Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mouseri and we're going to talk about muscle strain injury prevention today. So this is actually one of the most common questions that I get at the moment about the athletic stuff that I'm talking about is basically how do muscle strain injuries happen and what can we do training wise to prevent them or reduce the incidence of them happening. And I think this is a really interesting topic because I think that the mainstream fitness industry doesn't have a clear model of how muscle strain injuries happen and the literature is not enormously clear. There are obviously risk factors but there isn't really a very clear model. I think we can actually derive a fairly straightforward physiological model and I've done that in the FAQ which is you know obviously the greatest secret on the internet. But it is in there in the FAQ and if you do read it then you'll find it. But I'm just going to go through it now. So basically if we look at the really fundamental studies that have been done on muscle strain injuries you can basically cause a muscle to tear in animal models if you basically elongate it past a certain length, tearing length. And the interesting thing is it doesn't really matter whether the muscle is activated or not when you do that. So let's say you have an animal muscle and you're testing it and you basically elongate it to a certain length. Obviously you're not in a physiological scenario here. We're talking about muscles that you've actually physically removed. So you stretch them basically and they tear at a certain length. And if you activate them it doesn't matter. They still tear at the same length. And the really cool thing that that tells us is that it's not force production that matters. It's actually just literally the length of the muscle that you're tearing that matters. So what we're saying is that tearing happens at a certain length. It doesn't matter whether the muscle is activated or not. Now the second thing you can also do is extend that and look at different types of muscle. So you can look at muscles that are fusiform. You can look at muscles that are pennate. And what you'll see is that pennate muscles require a lot longer, a lot larger extensions to tear than a fusiform muscle. And that's really cool because what that tells you is that it's the muscle fiber length that matters and not the whole muscle length. So as in many of the situations that I talk about, what everything comes back to is what the fiber is doing, not really what the whole muscle is doing. So that's really, really cool. It's really interesting. So basically saying that muscle fibers have a tearing length, not just the actual muscle. And then you can go, okay, well, what does that, where do we go from here? Well, where you go from here is to start looking at what a strain injury looks like and whether it's exactly the same as muscle damage. And it's not. And this is really cool because if you look at the literature, a lot of the eccentric literature, lots of the eccentric training literature will talk about muscle injury and muscle damage, and they will use the terms interchangeably. And what's very clear from the actual strain injury literature is that if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you take a muscle fiber or a muscle and you expose it to eccentric contractions and you do a whole bunch of those, like you would do in a, you know, kind of a 1990s, early 2000s eccentric training program, then basically you're going to create a lot of muscle damage. But the features of that damage are not the same as what you would get if you just take a sort of muscle fiber or a muscle and you just expose it to a lot of muscle damage. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. So if you look at the strain injury literature, it's not the same. It's actually very different. And one is literally muscle strain injury literature, which is what I think is basically single high amplitude stretches with or without activation. Now in that scenario, what you'll see is that the eccentric training or eccentric contractions kind of literature will give you a whole load of middle region. So if you've got a muscle, you've got proximal, middle and distal regions, the whole load of middle region damage, inflammation and inflammation. Well, various signs of damage, but damage, inflammation and also satellite cell activation. Now, if you deplete that satellite cell activation, you won't get the appropriate repair processes happening. And if you impair the kind of the inflammation, again, you won't get the appropriate repair processes happening. If you look at single high amplitude stretches, none of that applies. You've got damage happening, not in the middle region, but in the proximal or distal regions. You don't need to worry about satellite cells because if you deplete them, nothing really changes. And you don't get damage. The inflammation response, not on these single kind of high amplitude stretch injuries that I'm talking about. So very, very different characteristics. So what we're saying then is that damage is not really the same thing as a strain injury. So ultimately, if we now go further down the line saying, OK, well, what does this kind of unique little body of studies that have kind of done high amplitude stretches without kind of creating a lot of what we would call muscle