Leak Finder
What an incredibly healthy post that last one of mine was. It really felt good to get all that out in the open actually-kind of like a deep breath out ’ahhhh, I’m shallow.’ And it was ok. Felt nice, like it’s ok to be me and to be how I am even if it’s unlikely that I’m going to be happy being that way forever. Right now, it’s ok and I’m cool with it.
In other news, Damn there are a lot of leaks in training today. I’ve said this in past blogs but I want to see if I can say it more eleoquently now: Training in theory in generally well understood; training in practice, specifically for already well trained individuals, is so full of holes it doesn’t hold water any better than a goddamn sieve. The understanding is up to date but the application is still based on exercises that were made when the understanding was much less advanced than it is now. Worse is the fact that for the general public the old exercises and their application hold up just fine. They’ve been tempered by the new better understanding enough that their are a good deal of results backing therapist’s attempts to improve their clients’ well being-making people think that they have hit the nail on the head.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and it becomes painfully apparent in the well trained individual such as myself and many of the people reading this. It does so via the length tension relationship or the balance between the muscle groups. A non-trained individual gets great results because he/she is almost always doing an exercise that puts him/her in postive balance again. On the other hand, a well trained individual might be training the right muscle group but they are doing an exercise that doesn’t have the ability to deliver them the result they need-specifically because it was created by feel and not by thought. Rotator cuff exercises are a great example, they often start in the completely wrong place to help anyone dramatically with major impingement issues from heavy pressing movements-big surprise there, there are 10 million huge powerlifters and bodybuilders out there not getting anything out of their countless external rotations, shoulder adducting movements, and retractions.
Again, the problem is usually not that the trainer or the therapist doesn’t know what needs to be worked on, the problem is that the trainer or therpist knows exactly what needs to be worked on and then chooses and exercise from the old catalogue of exercises that are already out there. This is also why it often yields better results for a therapist to treat someone with an unusual injury-because they have to make up an exercise and in doing so they apply their good understanding to their creation; whereas they usually apply their good understanding to their diagnosis and their laziness when choosing an exercise.
Another issue I can’t seem to get away from is this one of ‘changing it up.’ Seems like it could be bunk. If you have specific attachment sites, then you have specific functions as well within the confines of specific ranges of motion. There don’t seem to be 20 different exercises for each muscle group like most bodybuilders and 15-25 yr old guys would have you believe. There seem to be anwhere from 1-4, with four being on the real high end-muscles with unusually high number of different functions. There might be a million different ways to load the movement and a million different apparati to do the movement with, but the movement should still be within the range of motion that is most applicable to it’s attachment sites-whereas most different exercises for the same muscle group definitely are not-what they are, are different exercises for different degrees of the same muscle group.
I’ll give you an example: An incline curl and a barbell curl. The long head of the bicep attaches at the supraglenoid tubercle=up in your shoulder. If you do a bicep curl on an incline bench and let your arm hang all the way back, you do the movement from the fully stetched position. If you do a barbell curl, you can go all the way down until your arms are hyperextended if you want and the long head of the bicep still won’t be in it’s fully stretched position, which, in my mind, makes this an inferior movement. Not only do you not get the development from going through a full range of motion, but you heavily load a movement that is destroying the length tension relationship between your bicep, forearm, and delt(along with the rest of the body to a lesser extent)-so you get a worse length tension relationship, faster! Now all the hard core guys are whining that you can use much more weight and build more size with the BB curl, but to that I say grow some balls and get strong in the incline curl, or the drag curl, or any number of different ways you can do it.
In other news, I went to the physical therapist the other day and she kicked me back a few notches, which I desperately needed. I went in kind of cocky about having found a lot of leaks and although I had, she found a lot more in my(surprise surprise) application. It was good for me because it was embarassing and it gave me a couple more things to think about upon leaving.
