Size Matters Not: A Case for Strength Part II

In Part I of this series I suggested that you should see progress in your exercise routine. Further, I broached the idea that muscular strength and muscular size are not necessarily the same. Finally, I argued that getting “too big” is nearly impossible for you to do. This is Part II of the conversation.

Big vs. strong. What’s the difference?

Muscle bulk is what a lot of men (especially young guys) want from their exercise program. For many of you though, your fitness goals don’t include bulking up. Most women I encounter want to get leaner and essentially smaller. Obesity is a big problem in America so many of us definitely don’t need to consider enlarging ourselves. Endurance athletes don’t need to haul around extra muscle as it can hinder performance. Because of all this we see a lot of people lifting rather light weights for very high reps (15-20 or more). The problem is, you can’t actually get stronger this way.

Let me offer this thought to you: You can get stronger–without getting bigger! You can learn to create more force with your muscles without much if any additional muscle growth. The two circumstances are not the same. Strictly speaking, bigger muscles can be stronger than smaller muscles, but strength is much more than that. Strength is also very much the result of changes within the central nervous system (CNS). Here’s more on that.

Neurology of strength

Zoe Smith is a record-setting British Olympic weightlifter.

It’s helpful to understand a little bit about processes by which we get stronger. Besides some potential muscle growth, what happens when we strength train? Without getting overly science-y, here’s a description:

Better intramuscular coordination:
This is learning to use more of an individual muscle. Muscles are made up of muscle fibers. Those muscle fibers are innervated (“fired”) by nerves. The nerve plus the muscle fibers it innervates is known as a motor unit. Untrained individuals can recruit only so many motor units for a given task. Effective strength training enables us to recruit more motor units within an individual muscle.

Strength training also changes the rate at which our motor units fire. Untrained people fire their motor units more slowly than trained people. Proper strength training can enable us to fire our motor units very quickly. The result is we can be stronger and/or faster and muscle growth is unaffected.

At the same time, strength training also teaches us to synchronize these motor units to fire together. All of this is skill, and it has nothing to do with muscle growth.

Better intermuscular coordination:
This is better coordination of muscle groups. In looking at almost any common human movement (sitting to standing, running, reaching, pushing, pulling, lifting something off the ground, climbing stairs, etc.) multiple body parts move together. Proper exercise selection (multi-joint exercises like squats, lunges, rows, presses, etc.) plus appropriate loading of these exercises enable us to develop stronger movement patterns rather than just a stronger quad, calf, bicep, etc. This again is a way of becoming stronger without enlarging the muscles.
What else?
Effective strength training gives us stronger connective tissue. Ligaments and tendons become stronger just like the muscles. Our bones also get stronger if we load them effectively. A good strength program is a very effective way to protect against injury and increase bone density in people of all ages and abilities.

Examples of Stronger, Not Bigger

The majority of sports actually don’t require athletes to be particularly big. American football linemen need to be big in order to

Greek weightlifting legend Pyrros Dimas. Incredibly strong but not stereotypically massive.

shove opponents out of the way. It’s a similar situation with sumo wrestlers. Shot putters need to be big so they can put a lot of mass against the shot. Beyond that, very large athletes are often at a disadvantage. They can’t generate as much power relative to their body weight. They can’t endure as well. Thus, for many athletes, some degree of increased muscle mass may be a good thing, but being “too big” is not an advantage. Strength however is always in demand.

German Olympic weightlifter Julia Rohde. Strong–not huge.

Most sports involve sprinting of some sort. More strength helps an athlete sprint faster. Does more bulk help? Only up to a point. A massively muscle-bound body doesn’t help.

Weight class athletes such as boxers, weightlifters, martial artists, and wrestlers must stay within a certain weight range to compete. Now, we’ve all seen the stereotypical massive superheavyweight weightlifter or powerlifter. Look at the lighter weight classes of these sports though and you won’t see such hulking physiques. You’ll see lean, strong athletic physiques. These people are always looking to get stronger and more powerful without getting bigger.

Gymnasts are excellent examples of athletes who must be very strong and

US Gymnast Danell Leyva is very strong but not overly bulky.

powerful yet clearly don’t benefit much at all from enormous amounts of muscle bulk. Have you ever seen a gymnast that was “too big?”

So there are numerous examples of people who require great strength but have no need of excessive muscle. How exactly do they get there? I’m glad you asked! Stay tuned for Part III of this series.

