Monday Motivation: Secrets to success Pt. 1

Pretty powerful message.

Weekend Plans

Hope everyone has a great weekend.  I will be heading down to Indianapolis for the Performance Enhancement Seminar.  I will give a full report on all the presenters and hopefully the interesting nuggets of information I can gleam from each presenter.  Should be good, Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, Even Osar and a few others.

Quadratus Lumborum training with Unilateral Work

Stuart McGill is doing some amazing research out in Canada about the mechanics of the low back, low back pain, improving low back function and back performance.  His latest study is pretty cool looking at the strongest guys on the planet.  Professional strongmen.  He was looking at analysing the strong man yoke carry.  He also test the hip abductor strength on each athlete.  What he found was that none of the athletes hips were strong enough in theory to stabilize the pelvis and move the leg under the loads they were lifting in competition.  So where was the strength and stability coming from?

McGill tested more and came out that the quadratus lumborum was indeed helping and bridging the gap in the performance.  The QL was indeed a big performance muscle.

To train the QL you have to be doing some unilateral carry type work.  Single arm farmers walk, single arm waiters walk, suitcase deadlifts ect.  If you're not doing any single arm weighted work, add it in and watch performance and in theory back pain improve.

Here is the exact article.  Stuart McGill Article.

Patient Education in Grand Rapids

In my office I have one piece of patient education on display.  That doesn't mean I think patient education isn't important, but I wanted one message to come across.  As you can see, there is an optimal line and a pain line.  The blocks make up many different things that are causing dysfunction in the body.  You can see getting rid of one block will put you below the pain line.  But you're nowhere near optimal.  How many times have I heard, well I don't need to do that, I do my stretches in the morning and gets rid of my pain, ever since I've done yoga my pain is gone, when I added this supplement, I'm good.

Or the pain goes away, but a week or a month later it comes back.  Here is viable and reliable information.  When load, which is any external force, exceeds capacity (every structure in your body has some limit) you start to get decreased performance and pain.

Do you want to just get out of pain, or do you want to reach optimal health and performance.  Remove each block of dysfunction.  Don't stop at the pain is gone, keep getting rid of dysfunction.

Monday Motivation: More 3rd World Weight Rooms

A good friend of mine takes student Athletic Trainers to the Dominican Republic twice each year. They provide care that the locals would otherwise never ever get a chance of receiving. It also give the students some hands on experience. This past trip, he sent me back some photos of a make shift weight room they found. It reiterates, never let your lack of equipment become an excuse for not working out.

Rowing Combo

Here is a back finisher that I like. Inverted rows and then immediately followed by higher reps with a jump stretch band.

Random Rants and Thoughts from a Grand Rapids Chiropractor

Here are just a few ideas floating around from some patient experiences I've had in the last few months of treatment.

1. Occipital/axis bones being locked in cervical extension causes more then just neck pain. The suboccipital muscles and this upper cervical joint have a lot to do with overall joint health down the line, even the pelvis. I have more understanding and respect for pure upper cervical chiropractors then in the past.

2. Work capacity for training is underdeveloped. The ability to put in work without performance decreasing is paramount. When your work capacity is high. I think your able to do what I consider some of the future of training. Heavy circuits. Not just going from bodyweight or low load stations, but heavy deadlifts, heavy military presses, strength moves essentially, all the while keeping the rest nil and your heart rate skyrocketing.

3. Adductor magnus continues to give me improved hip function after releasing these muscles.

4. A great pairing in training for the upper body is an unstable exercise and then a power exercise. Example TRX or blast strap push up into a Dumbell Press or Floor Press. I haven't found this to correlate for the lower body.

5. From a personal endo crash on my mountain bike, tricep endurance is critical is you wish to keep from making stupid mistakes and potentially having a crash.

6. I've had three cases where a lot of soft tissue work on the quadricep has eliminated chronic back pain. All male and all super active.

7. No amount of exercise/stretching can balance the position of the aerobars on your neck and upper back for people training for an IronMan. They need manual therapy, upper cervical adjustments and soft tissue work. 4-7 hours on a bike every few days with that head out, eyes up position cannot be balanced out.

