Warm ups have been an important part of any training program almost forever.  Warm ups have also evolved since the classic “just go for a 10 minutes jog” that most coaches and trainers used to recommend 20 years ago.  I do realize that it’s still common practice by highly uneducated personal trainers and coaches around the world, but I’m not going to get into this…

Mobility exercises, activation exercises, movement pattern training, dynamic stretching, foam rolling and the dozen of others soft-tissue work modalities are usually some of the components we can include in a good warm up.  Depending on your own situation, it might not be possible to include all of the above, and in fact, for some it might be possible to include only one or two.  The amount of time you spend with each client or athlete is going to dictate what your warm up is going to look like.  But it doesn’t mean that your warm up should take 30 minutes when you have more time with your clients and athletes.  The reason I say this is because there are many different components (as I mentioned above) that can fit into your warm up and it’s easy to get caught trying to include too much, and your warm up routine might end up taking forever to perform.  The warm up is essential to improve range of motion, increase blood flow to the muscles, increase heart rate and body temperature and decrease tension in stiff muscles.  But it’s also called a warm up.  It shouldn’t take half the time of your total session.  You want to choose the things that are going to be the most bang for your buck, get it done and be ready to attack your training.

Here’s the way I structure my warm ups in order to make them as effective as possible without taking forever:

- Self soft-tissue work: 5 min- Working on tight areas, usually 4-5 different areas (might different ones every day, depending on how I feel)

- Specifc warm up: 3-4 min- this is the time where I work on personal weaknesses or corrective work (this can include FMS correctives, correct a dysfunctional movement pattern, etc).  Currently I use this time to do PRI breathing drills.

- General warm up: 3-4 min- this will include more general movement patterns that will help improve dynamic range of motion and body temperature at the same time (combination of lunges, inverted reach, push ups, etc)

- Movement preparation: 3-4 min (if needed)- if I’m going to do any kind of dynamic work like sprints or plyometrics I will always include some sort of skips, cariocas, shuffle, back pedal, hops, etc.  If I only lift, I’ll usually just skip that part.

Following this model, a good, complete warm up would take you about 14-15 minutes (10-12 if you don’t do any movement prep).  It really covers everything and it’s not too long!

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I’ve had a couple people come up to me recently with a nagging shoulder pain.  One of them was one of the baseball pitchers that I train during the summer who’s now in College.  He’s had a nagging pain in his throwing shoulder for the past couple of months that’s preventing him from pitching at the same intensity as he used to, and now he’s freaking out because the baseball season is starting in a couple of weeks.  The second is a good friend of mine who’s into the Crossfit thing and he was telling me one of his shoulder has been bothering him for a little bit.  They both had pain in their shoulder with either the shoulder clearing test from the FMS (baseball player) or the empty can test (Crossfit guy).

The Empty Can Test

A quick assessment of their range of motion around the shoulder showed an internal rotation deficit in the painful shoulder for both of them.  Shoulder extension wasn’t too bad in both cases and t-spine ROM was lacking a little bit in the Crossfit guy.

Instead of cranking on their range of motion and possibly forcing something that’s not there (and possibly originates somewhere else), I gave them 2 simple breathing exercises that I learned from the Postural Restoration Institute to re-establish proper diaphragm function, as well as ribs, thorax and scapulae positioning.  I also gave my Crossfit buddy a t-spine mobility and scapular stabilizer drill do to because his posture was not great.

The positioning of the diaphragm can affect all the surrounding structures

After only 5 minutes, both of them had an increased internal rotation range of motion in the painful shoulder; and I did absolutely no stretching or soft-tissue work whatsoever.  And even more importantly, their shoulder pain wasn’t there anymore with neither the FMS shoulder clearing test or the empty can test!

This is how important proper breathing patterns and diaphragm function are.  It can affect the way your shoulder, your pelvis and everything around them is positioned.  Before forcing range of motion and hammering the soft-tissue work, make sure your athletes and clients are breathing right!