damage? What does it tell us? What it tells us is actually in those scenarios, you start to see. The tearing of costumers and that seems to be a really, really important feature. So specifically dystrophin, but basically costumers are the things that perform lateral force transmission and they probably provide a very important safety feature for the muscle fiber to stop it being excessively elongated because it's basically tethering it to neighboring muscle fibers. If you don't have that tethering effect, you can basically then stretch the muscle fiber to a much further length than you'd otherwise be able to do. And that's very, very important because if we now go and look at what happens if you perform some of these high amplitude stretches and then come back later on and see what you can see what you can then do when you mess around with the fiber. So if you perform a couple of high amplitude stretches and create this stripping off of dystrophin, the damaging of the costumers, and then you come back a couple of hours later and do the same thing again, the muscle now tears at a shorter length. And that's absolutely critical because that suddenly changes how we understand how muscle strain injuries are happening. Because I've lost track of the number of times that I've seen a situation, a famous instance, for example, soccer players on the pitch suddenly gets a hamstring strain injury and suddenly you've got 100 people all on their kind of Instagram or YouTube or whatever, analyzing it, telling you exactly what the guy was doing wrong when he actually got a strain injury. And I'm actually, hang on a minute, look at these studies and just kind of see that single high amplitude stretches are going to create this damage to the costumers, which then makes the muscle. find more vulnerable and therefore it now tears at a short length. So what you're saying then is that if you persistently do types of exercise that create this type of damage, this kind of micro strain, if you want to kind of call it like that, basically this kind of tearing of costumers, removing of the protection that those fibers have, they will then start tearing at shorter lengths and eventually you'll end up inside the physiological range of motion. And then you basically will tear literally at any point when you go into a very high amplitude kind of range of motion activity, which obviously we're going to do if we're. trying to gain possession or, you know, I'm on the pitch trying to kind of move into space or whatever it may be. So we're basically pushing ourselves to the limit and that scenario, we end up with a tear. It's not because of anything we did in the moment, it's because of what we've been doing in the last kind of couple of weeks up to that moment. So this is exactly the same thing applies to situations where people tear muscles in, I mean, I mentioned hamstring strain injury because it's the most famous example, but you can see it in strength training as well. So everybody like wants to kind of, you know, produce their list of reasons of why. Somebody tears a bicep off in the gym or why, so why somebody tears a peck when they're doing bench presses and everyone's got their reasons and it's like, well, hang on a minute. Maybe it's nothing to do with the thing that the person was doing in that moment in time. Maybe it's the stack of things that they've been doing in the last couple of weeks that have actually caused that muscle to become vulnerable to that particular thing. And this is really important because when I first started looking at the eccentric train literature, you know, like 15. Or. Years ago, and I was kind of, the Nordic studies were really getting going and everyone was out. It's probably more like 20, isn't it? Really? The Nordic studies were getting going. People were talking about Nordic hamstring curls, and there was a lot of pushback from the S and C coaches and sports coaches at the time saying, hang on a minute. We're worried about kind of pushing this kind of new intervention into our programs because we're worried about the amount of fatigue it's going to cause. And we're worried it's actually going to create a bigger problem than it's solving. And I think at the time I was probably. Sceptical of their criticism, but now I'm much more sympathetic because I look at, especially as we joke, some of those early Nordic studies, which is absolutely crazy. I mean, just insane, you know, five sets of 12, I mean, like seriously, you know, just absurd. So, but you can kind of like, now I understand having gone through the stretch, uh, kind of literature very carefully in the strains, uh, kind of a section of that literature and you kind of understand exactly what it is that creates the damage and why it then makes a, uh, actually. Can make some higher risk for a strain injury. So what we're saying then is that there has got to be a, uh, good dosage of eccentric training, and then there's going to be an insufficient dosage of eccentric training, which is probably very small, but okay. And there's going to be a, a dosage of eccentric training, which actually is going to elevate the risk of a strain injury because it's literally going to be doing the thing that you don't want to do, which is stripping all of the costumers of muscle fire. And then you won't be able to build them back in time for the next workout when you're doing that insane