Movement Science - The Fit Ethos

Time Under Tension Is A Scam

Lately if you follow any “science backed” fitness coach or influencer they’re all saying that time under tension for muscle hypertrophy is outdated and you’re an idiot if you still believe in it.

But is it really fake? No. But, yeah it kind of is. It’s a bit complicated but since no one actually explains anything past their condescending POVs, I’ll do it here.

If you prefer to watch and listen to a video, here is everything in this article in this YouTube video:

Historically Inaccurate

For those unfamiliar, time under tension has long been proposed as the mechanism of muscle growth and hypertrophy. In a nutshell, when you are training for hypertrophy, keeping the muscles under tension for extended periods of time is the main mechanism of stimulating muscle growth.

The problem with time under tension is that time is the greatest factor being given attention in that equation, but no one has ever really found the critical threshold for how long a set should last for optimal hypertrophy. Even worse, it fails to specify how much tension. Is it time under a little tension? Moderate tension? High tension?

In fact, research keeps finding more and more evidence that keeps putting time under tension under more and more scrutiny.

They’ve found that people can achieve the same significant muscle growth with 5×5, which is nowhere near the traditional range for hypertrophy, just as someone doing like 3×8-12 or even 20 reps, which is more the traditional “bodybuilding” range.

Numerous studies show that you can achieve significant hypertrophy with very low rep sets like 3-5 reps and with very high rep sets like up to 50 reps. They even found that you can achieve about the same level of hypertrophy with 30% of your max as with about 80% of your max.

So what on earth is going on here?

Before we break down the research and what it means for time under tension, let’s at least gather up what we know about muscle growth.

The 3 Requirements For Hypertrophy

Muscle hypertrophy generally needs 3 things:

We know that it takes mechanical tension. The greater levels of mechanical tension in the muscle, the greater number of motor units and larger motor units are recruited, which is essential for muscle growth.
We know that it takes effort aka reaching some level of volitional fatigue. In crude terms we need to create some sort of environment of metabolic distress within the muscle to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and the other cascading anabolic events in the body. This also allows for greater recruitment of motor units as fatigue sets in, similar to principle 1. Just a side bar. The metabolic stress theory is also being scrutinized as well, as more evidence emerges to show that metabolic stress may not have as much impact on muscle growth as we once thought but that’s a topic for another day.
We also need some level of training volume. We can’t just do 1 set and call it good.

So now that we’ve established those three criteria, let’s at least summarize the findings from these studies. I’ll have links to the studies and reviews down the description below if you’re interested in reading them.

The Studies Summarized

Taken as a whole, here are what those studies have found.

You can achieve significant muscle hypertrophy with both low repetitions and high repetitions.
You can achieve significant muscle hypertrophy with a wide range of intensities from 30% of your 1RM to 80% or even higher.
Generally, taking the sets to or close to volitional fatigue aka failure seems to be a prerequisite for any of the rep ranges and intensity ranges to be effective. In fact, while achieving failure is not required or even recommended for strength gains, training at least into the ballpark of failure, around 4 reps in reserve or even less, seems to have a significant positive effect on hypertrophy gains. There are great bits of variability in this data as well as a lot studies having shown that training to failure is not a requirement for muscle growth, but the data does learn towards greater effort = greater gains.
You need to do more than a single set. Yes, that was a finding in one of the studies.
If you are using moderate loads, you don’t need to do as many sets, around 2-3 seemed to be sufficient. If you are using heavier loads, more sets were required to achieve similar levels of hypertrophy. In my little intuitive leap, this is likely due to ensuring that similar volumes and workloads are achieved. However, there was great variability in the data as some studies showed that there was no significant increase in hypertrophy with increasing the number of sets per week while others showed a strong dose response relationship to volume and muscle mass, meaning for every added set, there was an increase in hypertrophy. However, the data does lean towards the idea that there is a ceiling to the number of sets you should do on a practical basis.

Now, there is a lot more to be learned from these papers so I highly encourage you to go through and read them yourself.

