How To Become the Most Improved Lifter in Your Gym: A step-by-step guide
Whether it is a CrossFit gym, Orange Theory, Crunch, or private gym with personal training, you can take steps to take full advantage of your membership to achieve your goals. Taking an intentional approach to your training can pay dividends in the speed and depth of your gains early on. Follow along to learn how to systematically evaluate and train your deficiencies on the gym floor.
Step 1: Address mobility
Mobility comes first.
We need to have access to minimum range of motion requirements to exercise and perform with minimal risk to injury and to maximize our performance potential. Let’s use the squat for an example. If we lack hip internal rotation, external rotation, and flexion enough to stop us from achieving a full squat depth, then we will either increase our chances of injury to achieve parallel or reduce the gains we can get from that movement. If our hips run out of available motion early in the squat, we will achieve deep ranges only by increasing the motion at the pelvis as a whole and, therefore, create flexion at the lumbar spine. This directly increases the risk of low back pain and injury! If we listen to our mobility limitations and stop our squat short of full depth, we stop ourselves from getting to the most difficult point in the squat and prevent full recruitment of the involved muscles. This is limiting in strength gains and muscle hypertrophy which rely on achieving full muscle length for greatest adaptations. So, we can see how limited mobility increases injury potential while limiting performance.
But how can you work on mobility?
Well first, the training you are doing at the gym will already help in this regard, so keep it up! But as we know, we want to accelerate this process to help limit injury and pain and achieve greater performance sooner (quicker than your friends!). Here’s a few ways we can assess for hip mobility. This is not an exhaustive diagnostic evaluation, but we can at least have you collect a few data points at home. Take a look at the video below and see where you stand…
Hip Mobility
1. Hip flexion
2. Hip internal rotation
3. Hip External rotation
Shoulder mobility
1. Shoulder flexion (lat test)
2. Shoulder internal rotation
3. Shoulder external rotation
Thoracic spine mobility
1. Lumbar locked test
These tests focus on three significant regions in the body, but together still does not represent a comprehensive assessment. Reach out to contact@integratedrpc.com to learn more about the assessments we do at Integrated Rehab And Performance Center.
If you find limitations in any of these regions, here are a few ways to start making improvements in these areas.
Hip mobility
2. Hip 90/90 with medicine ball
Shoulder mobility
Thoracic rotation
2. FRC thoracic spine rotation
3. Quadruped banded thoracic spine rotation
Step 2: Address stability
As we begin improving our mobility, we should begin enhancing our ability to stabilize these joints and control the motion occurring at these joints. For this we need to work on stability. Stability, again, has an impact on pain and injury as well as performance. For example, if we are doing a barbell snatch or a shoulder overhead press, we need to create stability at the shoulder complex as a whole. We need the scapulas to move and rotate on the rib cage while the humorous slides and rotates in its articulation. We need the muscles of the shoulder complex to control this activity to create the motion in the appropriate degrees without allowing excessive motion. We need stability at the shoulder complex to create a stable surface for the primary movers at the shoulder to create enough force to lift the barbell. In the snatch, we need stability at the shoulder complex to prevent excessive motion in the catch and then maintain the overhead position as we stand the barbell up. Without the stability here, we are at increased risk for injury to the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and tissues of the shoulder like the labrum.
Similar concepts apply at the hip and knees in the squat. We need stability at the hip to control the motion of the knee. If our lateral hip muscles are not strong enough or we do not understand how to create the stability with these muscles, then we will often see excessive knee cave and increased forces upon the knee joint. Again, injury and performance are affected.
So how do we assess for stability? Testing for stability can be a bit more involved and getting properly evaluated by a medical professional is best. For you at home, the best thing you can do is snatch, squat, overhead press… do your normal lifts and consciously evaluate how stable you feel while recording and watching your lifts on your phone. In the squat, how well you can control your knees, pelvis (butt wink) and core (forward dipping in the transition in the bottom of the squat). In the overhead press, how much do your scapulas move and is it symmetrical on both sides (best evaluated with a professional). Do both sides rise at the same time? How does it feel in the bench press. Do you feel both scapulas equally, do both shoulders feel like they are creating force equally? Does the bar rise at the same rate on both sides? These are the next best ways to assess for stability at home.
What can you do to improve stability at home? Try these movements for the lower extremity, upper extremity, and core.
Lower extremity stability
3. Single leg in front side to side kettlebell swing
Upper extremity stability
Core Stability
Step 3: Integrate mobility and stability
This step is especially dependent on your performance and fitness goals. We want to help create a body that can produce strength and power in a full range of motion to improve your outcomes, allowing you to lift and train with greater intensity, more often, and with greater effect. Generally speaking, we want to incorporate explosive and plyometric movements that simulate our required tasks. I’ll give you two examples for this, the snatch and running performance.
Snatch
To work on improving the integration of our mobility and stability for the purpose of being a better snatcher, we can utilize the two drills below.
1. Heel elevated deep squat and press alternating
This drill uses and assists are mobility to get into a full deep squat. We then build on our core, hip, and shoulder complex stability to maintain an upright posture while pressing moderate weight slowly overhead, one arm at a time. We need to maintain that upright posture, again requiring thoracic spine mobility and stability, while pressing dumbbells straight overhead, requiring shoulder mobility and shoulder complex stability to do it.
This drill builds an explosive component into the overhead squat like the sntach does, but we can limit the skill components needed and focus on accumulating more time working on our deep overhead squat, the most difficult part of the snatch movement, balancing our use of mobility and stability.
Running and sprinting
If jogging, running, and short sprints are involved in your training, here is how we might transfer our mobility and stability improvements to this activity.
1. Hip lock training with the bent to straight knee calf raise
This exercise takes ankle mobility with hip and knee extension and coupled with hip strength and stability to incorporate them and improve inter-muscular coordination. The drives the hip lock position. The hip lock position is a hip and pelvis position represented by the working side pelvis being slightly lower than the opposite side pelvis due to the contraction of the working side glute and glute Medius muscles. These stabilize the hip and pull that side of the pelvis down. This is an essential position for effective sprinting and running performance, as well as injury prevention to the lateral hip muscles, tendons, and bursae common associated with endurance running and intense sprinting.
2. Depth drops to vertical jump
This drill helps to create a force absorption stimulus and force production requirement as is needed in running and jogging. We can also influence the development of the stretch shortening cycle and efficiency of the tendons in the lower extremity.
Again, these are just a few examples of drills that can be used for specific exercise examples. An involved goal setting discussion and history, thorough assessment, and specified hands on and exercise prescription will help create the ideal plan for you.
Conclusion
To take full advantage of your gym memberships and escalate the rate of your progress as much as possible, we need to assess and address your mobility and stability. We also need to make sure we are integrating these two components and translating it to the movements you perform during training. Take your gains and progress to the next level and prevent future pain and injury by taking a closer look at your mobility and stability as is required by your fitness activities and your goals!
-Dr. Nick DC, TPI, CSCS
If you would like to learn more about your body, pain, and performance, send Dr. Nick an email at contact@integratedrpc.com or call at (585)478-4379, or schedule a FREE discovery visit at Contact.
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