volume of eccentric contractions. And I think that's the problem. That we've got, which is that I probably got a, uh, very clear U shaped, uh, dose response relationship when it comes to eccentric training. Now, actually the same thing applies to, uh, static stretching, although I'd probably argue it's, uh, smaller because you don't have the, uh, kind of any, any of the other damage aspects, the traditional damage aspects that we would say in terms of inflammation should have those problems, uh, which can also weaken the fiber, but you do obviously have the potential if you're pushing into really high amplitude stretches, you can. get to a scenario where it will create the same issue i don't think it's quite as high risk but it does exist i would imagine so we've got this dose uh you kind of u-shaped uh kind of dose response relationship we want a perfect dose of eccentric training in order to create the adaptions that we're going to protect us because eccentric training does have a tendency to cause greater cost of meridition it is going to give us more sarcomas in series which then because muscle fiber lengthening is the issue not muscle lengthening is going to extend the maximum length of the muscle can go to before it's straight before it actually strains so we do want the adaptions that eccentric training causes because it's going to add length to the fiber and allow the fiber to tear at a longer length which means it's not going to tear inside the physiological range of motion adding costumers again protects us so it's doing the things we want but if we don't recover from that in time for the next exposure to that type of activity we're going to be in trouble so ultimately that's how i think a muscle strain injury is happening and obviously that is how eccentric training can help us not helping us you know in a way that is completely indiscriminate and indiscriminate what word am i looking for it's not helping us in a way that is independent of the volume like if you go excess excessive on the volume it's going to actually make things worse and also if the athlete is doing a ton of high amplitude movements like in sprinting max speed sprinting and kind of changes of direction at the same time as you're programming that eccentric stuff that basically is going to be a a recipe for disaster in all honesty so that's the physiological bit so rob let's start with um the kind of classic the hamstring strain stuff so um just talk to us a little talk talk a little bit about the the exercises that you use because i know that you probably use a couple not just not just one so a couple of exercises that you're using and give us specifics on the volumes and the workout volumes and the frequencies um in terms of sets and reps and that kind of thing just so we understand kind of the dosages that you're you're delivering at the moment yeah definitely um
Speaker 2actually i did get this question a few times recently about kind of the the minimum dose i use and um usually so in terms of exercises for the hamstrings at least obviously everyone's going to do nordics and i do use nordics occasionally um actually don't use them as often but it's more of a more of an equipment thing so the thing that i'd prefer over that is generally going to be some uh eccentric uh seated leg curls so just like uh we said a few times in other episodes but um two legs down and then uh do the eccentric with one leg so you actually get like a super max eccentric um in terms of sets and reps you know always kind of going with just single reps so i might be doing you know two two to three reps in a workout and for a lot of people especially if they're playing more games and things like that just gonna be one rep um twice a week or so so really really low volumes there and people have asked how i how i know that an athlete is maintaining you know the the changes or like still making progress i guess and uh you know obviously like in terms of loading if you're using the the same loads or the loads increasing in those exercises after quite a long time you know once you pass the the coordination gains and recruitment and all those things initially you're probably doing about all you need to do and then you know obviously if they're not getting injured it is uh it is very likely doing its thing so if someone has a history of strains and they're no longer getting strains um i then assume we're doing a pretty good job and giving them an appropriate dose but it's usually not more on either of those exercises than just a few reps a couple times a week um like i said less when they just have more going on sure um so what's
