Maintaining Balance, Part Two

In my last article I addressed the subject of maintaining balance among your various muscles – a necessity for anyone who’s sincere about getting stronger. It’s important for another reason as well: preventing injuries.

If one area gets too far ahead of the others, weak spots are bound to reveal themselves. They always do, regardless of a person’s strength level. Even very advanced lifters like the top Olympic weightlifters and nationally ranked powerlifters have to pay close attention to balance.

The catch is, it’s not just the large groups that cause difficulties. Often it’s the smaller muscles that put you on the shelf. Pulling a biceps or a calf can be just as devastating to progress as tearing a quad.

The solution is to spend some time examining and reexamining your program to make certain you’re giving all the muscles and attachments proper attention – something that’s easier said that done. I like to have someone look over my program periodically. He doesn’t have to be an expert, but a second set of eyes may be able to spot a flaw I’ve missed simply because I do the routine over and over, and it’s become a habit.

Even when people make the effort to work all their major groups with equal intensity, one always moves ahead of the others. In most cases leg strength comes the fastest – partly because any good strength program gives priority to squats and the muscles involved have a tendency to respond quickly.

Then there’s the fact of individual difference. Two people who are the same age, weight and body type and have the same athletic ability and motivation will invariably progress quite differently. A prime reason is the levelers that each person gets as part of his or her genetic package.

After a few months of diligent strength training, the variances in strength in the major muscle groups become clearly defined. That’s the time to start making some adjustments in your program so the weaker groups don’t get too far behind. If, for example, you’ve added 150 pounds to your squat but only 40 to your power clean, you obviously have to make some changes to improve your back strength. The same idea holds true for upper-body strength, but keep in mind that the muscles of the shoulders and chest are the slowest to mature, so gains come more slowly. That’s true especially for teenagers. Older athletes who are just getting started in strength training generally do well with upper-body exercises simply because their bodies have matured to a greater extent than teenagers’ bodies.

How do you adjust your routine? By shifting your emphasis to the weaker group. The best method is to give it priority. Put it first in your workouts and throw in some extra auxiliary work. It’s a known fact that people always have more juice for the first exercise of the day. That’s another reason squats improve the fastest in a beginning routine. You do them first.

So, if your power cleans are lagging, you move power cleans to the front of your workout and start doing extra work on your pulls. You do a few extra sets of power cleans plus some hang cleans, high pulls and deadlifts – but not too many extra sets. That would be an invitation to become overtrained. You have to add the extra work gradually and sensibly. In truth, it isn’t usually a problem for back and leg work, but it certainly is when people are looking to improve their upper-body strength, which for most people translates to improving their bench press.

All too often in their quest for a bigger bench people do far too much. The shoulder girdle is, in fact, rather delicate, and you have to establish a firm base before piling up the workload, something you can only do over time. There’s no way to hurry the process, although nearly everyone tries – and fails. I’ve watched trainees go from doing six total sets of benches to twice that number, then do a half-dozen auxiliary exercises. Seldom do their benches move up, but they almost always end up with a nagging injury that forces them to stop benching altogether.

So the first step is to put the weak lifts up front and sensibly add more work. The next step is more complicated, as it involves determining an exercise’s weak portion. Say, for example, the hardest part of the bench press for you is locking the bar out at the finish. That means the weakest group is your triceps. You proceed logically and start doing some specialized exercises to strengthen your triceps, but in order for that approach to be effective, you have to consider that there are three parts to the triceps and that you have to work each somewhat differently. The long head may be the most important of the three, but few people know how to hit it directly. My favorite exercise for that has always been straight-arm pullovers because they’re also less stressful to the elbows. When you do them correctly and with decent weights, they bring quick results. Other lifters find weighted dips or partial presses performed inside a power rack to be effective.

Finding a suitable exercise to strengthen a weak area often depends on having a basic knowledge of anatomy and kinesiology. I’m not talking about premed stuff but, rather, a fundamental understanding of what muscles you use for certain exercises. That information, which you can get from an anatomy book, is extremely helpful in adapting a program.

Say you’re having trouble with our pulling exercises: power cleans, high pulls and deadlifts. Your training mate tells you that you’re lifting your hips up much too fast. That causes you to break proper positioning and negatively influences the finish – a form mistake that indicates a weakness in your hips and lumbars. You can remedy it by doing deadlifts from a lower-than-normal position. I have my athletes do them with 25-pound plates on the bar. Isometrics performed from a very low position in the rack are also helpful, as are back hypers, reverse back hypers, stiff-legged deadlifts and good mornings.

In some cases a weak spot reveals itself not in an obvious form breakdown or an injury but a nagging irritation, a sore spot that lingers for days. Many beginners have a weakness in their middle backs, partly because that area doesn’t get much direct work early on. Power cleans work the middle some, but because the movement is swift, the muscles don’t get enough work. When athletes come to me complaining of middle-back pain, I have them start doing bentover rows and snatch-grip high pulls. You can strengthen a weakness in the upper back with dynamic shrugs and high pulls.

