Guest User 8/13/15 Guest User 8/13/15

Anti-Lateral Flexion Core Exercises

We've gone over two core exercises in previous blogs. Deadbugs, which are mainly an anti-extension exercise that targets our 6-pack and obliques, and the Pallof Press, which we use to develop our anti-rotation strength and stability.

Today, I'll walk you through a few exercises that help us develop our capacity for resisting lateral flexion, or side-bending.

Exercise 1: SA Suitcase Carry

Key Points: The kettlebell will be held at one side and you'll maintain a perfectly upright posture, not allowing the weight of the bell to pull you into side-bending. You'll keep the tension in your core, maintaining perfect posture while walking about 20-30 yards.
To Progress: Add weight to increase the difficulty.
To Regress: Take out the walking component and perform a static hold with the weight in one hand. You can increase the difficulty by increasing the weight.

Exercise 2: Side Plank

Key Points: Keep your shoulder engaged by pressing the ground away with your bottom elbow and staying as long as you can from elbow to top shoulder. Keep your hips pushed forward by squeezing your glutes and maintain a double-chin to keep your head in line. Maintain a straight line from the top of your head to the your feet.
To Progress: Add weight, movement, or elevate your feet in order to increase the difficulty.
To Regress: Perform a short-lever side plank from your knees (video below), elevate your elbow on a bench, or do both in order to decrease the difficulty of the exercise and make it more manageable.

Exercise 3: Anti-Lateral Flexion Pallof Press

Key Points: This exercise will help develop your ability to resist lateral flexion and increase your shoulder stability at the same time. Begin in an athletic position with your hips and knees slightly bent, holding onto a band or cable that is attached to a beam at your side. Press the band or cable up overhead, maintaining a straight line from head to pelvis, and a rigid core to resist the band's lateral pull.
To Progress: Step further away from the point of attachment or use a stronger band in order to decrease the difficulty. You can also mess around with your stance to change the stability requirements.
To Regress: Step closer to the point of attachment or use a weaker band to make the exercise more manageable.

Exercise 4: Off-Set Deadlift

Key Points: This exercise is very hard and it's a ton of fun. If you really want to develop strength in resisting lateral flexion this exercise is a great choice. You're essentially performing a deadlift with weight on one side of the bar. Be sure to maintain a neutral spine, hinge at the hips, and use your posterior chain to lift the weight. Don't let the off-set load cause you to bend laterally.
To Progress: Add more weight or pull from a deficit!
To Regress: Elevate the bar slightly to decrease the range-of-motion, or spend more time developing lateral strength and stability using the exercises detailed above!

Throw a few of these exercises in your next program, focus on maintaining a steady progression, and soon you'll have abs like the gentlemen in the picture below!

Guest User 8/11/15 Guest User 8/11/15

Athlete Spotlight: Brian Eckert

Name: Brian Eckert
Age: 18
High School: James Madison High School
College: Radford
Sport/Position: Baseball/Left Handed Pitcher
Pitches: 88MPH Fastball, Slider, Curveball
Favorite Lift: Deadlift (you can see him pull an easy 350# right here)
Fun Fact: Brian is also an avid surfer.
Accomplishments:
- 23-1 Career record at Madison
- First Team All Conference
- First Team All Region
- First Team All State
- First Team All-Met

On paper, a job as a strength and conditioning coach seems like the perfect position. You're given the responsibility of wearing gym shorts all day and allowed to parade around a weight room working with highly driven athletes who want nothing more than to crush the day's lifts. However, this isn't always the case. Sometimes you're dealt kids who simply don't believe in strength training and the carryover it can have on performance, or just don't care. Fortunately for us, Brian Eckert is not one of them.

Brian has been training consistently with us for about 3 years now. This state champion pitcher is the type of kid who shows up at the gym with intensity ready to train and perfect the days lifts. He listens to every detail you present him with, and not passively either. He'll digest the information and come back at you with a question. It's these little things that make him as successful as he's been over his high school career. His high school team, James Madison, won the 6A Virginia State Title this past year and Brian was named First-Team All-Met by the Washington Post.

The awesome thing is, as serious as he comes across in training, Brian is pretty laid back when it really comes down to it. He's the type of kid you can carry on a conversation and joke around with during his training session, and then he'll flip that switch as soon as it's his turn to deadlift. He'll be pitching for Radford University as an incoming freshmen next year and the staff here at SAPT can't wait to watch him succeed on the mound. Good luck next year, Brian. We'll be cheering for you!

