Little Muscles, Big Jobs
One of the rugby players pulled me aside. ‘I’m worried about my ankle,’ he said. ‘We had our first day of practice yesterday, and I can already feel it. Do you know anything about ankle strengthening?’
‘I don’t,’ I confessed. I had provided programming and a bit of coaching for their summer strength training, and a group of us had just discussed the transition to conditioning and preparing for the season.
‘I’ll look it up and get back to you,’ I promised. On YouTube is a video in which a coach hops on one foot from side to side as well as up and down onto bumper plates lying flat. I had seen a training manual in which athletes hop on boards slanted to one side or another. The coach in the video mentioned this. ‘If you’re hopping from side to side, this accomplishes the same thing.’ He went on to explain that these plyometrics train your capacity to handle ground forces.
I sent the link, saying, ‘What I don’t know about ankle strengthening this guy does.’
Afterwards, I began to notice that a lot of kids already include plyometric drills in their training. The other day, at the outdoor gym, one young man was leaping up onto a platform with one leg, the other, and then both, and then similarly leaping down. He then went over to a basketball court and proceeded to skip and bound up and down its length - spending much of each trip three or four feet in the air.
An aside: If basketball star Michael Jordan was a ‘gifted’ athlete, then one of his gifts was a phenomenal level of plyometric reactivity, especially during an era when only the Russians knew how to train this.
Also, because I looked up that video, my big computer has convinced my little computer - my phone - that this is important, so now I’m getting all kinds of video suggestions for fine tuning body parts like knees, feet, and rotator cuffs. This stuff is in.
It’s a little disconcerting how well my electronics have sensed the moment. If not knees, feet, and rotator cuffs, then other body parts have come up. The major roles played by seemingly minor muscles have become a trend in my coaching and training.
Another student e-mailed me last weekend: ‘My lower back still hurts. Stretches aren’t working.’ It had been a week or 10 days.
‘OK,’ I wrote back. ‘I’m going to Home Depot.’
A second aside: this is one of the two leaders of the school weight lifting club. Upon listening to my introductory lecture, they elected to follow the plan I drew up. In five months, one increased his squat by 80 pounds, the other by 60.
At Home Depot I bought some lengths of 2x8 and 2x4 and a box of screws. In my driveway, I fashioned two flat platforms, really each just a pair of 2x8’s running in parallel, modeled after the one I’ve had in my home gym for years. One went to the outdoor gym, the other to our main indoor gym.
Because things can move a little slowly around here as lawyers ponder everything, I included the following explanation in an e-mail to the athletic department staff:
“It’s come to my attention that a certain number of athletes are suffering from the lower back strains that typically come with training, but they don’t know how to treat them. The reverse hyper platforms are valuable tools in a protocol that should have them back to strength in about a week’s time - which 99 times out of 100 is faster than simply allowing the injury to rest.
The rationale for the protocol is as follows:
1. When a small muscle in the lower back is pulled, not only will it hurt, the surrounding muscles will tighten up and similarly hurt to protect it.
2. This mechanism is counterproductive, particularly if the original pull is minor. These muscles will stay immobile and painful - accidentally - far longer than necessary.
3. The best way to heal the injured muscle and reintroduce motion to all its confederates is to put it - and them - through a full range of motion with very light resistance.
4. However, lower back muscles tend to be locked up at the very end of their ranges of motion. They’re there to hold position, namely the lumbar curve, so they don’t get much of a chance to perform their full function.
5. The reverse hypers allow an athlete to bend and then extend his lower trunk so that those muscles do work through their full ranges of motion. Neurologically the muscles are reminded that they must function; they are not allowed to lock up and refuse to behave. Circulation is also stimulated; the molecular damage of that injury is carried out, and new restorative groceries are brought in for healing.
In the event of a back pull, this is the protocol:
1. An athlete undergoing severe or sharp pain will have to take painkillers and wait at least 48 hours for the pain to ‘blur,’ which is to say lessen in severity and not seem like a knife driving through one particular point. **[I threw this in because I know how trainers and coaches can fall down dead over how crippling and dangerous back injuries are - in their minds {mainly when you don’t know how to treat them.} As I used that word ‘blur,’ you can see that this is clearly plagiarizing the many articles available on the Starr Protocol.]
2. When they’re ready to try the reverse hypers, they set a pair of squat rack spotter arms to slightly above waist level. The platform is made to span the spotter arms and not slide in any direction.
3. Grasping the forward edge and with their forearms on the platform, they will belly down onto the platform. Their legs, behind them, will extend to horizontal and swing down to beneath them - and past vertical. They can look down and see their toes ahead of them as their bodies bend.
This motion rounds the lower back and stretches tight, unhappy muscles quite effectively, as the legs swing forward. When the athlete lifts their legs to horizontal once more, the glute muscles and the hamstrings will take the primary load - leaving a small percentage of the weight for the back to lift.