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Strength and conditioning coaches and personal trainers use a variety of different coaching cues to guide their clients and athletes to perform various exercises the right way.  When you first start coaching or training people, you talk too much, demonstrate too many times and use too many coaching cues, and your clients end up being confused.  Rightfully so!  Just imagine trying to perform a complex movement that you have never done in your entire life and that is not even close to being similar to something you know; you have no point of reference, your body doesn’t recognize the movement pattern, and on top of that, the person teaching you the movement just keeps talking and adding the number of things you should focus on!  You end up not being able to focus on any one thing because there are too many of them.

But luckily, as you become a better trainer or coach you refine your coaching technique, simplify your explanations and use fewer coaching cues.  You also realize that the most effective coaching cues end up being 90% the same from person to person.  The “chest up” cue is definitely one that’s very common among coaches and trainers.  But it’s also an effective one for a bunch of different exercises.  You can usually use the “chest up” cue with the squat, the deadlift, all variations of horizontal pulling exercises and most posterior chain exercises, just to name a few.

I use the “chest up” cue quite a bit myself.  Combine a loud “chest up” yelled across the room with a French-Canadian accent, and you have something for athletes and fellow coaches at Endeavor to make fun of me for!  It has became a running joke around Endeavor, and our athletes will take the first opportunity to make fun of me, as you can testify yourself by listening to Colby Cohen, Boston Bruins prospect, at the beginning of the following video (I’m also famous for the “butt tight” cue as well, as you’ll notice):

Coming back to serious matters, the “chest up” cue is definitely a useful one to use, but one that you need to be careful with.  There are some unwanted results that could present with this particular coaching cue.  Let me explain…

The “chest up” cue is an effective one because it’s short, simple and hard to misinterpret.  What we are usually looking for with the “chest up” cue is for the client or athlete to prevent from rounding or slouching at the upper back and thoracic spine, and keep the spine neutral.  You might also use the “chest up” cue to help pack the shoulder blades back together when back squatting or doing a horizontal pull.  But one problem may present when an athlete or client tries to get his chest up.  What they don’t know when we say “chest up” is that we want an extension at the thoracic spine, but too often they will get that extension through their lower back or thoraco-lumbar junction.

T-L junction subsitution for thoracic extension

And if you don’t pay close attention to it, you might not even notice, especially if the client or athlete is wearing a loose shirt.

A lumbar hyperextension is not always obvious when you wear a loose shirt

 An extension at the thoraco-lumbar junction will in turn cause a lower ribs flare in the front.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that a rib flare is also associated with faulty breathing pattern because the diaphragm is not in an efficient position to do its job.

Just notice how differently the diaphragm is positioned between the inhaling and exhaling phases of breathing

So it’s very important to be conscious how your client or athlete will adjust when you tell him/her to get his/her chest up.  Again, the coaching cue in itself is not bad to use, you just need to be more aware of how the person in front of you will interpret it, and you can make the adjustment when necessary.  Personally, when correcting it, I like to put my finger tips on the person’s lower ribs while instructing them to get their ribs down while keeping their chest up; it usually works pretty well.

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I’m in the middle of Joel Jamieson’s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and I have to say that (even being only 1/4 of the way through it) this book is about to be one that’s a COMPLETE game changer for me.  Even though the title says ‘MMA Conditioning’, the book is not so much about specific MMA conditioning as it is about developing the different energy systems the right way.  It’s making me rethink all of the conditioning I program for my athletes.  And I’ll have more on the subject very soon.