Speaker 1really interesting there i mean there's a couple of interesting things there but one of the first things i noticed as you were talking through that is obviously the use of the two different um hip positions because obviously the nordic is is basically a lying leg curl more or less and so as a result it does focus more on the short head of the biceps femoris um whereas the seated leg curl gives you uh pretty much the exact opposite it gives you the three two joint hamstrings so arguably there's actually kind of a role for doing kind of both really um but if ever i had to choose in the context of a sort of sprinting situation i'm always going to choose the seated leg girl because you know that's kind of the one that's much more likely to have the issues with um uh excessive lengthening because you're literally talking about lengthening the two joint muscles at the end of the uh kind of terminal swing phase of the sprinting gate cycle so um i think yeah genuinely i think even though i'm a i have been in the past a nordic curl fanboy i think probably the the seat of the leg curl is definitely uh kind of better just from the information we've got in the last couple of years showing that you know from a um you know a new mechanical matching point of view you just end up with different muscles working because of the change in their position yeah um really interesting then is like how low you've gone on those sets and reps i mean like i mean obviously you know one set uh kind of uh twice a week is definitely something i'm a big fan of in athletic situations pretty much across the board but you've kind of brought that all the way down to a single rep is is really kind of interesting now obviously with eccentrics that we talked about before the stimulating rep model works backwards so the first rep is your most stimulating rep um you know fundamentally highest recruitment and um you know highest uh kind of tension because you don't have any calcium on accumulation at that point so you know definitely uh going to be getting all the value not all the value but a big chunk of the value from that yeah and even if i were going to program like a set of two or three which i honestly think i probably would um just kind of gut feel um the the issue is i'd still take a break so i'd still probably take five ten seconds between reps anyway so it ended up looking like sort of two mini sets yeah it's more costarish yeah um so so ultimately it would kind of end up being in that sort of yeah so then more like two sets of one rather than one set of two honestly it's not really that important but yeah so no fascinating to see just how low those volumes yeah i mean ultimately that is going to mean that you can run that pretty much all the time there's not going to be anybody who's kind of going to have so many things on in their in their schedule
Speaker 2they're not going to do two singles yeah i mean i generally don't take those out um once i've started them with someone they're just kind of hanging in there all the time and um yeah hopefully they don't miss it within the week well that's it yeah i mean and that's the interesting thing is i mean
Speaker 1yeah so just for people who kind of uh haven't been following along with what we've uh been saying about eccentrics and maintenance and stuff like that uh there's some really interesting data um whereby um on the one hand if you stop doing your eccentric training you lose all your fascicle length increases within about two weeks more or less so super quick it's about twice as fast as you're going to get with a strength training program for hypertrophy so you do a couple of months of strength training for hypertrophy you kind of increase some size you're losing all of that within about a month of not training um if you do the same with eccentric training it's all going to go in about two weeks so really really problematic on that front so we just don't want times where the athletes are kind of just you know taking two weeks on a beach somewhere and not doing anything and then come back and we've got to start from scratch again actually more seriously the problem is not so much the athlete it's actually the uh snc um kind of um tendency which is almost baked into the mentality now which is that they do things in blocks so they're really kind of focusing this block idea which has got to go i mean like a number and it's interesting like even when i talk to um sports teams that i've got a strong um kind of a really strong sort of physiological scientific background exercise science understanding and they've kind of talked to me and they've used some of my ideas they still work in blocks and i'm like guys stop it it's just stop it it doesn't it's absolutely non-physiological periodization is not a good thing you know we've talked about this so it's it's really not a good idea um but yeah they they will do like a whole month or six weeks of eccentric training and then they'll kind of take it completely out of the program like no no it's just keep it it's just leave it in leave it in the entire time but yeah so there's this really really uh kind of uh fast loss of vesicle length if we take out the program but on the other hand um it doesn't look like we need a lot to keep maintenance so you could actually drop down to maybe a couple of reps once a week if you absolutely had to like if your schedule was just crazy really congested four reps once a week yeah yeah you can do kind of like a slightly higher volume once a week and it's unlike normal strength training where you have to go a bit crazy and do like four sets once a week to really kind of spin your wheels and you can kind of do that with uh eccentric training for fascicle lengths and you'll kind of more or less uh do that about half the volume so uh kind of really uh important uh kind of feature there that we can leverage if we need to um yeah so so that's what we're looking at here and that's what we're looking at with um with hamstring stuff um so obviously that is like the number one kind of muscle strain injury that everybody talks about the exercise science literature pretty much exclusively focuses on