Size Matters Not: Part I

I’m very grateful to Jamie Atlas of Bonza Bodies for giving me the opportunity to write a guest post for his blog. He runs one of the big group bootcamps at Red Rocks. He’s been featured in 5280 and has been voted one of the top trainers on Denver’s A-List. Jamie also contributes a fitness column to the Denver Post. So, he’s a fairly big-time presence in the Denver health & fitness scene. He’s also been very generous to me with his time and his sharing of information. So head over to his blog for my post titled Size Matters Not. A Case for Strength Part I. Parts II and III will appear on my blog.

Thoughts on Posture: Part II

In the previous post, I discussed a few thoughts, ideas and myths surrounding our posture. A key concept is that posture actually isn’t tied very strongly to back pain. There are still good reasons to learn and practice good posture though.

Proper posture while lifting

Let’s think of a squat or deadlift. In these exercises, the legs are the engines that drive the exercise. They provide the “oomph” to move the barbell (or whatever implement) we’re holding in your arms/hands. The trunk is the transmission between the engines and the arms/hands/object.

The deadlift done wrong (left) and well (right.)

Keeping the spine braced in a neutral position ensures the best, most efficient transfer of force from the legs into the barbell. If the spine twists or bends then we leak force and risk injury.

Glutes, abs and shoulder muscles are engaged. Keep it this way during a push-up.

Similarly, look at a push-up. Here, the arms and the shoulders are the drivers and the rest of the body is the implement we’re moving. We again want to keep the trunk rigid and braced, not loose, deflated and floppy. With proper technique we get a more thorough range of motion and stimulate the working muscles more. By doing a push-up in good posture, you’ll essentially get more out of the exercise than if you do it with poor posture. Risk of shoulder and back injury is reduced too.

Bad push-up! No!

We can expand our view of posture out to any number of sports from running to golf to tennis to whatever else you like. In the vast majority of our sports, we want to keep solid posture so we can most effectively transmit force (usually) into the ground and into something like a club, a ball or an opponent.

In the grand scheme, good solid posture will enable you to lift more weight which will enable you to reach your fitness goals faster and more effectively. We can also make our sporting movements more effective through the use of good posture. You’ll avoid injury too which will allow you to train longer and more consistently.

Posture and safety.

Okay, in the last post, I mentioned that pain isn’t strongly linked to posture. Yet in this post (above) I’ve suggested that braced, neutral posture while lifting can help prevent injury. Am I contradicting myself? Not entirely.

If we load our joints at the far ends of where they can move then we do risk doing damage to joint tissues and this may bring on pain. So we want to avoid excessive spinal flexion, and/or spinal extension, and/or spinal twisting when lifting. Yes our spine can and should bend and twist, just not under heavy load. Rather we should put the spine in neutral and brace with the trunk muscles before we lift.

Posture for looks

Why do most people work out? Looks, no? For most of us, looks is somewhere on our list of reasons we exercise. We want to look lean and strong. Adopting good, erect, tall posture will instantaneously improve our appearance. Incredible! Tall posture makes us appear leaner and stronger. Slumped posture makes us look pudgy and weak. Look at the pictures and you be the judge.

(Ironically, when I look around the gym, I see lots of people exercising in very bad posture. Presumably they want good looks yet they engage in activities that only reinforce bad posture. Crunches may be the most effective way of promoting slumped, head-forward-style bad posture.)

Posture and confidence — (Yes posture and the brain are linked!)

Power Posture!

The same tall posture described above makes you feel better and more confident. Don’t believe me?

He looks like a leader.

Here’s the abstract from a study looking at this phenomenon (emphasis is mine.):

“Building on the notion of embodied attitudes, we examined how body postures can influence self-evaluations by affecting thought confidence, a meta-cognitive process. Specifically, participants were asked to think about and write down their best or worse qualities while they were sitting down with their back erect and pushing their chest out (confident posture) or slouched forward with their back curved (doubtful posture). Then, participants completed a number of measures and reported their self-evaluations. In line with the self-validation hypothesis, we predicted and found that the effect of the direction of thoughts (positive/negative) on self-related attitudes was significantly greater when participants wrote their thoughts in the confident than in the doubtful posture. These postures did not influence the number or quality of thoughts listed, but did have an impact on the confidence with which people held their thoughts.”