While reading it though, I’ve come to a couple realizations about my job as a strength and conditioning coach that go beyond just conditioning stuff.  As a professional who’s concerned about constantly thriving to get better and always do what’s best for his athletes, it’s quite important to reach out to new resources that will help you get better at what you do, especially in an ever-evolving industry like ours.  In our quest to learn new information and get better, the internet has been more than helpful.  It’s giving us free information everywhere in the form of blogs, articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, you name it.  Of course there will always be information that’s of low quality and it makes it very easy for anyone to put information out there without any guarantees that it’s any good.  But with a minimum of educational background and critical judgment, one can pretty easily judge of the quality of information he’s reading.

What we see happening with the age of the internet though, is some trends spreading virally, which can end up changing our perspective on things.  One such trend has been pre-hab and corrective training.  There is a LOT of great information out there on injury prevention, corrective exercises, and the like.  It seems to be the cool thing to write about these days, and I am guilty as charged, like a lot of people.  And don’t get me wrong, I do not think there is anything wrong with using injury prevention strategies or trying to learn more about how the body moves.  But is this overwhelming amount of information about injury prevention been shifting the pendulum too far?  Having all of this information available to you, and being aware of the importance of limiting injuries can make you obsessed with it…when in reality it’s only one part of the puzzle.  Continuing education is not just about learning more about functional anatomy and new corrective exercise strategies.  It’s about getting better at what you do.  And I say this because I’m starting to realize that it’s one big mistake I’ve been making in the last couple of years.  Functional anatomy is a very complex thing and it’s easy to get caught in just wanting to learn more and more about that only.

But there are a lot more components to our job that we need to consider and get better at.  Conditioning is one of those areas.  One of my bosses at a former job once said in a meeting: “the problem with you, personal trainers, is that you’re too good with the lifting part of the programs you write.  Programing for cardio is by far your weakest link.”  And if you’re wondering, yes, he did indeed used the word ‘cardio’.  But when he said that, I didn’t listen for a couple of reason:

• He started by critiquing us, which is never a good way to open the lines of communication
• I was obsessed with strength at that point in my career, and thought nothing else really mattered
• Conditioning was a very simple concept in my head, and if you wanted to improve it you just had to do intervals
• He wasn’t really good at his job anyway
• He was shaped like a pear and his training consisted of squats on a wobble board, Russian twists and machine chest press

“You should listen to me ’cause I know how to train right!”

Thinking back about what he said, he probably was right.  But it’s unfortunate that he was such a close-minded indiviual because I probably could’ve learned a thing or two from him, but I was completely shut off because of his attitude in general.

What I’m trying to say here is that I’m not saying that injury prevention strategies (or any other component of a training program) are not important, but we need to take a step back and realize what our job is.  We need to get better at what we do in a more general sense.  We want to get better at preventing injuries, but we also need to get better at maximizing hypertrophy, developing speed, improving range of motion, and of course improving conditioning, which I think is too often overlooked in a training program.

Never forget that your clients are looking for a training effect.  Let me say that again: your clients are looking for a training effect.  Working AROUND limitation is as much our job (if not more) than working ON limitations.  Your clients are not looking to do miniband exercises for an hour and half let you tell them how bad they move.  They want to reach their fitness goal.  They don’t want you to tell them what their goal is.

Not sure this is what your clients are expecting

Think about how you would feel if you were to go in store restaurant, order a pizza and 15 minutes later your waitress would bring you a salad telling you that it’s better for you to eat a salad!  This might be a stupid example, but it’s just to make you realize that what we do is still in big part customer service (unless you’re working in a college or a pro team setting).  Clients and athletes come to us to get results, whether it’s improved performance, fat loss, muscle gain or whatever else; they expect to get results because they’re giving you their hard-earned money!  I think it’s important to always ask your clients what THEY expect out of your services.  It doesn’t mean we can’t help them move and feel better along the way, but I think it’s important to always keep the client’s expectations in mind and do what you need to meet them.

Getting better at what we do is not only preventing injuries better.  It’s making them lose fat faster, getting them bigger and stronger, maximizing their conditioning, and more than anything else listening to their needs and meeting (or should I say exceeding) their expectations.

