From an evolutionary perspective, your body only does this to give you a better chance at survival--meaning, giving you a better chance of killing & eating prey, outperforming your peers, getting mates, and reproducing. It doesn’t really know that you’re trying to lift more, run faster, kick harder, throw farther, and so on. Those are more like bi-products (side-effects) of the process. THE TRUTH ABOUT OVERTRAINING One thing I want to emphasize is that you can and will lose these increases in performance if you don’t continue to train them or if you overtrain them. Overtraining does exist, it does occur, and--regardless of what the bodybuilders and YouTube fitness “gurus” tell you--YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO OVERTRAINING! The body can only adapt to so much and for so long. Time is of the essence: time to rest and time to rebuild. Imagine if I contracted you at 5 PM in the afternoon to build a 50-story tower by TOMORROW because I really, really, really want a 50-story tower by TOMORROW.  It’s not going to happen. It just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter how I feel, how much I want it, how motivated I am, how much I’m willing to pay, how many people I have working for me, etc.. There is a process to building a tower that can’t be skimped over--things like getting the land and building rights, letting the cement harden, installing steel beams, and so many other things that need to be done in order to execute the project. Imagine if, after every floor you’ve built, you then took a sledgehammer and smashed a chunk of it. How can it ever be finished? Imagine if you had a wound and you kept picking at it over and over again. How can it ever heal? This is the same thing you have to keep in mind when trying to avoid overtraining. Your muscles, your bones, your joints, and your central nervous system need time to recover. You have a maximum recoverable volume that you must stay in to avoid sabotaging your own progress by overtraining. In short: you can’t go 110% 110% of the time, just like you can’t all-out sprint forever and you can’t perform your true one-rep max forever. It would be ideal in an ideal world, but we don’t live in an ideal world. You have work, you may have kids, you may have pets, you have chores, you have other things that require your time and energy.
The Bulgarian weightlifters who popularized the Bulgarian method (essentially doing max clean & jerks and snatches nearly every day) had the advantage of that being their only job. Everything would be provided for them. They would be taken care of by the government so long as they didn’t get seriously injured or start to suck. You don’t have that luxury. You also don’t legally have access to the performance-enhancing drugs and pain-killers they were possibly on and blood-doping they possibly did to keep up with that level of wear & tear. According to Louie Simmons and Chris McGrail, you require 72 hours between heavy and dynamic upper and lower body days. In simpler terms, you have to wait three days to hit the lower body again after a lower-body heavy or speed day, and the same thing applies to upper body. In the in-between time you can do core, cardio, stretching, yoga, dancing, and a range of other activities as long as they don’t over-tax the system. HOW TO USE PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD Mark Rippetoe of Starting Strength and Practical Programming fame recommends adding 5 lbs. to each of your foundational lifts every workout session (48-72 hours) until this is no longer possible and very small micro-loading (0.25-3 lbs.) may have to be used instead, usually for late-intermediate to advanced lifters. This is actually very good advice and fundamentally sound for beginners and early intermediates, however it does highlight an all too painful reality: you’ll plateau eventually (duh). Rippetoe is not shy about this fact. Beginners can recover faster and make more progress faster than an intermediate or advanced person.
Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell explained that more advanced training should be done in three-week cycles, alternating lifts and exercises as well as reps and sets from week to week for three weeks so that the body cannot accommodate to it (get so used to the stimulus that it feels it no longer needs to get better). Simmons goes on to say that this is because the training effect in relation to performance acts in what he calls a three-week “pendulum wave.” Pendulums swing and sway, neither gaining or losing energy unless a new stimulus is introduced into the system. That is actually a decent analogy for what actually happens. The magnitude to which your training will effect your performance will peak around the three week mark at the end of each cycle and then either stagnate or decline afterward if you don’t change things up (introduce a different stimulus).  What I personally recommend, as you’ll see in my workouts plans, is that we alternate between different variations of lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, push-press, rows, etc.) and rep schemes (8x1, 5x5, 4x4, 3x5, 9x3, 3x10, 4x8) to avoid suffering a drop in performance after each three-week wave or stagnating, seeking and working up to a maximum bench, squat, and/or deadlift at the end of it.