4. NO WEIGHT is attached to the legs.
5. Typically, an athlete will knock through 4 or 5 sets of 10 or 15 reps. The relief can be so profound that they’ll want to do more. Really, healing can take as much as a week of hitting these daily, stimulating activation and circulation in the muscles.
Even uninjured athletes will like these. A football player with a ‘stiff back’ tried these when [Esau] and I were testing the platform, and he was impressed.
This is a very simple if unorthodox approach. Stretching a tight back would seem obvious, but this is the best possible leverage for doing so.
The reverse hyper platform was invented by powerlifter Louie Simmons.
[I also included a video link.]
Of course, light weights and high reps to heal muscle belly tears is an old trick in strength circles. You can Google 'The Starr Protocol,’ named for strongman and coach Bill Starr.
Once again, the Bat Signal shone into the night sky.
A third aside: the kids at this school tend to be so busy and their schedules so full that they lift when they can, which is various times on various days. That means that the club does not have designated training times where I can roam around and supervise. I’m meeting kids here and there, functioning like a consultant.
This body part is buried deep in the shoulder, in the seam between the pec muscle and deltoid. This latest kid wrote,’Since the week I hit 270 on bench I have started losing strength due to an extremely tight left shoulder with no mobility. Over the quick summer break before the Halifax trip I was able to get back up to 265, but after returning anything over 185 gives a debilitating pain . . . I am unsure what to do to loosen that up as I would like to keep progressing towards the goal of 3 plates. Do you have any suggestions for shoulder stretches/ exercises in that plane of motion?’
I answered, ‘I bet I know what this is, but in any case we’d have to follow a protocol, loosening up that pec muscle by way of massage with a softball or lacrosse ball, getting some stretches in with a band, and retraining your bench press set up by way of the floor press, to teach you how to set your shoulder blades - and shoulders - the right way.
You’re probably beating up some little muscles that are not meant to bridge the gap between chest and shoulder and carry a great deal of weight - SO you might have to bag the bench press for the immediate future. Inclines wouldn’t hurt, but dips do, right?
You’ll bench, but by way of floor presses, to retrain your brain and give those little dudes in your shoulder a chance to heal.’
My coaching is taking on a new and nearly infinite dimension, wisdom gained from the moronic things I’ve done to myself, a far greater category than all my magnificent exploits.
The cure for a shoulder in flames is in the floor press, which teaches an athlete to set his shoulders properly. A coach can say what’s supposed to happen: ‘Put your shoulder blades in your back pockets,’ and athletes will get down on the bench and do it - some better than others, but everybody loses the position pretty quickly.
The floor press allows an athlete to lower the bar (in a bench pressing motion) to where the backs of their arms rest on the ground. From there, and on each rep, he or she can hoist their torso up in the air in order to squeeze their shoulder blades together and down to where they belong. In this position, the lifter’s chest is held high, the arm bones are buried deep in the sockets of the shoulders where they belong, and the pec muscles are stretched backwards to full length, primed to contribute as powerfully as possible. Furthermore, those smaller muscles between the chest and shoulder that had been handling a load not intended for them are now tucked safely away.
A month or more of floor presses will train an athlete to set their chest correctly in the regular bench press.
Near my house is the campus obstacle course, which is a pretty dicy challenge with a particularly cruel final event. It’s a rope climb - but with a very thick rope, probably four inches in diameter, like a fat, full firehose and not the typical two-inch rope in your high school gym, or which would be like the end of an Olympic bar. Climbers already exhausted from the entire course cannot muscle themselves up to the crossbar. Typical grip strength cannot manage a rope that thick, so they must wrap it in their legs and feet and inchworm upwards with their entire bodies, which is brutal as a final test.
We had a guest over the other day whose kids wanted to try the course. As I stood by the ropes as fresh as a daisy, I wondered if my grip could manage the thick rope for a quick legless climb - which I could do on a two-inch line any day of the week. It could not.
I’ve had two opportunities to sail along the East Coast on a tall ship. The first trip was on the smaller of the two ships, with a smaller crew who had to work very hard. Everyone’s forearms were noticeably developed. After only a few days aboard, heaving on manila lines of all sizes, I could see a difference in mine.
This is all to say that the Popeye Effect - the giant sailor’s forearms lampooned in the old cartoon - is a 100 percent valid scientific proposition. It’s an adaptation I have to regain so that if any more visitors pop in I can make a suitably quick legless dash up these four-inch ropes. This means a stop by the O-course for a few climbs at the end of my upper body days - and I’ll eats me spinach.
If I’ve broken down the major lifts into their component movements, then this is the next level of specificity. We can’t take the little muscles for granted.
