The knee is probably one of the most troublesome joints in the body, especially amongst athletes. Before we delve into the exercise alternatives for your bum knees, I’ll say this; before getting started with any of these exercises, if you have pain, you need to consult a qualified professional and get assessed. You need to clear out any underlying issues that might aggravate your problem before getting started. And also makes sure when you try one of these exercises that you can perform them totally pain-free, because as you probably know by now, pain equals irritation, and irritation equals your knee not getting better. Now that we got the boring stuff out of the way, let’s move on to the good stuff!
- Sled Drags and Prowler Push. The sled drag might be one of the most knee-friendly alternatives to heavy squat and lunges. Most knee pains occur at a significant amount of knee flexion (read: when the knee is bent close to 90°). Sled drags and Prowler pushes (with a high grip) involve a lot less knee flexion than any squat variation. The other advantage the Sled drag and Prowler push have is that they don’t have an eccentric action; it’s mostly concentric actions as you keep moving forward and driving your feet into the ground. You really have no forces to decelerate. For some people with knee pain, eccentric contractions may be more painful. And even if it’s not the case, it still put less stress on your joints.
- Deadlift variations. Posterior chain exercises can usually be done pain-free because they involve less knee flexion and they put most of the stress on the posterior chain (hamstring, glutes, lumbar erectors). If you’re going to use deadlift variations, depending on how bad your knees hurt, you might want to start with more straight-legs variations. The first one to try is definitely the SLDL (Stiff-Leg Deadlift) because it involves almost no knee flexion at all:
Then you can move to Rack Pulls, which involve a little more knee flexion (depending on where you set up the pins):
And if your knees allow more flexion without pain, you can try and pull from the floor, either with a straight bar or with a trap bar:
- Box Squat. This is an option for when your knees start to feel better. The box squat is a great option because, even if it’s technically a quad dominant exercise (also means more stressful on the knees), the goal is to sit as far back as possible on the box. The result is that it shifts your weight posteriorly to make it less knee dominant. Charlie Weingroff went into great detail in his DVDs Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training about how the box squat keeps you more in a vertical shin position, and therefore it puts less stress on your knees. Everybody that has been dealing with some sort of knee pain and want to reintroduce the squat in their training should re-learn to squat with (at least somewhat of) a vertical shin:
- Split Squat Isometric Holds. These are not much of a typical strength training option, but it can be a great addition to your training for different reasons; single-leg endurance, conditioning purposes, etc. So if you can tolerate some knee flexion, holding an isometric position for time usually doesn’t irritate the knees.
Split Squat Holds can be very versatile, and if you get creative like Kevin Neeld (seriously, he’s sooo smart) you can use them this way:
Having pain and injuries is probably the most frustrating thing in the world for athletes and weekend warriors alike. The last thing you want is be reminded constantly of the things you can’t do; that’s why it’s important to find alternatives and focus on what the athlete actually CAN do! As my colleague Eric Cressey puts it: ” you want to feel like an athlete, not like a patient”.
Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter; it’s FREE and I’ll send you 3 sports performance reports as a bonus!!
With the move at Endeavor this week and the fact that I’m going without internet (because it’s not been installed in our new facility yet) makes it very hard for me to keep up with my “internet stuff” like writing blog posts.
That being said, even if I don’t have time to write a new post today, I have great articles fort you to read from around the web from some of the bests in strength and conditioning. Make sure you read these, they’re all really good!!
That’s it for now. Hopefully everything is settled in at Endeavor pretty soon, so I can get back to my usual schedule. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!
Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter. It’s FREE and I’ll send you my 3 reports on speed training and injury prevention automatically!
With the rising popularity of Dr. Stuart McGill and his work on the lumbar spine in the health and fitness community, people have started to understand that excessive lumbar motion leads to injuries. The extent of his research (which he has been leading for years) have given all of us a better understanding of the spine, how it works, how it should move, and what leads to injuries.
This is a MUST read. Period.
Like many other things in the fitness business, it caused an overreaction. We started avoiding movement at the lumbar spine at any cost. We started to focus on the hips and the thoracic spine as the places to improve mobility, which I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing because that is exactly what most people need; more mobility in the t-spine and the hips.