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 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.   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.  Imagine you were running a relay race and you’re the fastest and most competent member of your team because you’ve run these types of races all your life (heck, maybe you come from a lineage of crazy masochistic family members who like to run for fun). However, you’re expected to handoff the baton to a newcomer to the sport who is slow, clumsy, and also incompetent. They fumble with the baton and don’t know what to do. Then, when they finally get going, it’s at a leisurely slow pace. They struggle to even stay in the team’s designated lane. Inevitably, despite your best efforts, your team loses due to the poor performance of your worst teammate. What does this have to do with your strength and fitness goals? Well, this might be how your overdeveloped quads feel about your weak glutes or hamstrings--the reason why you don’t squat or deadlift as much as you should. Or, this is how your strong biceps feel about your weak lats--the reason you struggle to do more than a few pull-ups or chin-ups. Someone or something isn’t doing its fair share of the work. This is also an analogy for how something in your kinetic chain may be broken.  You might have the quads of an 800 pound deadlifter but the glutes of a 300 pound deadlifter. In this case, you’re limited to a 300 pound deadlift because you’re only as strong as your weakest link. You might have the triceps of a 400 pound bench presser but the chest of a 200 pound bench presser. In this case, you’re limited to a 200 pound bench press. Your triceps, in this example, are your all-star runners who carry your team. However, your chest, in this example, is like that terrible runner on your team: it isn’t strong or fast enough yet, it isn’t skilled enough yet, and it doesn’t know what the hell to do to keep up with the rest of the team or the competition. It only knows that it’s under stress and it doesn’t want to get hurt.  You really are only as strong as your weakest link. Just because the phrase is cliche doesn’t make it invalid. With this in mind, let’s observe our most fundamental lift again: the deadlift. If you have weak lats, you are more likely to be pulled and rounded forward during the lift, forcing you into a position where it is more difficult to exert force at the top of the lift. If you have weak glutes and/or hamstrings, you will struggle above the knees to lock out any respectable weight because you cannot flex your hips strong enough to finish the movement. If you have weak quads, you may struggle to initiate the movement with adequate leg drive to break the weight off the floor. Heck, if you have weak hands, a broken finger, a torn bicep, or a strained forearm then your grip on the bar is going to be dramatically affected. Even grip strength is a potential weakness that needs to be addressed. IF YOU HAVE A WEAKNESS, ATTACK IT!
Arnold famously said that while he worked out, he would look in the mirror, pose, identify weaknesses in his physique and “attack” those weaknesses. An NFL coach will often know the weaknesses on his team going into the offseason so as to draft or trade for players to fill those specific weaknesses (or risk opposing teams exposing and exploiting those weaknesses during the season). For example, an otherwise stacked team of extremely talented offensive and defensive players might lack a reliable field-goal kicker. This is a big deal considering that kickers, who are usually not highly regarded as “athletes” and usually don’t get much of the glory or attention, are actually responsible for the most points in NFL history. It’s not even close (https://www.pro-football-reference.com/l…/scoring_career.htm). The last time I checked, you win games by scoring more points than the opponent. Kickers just happen to do it rather quietly. Perhaps your butt is also doing its job (or underperforming at its job) quietly. Perhaps it could be doing more. Perhaps one head of your deltoids or your calves or your traps or some other muscle group is lagging when it could be thriving. I refer to these as “sleeper” muscles. These are muscles that we don’t normally think of as contributing to anything important or ones that we haven’t yet built a strong mind-muscle connection with. Here’s the test of whether or not you have a sleeping muscle: can you make that particular muscle contract voluntarily? In other words, can you flex it? Your pecs? Your glutes? How difficult is it to do so? If you have to put a lot effort into it then you probably have an underdevelopment--a weakness--there. A second test is to ask yourself: what hurts? Is it the labrum in your shoulder? Is it the inside of your knee? Your left hip? Your lower back? As Louie Simmons often says, WEAK THINGS GET BROKEN. Weak things usually hurt. If a joint (or your spine) is lacking the skeletal muscle support it requires to remain stable and safe, that area will send pain signals to your brain to tell you to stop asking it to do that activity. The only way to overcome this is to become STRONGER, WAKE UP those sleeping muscles, and bring up those weaknesses. Doing so will lead to extraordinary increases in strength and size (i.e. aesthetics).  We can fix these problems with targeted repetition work. This is where “repetition effort method” comes in. The repetition effort method uses rep-ranges between 6-20 repetitions and relatively lighter weight (than the max effort method) to target specific muscular and also soft-tissue weaknesses. Remember, the tissue around your joints also has the ability to strengthen itself, it simply takes a bit longer than muscles do. A lot of heavy bench pressers (people who press in excess of 600 lbs.) often do very heavy cable pulls. Their goal is not necessarily to build bodybuilder-type lats but to strengthen the connective tissue in the elbow joint to prevent injury. They may use repetitions of dumbbell chest flies to strengthen the connective tissue in the chest or do Arnold presses to strengthen a weak rotator cuff. This is something that can’t be safely done with heavier weights and low repetitions, at least not at first.
