What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I want to cover a very important topic.
The topic of strength.
You see, we did a recent video and had our guy Jesse here, and we talked about the gains
he’s been making recently.
First of all, Jesse thanks you for all the nice things that were said about him.
Then there were a couple of not nice things.
Like “Jesse still looks like a girl.”
I saw the comment.
JESSE: What the f**k, guys?!
JEFF: Honestly, when is the last time you saw a girl with a beard like that?
I mean, that’s confirmation alone that Jesse’s all man, making all man gains.
Honestly, we do have to talk about strength because there’s a lot to learn here, and
people wanted to know more about the point I made about that line.
That fine line between true strength and compensatory strength.
I think we need to go over that and break it all down because I think there are some
really good things you can learn from that.
So, let’s start this all out by first defining what strength is.
The classic definition of strength is ‘your ability to generate force against some sort
of external load, or resistance’.
That’s pretty much what it is.
The issue with that definition, and why I think we need to take it a step further is
that doesn’t necessarily rule out, or take out of the equation, this idea of compensatory
strength.
Meaning, what compensations are you making to produce that force?
Because you could be doing a lot of that.
As a matter of fact, as I argued in Jesse’s video, there is a lot of that happening.
Especially with Jesse.
Especially a lot of times with beginners who don’t take the time to build from the ground
up and are speeding toward higher, and higher new PRs every, single time they hit the gym.
They’re not taking the time to develop what they need to.
The idea as a trainer for athletes is, I have to be extremely concerned about differentiating
between true strength and compensatory strength.
I know that as an athlete goes onto the field of competition they’re going to become a
lot more spontaneous, in terms of the force that they generate.
They’re competing.
They’re not working in a controlled environment.
But we have to know that their true strength is maximized as much as possible because the
earlier they have to rely on compensations – compensatory strength – the degree to
which they have to compensate, and the frequency with which they have to compensate are all
major determinates in terms of how likely that person is to become injured.
If they have to do this more often, more frequently, or to a greater degree than their likelihood
of injuring themselves by making these compensations is higher.
We don’t want to see that.
We can’t afford to see that.
We need to make sure we’re seeing the true strength as maximized as possible and that
demands we become more alert to the small compensations.
What is the compensation here?
It’s not obvious stuff.
We’re not talking about swinging a barbell back on a curl like this or looking like an
angry cat when you’re deadlifting.
That’s just called piss-poor form.
We’re not talking about that.
When we talk about compensation, realizing – especially when it comes to athletes – that
athletes are masters of compensation.
They know how to make compensations without it even being noticeable to the person that’s
watching them or coaching them.
Unless you have a trained eye.
And certainly, sometimes they don’t even feel it themselves.
By nature, compensations are actually more effective – efficient.
The reason why you compensate is because you’re doing a more efficient movement pattern and
you’re making that lift become effective when it shouldn’t be because you don’t
have the strength in the first place to actually execute it.
We can’t let that go.
We can’t just say “Hey, train around it.
You’re going to get better at it.”
That’s not how it works.
Once your body becomes efficient in fighting this effective pattern, which is unwanted
and pathologic, then you have to figure out a way to intervene.
It’s like knowing the shortcut once you learn the short way home.
You’re never going to take the long way anymore unless you’re trying to go for a
scenic drive.
There’s no point.
We need to be able to intervene on that and decrease the reliability on their compensatory
strength by increasing that focus on developing that true strength.
What are some real examples then?
If we’re talking about a real example, I just had an athlete come in here, a high performing
athlete who was having some issue with hip pain on a deadlift.
To anyone that was watching – as a matter of fact, this person was actually recording
themselves doing the lift.
To anybody watching, there was nothing you could detect from their form.
Everything looked great.
The bar path was great.
The loading of the hips was great.
The positioning of the back throughout was great.
Everything was great.
But what I saw – again, I’ve been doing this a long time, guys.
I saw something very, very slight that I didn’t even have confirmation of until we broke out
force plates.
I thought I saw a little bit of tilting on the bar on the way up, indicating that there
might have been a little bit of a weight shift.
The weight shift could come from a lot of different things.
As it turns out, it could potentially come from a little bit of a hip impingement issue
on that side in trying to get off that hip a little bit as you get down, deeper into
the deadlift.
Now, we break out the force plates and what happens?
As they’re coming up they’re about 50/50 on the way down.
The minute they start to come out of the hole, out of the bottom of the deadlift and they
come up I see this shift to a 55/45.
Which is enormous.
That’s one that may not come back and bite him on that individual rep, but if you do
that day, after day, session after session, workout after workout; that’s going to become
a problem.
That’s not something that’s just going to disappear.
That’s going to be ingrained and strengths will be developed around that compensatory
strength.
We can’t allow that to happen.
Now, you apply that to a squat it gets even more problematic.
In the bottom of a squat you may not see it.
You may not.
But you could probably feel sometimes when someone makes a slight shift.
They’re down in the hole, they’re going to come out of it, and they make a slight
shift away.
Why do we do that?
It could be for a whole host of reasons.
It could be because of the actual anatomy of your hip and how it’s shaped.
That could be one thing, but you’re not changing that no matter what weight you’re
lifting.