It’s not a breaking news if I tell you that baseball players, and especially pitchers need to address rotator cuff strength in their training program.  There are many different ways to go about it beyond the traditional external rotation variations that will give you some added benefits on top of the strength you’ll gain in your cuff muscles from performing these exercises.  Here are the different options you have and the benefits from using each of them.

1. External Rotation Using External Resistance.  This is the category that I just mentioned above; it’s pretty much the ‘typical’ way of strenghtening the rotator cuff.  It’s usually done either with an abducted or adducted arm, and can be done using different types of resistance like dumbbells, cables or bands.  External rotation with external resistance helps strengthen the rotator cuff muscles concentrically and eccentrically in an external rotation pattern.  These muscles are important because they help decelerate the arm in the pitching motion.

Side-lying DB external rotation

2. Internal Rotation Exercises.  The reason why I put this one in a separate category than the previous one is because I think internal rotation based exercises serve a completely different purpose than external rotation exercises for baseball players.  For one, internal rotation exercises will strengthen the subscapularis, a very important internal rotator that won’t get much work from the external rotation exercises.  The subscapularis, located under the shoulder blade, prevents anterior migration of the humeral head during horizontal adduction or internal rotation of the humerus.  This can cause impingement in the shoulder, which usually happens when the pec major and the latissimus dorsi (both internal rotators) take over.  There are different ways to go about strengthening the subscapularis, but the most effective way is in a prone position with the arm abducted at 90 degrees.

3. Manual Dynamic Stabilziation.  I’ve talked about this type of exercise on different occasions before.  If you understand anatomy well, you should know that the first role of the rotator cuff muscles, even before internal and external rotation, is to stabilize the humeral head in the glenoid fossa.  So it only makes sense to stabilize these muscles in their purest function to avoid impingement.  There are many ways to go about it, and you can certainly play around with the body position (supine, quadruped, kneeling, etc), and the arm position as well.

4. Dynamic Stabilization with Unstable Surfaces.  Similar to the previous category, it challenges the rotator cuff muscles in a stabilization role.  Instead of having a manual resistance when you don’t have a coach or a training partner around, the use of unstable surfaces can definitely be convenient.  Again the positions and implements can vary.

5. External Rotation with Manual Resistance.  Similar to the first category, it will strengthen the rotator cuff muscles in the external rotation pattern.  There are 2 major differences from the ‘typical’ external rotation exercises with external loads.  First, there are less chances of your athletes cheating the movement and trying to compensate with the scapular muscles, and second, if done the right way it will put an emphasis on the eccentric part of the movement (which is more specific to the pitching motion).

6. Dynamic Stabilization with Unstable Surface and Perturbation.  This is basically a combination of categories 3 and 4.  This pushes the stabilization demand on the cuff muscles a little further.  Progressions from this category would not be used with novice lifters, as they need to master the different types of stabilization exercises separately before combining them.

There are many more factors that contribute to shoulder health and injury prevention.  To learn more about those factors, enter your info below and get my FREE report on Injury Prevention Strategies for the Shoulder!

There are bunch of different injuries that occur in every sport.  If you look carefully at the injuries in each sport you’ll notice that there are injuries that are common in each one of them.  In fact, you could probably identify 3-4 different injuries in a given sport that you keep hearing about from athletes.  Hockey, like every sport, has its common injuries.  Before we go any further in this injury prevention discussion, it’s important to acknowledge that there are 2 different types of injuries:

1. Trauma injuries (e.g. shoulder dislocations, concussions, etc) that usually happen with some type of contact.  These injuries are not really preventable (the only thing you can really do is beef up the surrounding muscles to limit the effect of the impact).
2. Overuse/Under-recovery injuries (e.g. tendinopathy, muscle strains, etc) .  These injuries are largely preventable and can become pretty much completely absent if taken care of the right way.

Unfortunately, nothing you can do to prevent that.