Many of these repetition method exercises are bodybuilding-type single-joint isolation exercises as opposed to the multi-joint compound movements that powerlifters, weightlifters, and crossfitters often advocate. We sometimes call these “accessory” movements because they assist with things that the bigger movements like the squat and bench press miss. For example, someone with abnormally strong triceps may struggle to develop strong shoulders because their triceps do almost all of the work during a bench press. For this reason, they should do repetitions of overhead shoulder presses. Similarly, someone with abnormally strong quads may have greatly lagging hamstrings because their quads do almost all the work in the squat. This is where things like Romanian deadlifts, stiff-legged deadlifts, and even hamstring curls may help a lot. Targeting these weaknesses with repetition work not only makes you stronger and more muscular but it also helps you to prevent imbalances and injuries. By strengthening all your muscles along your kinetic chain from your feet to your head, you will become a better overall competitor.  I’ve benched alongside world record holders as well as state and national record holders--people who bench upwards of 600 to 900 pounds. One of the best things I’ve learned from being around these elite benchers is using the entire body to press the most weight possible. The bench press is primarily a chest and tricep movement but the rest of the body can contribute greatly. For one, the back can hug the bench, creating a more stable surface for pressing. One thing that will hold any of your lifts back is INEFFICIENCY. Inefficiency is any energy lost not moving the weight in the direction you want it (up). Instability (the horizontal/left-right shifting of the force during the press) will cause force to be wasted. Your shoulder blades should be pulled back with the lats engaged (like performing a row or lat-pulldown) so that they hug and contour to the bench. Next, the legs can contribute greatly to the press. The legs are obviously much stronger than the arms and chest. Most people don’t use them to help with the press because they don’t know how or they don’t see the point. After all, how would a movement so far away (the feet) affect force moving through the fists during a press?
Take note of how Mike Tyson used leg drive to deliver more devastating punches and how John Elway used leg drive to deliver passes that traveled faster and further than most. Both men are famous for their "power." If this sounds insane to you, just imagine a boxer like Mike Tyson trying to throw a hard punch while sitting down. Wouldn’t his punch be weaker? Imagine a quarterback like John Elway throwing a 60 yard pass while sitting down. Maybe these great athletes could do it but it wouldn’t be their best possible effort. It’s incredibly inefficient. The arms are simply not a strong enough muscle group to generate a significant amount of force independently. Compare the bench press to a different kind of press: the push-press. Have you ever performed a push-press? A push-press is a shoulder press with leg drive at the bottom of the movement. You can usually move between 40-60 more pounds doing a push-press than a strict shoulder press. Thus, getting the legs involved in such a movement can make a huge difference.  So, how do you use leg drive during a bench press? Here’s what I call the “Whip” technique. Think about a whip. You hold one part of it (the handle), cause it to coil, and then perform a throwing-like motion. The energy from that end transfers through the whip as it coils and uncoils itself, eventually breaking the sound barrier (believe it or not) and causing it to “crack” upon impact or lengthening at the other end. Similarly, your bench press should start at your feet. You should “throw” or “pop” the force through your legs, through your entire body, through your arms, and “crack” that force into the bar as it leaves your chest.  One other way I like to think about this is to treat it like the keg toss. Have you seen a keg toss in a strongman competition? The movement starts from the ground. The force passes through the feet, through the body, through the hands, and hurls the keg through the air overhead. Imagine if the strongman had tried to lift it just with his arms. Not only would that be absurd but it’d either not leave the ground or it would hit him or her in the face.