that as a strain injury um but you know we do see a smaller incidence um especially in the strength training community of people tearing biceps and pecs now before we jump into this i just want to clarify two things firstly i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing but i'm not really qualified to talk about exactly what i'm doing what the injury is so i'm not like a what the injury is so i'm not like a what the injury is so i'm not like a kind of expert in muscle injury i know kind of expert in muscle injury i know kind of expert in muscle injury i know how muscles work how muscles work how muscles work i know how tendons work more or less um but i know how tendons work more or less um but i know how tendons work more or less um but i don't really know enough about the i don't really know enough about the i don't really know enough about the kind of etiology of specific injuries so that's the first thing i want to clarify secondly i want to clarify that i'm not convinced that it's always a muscle strain injury when i'm looking at those things i have a horrible suspicion that sometimes it might be either musculo tenderness problem or actually even a tendon rupture so i'm not i don't want to kind of make the assumption that what i'm seeing is always the same but for the purpose of today because we're going to probably extend this conversation to another podcast episode about tendons another day but just for purposes today assume that we're talking about a strain injury in terms of a pec and a biceps situation um obviously it's going to follow the same rules and the interesting thing about obviously the biceps is that it's a fusiform muscle so we're going to see a shorter kind of tearing length than we would see with a sort of more panic muscle um and obviously people tend to at least my and this is anecdotal but what i see and what i see may not be all there is because that isn't how it works but i tend to see uh tears being talked about in the context of preacher curls and in the context of uh deadlifts with mixed grips that's kind of the two scenarios i tend to see people talking about and i actually know people who have torn their biceps one in that instance and the preacher killed another one i don't actually know two people who have actually experienced those two precise injuries although i didn't kind of press them on exactly the nature of the injury specifically so i couldn't even talk about those precisely but anyway so um so it strikes me that those are probably programming errors of volume yeah that's typically volume stretch position stuff where i would jump to immediately
Speaker 2um because yeah like you said you're saying before you'll see it um you know it doesn't matter the activation and the force so much and things like that so you'll see people do you know like a very light load compared to their one rm and a bench press and then something just goes and same thing with like i had a good buddy of mine who had a strain injury on preachers on single arm preachers and it was again doing like you know a warm-up set wow or you know so certainly was any kind of like max effort rep or anything like that it was maybe the third rap he's only a set of four or five just warming up and had a bit of a strain there and it was very clearly you know like visible and everything like that um not some kind of full tendon rupture or anything like that but you know so i think again it's like like you said more of a volume and recovery management thing when you're just slamming sets and reps and going to failure and all these things and then training yourself again you know in um two days or sometimes if people are doing an odd program doing things that might involve those muscles you know back-to-back days and things like that that at that point you're just going to get to a place where just regardless of what you do like you said it's just going to kind of go um and people yeah like all the time i mean i've had people ask me about it and they're like yeah it didn't seem like i was doing anything crazy you know is that the other thing what do you think happened do you think my technique was off do you think maybe my arm path was off everybody's an arm to biomechanist yeah and i'm all the time i'm like no i i don't think anything was wrong with your technique it was the same as it always does probably and um it was just whatever you did in the last month was probably what did it so you know the next time around do a little less in the month leading up to it because we're like you know pexton biceps obviously we're not programming or at least i'm not um super maximal eccentric stuff i don't think that's a good use of time and it's you know a little more dicey i would say than i would like obviously what are you going to do like a super maxi centric on like a bench press or chest press it's not a realistic thing to do for the most part um i don't know so i wouldn't go about it that way i would just go about the programming end of things by managing um the volumes and the frequencies just a few sets a few times a week especially like you said in stretch position stuff so if you want to do maybe a little more volume with more contracted position focused work um if you want to volumize but otherwise yeah just keep it minimal make sure you're recovering um and that's you know about the best you can do because i don't at least that i've seen and i've i mean i've had a couple you know minor strains over the years they never come about when i really feel anything beforehand i don't notice anything myself and then they just kind of go so you know you're not going to have an indicator that your program is shitty um until you have the big uh the big thing that nails you so
