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| Pop quiz, hotshot. You need to add some plates to the bar and pack some meat on your bones. You've got precious few weeks to accomplish both, but only have four days per week to train. What do you do? What do you do?
I've asked this question to myself countless times and only recently have I come up with what I believe is the most effective method. Forget total-body training. Forget upper and lower splits. The trick is to, well...I'll get to that in a minute.
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| We see everything at Cressey Performance. While just about 70% of our clients are baseball players, we also have everything from Olympic bobsledders and boxers, to pro hockey players and triathletes, to 69-year-old men who bang out pull-ups like nobody's business.
Obviously, certain athletic populations have specific weaknesses that need to be addressed. Soccer and hockey players and powerlifters tend to have poor hip internal rotation. Basketball players don't have enough ankle mobility. Baseball pitchers need to pay more attention to scapular stability, posterior rotator cuff strength, and glenohumeral (shoulder) internal rotation range of motion.
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| Stretches to maintain length of both the pectoralis major and pectoralis minor are really important — especially in the weight-training population, where Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are declared national bench press holidays in all 52 weeks of the year. Simply put, everyone presses too much and pulls too little.
However, what few people (including Mike and I, circa 2004) realize is that in the process of stretching out the pecs (particularly pectoralis major) in this fashion, you run the risk of irritating the anterior shoulder capsule, particularly if the shoulder blades aren't stabilized. As the picture below shows, the attachment point of the pectoralis major is further down the humerus.
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| Featured below are my top five prehab week deloading strategies. For most of you, this will be week 4 of every four-week cycle. You don't have to adhere to this strategy year-round, but rather once every two to three deloads you take.
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| Ask any successful lifter what works best, and he’s likely going to tell you that anything will work, but not forever. With that in mind, it’s imperative for all lifters to have an extensive toolbox from which to draw when it comes to building size and strength.
Everyone knows about free weights. Bodyweight-only training has been around for centuries. We’ve got Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley trying to sell Total Gyms, and Tony Little screaming in our ears about his damn Gazelle. However, not many people are preaching the virtues of training with resistance bands – most likely because people aren’t aware of how versatile a set of implements they are.
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| The Smith machine is the equipment parallel to High Intensity Training. On one hand, it's been called more dirty names than Madonna on a trip to the Vatican. On the other hand, there are those who vehemently adhere to it in spite of the fact that it's an inferior way to train.
I'm about as anti-machine a guy as you'll ever meet, but I'm also open-minded enough to realize that as is the case with most things in life, the answer rests somewhere in the middle.
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| In Part I, our first five adages focused predominantly on the lower body. Now, in Part 2, we’ll look closely at some commonly maligned upper body exercises.
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| We live in a society that doesn't want gray areas. People want right or wrong, up or down, and left or right. This mindset carries over to the gym, too; lifters want to be able to say that Exercise A is evil, and Exercise B is safe.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple, so with that in mind, I'm devoting this article to killing off some myths, establishing some more well-defined gray areas, and making recommendations on who can do what.
I'm going to come right out and say it: in the absence of musculoskeletal pathology, no movement is fundamentally bad. Sure, there are exercises like kickbacks and leg extensions that don't give you as much bang for your buck as their multi-joint counterparts (e.g. dips and squats), but that's not to say that these pansy exercises are "bad" for you. Likewise, it's rare that I write any sort of machine lift into my programming, but there are rehabilitation patients that benefit greatly from certain machine training.
In my opinion, there are only five scenarios in which exercise is ever truly bad for you from a health standpoint:
1. When that exercise is performed in excessive volume.
2. When that exercise is performed with poor technique.
3. When that exercise is performed in a manner that puts it out of balance with the rest of the programming that is in place.
4. When that exercise irritates an existing injury or condition.
5. When that exercise is performed with excessive loading (relative to the lifter's capabilities).
Now, it's not feasible for me to outline every specific instance where every exercise is safe or unsafe, but I can address some common adages we frequently hear in our gyms.
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| Hi. My name is Eric and I have a problem. I never expected it and I didn't plan for it. It just happened. And now, I'll never be the same. Hardly a minute passes when I don't think about it, salivate, and get the shivers. My own grandmother cringes in fright when she even hears about "it."
Yes, folks, I'm a deadlift-aholic. I don't just want to pull; I want to pull every minute of every day for the rest of my life. I dream about grinding out heavy pulls where the bar seemingly bends in half, and I jump at the opportunity to do speed pulls so quickly that I nearly castrate myself with the bar. This passion has led me to a ranking in the Powerlifting USA Top 100 for my weight class, and the brink of a 1RM of 3.5 times my body weight.
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| It's been a while since Part IV so those of you following this program are probably chomping at the bit for the conclusion. Chomp no more, because this is it!
The program contained in this article is designed to reintroduce more of the traditional exercises that you've grown to love while still maintaining the emphasis on postural corrections through appropriate prioritization and volume manipulation. Essentially, it's one step closer to the balanced training programs you should seek to create. Remember, we shifted the balance in the opposite direction to start to take care of the problems created by lack of balance in previous programs.
This program will last three weeks (and is meant to follow the first program outlined in part IV), after which you'll want to have a back-off week consisting of markedly lower volume. Oh, and even if you're not following the entire "Neanderthal No More" program, you'll still learn some new exercises you've probably tried before.
Here are the goods:
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LEARN
HOW TO
DEADLIFT
- Avoid the most common deadlifting mistakes
- 9 - minute instructional video
- 3 part follow up series
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