You should gather energy like a spring as you lower the bar to your lower-chest or upper abs. Feel the weight dropping into your feet and then push your feet into the floor as your simultaneously push the bar with your hands. Imagine throwing the bar up and over your head like a keg toss. Imagine the energy from your feet transferring through your body and “cracking” like a whip into the barbell. You should be able to press much more weight this way.   Without a strong offensive line in football, the quarterback, running-backs, and receivers are rendered defenseless and useless no matter their skill level. Without a strong central pawn formation in chess, your rooks, queen, knights, bishops, and ultimately your king are weak and vulnerable. Likewise, without a strong core as an athlete, you can’t throw a hard punch, shoot a tight basket, throw a deep pass, jump over a high hurdle, make a tackle, execute a wrestling move, swing a club or bat, hit a ball, or lift a heavy weight. You’ll find inspirational athletes without arms, legs, hands, fingers, toes, hearing, sight, or even a normally functioning brain who do incredible things (check out Shaquem Griffin of the Seattle Seahawks who plays with no left hand), but you’ll never see an athlete be competitive without a torso. Your torso is the center of your power. Without it, you are weak. It doesn’t matter how powerful your legs or arms are. Think about it: you can leg-press, hack squat, or belt squat 1,000+ pounds with ease because your legs just need to focus on pushing the weight, but once you’re forced to stabilize it and get the core involved (as with a normal front or back squat), you’re only about 25-40% as strong on average. Your body--especially your central nervous system (CNS)--WILL NOT allow you to lift anything more than your spine can handle. It will shut you down. And, yes, there is the freak exception to this rule where a person can “tough out” the body’s emergency signals and manage to suffer a spinal cord injury mid-lift. However, this is surprisingly extremely rare. The body will fight you to prevent you from getting injured. Wouldn’t you rather have it fight for you?  The only way to do this is to convince your body that your spine is protected. You need to strengthen your “internal belt”--your core. That means your abs and obliques primarily, complementing your lower back. Think about it. An external belt (such as a lifting belt) makes a lift about 20% easier because it helps you to create and maintain intra-abdominal pressure by acting as a “container” that prevents a power leak. Think about a can of soda. When you shake that can of soda, pressure builds up inside of it and the can is actually able to support a decent amount of weight if you place something on it. However, once you open the soda, the internal pressure is lost and the second an external pressure is placed on it, the can will be smashed and its carbonated liquid contents will spill out. As Mulan logic goes, once you find your center, you are sure to win. Focus on building a stronger, more rigid, and durable core. Think of this like a strong offensive line in football--the offensive line acts to block for the quarterback and running-backs, allowing them time and space to make big plays. Likewise, a strong central pawn formation in chess allows your more glamorous and powerful pieces like your knights and bishops to safely and more effectively get involved in the game.
CONTROL THE CENTER & YOU CONTROL THE GAME Consider the battle of Gaugamela between Alexander the Great’s Macedonian army of 40,000 and King Darius III Persian army of 250,000-1,000,000,000. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the Persians greatly weakened their center in several ways that made them susceptible to defeat. First, Darius sent his scythe chariots and elephants forward with little infantry support, allowing them to be trapped and mowed down by the Macedonians. His whole right side was overcommitted to the flanking action, leaving his forces off-balance. Second, he fell for a feint maneuver by Alexander’s cavalry and had his own cavalry leave the center to begin following Alexander to the left in an attempt to keep him on the prepared battlefield. At a critical moment of the battle, Alexander swung left and led his cavalry into the gap created in the Persian center directly at the now-vulnerable King Darius. Despite the incredible size and power of his army, Darius was now vulnerable because he had weakened his center for other pursuits. It was Alexander’s greatest victory. He understood as Darius had failed to that a strong center is key to success. King Darius in this scenario is your unprotected spine due to a weak core.  CONTROL THE CENTER AND YOU CONTROL THE BATTLE Let’s look at this in relation to the deadlift, the king of all exercises. When I deadlift, I first take a huge breath, hold it, and brace my core by focusing on contracting it as hard as I can and bringing my rib-cage downward (not forward). You should be tight and shaking. Imagine a tea kettle near the end of its heating cycle with the steam screaming to get out from the top and the kettle itself shaking from the internal forces. This breathing & bracing technique is known as the valsava maneuver. The very best Olympic weightlifters and powerlifters in the world use it. During the lift, the core acts like a strong pawn formation. The back takes the role of the queen while the legs and glutes take up the role of the two rooks. These are the strongest pieces on the chessboard in comparison to the biggest contributors to your lift. The core, thus, frees the back and legs up to do their thing and work in unison to lift a heavier weight than they could individually. All of these support and protect your king: your spine.