A lot of that turns a lot of what we theorized about resistance training on its head, including the idea of specific rep ranges only suiting specific goals. You know, 1-5 reps is good for strength, 8-12 is optimal for hypertrophy, and any more than 12 is only for endurance. It’s what every fitness professional learns at some point and it turns out that it doesn’t even scratch the surface. It turns out the hypertrophy rep range might be all rep ranges

And it also seems to put time under tension under great scrutiny. Like I mentioned earlier, time under tension places an emphasis on the TIME aspect of lifting during a set but the plethora of evidence that we just went over shows that it’s way overvalued. In fact, a study by Brad Shoenfeld showed intentionally making the reps extremely slow, as in 10 seconds per rep, was not favorable for hypertrophy. If time under tension was really the primary factor in hypertrophy, very slow training should work, but it doesn’t.

But let’s not throw out the entire concept.

A New Perspective: Tension Vs Time

A better way to look at this isn’t time under tension.

We can reframe it as tension vs time and it’s an inverse relationship.

We also know that effort is a big factor in hypertrophy training, so we can insert it as

tension vs time = effort

That’s not a real equation I’m not great at math.

So as tension goes up, meaning increased intensity via heavier weights or purposefully creating more tension in the muscle, time as in reps to fatigue will naturally go down. As tension goes down, time or reps to fatigue will naturally go up.

By the way, even I’m not a huge fan of this equation that I just came up with because it still overemphasizes time.

Volitional fatigue is important. Absolutely none of this matters if you are taking it easy and stopping your sets far short of fatigue.

Actually, maybe I should write it like,

tension + effort to volitional fatigue = hypertrophy

The important thing here is effort and taking the sets closer to failure, but even then this isn’t a perfect relationship because as we approach the extremes of this relationship, we run into some issues.

For example, I’ve never really heard of anyone gaining a ton of muscle using sets of 1 or 2 reps with extremely heavy weights despite what we learned today, nor do I really hear of anyone gaining a ton of muscle using really light weights like 15% of your 1RM. And beyond that there’s the practical problems like burning out with a prolonged program of extremely heavy and high volume training, potential joint problems from excessively heavy training, and on the other end of the spectrum, your workouts will last forever if you’re only doing sets of 50 or more.

So in real life, it will probably always come back to moderate parameters.

So let’s take a moment to recap some of the lessons learned here and have some practical takeaways to apply to your own training.

Top Scientific and Practical Takeaways

You can achieve muscular hypertrophy with a wide range of intensities and rep ranges.
No matter which level of intensity or rep range you choose, effort and taking each set close to volitional fatigue or close to failure seems to be favorable.
Time under tension has historically overemphasized the importance of TIME.
Time or reps to fatigue has an inverse relationship to the amount of tension used, meaning high levels of tension will require less time to fatigue while lower levels of tension will require more time to fatigue. In any case, training close to failure, about 4 reps or less in reserve, is favorable for either situation.
You cannot escape the laws and requirements of muscle hypertrophy, which are mechanical tension, effort to fatigue, and volume.
As far as total volume goes, it seems like you can get away with doing about 3-4 sets of an exercise per workout and achieve good gains. But, there is data to show that doing more sets total per week has a benefit for hypertrophy.

So how do we transform this into something actionable for our own training?

First of all, it means that we can insert more variation into our training without fear of losing out on potential hypertrophy gains.
Second, you can start tailoring your rep ranges to each exercise depending on what typically feels good and makes logical sense for the kind of exercise you are doing.

So here is the way I organize my workouts and rep ranges. Side note, I usually do an upper body/ lower body split.

For your main, big compound lifts like the squat, bench, deadlift, and overhead press, focus on doing sets around the 3 to 6 or even maybe up to the 8 rep range. 4-6 sets will compliment these rep ranges well.

For your assistance lifts which may still be compound lifts but typically “smaller” exercises like lat pull downs, dips, rows, dumbbell variations, split squats, RDLs, etc, work around the 5-8 or 5-12 rep range. 3-4 sets for each of these exercises will likely work well.

