Dr. of Physical Therapy Kelly Starrett continues to put out very useful information via his site MobilityWOD. Torque and Trunk Stability Part I: How to Stand is a recent post. It discusses trunk and hip mechanics with regard to standing. Does this sound to simple a topic? Standing? Perhaps not.
As I’ve mentioned before (here and here) we often don’t walk very well. Strangely, it’s not uncommon for us to stand incorrectly or less than optimally. As with walking, it so happens we stand a lot. And if we’re doing it improperly then we very likely are moving toward injury and pain or at the very least, poor performance.
The themes in this video appear in a lot of other MobilityWOD videos (like this one on the set up for the deadlift.) The concepts of trunk stability via glute and abdominal contraction are hugely important. As is the idea of torquing or twisting the legs out in order to create stiffness through the legs and hips. (Similarly for the upper body it’s a good idea to torque out or externally rotate the arms during pressing movements.)
I’ve been using these concepts in my own workouts as well as with my clients and I’ve seen some very good results: more strength, less knee pain and instability, better overall technique. All of this is good.
If you’re one of my clients then this stuff is homework. If you’re not one of my clients but you want to perform better. Go ahead and make it homework anyway. See if it helps your squat, deadlift or sitting to standing from a chair–or the ground preferably.
In the previous post I discussed my difficulty in solving my running-related pain issues. Analyzing and changing one’s running technique is a challenging thing, but I’m going to attempt it. I’m mainly going to discuss running here but these concepts apply to walking as well. (Don’t think that poor walking mechanics don’t matter. We spend a lot of time walking. If we’re doing it wrong then we’re really hammering the body into a mangled mess.)
Really important thing #1: Let the foot drop right below you. Don’t reach out with your heel.
It’s vital to get the foot strike correct when running. I now realize that for years I was reaching forward with my leg, putting my heel out in front of me, and hitting the ground with my heel. This is bad. It promotes overuse of the hamstring muscles and de-emphasizes the glutes.
I then spent the past year to year-and-a-half trying a forefoot strike. I thought this was an effective correction of my heel strike but I was still doing several things wrong. First, I was still reaching out ahead of me. As a result I was still using my hamstrings too much and I wasn’t using my glutes enough. And though I was hitting with my forefoot and avoiding a heel strike, I wasn’t allowing my heel to settle to the ground.
Now I’m doing things a lot better. First, I drop my foot directly below me. In fact, it feels like my foot is dropping behind me. Let me emphasize the word “drop.” I passively let the leg unfold underneath me and let gravity pull my foot to the ground. I don’t actively try to do much of anything with my foot. I often pay attention to how things feel down there but I don’t try to pull my foot off the ground or push off in any particular way. Steve Magness discusses this process in is superb post How to run with proper biomechanics. I’ve bolded the key points:
Once the knee has cycled through, the lower leg should drop to the ground so that it hits close to under your center of gravity. When foot contact is made, it should be made where the lower leg is 90 degrees to the ground. This puts it in optimal position for force production. The leg does not extend outwards like is seen in most joggers and there is no reaching for the ground. Reaching out with the lower leg results in over striding and creates a braking action. Another common mistake is people extending the lower leg out slightly and then pulling it back in a paw like action before ground contact. They are trying to get quick with the foot and create a negative acceleration. This is incorrect and does not lead to shorter ground contact times or better positioning for force production. Instead the paw back motion simply engages the hamstrings and other muscles to a greater degree than necessary, thus wasting energy. The leg should simply unfold and drop underneath the runner.
I know I’m running well when it actually feels like the foot is dropping behind me. (It’s not actually behind me, it’s just dropping quite a bit further back than it used to.) I now focus on hip extension when I run, or using my glutes to drive my leg back. With this proper foot placement I can feel my glutes turn on and propel me forward. It helps to have a slight forward lean through this process.
Really important thing #2: Lengthen through the hip
This concept of what I call “lengthening through the hip” has had a massive impact on my walking and running technique and thus my pain issues as well. Denver-area physical therapist Rick Olderman helped me solve a strange little bodily riddle I’d had for years, and this hip lengthening process was right at the core of it.
For a long time I noticed that standing on my right leg was a lot different from standing on my left. When I would stand on my right leg I always sort of tipped or shifted to the right. It didn’t feel right. My balance would shift in a sort of exaggerated way. This was happening every step. Standing incorrectly on my right leg when walking and running also meant I would land badly on my left leg. Lengthening up and pressing my weight through my hip into my foot solved this issue.
This concept is a little tough to effectively describe in words but here goes: As my foot hits the ground below me, I think of lifting my trunk away from hip. In my mind the hip and the rib cage of the stance leg are separating–moving away from each other, and I’m sort of getting taller in the process. I don’t think of bounding or hopping though. I’m trying to make my leg longer below me and behind me as I move forward. A slight lean forward from the ankles helps me do this all correctly.
This movement is sort of a subtle kind of thing to grasp. Describing this process is sort of like describing chocolate to someone who’s never tasted it. It’s not like simply flexing your elbow or bending your knee. It’ll probably take a bit of practice to get a feel for this. The goal should be to take this strange-feeling novel movement and turn it into a habit. The video below should help explain this.
