Q: Is there any reason why there is such a big incidence of pec tears during benching in comparison to shoulder/triceps/lat tears, especially if powerlifting style is supposed to de-emphasize the use of the pecs?
A: Research at Indiana University found that cross-sectional area of the subscapularis is the best predictor of powerlifting performance, believe it or not.
If you're getting that much hypertrophy of the subscapularis, it's doing a lot of work - and for a small muscle. Ask any manual therapist, and they'll tell you that subscapularis is always balled up - and frequently shuts down due to repetitive microtrauma.
Shut subscapularis down, and pec major will work overtime as an internal rotator of the humerus. Reference Shirley Sahrmann's work; if you see an strained/tight muscle, look for an underactive synergist.
You'll also get a humeral anterior glide, and additional tightness/restrictions on infraspinatus/teres minor.
So, the name of the game is to activate subscapularis with exercises like those in Inside-Out, and also improve the length and tissue quality of your external rotators.
Eric Cressey
Q: I really enjoyed your “What I Learned in 2007” article, especially where you touched on keeping a clean diet in spite of all your travels. Do you have any more tips?
A: I do, but rather than reinvent the wheel, I might as well refer you to a great article by Dr. John M. Berardi, CSCS, creator of the Precision Nutrition system. This is reprinted with his permission:
Eating on the Road: Nutritional Travel Strategies
More and more the biggest challenge my clients face is sticking to their nutritional plan while on the road. Therefore in this article, I’ve compiled a list of my top 10 favorite strategies for maintaining your nutritional discipline when traveling.
Strategy #1 — Location, Location, Location
If you’re planning to take to the road for sport or for business, your first item of business is this—ensure that everything you need is in close proximity to where you’ll be working or playing. Location is key.
So let’s say you’re going to a week long conference at the Indiana Convention Centre and RCA Dome. Well first, get on the internet and find all the hotels nearest the Convention Centre. Next, give these hotels a call to find out where the nearest grocery stores, restaurants and gyms are located. Pick the hotel with the best combination of nearby resources. This way, even if you don’t get a rental car, you can easily walk or cab to your fitness and nutritional havens.
Skip this strategy and you’re giving yourself big excuses to skip workouts, miss meals, and make poor food selections while on the road.
Strategy #2 — The Penthouse Suite?
While you don’t necessarily have to stay at a 5 star hotel or choose the penthouse suite, one great strategy for you road warriors is to choose a hotel chain that offers rooms/suites with kitchens or kitchenettes. If you know a nice kitchen set-up is waiting for you, you won’t have much difficulty sticking to your meal plan.
Just have your cabbie drop you at the grocery store on your way from the airport. Once you get to your hotel room you can rest assured that you’ll be able to eat as well as when you’re at home.
If you’re looking for a good hotel chain, Marriott Residence Inns are a nice
choice. You can find other hotels that meet your needs as well. I recommend Marriott because my clients have always had great experiences with them.
Now, if you absolutely can’t find or afford a hotel that has a kitchen or kitchenette, make sure that your hotel room has, at the very least, a refrigerator (most do). As long as you’ve got a refrigerator, you can stock your hotel room with good snacks. My athletes and I pick up fresh fruits and vegetables, bottled water, cottage cheese, plain yogurt, regular cheese, natural peanut butter, whole grain breads and mixed nuts on our way into town and snack on these during our weeks on the road.
Strategy #3 — Can You Ship Egg Whites Next Day?
Here’s a great strategy I picked up former client and current good friend, Austin. This guy is a bona fide road warrior himself and has a ton of great strategies for eating on the road. Instead of going shopping when he gets to town, Austin actually ships his food and supplements via UPS or Fed Ex.
He gets a medium sized cold shipping box, loads it up with ice, protein powders, fruits and veggies, mixed nuts, legumes, meat, eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt, cooking pans, utensils, shaker bottles and non-stick cooking spray and ships it to his hotel before leaving home.
By doing this, Austin doesn’t need to worry about where grocery stores and restaurants are located. As soon as he arrives in town, he’s good to go—nutritionally, at least. All he needs to find is a gym and he’s set. Again, although the shipping option may seem a bit pricey, you’ll end up saving money on restaurants and the price may work out in the end.
Strategy #4 — The Big Cooler
Here’s another strategy I picked up from my buddy Austin that helps ya’ transport both luggage and groceries simultaneously for shorter trips that might last only a day or two.
Pick up a big cooler with an extendible handle and wheels (much like the wheeled luggage so popular nowadays), put a little partition down the middle, and you’ve got a ready made combined cooler/suitcase that can act as a carry-on. Put your cottage cheese on one side and your drawers on the other!
Strategy #5 — What’s On The Menu?
If you decide to have others prepare your meals for you when on the road, make sure you use Strategy #1 above to find out where the restaurants nearest your hotel are located. Next, visit them on the web for downloadable menus. If they don’t have downloadable menus, call them and ask them to send a menu over to your hotel for when you arrive.