Knowing that there is little we can do to prevent trauma injuries, we’ll focus on the preventable injuries.  Appropriate training and recovery methods can almost always prevent those injuries.  If we want to help prevent those injuries, we need to know what they are in the first place.   In hockey players, the common preventable injuries are:

• Adductor/Hip flexor strains
• Hip labral tear
• Sports hernias

If you are a hockey player or train hockey players, you’ll know that these injuries are VERY common among the hockey community.  The nature of the sport and the large amount of stress placed on the hips can explain in part why those injuries occur.  But it’s also important to understand that common doesn’t mean that it’s OK and that we shouldn’t do anything to prevent them.

To prevent the injury, you need to understand the injury mechanism.  In hockey the hip abductors (glutes) get a lot stress from the skating motion.  Conversely, the adductors and hip flexors are elongated with every stride of the skating motion.  That certainly creates imbalances across the hip musculature; some muscles get weak, some muscles build up a lot of adhesions and trigger points and some muscles are just overused.  Re-establishing that muscle balance in your training program is crucial to keep your athletes healthy.

Getting some soft-tissue work done on your glutes and adductors, stretching your glutes, strengthening your adductors in a shortened position and re-establishing neutral pelvic position (getting out of anterior tilt, which is way too common among hockey players) are just a couple of examples of strategies to help restore muscle balance across the hips for hockey players.

Kevin Neeld has a full chapter in his book Ultimate Hockey Training dedicated to those common hockey injuries and how to prevent them.  If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of his book.

I blogged quite a bit recently about the importance of breathing patterns in posture, muscle tone, optimal movement patterns, injury prevention and cardiovascular functions.  If breathing patterns aren’t optimal, it’s important to train them, or re-train them to make sure your diaphragm functions optimally for all of the reasons above.  Efficient breathing pattern means an adequate use of your diaphragm muscles (yes, you have two), and them functioning optimally is of utmost importance.

But do you know how to identify faulty breathing patterns in the first place?

There are many different ways to assess breathing patterns, some more advanced than others.  Here are simple ways to identify faulty breathing patterns:

1. Neck muscles’ hypertonicity.  When someone has faulty breathing habits, he will tend to “breathe more through his chest than through his belly”.  Breathing through your chest will make your shoulders go up and down every time you breathe and it will put a lot of stress on your neck muscles.  If you have a client who present with hypertonic neck muscles, it might be because of faulty breathing pattern.  This tension in those neck muscles can also lead to pretty severe headaches, as well.

Hypertonic sternocleidomastoid.  Could be the sign of a chest breather

2. Shoulder protraction.  As I just mentioned in the previous point, a chest breather will put a lot of strain on his neck and shoulder muscles as well.  Assessing the resting posture of the shoulders, as well as how they move when the person breathe (looking for significant up and down motion) can help identify faulty breathing patterns.  A chest breather will have his shoulders sitting higher (sort of shrugged up) and protracted because of the use of the wrong muscles to breathe.

Posture looks better on the right. But both present with protracted shoulders which could be sign of faulty breathing patterns.

3. Rib flare.  This is a really easy thing to identify: simply put the client on his back, ask him to pull his shirt up a little bit, and notice the position of his lower ribs.  If they are flaring out it is most definitely a sign of faulty breathing pattern.

  This is a rib flare.

……not to be confused with a Rick Flair.

4. Hyperextension at the thoraco-lumbar (T-L) junction.  This one goes hand-in-hand with the previous point on the rib flare.  If there is indeed a rib flare, chances are that there will also be a hyperextension at the T-L junction.  This can be caused by a faulty breathing pattern, as well as a lack of appropriate thoracic spine mobility.  People often compensate for a lack of t-spine extension with hyperextension at the T-L segment.