People often become very discouraged when they start doing an exercise to strengthen a weak area. Having to use weenie weights in front of your buddies is hard on the ego. Many let their buddies get their goat and stop doing the needed work, which is a major mistake because the weak spot only gets weaker. So take the abuse. It won’t last very long if you work your weak spot diligently. With patience and persistence you can turn a weak area into a strong point – and convert the static into admiration.

Most people who pay attention to training principles understand the importance of maintaining balanced strength from top to bottom. Even so, many overlook the front-to-back balance. On some parts of the body the front-to-back balance is well-established; for example, the ratio between the quads and the leg biceps, or hamstrings. All competent athletic trainers know that the leg biceps should never be less than 50% of the quads, strength-wise. So, if you’re using 160 pounds on your leg extensions, you should be using at least 80 pounds on your leg curls.

Other front-to-back ratios are frequently ignored, however, like the connection between the traps and the muscles of the shoulder girdle, the deltoids and pecs. One of the most common problems with lifters who specialize on the bench press is that they fail to do enough heavy work for their traps. I’ve watched ambitious benchers work the flat bench for an hour, go to the incline for another half hour, proceed to dumbell presses and then finish off with 3 sets of 20 shrugs with light dumbells. That always – not sometimes, but always – results in unbalanced strength and reveals itself with a pain at the crown of the shoulders, usually in the rear portion of the delts. The easy remedy is to attack the traps. Dynamic high pulls and shrugs work perfectly. By DYNAMIC I mean pulling the bar as high as possible in an explosive manner, not the kind of shrugs or high pulls where you merely elevate your shoulders.

Another area in which lifters frequently miss developing balance is the midsection. As a rule, most serious strength athletes do sufficient lumbar work, which is good because, in my opinion, the lumbars can never be too strong. Many don’t do any sort of ab work, however. Some avoid it because, if you do it right, ab work is never fun. Others – a great many, actually – don’t include ab work in their routines because they have flat abdomens and aren’t carrying any excess weight. They just think they don’t need to do situps, crunches or leg lifts.

The problem is, the abs need to be strong if you’re going to squat heavy weights and pull big weights off the floor. The lower abs, especially, come under a great deal of stress in strength training. Beginners find that out quickly. After squatting heavy, many tell me with wide eyes that they think they might be getting a hernia. It feels as if their abs are tearing. It’s true that a hernia can result, but it seldom happens if lifters are smart enough to include ab work in their programs from the beginning.

The good news is that abs respond rapidly. The problem generally disappears in a week. It’s also good to keep the balance concept in mind when designing your ab routine; that is, always do something for your upper abs as well as your lower abs.

That goes for the sides – the obliques – which brings me to yet another important type of balance that more often than not is skipped over: lateral balance. Lateral strength is invaluable for athletes who are required to twist their trunk aggressively. That includes a lacrosse player shooting the ball, a football player blocking and tackling and a tennis player delivering a strike. You have to exercise your serratus and intercostals.

Ethan Reeve, the very capable strength coach at Ohio University, includes a wonderful movement for improving lateral strength. You hold a 45-pound Olympic bar on end, then swing it down to one side, back to the starting position, then over to the other side. Once you get the form down, you add plates to the top of the bar. It’s very tough to do with any amount of weight – and extremely effective.

Lateral strength is critical in the legs, especially the insides of the legs, the adductors. The outsides, the abductors, generally get plenty of work from full squats, but quite often the adductors are behind at the beginning and have trouble catching up. In fact, most beginners start out with very weak adductors, partly because few exercises hit them directly.

If your knees turn in when you’re coming out of a heavy squat, or when you’re pulling a weight off the floor, you have weak adductors. You need to bring them up to par because they’re absolutely essential to knee stability. The adductor machine works like magic. Within a couple of weeks of doing 2 sets of 20 on the machine, you can correct the weakness. In the event that there’s no machine available, which is my situation right now, try very wide stance squats for high reps. I have my athletes with weak adductors do wide-stance squats for 20 reps as their back-off set. If they’re terribly weak, I have them do all their squats with a wider stance. Invariably, their adductors get extremely sore after the first time they do them. That’s good because it tells me they’re working.

The final point on balance is to think about your smaller groups every so often. It’s easy to skip calf work because, like ab work, it’s never much fun if you do it right. Nevertheless, every athlete knows that strong calves are important, and if you’ve ever had the misfortune to pull one, you know how difficult the rebuilding process can be. Another smaller bodypart to watch is the biceps. Most trainees get sufficient work for their biceps with heavy pulling. Even so, it’s still wise to include some specific exercises for the biceps in your program. Chins are best, and, of course, there’s plenty of variety in curling.