By having the restaurant menus, you’ll know exactly what types of food you can have access to at all times. Also, when dining with a group, you’ll be able to suggest places that conform to your nutritional requirements.
Strategy #6 — You Don’t Have To Order From The Menu
Here’s a hot tip that most people fail to realize. Most restaurants can easily provide a meal custom to your specifications even if it’s not on the menu. So don’t become a slave to the menu offerings. Ordering a specific number from the menu is almost always a recipe for disaster unless the menu is designed for "healthy eating" or whatever the restaurant is calling it. Most normal dishes have too much fat and too many processed carbohydrates for most body-conscious individuals.
Instead of ordering an item directly from the menu, either ask for an item that you like prepared without the sauces or high carbohydrate portions or simply ask for a portion of protein and a few servings of vegetables and fruit on the side. Remember, you’re paying top dollar for your meal and you’re about to tip your waitress. So don’t feel bad asking them to meet your needs, uh, nutritionally, that is.
Strategy #7 —Protein and Energy Supplements
Using some combination of the strategies above, you should be able to ensure that good meal options are always around the corner. But sometimes when you’re on the road it’s impossible to slip back to your room or to get to a restaurant.
For times like this, you’ll need to consider a few supplement options.
Typically, when at home I only use 1-2 scoops of protein powder per day, but when on the road, I may use up to 6 scoops if necessary. Protein choices are both hard to come by and more expensive than other options. So increasing your dietary energy with protein powders is a good fall-back option.
Strategy #8 — Powdered Veggies
Normally, at home, I get about 10 servings of fruits and veggies per day. But when I’m on the road that amount is usually reduced to somewhere around 2-4 servings unless I’m very conscious of my intake. A great way to make up for this reduction in my micronutrient intake is to use a powdered vegetable supplement such as Greens+.
If I’m on the road, these products help make up for the deficit I may be experiencing. An added bonus is that I seem to better digest my protein supplements when adding some powdered veggies to my protein shakes.
Strategy #9 — Homemade Bars
If you’re not into drinking numerous protein shakes per day, another great option is to bring some homemade snacks with you. In fact, homemade protein/energy bars are a fantastic alternative to the mostly crappy, store bought, sugar laden, artificial ingredient containin’, protein bars.
Strategy #10 — Sleep Pills
Jet lag, time zone changes, unfamiliar sleeping environments, poor nutrition, altered exercise habits, and the stress associated with big business meetings or competitions can all really impair your ability to get adequate rest when on the road.
Following the previous nine steps will help you take care of your nutritional intake. Making sure not to skip workouts will also help. So will the addition of a ZMA supplement. While research hasn’t provided direct evidence to support a relationship between zinc and/or magnesium status and sleep quality, most ZMA users find dramatically improved sleep quality when taking this supplement. Three capsules before bed should do the trick.
If you’re going to be successful in maintaining a good nutritional plan, no matter what the circumstances, you’re going to have to plan for the unplanned and display adaptability to all circumstances. The guidelines included in this article should help get you thinking about how to become a successful road warrior.
For more great training and nutrition wisdom, check out our complete system, Precision Nutrition. Containing system manuals, gourmet cookbook, digital audio/video library, online membership, and more, Precision Nutrition will teach you everything you need to know to get the body you want -- guaranteed. And what's more, your online access allows you to talk exercise and nutrition 24/7 with thousands of fellow members and the Precision Nutrition coaches.
I’m of the belief that all stress on our systems is shared by the active restraints and passive restraints. Active restraints include muscles and tendons – the dynamic models of our bodies.
Passive restraints include labrums, menisci, ligaments, and bone; some of them can get a bit stronger (particularly bone), but on the whole, they aren’t as dynamic as muscles and tendons.
Now, if the stress is shared between active and passive restraints, wouldn’t it make sense that strong active restraints with good tissue quality and length would protect ligaments, menisci, and labrums (and do so through a full ROM)?
The conventional medical model – whether it’s because of watered-down physical therapy due to stingy insurance companies or just a desire to do more surgeries – fixes the passive restraints first. In some cases, this is good. For instance, if you have an acromioclavicular joint separation with serious ligament laxity, you’ll likely need surgery to tighten those ligaments up, as the AC joint is an articulation without much help from active restraints.
In other cases, it does a disservice to the dynamic ability of the body to protect itself with adaptation. Consider the lateral release surgery at the knee, where surgeons cut the lateral retinaculum on the outside of the knee, allowing the patella to track more medially. I’ve seen a lot of people avoid the surgeries (and, in turn, the numerous possible complications) with even just 2-3 weeks of very good physical therapy focusing on the active restraints. I’m not saying all these surgeries are contraindicated – just that we need to exhaust other options first.
So, the next time you’ve got an ache or pain, consider whether it’s an active or passive restraint giving you problems – and if it’s the latter, work backward to find out which active restraint you need to bring up to par.
