Happy PR Friday
Post your weekly PR’s or training updates to the comments. Be on the lookout for a nice Christmas post this weekend. Happy Festivus in the mean time!

Kyle S. asks on the Facebook Fan Page:
What are some cues I should keep in mind for teaching my wife (or anyone) to high bar squat? I’ve looked on YouTube but I never know who is full of shit.

Dear Kyle,

I briefly answered this in the wall thread, but figured it would be good for others to hear too. Irre-fucking-gardless of type of squat, the knees need to be shoved out. This will prevent hip impingement — a pinching of the femur and the ASIS (hip bone) that can prevent full ROM, prevent the lumbar from maintaining extension, and can pinch tissues like skin, fat, tendons, or muscles. There’s no point in explaining it further when a comprehensive article has already been written. So “knees out” is an important cue for any squatting, including the high bar squat.

The chest also needs to be up so that the thoracic spine is held in extension from the time the bar is un-racked until it is re-racked. I’ve been meaning to do a post on this for a while, because I see a lot of you fucking it up. Think “chest into chin”, which is the cue that means, “pull your chest up as high as you can, as if you were going to try and touch your chin without actually lowering the chin”.

The eyes need to be forward. Some look up, but this puts the cervical spine in extension and I’m not a fan of that. Eyes straight ahead will help maintain proper positioning throughout the entire spine.

Those last two things (the chest and eyes) are passive cues — the lifter shouldn’t have to think about them at all because they should be automatic every time. Assuming “knees out”, “chest to chin”, and the eye positioning is all correct (or at least the passive cues are automatic), then “heels” can be cued. That’s the cue to imply “drive the heels out of the bottom” in order to prevent any forward torso inclination during the ascent as a result of shifting the weight to the balls of the feet.

And for fuck’s sake, if you’re trying to high bar squat without weightlifting shoes then that’s the first thing to correct. Here’s the gear post.

Continue reading →

Here are some vids to entertain you before tomorrow’s Q&A post.

This is a great vid of Donny Shankle lifting. He jerks from blocks all the way up to 225kg, then hang clean and jerks up to 200kg (the latter is a PR). Then there’s some good fun after all that — watch until the end.

Continue reading →

My mate in Australia, Shannon Green (owner of Warrior Performance – website and Facebook fan page), competes in strongman with his mates Stuart and Shane. They are all great guys. Shannon is a real sharp guy and has spent a lot of time studying many different aspects of physical performance. He has made, collected, or bought the majority of the implements he would need for strongman training, and I asked him to throw together some information on how to train for it.

Check out this video from when Tom and I visited Shannon’s training dungeon.

This first post pertains to what strongman is and what some basic requirements are. A second post will put it all together into a programming template.
Continue reading →

Movement on Earth is dependent on articulation with the ground. Human locomotion occurs because our body applies force with the feet into the ground and all motion, athletics, and training are dependent on how efficiently this occurs. Despite fast improvements in performance in recent history, there has been an equal increase in dysfunction in the average body.

Duck Footed
I’ve always hated when people walk duck footed because it looks lazy, unnatural, and inefficient. I’ve noticed that I see it a lot in people who don’t have an athletic background. Dancers often do it because they are taught to be externally rotated in the hip constantly. It often results in collapsing the arch via ‘navicular drop’– the navicular is just a bone behind the base of the big toe on the inside of the foot and this term merely means it has dropped to the floor because of a lack of an arch (see picture below). Going barefoot or wearing flip flops a lot can also cause arch issues. Walking duck footed, or externally rotated in the hip, can also result in excessive loading of the hips instead of distributing the load evenly throughout the entire leg, hip, and trunk. Choosing good footwear can help support proper foot alignment. Ingrown toenail better fitting footwear is also something to consider when thinking about overall foot health.

Continue reading →

I’m interested in looking at information from female lifters. I’ve been observing the difference between the Volume and Intensity Days in the Texas Method for a while. Recently I started thinking in terms of percent instead of absolute weight; reducing the Volume Day weight to a certain percent of the Intensity Day weight is more instructive than aiming for a discrepancy between the weight lifted.



This led me to start thinking about the differences between female and male lifters. The neuromuscular efficiency of a female lifter is lower than a male’s. In other words, her nervous system cannot utilize motor units as well as a males. The neuron will innervate fewer muscle fibers compared to a male; it’s a result of different sex hormones and characteristics. This means that a female is not capable of lifting her true absolute strength — what her muscle fibers are actually capable of — because it’s always limited by the nervous systems ability to innervate muscle fibers (AKA neuromuscular efficiency).

This means that a girl’s 1RM is relatively lower and as a result she can perform multi-rep sets at a higher percentage of her actual max than a guy. If I can press 240, then I might be able to double 228, or 95% of my max. A girl might be able to do as many as five reps with 95% of her max.

To get more data points, I’d like the females to answer a few questions. Please forward these questions to any friends you have that lift (even periodically in CrossFit).

1. List the 3 rep maxes (3RMs) of all the lifts you have data on. For example, if you don’t have data for bench, then omit it. If the weight is merely your best triple and not a true 3RM, please indicate this*.

2. List the 5RMs of all the lifts you have data on. If the weight is merely your best set of five and not a true 5RM, please indicate this*.

3. List the 1RMs of all the lifts you have data on. These 1RMs should be within three months of the above numbers.

4. List the set/rep scheme of your recent and/or current program. If you primarily perform fives or triples, point that out. If a girl has only done fives, then her lack of adaptation to singles would explain an artificially low 1RM.

*If you are able to perform this set more than once in the same training session, it is by default not a repetition max since repeating it means it wasn’t a representation of maximal ability.
Note: If you don’t have exact 3RMs or 5RMs (i.e. your best squat is 180×4), then list the closest number.