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.