One of the biggest perks of being in this business is that I get a lot of free stuff sent to me. I’m not going to lie: a lot of it is absolute garbage that is so bad that I can’t read or view the whole thing. I look at some fitness gimmicks and can’t help but think “why?” I’ve actually got an entire section on my bookshelf of stuff I’ve received that’s just flat-out bad.
Why do I even mention this to you? Well, for one, so that you’ll know that if something gets a thumbs-up in my newsletter or blog, it’s legit. Second, and more importantly, I’ve grown to see patterns – and one such pattern is that everything that John Berardi has sent me is pretty much gold. The newly introduced Gourmet Nutrition Cookbook 2.0 is no exception.
I was impressed not only with the presentation of the book (well organized and easy to read), but obviously the content itself. There is an excellent and diverse selection of recipes, and they’ve been met with open arms and salivating mouths from our athletes.
One of my pitchers was in the office when it arrived, and I he asked if he could see it. That night, he made some of the bars and said that they came out great. Young athletes are a great measure of how good a nutrition product is; they’re impressionable, yet very stubborn. If something isn’t good, they’ll call BS or just ignore it altogether. Only two nutrition products have gotten my guys going; this one and the nutrition component of Jason Ferruggia’s Muscle Gaining Secrets.
In Newsletter 95, I wrote about how pathologies often don’t become symptomatic until inefficiencies get to be too bad. Here is a perfect example of a guy who has basically learned how to work around a pathology to remain competitive at a high level.
New Twist Keeps Dickey’s Career Afloat
You can bet that he’s got a lot of efficiency working in his favor.
Thanks, Paul Vajdic, for passing this along!
Click the link below to view an hour-long interview I did on the Audrey Hall Show alongside Rich Gedman (former Red Sox catcher and current manager of the Worcester Tornadoes) and Bunky Smith (head coach of Framingham's American Legion Team) on the topic of youth baseball training.
Q: Just got The Art of the Deload. The overtraining study you quoted was fairly jaw dropping (for me). I always thought intensity overtraining was worse than volume, but it appears to be the opposite. Given that study, it would appear to me that the best way to induce hypertrophy (via rep work) would do a 1 set to within 1 rep of failure, then do rest pauses or drops, but not to total failure. Thus, you have minimum nervous system fatigue and little potentially anabolic hormone level lowering volume fatigue. Do you agree?
A: I wouldn't say that one is necessarily worse than the other - just that intensity-related overtraining is tougher to detect. Basically, a performance drop-off is all that you'll see (nothing endocrine, and no muscle damage markers).
I think the secret is fluctuation of training stress. It's always about finding a balance between stressors and tolerance to stress. Supplements can help, sleep can help, minimizing stress can help - and the same goes for a host of other factors. The right answer is constantly fluctuating based on what's going on in the world outside the gym. What you outlined might work one week, be too little another week, and too much in a third week. The secret is to listen to your body and eventually learn to be one step ahead of it.
Eric Cressey
Download My New Special Report: The Art of the Deload
Q: If you were to introduce someone to resistance training for the first time, and were interested in teaching them to bench press properly with the elbows tucked, which bench grip would you have them use? In other words, everything else equal, what are your basic guidelines for optimum bench biomechanics?
A: This is one area in which true specificity might take a bit of a backseat in the short-term.
If we’re dealing with a true beginner, I’m going to start with dumbbell pressing and push-ups (which, incidentally, everyone thinks they can do perfectly – yet 95% of the lay population completely butchers).
With a push-up, we can build some solid lumbar spine and scapular stability while optimizing the angle of the upper arm to the torso (about 45 degrees). If it’s too hard from the floor, we just elevate them a bit by doing the push-ups off the safety pins in a power rack.
I'd also teach them a neutral grip dumbbell bench press first. My experience has been that people who are trying to learn the elbows-tucked style of benching do best with a lot of neutral grip pressing as their assistance work.
As a next step, at Cressey Performance, we’ll throw in a multi-purpose bar, which allows people to bench with a neutral grip. You won’t see them very often in gyms, but they’re absolutely awesome.
There is more instability, so it teaches the lifter to grip the bar like crazy and optimize scapular stability. You can’t shoot a cannon from a canoe.
After 4-6 weeks of this stuff, beginners can start to dabble with the straight bar – and they usually pick it up really quickly.
Over the past few months, personal trainer and author Vince DelMonte has rounded up some of the premier strength, nutrition, bodybuilding, and rehabilitation experts to take part in the FREE Ultimate Muscle Advantage Teleseminar Series.
For six weeks, starting March 3, this elite team – including the likes of Bill Hartman, Chad Waterbury, John Berardi, Mike Robertson, Charles Staley, Jason Ferruggia, and I – will cover a variety of topics of interest to you. There will be two calls per week.
We haven’t even done the calls yet, but suffice it to say that I know Vince, and he’s a guy that always overdelivers. And, given that the teleseminar series is free, you haven’t got much to lose! Check it out:
Writer Greg McGlone rounded up five of the biggest, baddest, strongest, and best-informed hombres in the iron game, and invited them to share their "secrets" with those of us who also want to get bigger, badder, stronger, and better-informed.
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