Notice the T-L junction hyperextension

This is some of the stuff that I got from Dr. Jeff Cubos’ presentation in Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Upper Body.  That is a resource with great information, and if you’re interested in learning more about breathing patterns, how to assess for them and how to re-train them properly. You can get it by clicking on the link below:

Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Upper Body

Injury prevention strategies are an important part of a strength and conditioning program.  How important is it to get bigger, faster, stronger and more powerful if you’re sidelined with a preventable injury?  Not that important I would think…

But when including injury prevention strategies in your program or the ones of your athletes, you can face a couple challenges, mainly:

• how exactly to program those injury prevention strategies in your training
• how to not completely turn your training program into a rehab program
• not make your athletes feel like patients
• how to maintain a training effect while still working on injury prevention

Not Exactly how you want to make your athletes feel like

These are legitimate concerns in my opinion because there is a fine line between too much and too little corrective exercises.  And it’s also not easy to know where to include them in your program so you still end up with an optimal result, both from from an exercise prescription and a time management perspective.  Here are a couple of tips to help you program your corrective exercises better into your own program or the ones of your athletes.

1. Your warm up.  There is a decent amount of injury prevention strategies that can be included in your warm up, especially if they’re mobility exercises.  A warm up is the perfect time to work on soft-tissue restriction and mobility to improve range of motion.  And you’re going to use your lifting to reinforce that new found mobility with appropriate lifting exercises.

Your warm up should be a little more specific than that…

2. Your cool down.  Soft-tissue work and static stretching are great to include at the end of your training session.  It will promote recovery and limit the possible range of motion loss from tight muscles.

3. Fillers.  This is probably my favorite way to include injury prevention strategies in a training program.  Fillers are basically a corrective exercise that you include between sets of a lifting exercise.  It can help reinforce a movement pattern of your main lifting exercise, it can be a stability exercise or it can be a mobility exercise that doesn’t affect the part(s) of your body you’re training.  The reason I like fillers so much is because from a time efficiency perspective, it really doesn’t get any better.  It saves time so yo don’t have to do all of that corrective work at the beginning or at the end of your training, which would make your session time longer by at least 10-20 minutes.  It also makes your training more productive; you spend less time (if at all, when programed thoroughly) waiting and doing nothing between your sets of your main exercises.  This is something very common among most gym enthusiasts; they spend an awful lot of time doing nothing (most of the time talking, and losing focus) between their working sets.  No wonder why most people hate going to the gym and lifting weights!  I would hate training too if I had to wait 1-2 minutes between every single set of every exercise I’m doing; this is boring as hell!  Putting fillers in between your sets makes you move more, reduces your down time between sets, and makes you feel like your training was much more productive and that you got a lot more done in the same amount of time.  And you took care of the injury prevention side of things on top of that!

Here’s what a hypothetical upper body day could look like with the use of filler sets if we wanted to include shoulder injury prevention strategies (filler exercises are highlighted in green) :

Notice that you’d still get a decent training effect from the rest of the exercises while simultaneously working on lower trap and serratus anterior activation, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and anterior chain muscles extensibility, which all play an important role in injury prevention for the shoulders.

As I mentioned above, fillers can be a tremendous addition in your training program.  Give it a shot and play around with your corrective exercises that you want to include in your program.  As long as your filler exercise doesn’t interfere with your main exercise, you should be fine.  But you might need some time to play around and find good combinations that will work for you.

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We live in a world where low back pain is a very common issue.  We all know people who have back pain or who’ve had hernias or hurt there back playing sports, training or sometimes just picking up grocery bags off the floor.  I read a statistic somewhere that stated that 80% of the population will, at some point in their life, suffer from back pain.  That is A LOT!  And the truth is that low back problems are still very misunderstood.  Even in the research world, we seem to have a better understanding of the injury mechanisms of the lower back, thanks to great researchers like Stuart McGill, but there are still some gray areas.  There seem to be much more that we need to learn.