For the smaller accessory exercises like bicep curls, tricep extensions, knee extensions, hamstring curls, lateral raises, etc, exercises that are typically a bit cumbersome to load incredibly heavily and maintain good technique, perform your sets at higher rep ranges like around 8-15 reps. 2-3 sets here will likely work really well. Now, that doesn’t seem like much but considering that these smaller accessory exercises are typically performed after the main lifts and assistance exercises towards the end of the workout, 2-3 sets should feel sufficient.

In all of these ranges, remember that you need to put in effort and take each set to relative fatigue.
And finally third, As far as rep tempo goes, we know that you don’t need to purposely make each rep take longer for better gains. However, a sensible way to standardize your reps and ensure you are creating adequate mechanical tension and taking advantage of what both eccentric and concentric contraction have to offer, a sensible approach is to control the eccentric portion of the lift through like a 1 or 2 count, and lift through the concentric portion as quickly and as powerfully as possible without breaking technique.

So I hope that you found this article helpful or at least thought provoking in some way. Time under tension has been a long standing concept but as new information comes out, the intelligent thing to do as movement professionals is to learn from it and apply it to our own practice or training.

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions, put them down below.

This Exercise May Save Your Life

She struggled to stand up from her chair. Once on my exam table, it took all of her strength to roll from her side to her stomach. She needed help to return back to her side, then back to a sitting position. During our initial chat, she informed me that she fell a few nights ago next to her bed and couldn’t pull herself back up. She had to wait on the floor until morning when her son in law heard her calling for help.

Her diagnosis? Nothing in particular. I was initially called a few weeks prior to help with her low back pain, which we had resolved, and now I was asked to help with balance and strengthening.

An endless number of pathologies and problems can plague our elder years, but none more commonly degrades day to day living of the elderly as fragility and weakness.

Sarcopenia and Fall Risk

Sarcopenia is age-related loss of muscle mass (sarco: muscle, penia: little) that can start in our 40s. By the time we are 80, we can potentially have lost 50% of our muscle mass. It’s a much bigger problem than we think.

Age-related frailty cause elderly individuals to be less steady, unbalanced, and unconfident in their ability to go out and navigate the world. It can cause people to fall more often. Secondary issues to sarcopenia often can include osteoporosis, metabolic syndrome, sleep disruptions, and greater chances of all-cause mortality.

Add on a sedentary lifestyle that often leads to sarcopenia, and you may end up with sarcopenic obesity, characterized by high body fat percentages combined with low levels of muscle mass. The result is an individual who has an even harder time moving because of the extra weight on their frame.

All of this creates the perfect storm of difficulty standing up from a chair (or the floor, god forbid if they fall), difficulty navigating stairs, recovering from a stumble, and an increased risk of falling. Sarcopenia is a known major contributor to falling, and falling can cause serious medical complications.

So what do we do? If sarcopenia is the culprit and root cause of many of these problems, we must aim to slow or reverse this process.

The Squat/Sit to Stand

If there is one exercise I can prescribe for the above patient vignette, it is the squat or sit to stand. It is the exercise that addresses as many problems as possible with a single movement.

The gut reaction may be to overhaul this individual’s entire lifestyle, but we know that drastic changes are not sustainable unless they are on board. Most people will not be agreeable to a full lifestyle change.

Tests that involve the sit to stand have been shown to effectively measure global muscle strength of the legs, hips, and trunk. It is almost the perfect exercise.

The sit to stand is excellent because it is simple and easily scalable. If it gets too easy, you either hold a weight in your hands or progress to staggered stance, single leg, or free standing squat variations.

Sit to Stand Technique

To perform the sit to stand, sit in a chair where your knees are bent to at least 90 degrees. Scoot towards the front of the chair and bring your heels back behind the knees. Lean forward, and stand upwards by pushing your feet straight into the floor. Preferably, your hands should be held in front of you for balance or crossed in front of your chest.