Recently I mentioned that you sit too much, and we looked at a hip mobility complex to help you combat the effects of sitting. Here’s another very good hip mobility process from Kelly Starrett at MobilityWOD.com.
I’ve been doing this drill myself and with other clients and we’ve been seeing very nice results from loosening tight low backs to improving squat performance and generally realizing that we’ve got all kinds of tight, gunked-up tissue in our hips. All this tightness and restriction can mean trouble for knees, ankles, low backs, shoulders–all sorts of parts. Try this drill. Keep working on it. Do it frequently especially after long bike rides or any long period of sitting and before your workouts.
I’ve recently mentioned California-based physical therapist Kelly Starrett, and his very interesting blog MobilityWOD.com. (I’m doing his Mobility Course in Denver at the end of April.) One of his posts discusses why sitting is poison for your ability to move. (Also, check out Why sitting all day is slowly killing you for more details on this evil activity.) He’s on to something. Sitting is bad and we need to do something about it.
You sit too much.
By the way, if you’re saying, “But I don’t sit that much,” I have several questions for you:
1) Are you a non-Amish/non-lumberjack American in the modern world? If you say “yes” then you sit too much.
2) Do you own a car? If you say “yes” then you sit too much.
3) Is there a desk and/or a computer involved in your life? Clearly your answer is “yes” because you’re reading this.
4) Are you a cyclist? If it’s “yes” then you sit too much.
5) You sit too much.
Deep posterior hip muscles
Effects of sitting
So what does sitting do to us? First, we get restrictions in a bunch of our muscles and tissues. Particularly we see restrictions in our posterior hip capsule. This type of restriction can contribute to a condition called anterior femoral glide syndrome, which can cause pain at the front of the hip and generally bad movement. Further, the various
muscles in this region can become impaired, tight and weak. Sitting shuts down these muscles and our brain literally forgets how to use these extremely important movers and stabilizers. All of this can result in various aches and pains, poor balance, difficulty sitting and standing, poor running form, poor lifting form–it’s all bad!! What’s the solution?
Mobilize & strengthen
Superficial posterior hip muscles
The best way to address these restrictions is to move. We’ve got to move the tight tissues and we have to re-learn how to operate these muscles that have likely gone dormant. What follows are three drills borrowed and adapted from Shirley Sahrmann and Nick Tumminello.
Simply doing these movements and feeling a stretch in the hip will help loosen tight tissue, but we want to go beyond that. Again, we need to re-learn how to use these muscles and in order to do that you must contract them as you’re doing these drills. Think of adjusting the tension of your glutes in much the same way as you’d adjust the tension of your bicep during a bicep curl. You’ll maintain tension throughout the movement even as the muscle become stretched. You’ll probably
find it difficult to maintain a perceptible contraction as the glute stretch. Work on it. It’s a skill that you should develop in order to overcome pain and perform better. It’ll take practice but the payoff will be tremendous.
This will sound odd but without reservation I can tell you that I’m all kinds of giddy over the thoracic spine (aka t-spine)! I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about the t-spine and learning about the implications of proper t-spine mobility and strength. Bret Contreras has a good article on the topic. Mark’s Daily Apple has two articles on the topic, this one and this one. This PDF from Mark Buckley is very informative. And Nick Tuminello discusses the do’s and don’ts of the spine in general in How Not to Warm Up. I’ve got a few drills to show you that should be done by any modern Westerner–that is, anyone who sits for a living, drives a car, watches TV and/or bicycles. But first, what is the t-spine?
Hello spine.
Anatomy
Your spine or vertebral column normally consists of 33 bones. You have seven cervical vertebrae in the neck region, 12 thoracic vertebrae that make up the mid-back, and five lumbar vertebrae that make up the low back. Down at the very bottom you’ve got the sacrum and the coccyx, aka the tailbone. So think of your t-spine as starting from the base of your neck and ending on an even level with the top of your hip bones. So why should you care about this region?
The thoracic spine is built for movement. This part of our spine was made to twist, flex forward and sideways, extend back plus a combination of all the above. But look at the modern Western lifestyle: We sit and we hunch. We hunch at a computer. We hunch over a steering wheel. For fun, we hunch in front of a TV. If we’re cyclists, then we hunch even during our athletic event. If we play golf or softball then we get rotation but generally only in one direction. In other words, the t-spine spine gets very little movement. What are the implications?
Organ function
It’s fairly obvious that most of our internal organs rest near our t-spine. Those organs are innervated by nerves that exit out of the thoracic spine. This means those organs send and receive information to and from the brain by way of the t-spine. Have a look at the chart and notice which organs receive their nerve supply from the t-spine region.
Your organs' sources of nerve innervation
If this part of your spine is immobile then you could have compromised organ function. That could mean anything from hand and wrist pain to breathing issues, thyroid issues, heart dysfunction, kidney dysfunction, digestive trouble, and who-knows-what-else. Thus mobilizing this area may well improve organ function.