Guest User 8/6/15 Guest User 8/6/15

Create Your Own Workout - Part 4: Categorizing Movement

By now, the importance of viewing exercises in terms of movement patterns it should be drilled into your head. Isolation exercises certainly have their time and place, but we want to develop the strongest, most resilient body that we can. This demands that we use it as the sophisticated, interwoven organism that absorbs and generates force as a single unit.

Previously, we've introduced the basic human movement patterns that include: Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Carry, and Locomotion. Today I'll break them down even further, lay out the prime movers of each movement pattern, and help you categorize common exercises into their proper movement categories.

Basic Human Movements

Lower Body Movements:

Squat: Essentially every muscle in our lower extremities; Quadriceps, Hamstrings, Glutes, Calves, and Hip Flexors.
Hinge: Like the squat, hinge movements such as the deadlift utilize a large amount of lower body muscle mass, but place a major emphasis on the hamstrings, glutes, and spinal erectors.

Some people typically categorize squatting movements as "Lower Body Push" exercises, and hinge movements as "Lower Body Pull" movement, but for our purposes we use denote squat and hinge to emphasize the following:

During a hinge movement, like the deadlift, we want to predominantly see HIP FLEXION during the eccentric phase, making the movements primarily HIP EXTENSION exercises during the concentric contraction of the involved musculature.

Squatting movements normally involve a large amount of HIP AND KNEE FLEXION, resulting in more involvement of the knee extensors (read: quads) during the lifting phase.

Upper Body Movements:

For the upper body, we typically separate exercises into "Upper Body Push" and "Upper Body Pull" exercises, but we can divide them further as well. It's useful to note the vector in which you're pulling and pushing, for instance, is the exercise a vertical pull or a horizontal pull? This slight difference in direction will result in changes in muscle sequencing and the prime movers will vary.

Vertical Push: Anterior/Middle Deltoids, Triceps.
Horizontal Push: Pectoralis Major, Anterior Deltoids, Triceps.
Vertical Pull: Latissimus Dorsi, Biceps, Triceps-Long Head.
Horizontal Pull: Rhomboids, Latissimus Dorsi, Posterior Deltoids, Biceps.

Keep in mind I am strictly listing the muscles that play the largest part in each movement, the prime movers. Yes, the pecs (especially the clavicular fibers) play a synergistic role in an overhead press, but you'll be sorely disappointed if you decide to choose it for your main chest-builder. Horizontal pushes will give you the most bang for you buck if building a barrel chest is your goal.

You also need to be aware that the lower body lifts will cause muscular growth in your upper body because of the large amounts of tension being placed on the muscles. Your forearms and lats will absolutely grow as a result of gripping a heavy deadlift, and your shoulders will grow as a result of a heavy barbell loaded on your shoulders in a heavy front squat.

Locomotion and Carrying:

Locomotion and carrying movements are variable, and can be manipulated to emphasize different training adaptations. A Single-Arm Bottoms-Up Overhead KB Carry will be targeting shoulder stability to a much greater degree than a heavy Farmer's Carry, which will be placing the emphasis much more on hip stability and overall strength.

Final Thoughts and Example Exercises:

You can break most of the categories up in bilateral and unilateral variations, and we'll touch on the difference between the two later on in the series. They each provide unique training adaptations, therefore it's important to always decide on your training goal before choosing an exercise.

Below I'll leave you with a few example exercises of each movement pattern. These all serve as perfectly reasonable choices for your workout. Try them out before the next part in our series!

Squat: Goblet Squat, Back Squat, Front Squat, Zercher Squat, Split Squat, Pistol Squat.
Hinge: Deadlift, RDL, Glutebridge, Single-Leg RDL, Goodmorning.
Vertical Push: OH Press, Single-Arm Bottoms-Up OH Press, Z-Press, Handstand Pushups.
Horizontal Push: Bench Press, Floor Press, Pushups, Single-Arm Variations.
Vertical Pull: Chinups, Lat Pulldown, KB/DB Pullovers, TRX Ys.
Horizontal Pull: Row variations, Rear Delt Flys, TRX Ts, Face Pulls.
Locomotion: Leopard Crawls, Prowler Push, Bear Crawl, Bounding.
Carries: Farmer Carry, Goblet Carry, DA KB Racked Carry, Crossbody Carries.