*Scoot forward, heels back, lean forward. Stand straight up.*

The most common mistake with the sit to stand is sitting too far back and having the heels too far forward. This will cause you to swing your torso forward, using momentum to stand. The sit to stand should purely be a vertical movement, not a forward movement.

*Sitting back too far in the chair will cause you to use momentum or fall back into the chair.*

If the basic sit to stand is too difficult, sit on top of a pillow or use a taller chair to decrease the range of motion. Once you are able to perform at least 3 sets of 10 repetitions, decrease the height of the chair.

Progressing the Sit to Stand

There are numerous ways to progress the sit to stand. My preferred way is to have the individual hold a weight close to their chest like a goblet squat.

*Holding a weight to your chest is an excellent way to progress the sit to stand.*

Another way is to stagger the stance, effectively turning the exercise into a 1.5 legged sit to stand.

*Put one foot forward, turning the sit to stand into a 1.5 legged exercise.*

The natural progression from here is a single legged sit to stand.

*Lift one foot off the floor and stand.*

From here, you can progress to the free standing squat

The Squat Technique

Stand with a shoulder-width stance. Apply a slight external rotation force through the feet (as if you are trying to rotate your feet outwards but don’t let your feet actually move). This will engage the glute (buttock) musculature. Initiate the movement by pushing your hips slightly back, bend through the knees, and squat down over your feet. You will likely be leaning forward to some degree. If you have long legs, you will probably be leaning forward to a greater degree. This is fine.

Maintaining the external rotation force through your legs, push yourself back up into the starting position. Note that if you have uninjured knees, it is perfectly safe to allow your knees to travel past your toes.

Battle Frailty

Ideally, the sit to stand or squat will be a part of a larger, more comprehensive strength program. However, we already know that large changes to a lifestyle unfamiliar with exercise are unsustainable.

Most of my patients don’t want dozens of exercises to choose from. They want to be shown a few things they can do to maintain their strength and balance. The sit to stand or squat is almost always one of them.

Following the inclusion of this exercise, every single one of my patients and clients score better in strength and functional testing. They also report being able to walk faster, having better balance, navigating stairs easier, and being more confident in their day to day movements.

It is no coincidence that people from certain areas of the world live longer. Individuals from Okinawa, Japan, historically have always sat on the floor. As a result, they need to perform a full range squat numerous times a day. These people regularly live past 90 and 100, all the while staying active and mobile.

Studies have shown that strength training alone decreases all-cause mortality. One specific study showed that grip strength is a reliable predictor of longevity. The problem of elderly frailty is huge, and strength training is the main weapon that we must utilize to combat it.

As the population grows older each year, this problem is only going to get worse. We can start by just doing one exercise.

I Forbid You To Max Out During Every Workout

My wife and I often let friends and budding gym goers lift with us. I don’t mind. I enjoy having a good community of lifters and I love teaching others about lifting. One friend got into lifting about a year ago and loves it. He is still a relative novice but you can’t beat his enthusiasm.

He tends to come over on leg days. He’s obsessed with the squat.

“I hit 295 on the squat a two days ago. I’m going to try and hit that again today,” he said.

Weekly Roundup: Best Articles and Books on Strength, Fitness, Life

Another week, another set of fantastic, info-packed literature!