But as I just mentioned, there is definitely a better understanding of the injury mechanisms of the lower back.  According to McGill’s research there are different movement patterns that cause low back problems.  Hernias and other back problem are usually a result of one of the following:

• repetitive and/or excessive flexion at the lumbar spine
• repetitive and /or excessive extension of the lumbar spine
• repetitive and/or excessive rotation at the lumbar spine
• a combination of flexion and rotation
• a combination of extension and rotation

Most back problems originate from one of these mechanisms.  There are different reasons why these injury mechanisms develop.  Lack of hip mobility, lack of thoracic spine mobility, muscle imbalances and compensation patterns in the hips and core, poor posture, and sitting too much are all reasons why back pain these injury mechanisms can end up causing back pain.

One thing that is really important to understand with back problems is that they do go away.  Having back pain at some point in your life doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with this pain all your life.  Even serious back problems such as hernias don’t last forever.  If it needs surgery, you obviously need to get it.  If you don’t need it (which is often the case with low back hernias), according to McGill, the disk will go back in place by itself if you allow it some recovery time.

If the pain persists or come back, it probably means that the source of the pain hasn’t been addressed (note that I said the source, not the symptoms).  As mentioned above, the injury mechanisms that I outlined that are at the source of most back problems need to be addressed.  That might mean to learn to bend over the right way and learning a good hip hinge (e.g. let the hips move and do the work while keeping the spine in a neutral position).  It could also mean learning to get more hip extension when you run instead of having the lumbar spine compensate and extend too much.  There are also many daily behaviors that will need modifications in order to avoid the faulty movement occurring at the spine.

The bottom line is that you need to re-train your body to move the right way.  If you don’t, the pain will keep coming back because the injury mechanism is still there.  There is also usually a big mental component to any back problem, and understandably.  Folks who suffer from back pain often apprehend the pain coming back, whether it’s when they train or just in their daily activities.  Part of the re-training process in teaching good movement patterns and teaching back pain clients to move better is going to be mental and making sure they understand that they are not stuck with that pain their whole life.

It’s THAT important that you explain all of that as well as possible before you drop the word ‘Deadlift’ in front of them.  The deadlift is not only a safe tool, but an essential part of their rehab.  Most of them will associate deadlift with back injury, or think of it as a dangerous exercise for their back.  This couldn’t be any further form the truth.  And obviously deadlift doesn’t mean ‘heavy’ or ‘full range of motion’ right from day 1.  But there is a very under-appreciated rehab component to the deadlift for clients who’ve had back pain.  The deadlift is probably THE best way to teach someone how to hinge at the hips, while keeping their spine in a neutral alignment.  By reinforcing this movement pattern you will help your clients reduce their risk of re-injuring their back.  A very careful approach must be taken though, and no flaws should be allowed in their form before any type of loading is even considered.  The deadlift is really just a hip hinge and everyone should own that movement, whether you lift weights or not.  It’s just a back saver to know how to deadlift the right way.

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There has been a barefoot revolution lately in the fitness industry. We’ve realized that modern shoewear have been restricting foot and ankle mobility and basically being just crutches to fix bad mechanics (if you’re foot pronates too much when you run, buy an anti-pronator running shoe; if your shins or your knees hurt, buy a shoe with more cushioning; if your foot is flat get a shoe with a good arch support, or get orthotics).

This is like putting a bad-aid on an open wound…

Never have we been thinking: “well, if your foot pronates too much, there might be a cause to it”. The shoe itself became a solution to a problem that most likely originates somewhere else. We never thought about analyzing biomechanics and assessing movement quality at the hips, knees and ankles.

But luckily, we’re coming to the realization that the shoes are not going to be the solution. This trend probably started with the popularity of the book Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. A lot pf people started dropping anti-pronator shoes with an arch support and 2 inches cushioning to start running and training bare foot or in Vibram Five Fingers.

That caused another problem, though. People started getting injured because they transitioned too drastically to barefoot running and their body wasn’t ready for that.  If you have a problem originating at the hips that cause your feet to overpronate and you jump to barefoot running, not only you’re not solving the problem, but you may be making it worse!