It could be because you’re lacking dorsiflexion at the bottom of that lift, so you unload
it to not have to be as dorsiflexed on the bottom, on that ankle.
Again, that would probably show up if you were having – no matter what the load was
that you’re using.
But mobility issues do get worse as you increase that load.
It could be, again, this issue of this impingement.
As I go away from that side, usually the pelvis on that side will come forward, which creates
a relative external rotation in that hip, which is creating a little more room if you
have a hip impingement going on.
As the load becomes bigger I find I might be doing that more often, or maybe it’s
just a quad weakness and when I finally get to the bottom there, my right leg is not as
strong as my left leg, so I try to rely on the left leg a little more and I shift off
of it.
All of these things could be so minute that unless you have a trained eye watching them,
or unless you have experience doing this lift so many times you might not even feel it yourself.
But it doesn’t make it any less problematic.
If you keep adding weight to the bar every, single session after that you’re only making
that problem worse.
You need to intervene and get rid of that compensation.
Remember, not just blatant, ridiculous looking, bad form.
But this compensation often times hidden or subtle, if you want to continue to build true
strength without piling on more compensatory strength.
Another example I’ll give you, we actual went over in our meetings, and they actually
had a machine that was testing Nordic ham strength, your ham strength on a Nordic hamstring
raise.
Where you hook your legs underneath, almost like a glute-ham raise.
You lower your body down, and then pull yourself back up.
One of my colleagues that was there with me, the difference in strength between his two
hamstrings in initiating the pull to get your torso back up to vertical was ridiculous.
Off by about 40%.
Ask him if he felt the difference.
He didn’t feel any of it.
So, your body is hiding that discrepancy.
Allowing yourself to believe that you have equalized strength between both legs when
it was anything but what was occurring in this guy’s lower body.
It’s another argument for why, as athletes here, we often train you single legged.
We have to see if you can reveal those discrepancies in other ways.
But again, if you’re not necessarily having access to the force plates, having an awareness
with what’s going on with your body, don’t have someone measuring your strength on a
Nordic hamstring raise; what do you do?
Often times you just keep training and piling on weight, leading to more dysfunction, causing
more issues.
People would say “Jeff, as a physical therapist you’re too concerned about this.”
I have to be.
It’s my job.
But beyond that, I realize and understand the importance of this because I see the people
that come to me with the results of not addressing this difference.
It’s not just about strength.
You have to have your true strength and understand that the compensatory strength that will come
along with that has to be stopped as soon as possible.
Then build on that because this is certainly not an attack on heavy weights.
I believe in training with heavy weights and loading up, but only if you’ve developed
that base, built on a solid foundation, eliminating as many compensatory movements as possible.
Even those subtle ones.
Even if you need the help of someone to help you find them out so when you build on that
you’re building true strength.
The more true strength you have, and the greater you can raise that level there, the less likely
you’re going to have to rely on those other compensations.
Which is going to decrease your chance of injury.
It doesn’t just have to be an athlete.
It could be anyone in the gym that’s ever had issues.
Ask yourself when you’re making these compensations “Have you ever blown out your back doing
squats?
Do you have back problems, or back pain after doing squats?”
I can tell you this, if you’re unfortunate enough to the point where you’ve actually
had to go in and have it repaired it may not even be fixed.
A lot of times the nerve damage that’s left over from some of those injuries will stay
with you for the rest of your life.
Same thing with bad knees.
You do this for a long enough period of time, you wear down the cartilage, you develop osteoarthritis
in your knees; that ain’t going away.
It’s not changing.
So, it’s incredibly important to intervene now.
The reason we take a guy like Jesse – who is 24, by the way.
24 years old!
If we can intervene now and build a baseline, even if it takes a little longer than what
people might want to do or feel like they need to invest that time in the beginning.
They’d rather jump right into those heavy weights.
Look at how much time he’s got for the rest of his lifting life now to hopefully be building
true strength on a solid foundation.
Hopefully a long time, right?
This is not a short game, guys.
It’s never a sprint.
This is for the long term.
If you go back to what the approach was that we’re using with Jesse, you want to focus
on your bigger lifts.
Of course you do.
He always bench-presses, he rows, he squats, he deadlifts, he presses overhead.
But we’re trying to do it where we’re minimizing the obsession and urge to pile
weights on first until we realize that we’ve addressed all these things.
He came to me with lots of compensations, guys.
Again, maybe I’ve become a little overanalytical of them because this is what I’m trained
to do, but I don’t think that belies the fact that they still need to be addressed,
identified, and eliminated.
So that’s the big difference, guys, between what we talked about what true strength is.
What I want you guys to realize on this channel is, we want strength.
Strength is a prerequisite for anybody.
Not just athletes, but for anybody trying to function better.
There’s a big difference and we have to delineate between true strength and compensatory
strength, and we have to start becoming more aware of that.
And if we become more aware of that then we can do something about it.
Guys, in our ATHLEANX training programs I do that all the time.
Again, I can’t separate the physical therapist from the strength coach because it all matters.
It all comes together in the end.
We put that in all of our programs.
We put the science back in strength.
That’s what we do in all of our programs.
If you’re interested in training with them you can find them over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful, if it was a little bit of an eye
opener, leave your comments and thumbs up below.
Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you int
eh days and weeks ahead.
All right, guys.
See you soon.