Speaker 1yeah i think that's the important thing it's about program volume management of stretch positions i mean that's that's different from just programming volume in general so i think this is an important distinction so um when we're talking about volume management for muscles and trying to stay under the uh kind of um level of volume that we can recover from so i've talked about this in the context of bodybuilding so i do three sets three times a week that's totally doable you can do four or five sets twice a week again totally doable most of the time with most people doing say you know kind of moderate loads to failure uh if you bring down the kind of rep range and start training with slightly heavier loads start leaving rep and reserve you can kind of do a little bit more this is not what we're talking about that's that is muscle damage for the purposes of avoiding um accumulating uh muscle damage over time and ending up suppressing your recruitment because of cns fatigue and suppressing your tension because of the damage and other calcium unrelated team mechanisms what we're talking about here is a specifically different thing from that it's the accumulated volume um and recovery time that you need for training with stretched position stuff so that's its own thing and it comes into play with muscles that are at risk of this particular uh kind of strain injury which in strength training the pecs and the biceps and then sported mainly the hamstrings and probably you know kind of um the rectum but ultimately what we're saying here then is that um we've if people are doing high volumes or stretch position if people are doing high volumes straight away you've got to think about this but if you're doing high volumes you're off the end of the kind of volume recovery uh sort of curve then look at the number of stretch position exercises you're doing for the for the pecs and the biceps now pecs you always can really stretch position stuff for the uh if you're doing pressing most of the time whereas the biceps you can kind of manipulate that a little bit um you know in ways that are probably helpful but um you know fundamentally uh you know you can get work around things if you're doing bodybuilding exercises for the for the biceps what's interesting on the um on the peck side i think is that a lot of bench press programs and i've talked to uh quite a few um sort of bench press um coaches so like powerlifters who specialize in the bench press and even some coaches who are a little bit more experienced in the field of power olympic weightlifting which is you know bench press specific and what's really interesting is they actually do a ton of reps i mean it just tends to be something that is associated with success in that particular lift it's like they have to do a lot of repetitions to to make progress and there's various different approaches and i've i've talked to as i say quite a few of them and they've many of them very brilliant coaches and some of them will use velocity based stuff to try and kind of manage their volume in that way and to try and get high quality reps uh in in a way that is you know a lot more efficient and a lot more you know kind of minimizing the fatigue and minimizing reps aren't really doing anything others have gone down various different routes of using different variations um there's a whole clusters i mean this whole group of different approaches i think are very very cool to think about and they're very creative people um so ultimately given that bench press does require that high kind of or doesn't seem to require i'm not saying it requires but is the successful coaches i've seen tend to have used high volumes i'm not saying that that's definitely physiological say i'm observing this practically in the people that i talk to i talk to some pretty pretty cool
Speaker 2people yeah in the natural powerlifting world it's definitely much more common to see higher volumes i mean even coupled with higher frequencies honestly so most of them just all the successful ventures you know smaller weight classes especially um you'll notice
Speaker 1definitely higher volumes and frequencies so i do think that this is worth thinking about in terms of a risk management strategy because if you're having to do that kind of volume just because that it sort of fits your model of success in that sport and then obviously then that becomes a risk factor
Speaker 2yeah you can do i mean i've seen guys do they'll do you know maybe like one to two days on their main bench press and then like a midweek day or it's something like a tempo bench um something with like much lighter loads farther from failure things like that um currently how my bench routine is set up actually which is uh quite nice quite comfortable um you know people have seen ben bench press four five six days a week generally a lot of it is a million miles from failure and maybe you know next in they'll have a a close grip day or i guess like a long pause day um things like that sometimes block pressing and all that you do definitely see quite quite a bit more i think variety thrown in and you know like you said maybe just the risk management aspect while