Sorry about the ridiculous stock photo for the article pic…

Six Sessions of Sprint Interval Training Improves Running Performance in Trained Athletes
Koral J, Oranchuk DJ, Herrera R, Millet GY. Six Sessions of Sprint Interval Training Improves Running Performance in Trained Athletes. J Strength Cond Res. 2018;32(3):617-623. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000002286
The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40
This book outlines a solution to a pervasive problem of aging: fragility brought on by the loss of strength and muscle mass. Lifting weights and strength training is for everyone. If you are a budding trainer or clinician, this should be required reading.
Association Between Purpose in Life and Objective Measures of Physical Function in Older Adults
Kim ES, Kawachi I, Chen Y, Kubzansky LD. Association Between Purpose in Life and Objective Measures of Physical Function in Older Adults. JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(10):1039-1045. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2145
Correlation is not causation. However, we know that older adults who have a sense of purpose in their life tend to live longer and happier lives. This study explores whether having a sense of purpose in life is associated with improved physical function.
Effect of Weighted Exercises on Bone Mineral Density in Post Menopausal Women A Systematic Review
Zehnacker, Carol Hamilton PT, DPT, MS1; Bemis-Dougherty, Anita PT, DPT, MAS2. Effect of Weighted Exercises on Bone Mineral Density in Post Menopausal Women A Systematic Review. Journal of Geriatric Physical Therapy 30(2):p 79-88, August 2007.
More research is needed, but there is good hope for those who have osteoporosis or osteopenia. There is evidence to suggest that heavy weight training exercises can increase bone density in post menopausal women.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
What matters in the end? Medicine has performed miracles in improving and extending life, but even the experts often do not know how to talk about the end. Being Mortal explores the successes and failures of medicine in managing end of life matters. Perhaps the ultimate goal is not unnecessarily push away death, but to ensure that we live a good life until the very end.

Do Warm Up Sets Count Toward Total Sets?

This question will inevitably cross a beginner’s mind at some point. If a program says to do 5 sets of 5 on the incline bench press, do the warm up sets count towards those 5 sets?

Simple. No. You only start counting the 5 sets once you get up to your working weight. You can take as many warmup sets as you need, although I will recommend that you don’t get excessive about it.

A sample progression will look like this. Let’s say someone is performing their sets at 225 lbs on the incline bench press.

3 New Ways to Progressive Overload

Progressive overload is the foundational basis of strength training. It means that you need to gradually increase the intensity of your training over time. Essentially, make sure that you’re doing more now than you did in the past.

The most common strategy to achieve progressive overload is to increase the weight that you are lifting by a few pounds. The problem is that most advice ends there. If it was that simple, the world will be filled with 1000 pound squatters and 500 pound bench pressers.

Simply adding weight to the bar is a finite strategy. Since we tend to grow muscle and increase strength at a relatively slow rate, just adding weight to the bar will cause us to progress too quickly and hit a plateau.

We must expand our strategies to achieve progressive overload. Here are 3 ways to progressively overload your training that does not involve adding weight.

1. Increase training volume

Training volume is essentially the total amount of work you are doing. While there are multiple ways to determine training volume, it is often calculated by looking at the total number of sets and reps you are performing.

For example, if you are doing 5 sets of 5 reps of a particular exercise (5×5), your total volume will be 25 reps.

If you wanted to calculate the total work of a particular exercise, you will determine how many times you are lifting a particular weight. This is often unnecessary but provides insight about the intensities that are being achieved with certain exercises.

For example, if you lift 200 pounds on the squat for 5×5, you will calculate 5x5x200. This is 5000 pounds of total work.

Increasing your total training volume or work performed is one of the best ways to achieve progressive overload. Simply adding a rep to each set will drastically increase training volume.

In our first example, if you did one extra rep per set, your training volume will be 5×6=30 total reps.

In the second example, your total work will be 200x5x6=6000 pounds of total work.

To implement this strategy, aim to increase your reps per set by one rep for a few weeks. Depending on the set/rep scheme, you may need to climb up to 8 or 10 reps per set. Once you can do the prescribed number of reps for all sets, then you will add some weight to the bar and begin the progression all over again.

Remember that adding weight isn’t the only way to become stronger. Doing more total work is more important. The added benefit is this will force you to slow down your progress to prevent hitting plateaus.

2. Increase training density

Training density is how much time it takes to perform a certain amount of work.

Imagine your typical leg workout session. How long does it take to perform? 45 minutes? 60 minutes? Now imagine if you deliberately took 3 hours to perform the same exact workout. No extra sets or exercises. How easy would that be? This is very LOW training density. Same workout, just performed over a very long period of time.

Now take the same exact workout and imagine trying to do it 10 minutes faster than before. You will be hustling and probably straining hard to get through all of the work. This is an example of HIGH training density.

If you are able to perform the same amount of work in less time, something about your fitness has to have improved.