The valsava maneuver generates and then contains internal pressure similar to a shaken soda can, protecting and supporting the spine In summary, your core is extremely important and without it you would collapse like a boiled spaghetti noodle. However, I think that people often have a misconception about the core. The core is not just the abs--the six pack--it is the whole center of the torso below the chest including your obliques and, in my opinion, includes the lower-back. Abs, if you haven’t been preached to death about this already, aren’t made in the weight-room, they are made in the kitchen. In other words, you will usually only see them if you eat better and diet. Cardio and resistance training can also help but diet is key. To see your abs, you need to lower your overall body-fat percentage to reveal them. Almost all of us have a layer of fat covering our abs, so getting rid of that fat is the only way to get them to show. Still, the abs and obliques are like any muscle. They can grow and become denser with adaptive stress. So, exercising them is not entirely pointless for aesthetics. Building them may allow them to be seen sooner during a cut.
The abs and obliques are made up of relatively small muscles that respond well to repetition and recover quite quickly. Herschel Walker became legendary for his 2,000+ sit-ups a day routine that formed the base of his athletic endeavors. It is good to incorporate weighted movements as well from time to time, such as what George Leeman and the late Konstantin Konstantinovs performed. This includes crunches with a barbell or dumbbells, sit-ups with medicine ball tosses, leg-raises with a dumbbell between your legs or ankle weights, and an exercise I like to call “Don’t Die” where you place a weight on your abs while breathing and bracing, holding it there for about 10 seconds. This replicates the breathing and bracing against your belt which you will be doing with heavier lifts. Another thing I like to do to practice bracing the core and strengthening it is very heavy isometric holds such as unracking a heavy weight and holding it for a count of ten.  Yesterday, I talked to some of you about foot angles during heavy exercises and how it shifts the focus of the lift to different muscles. In short, flared toes shift the focus of a deadlift or squat to activate more glutes (butt), which should be the strongest muscle group in the body, and hamstrings; toes pointed forward uses more quads and lower-back to make up for the more limited hip rotation and greater knee flexion. One of Utah’s best lifters, David Herrera, who squats almost 800 lbs. at 181 lbs. has made a living off of this toes-pointed-forward stance and no one is quite sure how he does it. He is a rarity and few people deadlift or squat over 700 pounds without angling their feet/toes outward. To get the best of both worlds, it is good to train both toe/foot positions but to train your weaker stance with lighter weights. Use your stronger stance for max-efforts, that’s not the time to toy with it.  David Herrera is an anomaly as very few people can lift a maximal weight without some degree of toe flare Last week, we did a pretty taboo lift rack-pulling a lot of weight above the knees. It’s taboo because a lot of people disqualify it as an ineffective showoff lift. However, we have practical reasons to do it and it is, in fact, effective. The angle of the lift allows for the added use of the thighs (which are not as involved in a normal deadlift), traps, rhomboids, and lats with greater weight. This week, I programmed rack pulls at a lower height (second rack height) which shifts the focus to the hamstrings, glutes, lower-back, and spinal erectors (as with a normal deadlift) while also allowing the aforementioned muscles to help more.  This is the same for when you alternate between flat bench presses, decline bench presses, and incline bench presses. The emphasis shifts to other muscles in the movement. Flat bench will work more triceps and chest evenly. Decline bench presses will emphasize the powerful lower chest. Incline presses will emphasize the upper chest and deltoids.
Incline bench press .vs. decline bench press We will work all angles to create greater overall strength, functionality, and aesthetics. It will also help to reduce the risk of injury due to imbalances. One of the most common is having strong thighs but weak hamstrings. Work all your angles but be very careful in your weaker ones. Reduce the weight and put in your reps. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and we need to bring up all your weaknesses as best as possible without injury.  The angles of different rows (bent-over, upright, Pendlay, and Yates rows) work different muscles to varying degrees
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February 2020
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