Guest User 7/28/15 Guest User 7/28/15

Knowledge is Power: Beach Body Edition

The summer is my favorite season of the year, and no summer is complete without a trip to the beach. I'd like to think that I've spent the past few months getting "beach-body ready," but the past few days of coronas, boardwalk fries and chocolate chip pancakes has surely undone most of my hard work. With that being said, here are a few posts to help you expedite the process towards a beach body of your own.

12 Exercises to Make You Easier to Look At and Harder to KIll - Jarrett Brummett, SAPT

10 Tools For Getting Better at the Pullup - Melody Schoenfeld of FlawlessFitness.com

3 Reasons Why The Half-Kneeling Position Will Improve Your Training - Quinn Henoch, Darkside Strength

The Iron Grater - Jen SInkler, Author of

Guest User 7/23/15 Guest User 7/23/15

Create Your Own Workout - Part 3: To Isolate, or Not To Isolate?

We've touched on the importance of placing a major emphasis on compound movements rather than isolation exercises when writing your programs in Part 1 and Part 2. To start out today's post, let's review a couple of definitions:

Isolation Exercises: Movements that incorporate a single joint and target the musculature that performs the given joint action. These are generally lower skill movements such as bicep curls, lateral raises, and hamstring curls.
Compound Exercises: Movements that incorporate more than one joint. These movements are more complex and activate a wide variety of muscle groups such as squats, deadlifts, and KB swings.

We want to be as efficient as possible when designing our weight lifting routines. No one wants to spend more time than they need to in the gym, and choosing exercises that will give us the most bang-for-our-buck will help us reach our goals faster and more effectively.

Compound movements help us do just that. They target a large amount of muscle, inducing an anabolic training effect that is much more potent than that of localized strength work, while also mimicking movement patterns that every human being should perfect and strengthen. Taking this into account, exercises such as the squat, deadlift, pullup, and pushup should make up the majority of our strength work. We should never be programming isolation exercises as the "main lifts" of our program. This is how you spin your wheel and make little, if any, progress in the gym, just like the people in the video below:

Are isolation exercises worthless?

I don't think "worthless" is the correct term, but, in my opinion, isolation exercises are very, very, very optional. There are a few instance where they may be useful.

For bodybuilding purposes isolation exercises can be useful for bringing up lagging muscles. If you have poorly developed biceps, then throw in some bicep curls at the end of the workout. The extra work will be useful, but if you're not already performing rows and pullups, then you might as well go home and eat a cheeseburger. The compound movements absolutely must be in place before layering on isolation exercises.
To activate a muscle with poor tone or motor control. For a physical therapist or personal trainer who uses a protocol such as NKT, we often find muscles that exhibit poor function. For some reason or another, the wiring in your body is malfunctioning, preventing the nervous system from effectively communicating with your muscles. This is often the case for the gluteus medius, a muscle on the back and outside of your hip responsible for hip stability, abduction, and rotation. The reason behind this faulty wiring will need to be saved for another post, but a glute med activation drill in this scenario may serve you well
For ego purposes or simply for enjoyment. I'm not gonna lie, bicep curls are kinda fun. Plus, they give you a reason to wear tanks such as this one:

Guest User 7/16/15 Guest User 7/16/15

Bench Press Tips: No Spotter? No Excuse!

The Bench Press. The King the of Jungle when it comes to lifting weights, right? Well, in my humble opinion that title belongs to the squat, but there really is one question that rules them all when it comes to exercising your manliness... "How much do you bench, bro?"

The bench press really is a great lift, however, it's not for everyone. If you have a serious shoulder/elbow injury, if you're an overhead athlete, if you're incredibly kyphotic, it may be in your best interest to avoid the lift and the prioritize pulling movements for a while. But, if you can bench, bench away!

The bench press allows for heavy weights, progressive overload, and will gain you a ton of respect with the bros of the world if you can put up some serious numbers. It's a compound, multi-joint movement that will increase anabolic hormone release, improve bone density, put some hair on your chest, and strengthen, not only your muscles, but your ligaments and tendons too!

One of the excuses I typically hear for not bench pressing is "Well, I don't have a spotter." 1. You should never attempt a weight that you know you can't lift. It's dangerous, stupid, and will lead to no gainz. Remember, the weight room is for building strength, not testing it. 2. There's a very simple fix if you do find yourself in a hairy situation.

You don't want to end up looking like this....

Instead try this. It's a little tip I picked up from the man, the myth, the legend, Jonnie Candito.

See you next time!