Of course, this is another finite strategy to implement before it becomes impractical and possibly dangerous, but the point is to perform your training at a challenging pace.

3. Increase tension and improve technique

One of the critical principles of strength training is something called time under tension. It is essentially the total amount of time that a muscle is activated and creating tension. Muscle growth and strength is a direct consequence of time under tension. In general, longer bouts of time under tension tend to yield greater gains in muscle and strength (although this is a great generalization).

One overlooked part of time under tension is the amount of tension being produced. Lifting a heavier weight will naturally cause a muscle to create more tension. However, we can deliberately create more tension during an exercise by consciously tightening the working and stabilizing muscles.

Imagine performing a biceps curl with 20 pound dumbbells. Imagine casually curling them up and trying to expend as little energy on the movement as possible.

Now imagine curling the same 20 pound dumbbell but now brace your abs, squeeze your glutes, and stand tall. Pull your shoulders back. Grip the weights as hard as you can. Slow down the movement and try and actively flex the muscles harder as you lift the weights. In essence, try and make 20 pounds feel as difficult as possible.

This is a technique often employed by bodybuilders to maximize the amount of tension they are creating during any given exercise. Usually when we do this, we need to use impeccable technique to properly control the weights.

When we are intensionally increasing the amount of tension and improving technique, we naturally work harder during the exercise. This is another variation of progressive overload.

Expanding your toolkit

Never rely on just a single parameter to force progressive overload. The three strategies discussed here are simple to implement during every workout.

The pursuit of strength is a long journey. Slow but consistent progress is always favorable to rapid and unsustainable progress. Just focus on doing a little more each time you go into the gym.

1 Exercise That Will Bulletproof Your Hamstrings

The best way to treat a hamstring injury is to prevent it from happening. Once they happen, they become a real b**ch to rehabilitate. The best way to prevent injury is to make the muscle as strong as possible but adequately loading the hamstrings can be cumbersome and challenging if you don’t have regular access to a gym. This is where Nordic Hamstring Curls save the day. By their nature, they’re tremendously difficult and require no equipment.

Study after study has shown the value of Nordic hamstring curls in decreasing injury to the hamstrings.

This is exercise is so good that it’s consistently been shown to decrease the incidence of hamstring and knee injuries in populations particularly vulnerable to these by half. That is a hugely significant amount!

The Nordic Hamstring Exercise/Curl

The exercise is predominantly an eccentric muscle contraction, which is where most muscle damage and overload takes place.

You will need a partner or a solid place to wedge your foot.

Set up the exercise by kneeling on both knees. Your hips and torso will be upright. Your partner is going to hold down your feet with their hands on the back of your ankles/heels. Your partner should have their shoulders over your feet to make sure enough weight is applied.

Initiate the exercise by slowly lowering yourself to the floor by using your hamstrings. Try to approach the floor as slowly as possible. You will use your hands like a push up to absorb the impact at the floor. You can return to the starting position by either resetting the exercise or doing an explosive push up to hamstring curl your way back up.

Perform 3-5 sets of 5-10 repetitions.

Conclusions

Taking clues from weightlifting and sports medicine, they best way to make a muscle resilient and resistant to injury is to make it as strong as you can and train it with the greatest amount of tension as possible. Then you replicate game time scenarios with various drills.

The studies that showed the value of Nordic hamstring curls used the exercise in isolation with no other exercise program, but of course including the Nordic hamstring curl in a fully comprehensive program is the most optimal approach. However, if you for some reason had to choose just one exercise to do, this is it.

Mobility vs Stability in Strength and Fitness

People will often get caught up in the difference between mobility vs stability. They’ve become buzzwords in the fitness community, and if you’re not addressing them, then it may feel like something is being neglected.

But what on earth is mobility and what is stability? Most fitness coaches and trainers have a hard time differentiating the two and when they can, they have a hard time explaining why its so important to address.

So if these health nuts can’t even define these two concepts… Why is everyone so obsessed with them?

Let’s take some time to define mobility vs stability and explore the importance of each.