In the book Born to Run, McDougall talks about how the Tarahumara, a Mexican tribe, were one of the greatest groups of runners in the world and they were pretty much running barefoot (using thin leather sandals) and never got injured.

What we failed to realize about the Tarahumara is that they have been running for years and years barefoot, learning to run without shoes, building up their stamina while running barefoot (they probably didn’t start running 10 miles per day), they are very thin and light people who don’t present with any weight surplus whatsoever because they are a more active population than the average person in North America (which also means they probably don’t have as many movement dysfunctions and poor posture from sitting all day), and more than anything else the surface they are running on is soft: it’s DIRT!  And we have much heavier people, with sub-par running mechanics, usually pretty deconditioned  and running on concrete and asphalt and expecting to get the same benefits out of barefoot running as the Tarahumara?

So just dropping our shoewear altogether is probably not the right place to start.  But at the same time it’s pretty obvious that we need to get away from the Nike Shox, Reebok Zig Tech, high top sneakers and 2 inches heel lift running shoes of this world.  Before shoes, feet used to be hands; feet used to have dexterity and the brain used to have good motor control over the toes and how they’re moving.  Modern days shoewear have completely deprived the feet of any proprioception.  This is what feet should really look like:

This is the feet of a Tarahumara.  Notice how naturally spread out the toes are.  All they’re ever wearing is those thin leather sole sandals.

With modern days shoewear that have made our feet and toes become lazy this what our feet now look like:

You think this is normal? ….this is what 21st century footwear has done to our feet!

There is a problem with that!  So where do we start if we don’t drop our very cushioned footwear completely?  Here are a couple guidelines to help your feet become feet again:

• Fix any lower body movement pattern restrictions that you might have (having a symmetrical score of 14 on the FMS is a good place to start).
• Buy a pair of shoes with a thinner and more flexible sole to wear daily to get to work, go to school, when you go shopping, etc.  Nike Free, New Balance Minimus, and Reebok RealFlex are all great options.  You don’t have to wear them all day; you can start wearing them just a couple hours a day and progress from there if you’ve been having lower extremity issues or if you have a weight surplus.

• When you work out, do your warm up barefoot.  That’ll be a good place to start to help your feet and your toes gain proprioception, and that won’t be too much stress on your body.  You can go through dynamic stretching and low impact movement preparation drills.
• If you lift weights use a thin sole shoe like the ones mentioned above and do your posterior chain exercises (deadlift variations, pullthroughs, good mornings, etc) barefoot.
• If you run distances, keep your regular running shoes for a little while, but try to include some sprint work in your thin sole shoes on a soft surface (grass, dirt, turf, etc) to help improve your running stride and get more of a forefoot strike.  This way you minimize the impacts and your body will adjust, instead of having the shoes do all the work without the presence of decent foot proprioception, which in turn leads to having too much of a heel strike when you run (a.k.a not a good thing because a heel strike forces your body into deceleration with every stride).

• After a couple weeks, you can slowly move to sprints barefoot or with Vibram Five Fingers, and start running in a running shoe that has a thinner sole and doesn’t restrict motion as much.  If you’re running on concrete or asphalt, I would suggest you stay away from shoes that have too thin of a sole as those surfaces can take a beating on your lower extremeties.

• When you’re at home, try to walk barefoot as much as possible, and try to do proprioception drills for your feet and (especially) your toes.
• Hammer ankle and big toe mobility, as well as lower leg and plantar fascia soft-tissue work.

All of this should help your feet become feet again.  Adequate proprioception of the feet and toes shouldn’t be neglected; they give your CNS important feedback that will lead to better stability, more efficient gait and running mechanics and limit the instance of injuries, especially in runnners.  And don’t be surprised if your flat feet or high arches get fixed in the process.

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