This overreaction, though, caused us to ignore that there is a certain degree of movement that is normal to have at the lumbar spine.
As you can see in the chart, although the biggest potential for rotation is at the thoracic spine, the lumbar spine still have a couple of degrees of rotation. The same thing applies for flexion and extension.
To better understand the reason to why we actually need range of motion at the lumbar spine I’ll refer to the pendulum theory that Charlie Weingroff introduced a little while ago. To quote Charlie:
“So every joint has a core and it has a neutral that is decided just like a pendulum. It has to know that the stiffness properties allows it to go all the way to the left, right, front, back, etc., so it can rest with no effort in the middle, the position of optimal force transfer.
The clinical application is that the spine’s neutral is a function of full flexion, full extension, full side bending, and full rotation. Then and only then does the core have it’s premiere chance to do as little work as possible for segmental stabilization, and the phasic lumbar muscles can pick up the bracing slack to handle huge loads and force transfers.
If you don’t have yoga-ish mobility, the middle is always off-center, and the local stabilizers (of any joint system) aren’t triggered ideally via the brain getting “wrong” feedback from the joint receptors (…)”
What this means is simply that if your body doesn’t have a proper “neutral”, everything is going to be affected, compensation takes over, and injuries eventually happen.
Even if the goal should always be to lift weights and reinforce proper movement pattern with a perfectly neutral spine, it doesn’t mean that you’re body shouldn’t “own” that range of motion at the lumbar spine.
My personal story is a pretty interesting one in this regard. Since reading the work of Dr. McGill years ago I became a strong advocate in limiting motion at the lumbar spine. When I say I was doing everything with a neutral spine, I mean everything: sitting, brushing my teeth, tying my shoes, and even putting socks on in the morning! Have you ever tried putting socks on in the morning without allowing any sort of lumbar flexion? Trust me it’s not that easy! But I was doing it!
Not quite like this, but that far off!
I was also getting pretty strong for my height and my body structure, I was deadlifting a decent amount of weight and I never allowed myself to have anything less than perfect form on every single rep I was doing.
About 2 years ago, I started to get a little less zealous about the whole neutral spine thing in my everyday life. A couple of months later, I was brushing my teeth in the morning and as I was bending over to spit in the sink I felt a sharp pain go through my right lower back just above my right SI joint. A couple hours later, I couldn’t bend over at all, and I mean not at all. Even breaking at the hips slightly to grab a glass from the kitchen table was impossible. The pain started to go away after 3-4 days, but my back bothered me for a couple of weeks. And weirdly enough, a similar event happened about 8 months later.
It’s only when I learned about the SFMA, the pendulum theory and other philosophies along the same line that I realized that my lumbar spine wasn’t flexing at all, which was later confirmed to me by a good friend of mine who’s an enlightened physical therapist.
I’ve been working on my lumbar flexion more recently and making sure my toe touch, as per the SFMA, stays intact and turns out my back has been feeling much better.
That doesn’t mean I’m doing silly stuff like stiff-legged deadlift with a rounded back, or crunches and sit-ups, but I’m doing isolated mobility exercises that don’t involve any type of loading to make sure that my pendulum is in the right “neutral” position.
Do you ever assess for lumbar range of motion? You might be surprised at what you’ll find.
Enter your info below to receive the latest on injury prevention strategies! It’s all FREE!!
Third round of this series of interview already. Patrick Ward, strength and conditioning specialist and massage therapist, was kind enough to give me a couple minutes of his time to answer my questions. Here we go:
What does your current training look like?
My current training is pretty darn boring. I lift 3 days per week and perform total body workouts. I do the same four exercises each day 3 sets x 5 reps and currently work below 80% intensity for all sets. I do some form of cardiovascular exercise at least 3-5x/week usually consisting of either consistent work in the 120-150bpm range or some form of extensive tempo work. I’ll do this for about 3-5 weeks and then begin to focus more on some specific lifts, increase the intensity, etc…
What’s your favorite song to lift heavy things to?