Mobility

Mobility is simply your ability to move.

In the most broad sense, it is an individual’s ability to move themselves through space. An elderly individual who has difficulty with bed mobility, standing, and walking is said to have compromised mobility. An individual who has no difficulties moving is said to have normal mobility.

In the fitness community, mobility has taken on a much more microscopic context. Mobility has become an individual’s range of motion and ability to attain certain positions for exercise or athletics.

Mobility is both active and passive range of motion, for good or for bad. While it is common to have too little mobility, it is also possible to have too much mobility and cross into the space of instability. This can happen when mobility is obsessively chased while strength is neglected. It’s also possible to have more passive range of motion than you can actively control.

mobility vs stability flexible hypermobility girl

Pathological hypermobility is a relatively rare problem that some individuals suffer from.

Two good examples of instability resulting from genetic disorders are Ehlers Danlos syndrome and Marfans syndrome, often characterized by hypermobility and fragility of connective tissue. These individuals can get injured very easily from seemingly trivial trauma due to the decreased strength of their connective tissues.

While most people will not have to worry about this level of hypermobility, it is a good demonstration that there is a limit to our mobility needs.

When it comes to mobility, you simply just need to ask yourself if you have the requisite ability to move to complete the task at hand.

Stability

Stability in the context of human movement is the ability to stop or control any unwanted movement. If you’re doing an overhead press, you don’t want the bar shaking uncontrollably and swaying in all directions. Your ability to control that excessive and unwanted movement is stability.

There are two types of stability, just like mobility. Active stability is the ability of your muscles to actively control and stop unwanted movement. Passive stability is the inherent stability resulting from structures like ligaments, bones, tendons, fascia, etc. We can appreciate how pathology such as Ehlers Danlos and Marfans can cause a massive lack of passive stability.

Truly pathological instability outside of traumatic injury and disease is very rare. When I hear someone say that they have an “unstable spine”, I always ask questions. True spine instability is a serious problem that most people don’t have. A weak set of abs is not an immediate precursor to an unstable spine.

Now, if you have weak abs and try and do heavy lifting, it may very well become the weak link in your lifting, but it doesn’t mean you’re “unstable”. Heavy exercise inherently requires a greater degree of stability to transmit force and control unwanted movements.

When it comes to stability, you need to ask yourself if you have the requisite strength to control your body and any weight you are moving.

Mobility vs stability: A spectrum of movement

Mobility and stability are not mutually exclusive concepts. You cannot work just one end of the spectrum and expect to perform optimally. I have many friends who are fantastic yoga practitioners who only ever did yoga and had a plethora of shoulder, hip, and back problems. Only once they started to incorporate strength training into their exercise regimen did those problems go away.

Tennis player serve stability vs mobility — Most overhead sports will require a high level of stability

A perfect example of mobility and stability working in tandem is in Olympic style weightlifting. These athletes need tremendous levels of mobility to achieve the requisite positions in the clean and jerk and snatch while having superhuman strength and stability to keep the weight under control.

Gymnasts are another great example. Gymnastics requires high levels of mobility and flexibility as well as stability and strength to perfectly control the athletes bodyweight through space. Have you seen how jacked gymnasts are?

We cannot simply pursue one while neglecting the other. Mobility and stability are equally important for any high level athlete.

A practical way to integrate both

I will always come back to lifting weights. Most people associate strength training with bulky, slow, and immobile individuals. This is far from the truth. Proper technique in weightlifting, powerlifting, and bodybuilding requires high levels of mobility. Simply controlling your way through full ranges of motion during most lifting exercises will improve mobility. Overhead presses require good shoulder mobility. Stiff legged deadlifts require great hamstring flexibility. A full squat incorporates full ranges of motion from the hips, knees, and ankles as well as requiring good shoulder mobility.

If you incorporate a few mobility drill during your warm up, you will have a well-rounded plan that tackles both mobility and stability.

So quit freaking out about spending hours and hours on one and stick with an intelligent plan for fitness. Mobility and stability will naturally be addressed.