Here’s an excerpt from an article in Scientific American on the same subject:

“More impressively, expansive postures also altered the participants’ hormone levels. Using salivary samples, Carney and colleagues found that expansive postures led individuals to experience elevated testosterone (T) and decreased cortisol (C). This neuroendocrine profile of High T and Low C has been consistently linked to such outcomes as disease resistance and leadership abilities.”

and

“Together, these recent discoveries bolster the notion that power is grounded in the body. Not only does power change the body, but altering one’s postures changes one’s power, or at least the psychological experience of it.”

Finally, for a little more about the power of posture, here’s Amy Cuddy discussing the topic in a TED Talk:

Thoughts on Posture: Part I

Mom often told us to “stand up straight.” (Did she ever explain how to do it though?)Look around you and you’ll see some spectacularly “bad” posture. Slumped spines are all around us.

How important is posture with regard to pain? For a long time, various schools of thought have insisted that poor posture causes back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain and all sorts of other ailments. The fact is though posture and pain don’t really correlate all that well. Research by pain scientists have observed the following:

people in pain showing poor posture
people in pain showing good posture
people without pain in good posture
people without pain in bad posture

So we see that posture really isn’t strongly linked directly to pain. Further, we can’t really tell the chickens from the eggs: Did poor posture bring pain or did pain bring on poor posture. Or maybe we see both poor posture and pain in someone yet they really don’t have anything to do with each other. Sort of like hair and headaches. We often see them both in the same person yet we know they don’t really have anything to do with the other.

Todd Hargrove at BetterMovement.com wrote a great post on all of this called Back Pain Myths: Posture, Core Strength, Bulging Discs. He writes the following:

“In one study, researchers looked at the posture of teenagers and then tracked who developed back pain in adulthood. Teenagers with postural asymmetry, thoracic kyphosis (chest slumping) and lumbar lordosis (overly arched low lack) were no more likely to develop back pain than others with “better” posture.

Another study looked at increases in low back curve and pelvic angle due to pregnancy. The women with more postural distortion were no more likely to have back pain during the pregnancy. A systematic review of more than fifty four studies found no good evidence of a correlation between posture and pain. Leg length inequality seems to have no effect on back pain unless it is more than 20 mm (the average leg length difference is 5.2 mm). Hamstring and psoas tightness do not predict back pain.

These results are particularly striking given that many studies have quite easily found other factors that correlate well with low back pain, such as exercise, job satisfaction, educational level, stress, and smoking. Although some studies have found a correlation between back pain and posture, it is important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. It may be pain is causing the bad posture and not the other way around. This is a very likely possibility. People will spontaneously adopt different postural strategies when injected with a painful solution. Big surprise!”

What am I trying to say here? That posture doesn’t matter and that we should ignore it? Nope. I’ll give you some reasons to pay attention to posture:

Proper posture while lifting makes you stronger.
Proper lifting posture keeps you safe.
Tall, erect posture makes you look better.
This same tall posture makes you feel better and more confident. (Yes, the brain and posture are strongly linked!)

I’ll get into these topics in the next post.

ACL Rehab Update and the Latest Workout

The last post I sent out was sort of screwed up. Something was wrong with the code. Here’s the new and improved version.

Thursday was a full week since my ACL reconstruction and it was the day of my first PT appointment. According to the PT, I’m weeks ahead of schedule in terms of strength, mobility and gait. This was fantastic news and I’m completely convinced that my pre-surgery workout routine was the key.

The current thinking on ACL reconstruction and recovery is to engage in what’s known as prehabilitation (as opposed to rehabilitation) prior to surgery. Surgery is a type of controlled injury. Though the overall goal of surgery is to improve function and “fix” an injury, the immediate outcome of surgery is pain, poor movement, weakness and maybe instability. The aim in prehab is to make the involved area as mobile, strong and highly functional as possible so as to minimize the impact of surgery.

My prehab consisted of lots of squats and single-leg work, deadlifts, walking, and bicycling as well as various stretches and plenty of upper body and trunk/core work. Most of my work consisted of sagittal plane (front/back) movement. This was the most stable plane of movement available to me. I also did some frontal plane (side-to-side) work but only a little work in the transverse (rotational/twisting) plane. A torn ACL typically results from way too much twisting so I was very careful not to twist and I used anti-rotation exercises in which I worked to resist forces trying to twist me.

On Friday I did my first workout. Here’s what I did. Take note of the single-leg work. This was a big part of my prehab and will be a huge part of my rehab.