I can’t say that I have a favorite song to lift to but I do enjoy putting country music on the radio. Sometimes I even listen to sports talk radio when I lift. I try not to blast realy intense music and hype myself up for lifts in the gym unless I am testing something and I am trying to get really gassed up. Otherwise, I try and keep my cool.
What would be your best advice to an up-and-coming strength and conditioning coach who wants to make it in this business?
Read as much as you can, ask a lot of questions of others and of yourself, and never take anything anyone says as gospel – be open to many possibilities.
What’s your passion, or second passion in life after health and fitness?
I like jazz music a lot and actually my undergraduate degree was in jazz guitar from Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA.
Who are your 3 most influential mentors?
Charlie Weingroff, Willem Kramer, and Judith DeLany are up there as far as people that have influenced me professionally that I have been able to have some form of personal communication/relationship with. Also in that list I would have to include Don Miller, Jeff Cubos, and Dave Tenney.
What’s the biggest mistake you see athletes who want to make it to the next level make?
Doing too much. Most athletes crush themselves with insane amounts of either volume or intensity (or both) setting themselves back from further progres and decreasing their level of readiness, causing them to have inconsistent results when they compete.
What’s your favorite supplement?
I am not a huge supplement guy. I like fish oil and protein powder (muscle milk chocolate is my favorite). After that if you want some creatine or a multi-vitamin go for it. In general though I am a whole foods guy and feel that people should dial in their diet before they try and SUPPLEMENT it with anything.
What’s the most overrated exercise?
Every exercise has its place in a program and it is not my job to tell people what they should or should not use as every situation is different and every individual is different. I try not to get enamored with too many exercises or exercise variations. I see a lot of people creating new exercises for the sake of doing something “new”. I still like to stick with the basics and just focus on that.
What’s the most underrated exercise?
Don’t know if there is an underrated exercise. I try and focus on very basic compound exercises and they aren’t exercises that most people aren’t already doing – bench press, chin ups, rows, push ups, deadlifts, squats, lunges. Perhaps an exercise that I do like to use that I don’t think too many people use is the step up. I think it is a great exercise for the lower extremity and find that most people seem to shy away from it for one reason or another.
What book are you currently reading?
I usually have a few books going at the same time along with the countless studies that flood my desk. Currently the three books I have been concentrating most on are:
Soft Tissue Pain and Disability by Rene Calliet
Foundations for Osteopathic Medicine
The Science and Practice of Manual Therapy by Eyal Lederman
I like to do this type of posts once in a while to highlight some of the good stuff you can read on the internet through the blogs of smart fitness and strength and conditioning professionals. I don’t do it more often because quite frankly Ben Bruno does a much better job than me at this, and he does it on a consistent basis every week, so make sure you check out his website!
That being said here is what caught my attention in the past week or so:
There you go! You got 8 solid blog posts that you should definitely read because….well…they’ll make you smarter, plain and simple. And that’ll give you something to enjoy until I bring you some fresh new content next Tuesday!
Make sure you enter your info below to receive my 3 FREE sports performance training reports! Foam rolling, speed training, shoulder injury prevention and much more!!
Isolation training really doesn’t exist, whether it’s in bodybuilding or in rehab. The concept of isolating a muscle has long been associated with bodybuilding purposes to increase the size of the different major muscle groups individually. This has led the whole fitness industry to follow stupid training principles for years, and even today if you step foot in a commercial gym, 90% of people, including most personal trainers, use bodybuilding concepts (working every muscle separately, using body part splits, etc). But I digress.
Even Spiderman is following the trend
You can also notice a certain muscle isolation mindset in most rehab protocols. One of the most popular ones is the isolation of the VMO in knee pain and injuries. How many times have we heard “he has knee pain because his VMO is weaker than his vastus lateralis”. In an effort to cure every knee problem imaginable, we started isolating the VMO…or should I say “trying” to isolate the VMO.
Because of our understanding of the fascial system and how muscle interact together at this point, we now know that isolating the VMO is a flawed concept. But somehow we’ve managed to keep trying to isolate small muscles in the hope that it would cure our shoulder, low back or hip problem.