Speaker 1still getting like practice on the lift i think and i think that's it's a really complicated problem to solve because you you want that uh kind of crossover to the main lift which obviously has a very clear stretch position which you you know precisely where your risk is you don't want to be doing a billion reps in that position but at the same time you don't want to be doing reps that are not doing anything so so yeah so you kind of you're kind of in that zone where you're looking for strategies like as i say velocity-based training where you're doing very fast repetitions with you know kind of a lighter load i'm not saying it's a light load but it's a lighter load um you know you're doing um you're doing maybe a sort of partial range of motion stuff either you know pin presses or or kind of off blocks whatever you know you're doing maybe i mean even seeing people playing around with with with blood flow restriction stuff you know basically uh you can do blood flow restriction on the triceps and it will actually slow the whole lift down so yeah around that kind of thing and i think those those kind of creative approaches definitely worth exploring when you've got a problem that is this kind of um fundamental where you you're trying to make progress in the lift and actually you just that the lift requires a stretch position force production you're like well okay so what am i doing here yeah we get there so so i think that's it's it's a very interesting problem to try and solve so yeah so i guess um um in addition to the people that i already talked to about this problem if you're out there coaching people and you have thought about this problem as well then please do drop me a line and tell me what you're doing it'd be really interesting to hear what other people are doing because as i said i think there's a lot of creative people in this particular part of the strength and conditioning community doing some very cool stuff um so be interesting to see what they're doing but yeah i think it's it's probably the hardest one out of the three to really kind of work biceps is easy because you just do
Speaker 2alternate a stretch position day short position day yeah you can do you know maybe one stretch position movement and then two shorter it's it's really not that hard to do so yeah it's not if you don't you really don't want to tear your ship you can just do doesn't hit a very long muscle length yeah it's
Speaker 1basically uh you know kind of just don't do silly volumes and be right um but that's that i think that's what it comes down to is that um you know muscle strain injury has been i think misunderstood because very quickly i won't go on a huge rant here because i'm i'm aware that we're running up against time but very very quickly one of my biggest frustrations um insofar as i have frustrations but one of my biggest uh kind of frustrations in in strength and conditioning community or fitness industry in general is that people over complicate stuff that isn't complicated and they ignore where the actual complications really are and i think this is a perfect example so muscle strain injury if you actually want to understand it it is a little bit complicated it took me about kind of 15 minutes to explain it at the beginning of this podcast so it is actually complicated um but once you understood it it's actually really easy how to work around it it's just don't do silly volumes of stretch position exercises that's it um yeah but getting to that but people want to make the the bit that's not complicated they want to make it complicated they want to go oh no but his arm was in this position right here and he was doing this and i'm like guys you are making stuff up yeah you're making it crazy it's not real you know um but that's because they haven't done the reading and they haven't figured out actually how the uh the strain injury injury works in the first place so yeah just an insight into um how i look at the world or the world but the fitness industry um that's kind of the lens that i look through is i i see complexity where other people don't see it um or i think it genuinely lies and i see people making complex uh things uh explanations up for uh actually very simple problems and this is a perfect example anyway um speaking of which i know you didn't have any notice uh this time uh to give us examples of things that people do which are not probably ideal solutions for strain injury prevention but do you see anybody making claims for preventing i bet you do don't you try to give us examples that aren't like obvious to the person so we don't kind of
Speaker 2upset anybody i mean well if you're looking at like uh you know we're kind of talking about people going the the whole like biomechanical route of it and looking at like the specific point of injury there's there's a whole group of people um that are all about you know doing things with like your oh yeah this is what you said last time yeah this is yeah um you know if you they're they're the opinion that if you're pressuring towards the inside edge of your foot like things in your ankle and your knee and everything you're just going to tear to pieces you know your you know ankle bones in a certain position and this that and the other thing that everything in your lower body is just going to blow up um you know all kinds of very very uh things like that i see um so this is like the