Super set 1

Barbell press: 65 lbs. x 5 reps – 75 lbs. x 5 reps – 85 lbs. x 5 reps – 95 lbs. x 5 reps – 105 lbs. x 5 reps – 115 lbs. x 5 reps – 120 lbs. x 5 reps – 120 lbs. x 5 reps – 70 lbs. x 12 reps
- That last set was a back-off set. I’ll be employing back-off sets with various exercises and I’ll probably discuss back-off sets later.
1-leg exercises: Watch the video for an explanation
Toe raises (aka heel raises or calf raises): 2-foot x 30 reps – 1-foot x 10 reps. I alternated this pattern throughout the super set. I only used my body weight.

Super set 2

Leg lifts: 12 reps – 10 reps – 10 reps
- Haven’t done these in forever.
- I got sore and tired in the abdomen very quickly!
- Might be sore tomorrow
Band walks:
- Went to exertion in the hip abductors
- I was very careful to keep my right knee from caving in, which is an example of working to avoid transverse plane movement as I mentioned above.
Finally, I was able to just turn the cranks on a recumbent bike. I couldn’t generate much force with my leg but still, to get a full revolution was good news. I figure I’ll be on a real bike in maybe a week.

What makes a great trainer?

The Personal Training Development Center (PTDC) has a lot of useful, informative articles for personal trainers. Are Personal Trainers Missing the Point is a recent piece with which I agree. The key observation is this:

“The ability to correctly coach exercises is slowly becoming a lost art in the training world, despite that it’s the most fundamental component of being a personal trainer/coach.”

The article advocates for trainers to teach the squat, deadlift, bench press, standing press and pull-up. (I would ad the push-up to the list.) It’s also suggested that trainers learn to teach regressions and progressions of these exercises. These exercises are the essentials. They have been and still are the basic building blocks of effective exercise programs and they offer the most return on investment of a client’s training time. Read the article to learn three steps to becoming a better coach.

Running recovery

Alex Hutchinson writes for Runner’s World and the Running Times. He recently wrote an article called the Science of Recovery. He briefly discusses six methods: antioxidants, jogging (as during a cool down), ice bath, massage, cryosauna and compression garments. Anyone who trains hard–runner or not–may find the article interesting.

Pronation

Pete Larson at Runblogger.com gives us Do You Pronate? A Shoe Fitting Tale. Here, he describes overhearing a conversation between a confused shoe store customer and the mis-informed employee who tries to educate her on pronation. Contrary to what many of us believe, pronation is not a dire evil problem to be avoided at all costs. Larson says it well:

“The reality is that everybody pronates, and pronation is a completely normal movement… We might vary in how much we pronate, but asking someone if they pronate is like asking them if they breathe. I’d actually be much more concerned if the customer had revealed that no, she doesn’t pronate. At all. That would be worrisome.”

If you’re a runner then I highly suggest you learn about the realities of pronation.

Supplemental strength

I love strength training. I love all the subtleties and ins & outs of getting stronger. One area that I’m learning about is supplemental work (aka accessory work). This is weight training used to bring up one’s strength on other lifts (typically the squat, deadlift, bench press or standing press). With supplemental work, we’re looking to find weak areas and make them stronger.

Dave Tate at EliteFTS is one of the foremost experts on all of this. Thus, his article Dave Tate’s Guide to Supplemental Strength is very much up my alley, and it should be up yours if you’re serious about getting stronger. He discusses several categories of exercises and how to incorporate them into a routine. Below, the term “builders” refers to exercises that build the power lifts (squat, bench press, deadlift):

Always start with the builders. Do not start with the main lift.
Examples: Floor press, box squat. Sets: 3-5. Reps: 3-5.
Move to supplemental exercises — exercises that build the builders.
Examples: 2-board press, safety-bar close-stance squat. Sets: 3. Reps: 5-8.
Accessories — Either muscle-based (for size) or movement-based (for strength). Use supersets and tri-sets, as needed.
Examples: DB presses, biceps curls. Sets: 3. Reps: 10-20.
Rehab/Pre-hab — Whatever you need, nothing more or less. Examples:
External rotation, face pulls. Sets: 2-3. Reps: 20-30.

This is just a little bit of the article. It’s very detailed. There may not be much here for recreational lifters but for coaches and those of us who have gotten a little deeper into our lifting, it’s a superb article.

Denver Fitness Journal

All Things Health and Fitness by Kyle Norman, MS, CSCS, FMS, RRCA Running Coach

Month: May 2014