Limb function & pain issues (or avoidance thereof)
Proper t-spine movement is tied very strongly to good shoulder and arm function and to good low-back health. (I’ve had personal experience with this, both with my own pain issues and with various clients.) A gunked up t-spine means the shoulders are going to move badly. A tight t-spine will likely result in shoulders that are unstable. Thus the shoulders may pay the cost of poor t-spine movement. Similarly with the low-back.
The lumbar spine is not a terribly mobile part of the body. It has about 6-7 degrees of rotation in each direction. The t-spine however has about 35 degrees of rotation each way. Your entire spine rotates as you walk, run, swim, reach behind you and obviously if you golf, swing a bat or throw a punch. If you lose t-spine rotation then your lumbar spine will likely start to compensate and rotate more than it was designed to. So that low-back pain you keep heating and icing and stretching, etc? It very likely may be caused by poor t-spine movement.
Appearance
Why do most of us work out? We may say “just to be healthy” or “my doctor told me to, but the real honest reason most of us exercise is for looks. There’s nothing bad about looking good! Good t-spine movement and positioning can help you look better instantly.
Remember that we’re a hunched over society. Look around you. How many rounded shoulders do you see? This doesn’t look great. Imagine if people drew themselves up, lifted their collarbone, and lengthened their spines. No question but that we’d look stronger, healthier and more attractive.
Okay, so there’s some info on what your t-spine is and why proper movement is vital. Now it’s time to move! (Please pardon the discrepancy between the audio and video. I’m trying to figure out what the problem is. Youtube is a challenge for some reason.)
Big thanks to my very studious client Marilyn Munsterman who sent me a three-part video series on the kettlebell swing. The series comes from Franz Sniderman, an RKC (Russian Kettlebell Certified) instructor based in San Diego. The swing is more than just a swing. If you know how to swing a bell then you’ve got a very powerful exercise on your hands. If you only know how to do something that only looks like a swing, then you’ve got a waste of time and a potential injury on your hands.. Sniderman does a superb job of dissecting the signature kettlebell exercise and highlighting the essentials. Watch and learn.
I’m behind on the news here a little bit but a fascinating story appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine. Is Sitting a Lethal Activity discusses the idea that spending too much time sitting is harmful to our health. In fact the article suggests the following:
“Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. ‘Excessive sitting,’ Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. James Levine says, ‘is a lethal activity.'”
Okay, so this is no revelation to most of us. We know that moving is generally healthier than sitting. So if we exercise enough then we should be able to counteract the effects of sitting right? Not so fast. The Times article suggests that in fact we may not be able to exercise our way out of the risks of our seated lifestyle. The article states:
“A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. ‘Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,’ says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.”
So what does this mean? It seem that according to the evidence in the article, sitting is unhealthy. (Specifically we might say that lack of movement not sitting in and of itself.) If we do too much of it we’ll get sick and die early–whether or not we exercise a lot. This isn’t good! Most of the Western world sits for a living. We sit at computers. Then we sit in cars for transportation. Then for entertainment we sit in front of a television. HOURS and HOURS of sitting is our way of life. So what can we do?
Well, part of the research into this issue by Dr. Levine included the wearing of a special electronically wired “magic underwear” that measured the wearer’s movement. The researchers found that healthier people moved more during the day but it wasn’t necessarily in the form of exercise. They fidgeted more or simply engaged in many small movements throughout the day. Even leaning down and tying a shoe can generate a burst of movement that should ultimately lead to better health. (The term for all this small, non-exercise movement is NEAT or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Read more about NEAT here, here and here.)
Z-Health R-Phase joint mobility drills are tailor made to address our modern lack of movement. Any number of these drills directly counter the hours we spend immobilized in chairs. Following are three joint mobility drills that you can perform while seated. Moving our joints in these ways sends bursts of mechanoreceptor signals to the brain and basically lets the nervous system know that we’re still alive.
The previous post consisted of the first three videos of a seven-part series on the bench press. Here are the final four videos. It’s pretty detailed stuff that you might find quite useful. It all comes from the powerlifters at EliteFTS.
Key points to remember are:
The bench press is a total body lift, not just an upper body lift.
Keep the shoulder blades pinched back and pressed into the bench.
Keep a tight arch in the low back.
Keep the legs and glutes tight while pressing the feet firmly into the ground.
Hold the breath during the upward push.
Think of pulling the bar apart, or think of pulling the wrists apart.
Keep the entire body tight and tense the whole time you’re under the bar. Don’t relax.
Recently I posted an instructional series on the squat (here, and here). It came from the very knowledgeable and very strong lads at EliteFTS.com. The next in this series called So You Think You Can Bench. It’s a seven-part series. I’m posting the first three here.
You may not be a powerlifter looking for a massive bench press but much of the discussion is very useful. The bench press is a total body lift, not just an upper body lift. The whole body should be tight: legs, glutes and abs included. There should be a tight arch in the low back. (Dave Tate suggests in this video that you should actually be quite uncomfortable while you benching due to this excessively arched posture. I’m not sure we should spend much if any of our time being terribly uncomfortable. But the overall idea of tightness and tension is spot on.) The shoulder blades should be pulled back and pressed tightly into the bench. You should think of pulling the bar apart sort of like pulling apart a piece of chewing gum. Watch and learn.