Speaker 1people who were you're talking about last time who tried to um promote super high super unstable exercises because so like the single leg squat variations and rdl variations yeah they'll have people squatting with their
Speaker 2feet in a very you know like i guess a supinated foot position you know gripping either end other side of like a wedge board and squatting like that and you know saying that that's gonna prevent injuries and in the calf the quad this that and the other thing um that's a big one it's i i see those guys all the time we've gotten in arguments with a few and i just i can't really engage because i don't know if i'm going to be able to do that i don't know if i'm going to be able to do that because you know when i go do anything obviously or an athlete does it looks nothing like what they demonstrate is the appropriate technique to not get injured so yeah
Speaker 1just right amazing i think this is just that persistent belief that somehow practicing a movement in a gym will kind of transfer to a completely different scenario in the sporting context it just doesn't you know you can't transfer coordination like that it doesn't work
Speaker 2no amazing i guess you know one of the other things i see a lot is uh people telling athletes that they should train in the gym with with lighter loads because heavier loads are gonna put them at risk not only of injury in the gym but be worse for recovery for the field for the mat for things like that and then because they're not recovered etc they'll be at a higher risk for injury and
Speaker 1you know a match a game things like that well if you take that to the extreme like i mean if they're not recovered etc they'll be at a higher risk for injury and you know a match a game things they're doing like dozens and dozens and dozens of sets then okay fine and if you're genuinely comparing it with light loads in a power training context if you say if you're comparing high high volume heavy training with lower volume power training then sure yeah i mean yeah that's gonna
Speaker 2properly and just but if you're programming the way we program loads exactly the usual way they're going about it is still using like lower um lower weights and higher reps oh well then that's the opposite yeah exactly and i see that a lot and i think that's a really good point and i think even um worked with uh uh she was a former track sprinter and she said in her track career same thing they were doing like you know four sets of 12 like right about the failure on most exercises and things like that and i was like that is absolutely not what you want to be doing and then she said her whole team constantly was was beat up um things were injured things were not
Speaker 1feeling good that's exactly what i would expect with that kind of like so easy to look at that
Speaker 2and be like well that is why if you guys are getting injured that's precisely the reason so yeah i you get a lot of that and i can't it's still the the whole idea that people have that light loads are more recoverable and somehow going to be great for tendons and all these things so
Speaker 1this actually popped up last year when i was kind of really making the point that there's a big difference in recovery time between training with a couple of sets of heavy loads versus a couple of sets of light loads to failure and and a couple of people dug out two studies which i've since done infographics of um which is a couple of sets of heavy loads and a couple of sets of light loads which showed that light loads cause less fatigue than heavy loads but those two studies were power training studies so i i read those yeah so and they were they were literally kind of just throwing these abstracts around and it was clear that they'd never read either of the studies i mean these are fitness influencers who are well-known people you know and they were kind of quite happy to throw these out and clearly they've not read either of them but basically the two studies yeah very very clear that yeah if you kind of use a lighter load and you are training miles away from training context so you do the same number of reps just half the weight then yeah you can end up with less fatigue i mean that's just kind of self-explanatory you're not getting any of the adaptions so you're not actually doing anything you want to do so um yeah i mean low volume of heavy uh kind of loads like we've been talking about programming through the entirety of this podcast is not going to be an issue if somebody's doing crazy volumes then sure and generally speaking though they're going to be doing crazy volumes of moderate or light loads which is even worse um yeah okay cool so yeah basically um it that's interesting i hadn't thought that people would go down the route of thinking that lighter loads were somehow going to be um you still see it it's mad so um okay um so yeah and then again the coordination thing which is always going to be kind of there i mean i don't know why people think that but they do cool um we've gone on long enough i think that's yeah those are the worst ones we can count um we will come back and next week probably and talk about tendon damage and um tendinopathy so we will see you then
PodcastTranscript AI