Runners Should Lift Weights Part 2

In part 1, we explored common technical faults and injuries of running that can be remedied with strength training.

As mentioned in the previous post, running is a strenuous activity. Proper technique requires a certain level of strength.

In this post, we will go over the various performance gains runners can expect from strength training.

Improved energy efficiency/running economy

Running economy is essentially how much energy a runner expends at a certain pace. Multiple studies have shown that running economy improves with strength training. While the exact mechanism isn’t fully understood, we can make a few intuitive leaps.

First, an improvement in strength will decrease the perceived difficulty of all tasks. A stronger individual will find a given task easier than an individual who is weaker.

Second, an improvement in muscular strength and conditioning will improve energy use and efficiency. With decreased strain will come decreased energy usage. If the overall task of running becomes easier to perform, the overall energy expenditure is lowered.

Third, an improvement in strength will improve technical efficiency. Deviations in running technique caused by weakness will worsen running economy. Good technique exists for a reason: It is the intersection of optimal performance, energy efficiency, and injury prevention. As we deviate further from good technique, energy efficiency will plummet and injury risk rise.

To be sure, a systematic review and meta analysis (one of the highest levels of evidence) in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research confirms that strength training will greatly benefit running economy.

Improved Propulsion and Take Off

Running can be crudely described as your legs continuously pulling and launching you forward. The moment that your foot leaves the ground is the take off phase of running. The ability to propel your body forward takes tremendous strength and power.

Lifting weights will improve propulsion — *Now, no one actually runs like this but this image illustrates the importance of strong glutes and hammies for running. Do you think he would be able to do that with a pancake butt?*

If we improve the force output and power of the legs, we can vastly improve the take off phase of the running cycle. The glutes and hamstrings are the primary muscles responsible for forward propulsion. A program with a good variety of squats, deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, good mornings, hamstring curls, split squats, and box squats will be very beneficial here. In addition, a good mix of plyometrics will help with improving power.

Improved Management of Ground Reaction Forces

For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. When your foot strikes the ground, the ground needs to push back up into the foot. Think about running on solid ground versus running on a soft mattress. The mattress will push back with less force than the solid ground. This is called the ground reaction force.

Running produces tremendous amounts of ground reaction forces, 250% of bodyweight by certain measurements. Needless to say, if you don’t have the eccentric strength and tendon strength to manage this, then you are working much harder than you should and will likely get injured at some point.

Over striding technical fault — *The heel strike produces large amounts of ground reaction forces.*

The usual suspects for a good lower body strength program (squats, deadlifts, lunges, etc) will work well but if bounding, reaction, and eccentric strength are a problem, you should also do include a variety of plyometric exercises like skipping, broad jumps, jump roping, box jumps, and (for more advanced trainees) depth jumps.

One simple way to figure out if you need some help with managing and absorbing the ground reaction forces, perform the single leg hop test.

Hop forward as far as you can with one leg and land on the same foot. Do the same on the other side. If you can stick the landing without wobbling too much or losing your footing, you have good control and strength to manage the eccentric forces. If you are very wobbly, lose your footing, or there is a large discrepancy between your two legs, then you should probably spend some time lifting weights and jumping.

Lifting weights will improve all aspects of sports

As you can tell, lifting weights is not just for the meatheads and body builders. The myth that lifting weights will make you inflexible and slow needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. There is ample evidence to suggest that lifting weights will improve almost every aspect of athletics.

Remember this: A stronger human is harder to kill, harder to injure, and will outlast others who are weaker.

3 Common Running Injuries and Faults Lifting Weights Can Fix

Runners don’t lift. Lifters don’t run. I’m sure many of us have heard this dichotomy before, along with many other silly myths like lifting weights will make runners slower or inflexible.

This is silly nonsense.

Runners are missing out on a lot of potential gains in performance if strength training is neglected. This is because running is a relatively strenuous activity that requires a certain level of strength to tolerate.

Simply put, most people are not strong enough to effectively run with good technique.

Category: Movement Science