Monday Motivation

If you've never seen the movie Pumping Iron, it's worth you're time. Looking back on it, the same drive that made them champion bodybuilders has now made them very, very successful people.

Posterior Chain Pushing Power in Grand Rapids

I like exercises that work a lot of muscles, the more that gets worked, the shorter the workouts. This is a combo of two exercises that I like, the swiss ball leg curl and floor press. The combination of them both adds a new core element as well. Try it out.

Funny (Sad) post about Vitamin Water

A good friend of mine posted this on his facebook page. It's an article in the Huffington Post about Coca-Cola's Vitamin Water. It just makes good reading in terms of the hilarity of the situation and what I can imagine "lawyer speak" happening all the time. It's short, but will make you say "Really?". Here is the LINK.

Ultimate Metabolic Conditioner in Grand Rapids

I've taken two of the toughest things we like to do at Train Out Pain Chiropractic for metabolic conditioning and combined them. The result was awesome. Firehose conditioning then 1/2 way up the stairs. The rest interval was the walk down. Repeat for 5-8x depending on how your feeling. This was the last set of 6. It took about 8 or 9 minutes, but you could feel your metabolism on fire for hours after.

Monday Motivation: Soldiers Serving

This past February I was lucky enough to get to go the Vancouver Olympics.  We had 3 men's teams competing there.

It was needless to say an amazing experience.  One of the great things was getting able to work with awesome, amazing people.  One such person was John Napier.  He was featured in Parade Magazine.  He was the youngest bobsled pilot on tour.  He is in a program called World Class Athletes Program.  He is a soldier in the US Army.

After the Olympics John decided he wanted to serve a more active roll, so he volunteered to go to Afghanistan.

He could have easily just have stayed home and done the glorified recruitment tours talking about his Olympic experience.  John went the other way.  He is serving in Afghanistan as you read this.  People like this are amazing in my book.

Here are a few pics of their, "weight room."  Don't ever complain about your gyms lack of equipment.  Don't ever complain your gym is to hot or to cold.  Actually, next time you have something to complain about, don't.

Cervical Flexor Strengthening.m4v

This is a great exercise to strengthen the deep cervical neck flexors. These muscles are very important in stabilizing the cervical spine. Often with whiplash accidents they are damaged. Forward head posture has a tendency to inhibit these muscles and increasing shear loads on the cervical spine.

As you let your head dangle, create a double chin. Hold the double chin and lift your head up about 2-4 inches. Make sure you hold the double chin. You should feel it on the front of your neck. If you feel it on the back, you lost the double chin and have shifted the workload to the cervical extensors. You don't want that. Try incorporating 3x15 reps each day.

Bent Over Row: Good or Bad? Thoughts from Grand Rapids

There is an old saying, "There are no bad exercises, just bad form."  I believe this is true statement to an extent.  But, I like to ask the question, is there a better exercise in terms of cost/benefit to the individual performing the exercise.  One exercise I don't really ever prescribe in training programs is the Bent Over Row.

To many people I see doing the Bent Over Row use way to much weight in terms of holding a safe lower back arch.  They end up doing a somewhat body lean to get the weight to move and end up thrusting there chest at the weight as well.  At best your low back has to maintain an isometric arch, what you don't see is the psoas muscle (hip flexor) in a constant shortened but contracted position.  Add in bad technique, and you're looking at some back pain/dysfunction in the future.  Remember, it's not one incident that damages your bodies structures usually, it's repeated loads, over and over, until they give out.  So that's why picking better exercises is so important.  

Chest supported rows would be a solid alternative.  Heavy single arm dumbell rows (Krok rows) would be my go to exercise to replace the Bent Over Row.

Monday Motivation

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

by Nietze.

 Think about that when you're training or doing anything important.  Basically, even Nietze understood the power of a clearly defined goal.  If you don't lose track of the goal, the WHY, you won't get off track, no matter what, no matter the HOW.