This guy clearly needs some VMO activation exercises
As Charlie Weingroff recently said: “If you don’t believe in isolating the VMO, why are you trying to isolate the serratus anterior?” To me this is a quote that makes plenty of sense. It’s just how your body works, you can’t isolate just one muscle, whether it’s your VMO, your biceps brachii, the serratus anterior or the lower trap. Isolation just doesn’t exist.
Does it mean that you can’t reinforce a certain movement pattern that will facilitate the recruitment of certain muscles? No. But you shouldn’t think about “isolating one muscle” and think more in terms of movements. And in the end, the goal is be able to perform integrated movement patterns with optimal joint centration and the right muscles will do their job- as long as we don’t have movement restrictions.
To get all the insights in the strength and conditioning world, don’t forget to sign up for my FREE newsletter. You’ll also receive 3 short e-books on soft-tissue work, shoulder injury prevention and speed training!
Believe it or not, Christmas is already less than 2 week away! Crazy isn’t it?! But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy about it; au contraire! Christmas is by far my favorite time of year because I usually get some time off from work and that allows me to spend some time with my family and friends. The only problem with Christmas is that I always end up being late on Christmas shopping and finding presents for my loved ones. That being said, if you have a fitness or strength and conditioning enthusiast in your life, here’s a couple of gift ideas that are well worth it if you ask me!
Hearte Rate Monitor
With what the research tells us about heart rate variability (HRV) and the feedback our heart rate can give us about our training, intensity, recovery, etc. it only makes sense to keep track of your heart rate. Most monitors are very convenient to use and not very expensive (you can get a really good one for less than 100$!). I recommend the Polar RS-100. If you’re looking for the best quality/price ratio, you can’t get much better than that one. Also, with Joel Jamieson’s new HRV product coming out soon, it will be 100% compatible with the RS-100, so you’re killing 2 birds with one stone! Ultimate Hockey Training
Kevin Neeld’s new book is a great gift idea for any hockey player, parent or coach. It highlights every component of a hockey player development from the youth level to the professional level as well as going into details on the training program itself and all that should be included (foam rolling, warm up, strength and power work, conditioning, etc). It really is the most complete hockey development resource out there, and very up-to-date as well (compared to other hockey training resources I’ve read before). I’ve been spreading the word about Kevin’s book for the last 2 months for a reason. And for less than 30$, it makes for a very cheap gift idea! You can get Ultimate Hockey Training HERE.
Metabolic Cooking Cookbook
It’s no big news that nutrition is a HUGE part of the results you get from your training. Who says nutrition also says planning. If you don’t plan your meals ahead you’re setting yourself up for failure. Period. Metabolic Cooking is a great, healthy cookbook with over 250 delicious recipes that will help you achieve your health and performance goals. You’ll be taking a huge step toward planning your meals better with this resource, as there is also different sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks! For less than 50$, it was way worth it to me, and I’m sure it’ll be for you as well!
Show and Go
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’m a big fan of Show and Go, as I tried it myself and gained almost 15 pounds of muscle while boosting my Deadlift and my Bench Press by 20-30 pounds; all of this in less than 4 months! It’s the best system out there of any non-athlete gym enthusiast who wants to pack on muscle, gain strength and lose bodyfat. You get a 16-week program based on your goals and the number of times per week you hit the gym. And on top of that you have full video support for all the exercises that are included in the program and Eric throws a bunch of cool bonuses with it. It takes the guess work out of writing your own program and quite frankly, the results speak for themselves. It’s the perfect gift for the fitness enthusiast in your life!
TheraCane Massager
Doing soft-tissue work is now widely accepted as part of a complete training program. I’ve raved about the benefits of foam rolling and other similar tools to promote tissue quality. A foam roller doesn’t work quite as well on the upper body as it does on the lower body, though. The theracane massager is probably the best “upper body” tool I’ve come across for soft-tissue work. I own one and I have to say that it works wonders on areas like the pecs, upper traps, rhomboids as well as the posterior neck muscles. It’s the next best thing to getting a massage! Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training
This last gift idea might be more for people who are serious about strength and conditioning and are looking for a great continuing education resource. Charlie Weingroff has a way of explaining things and giving people a different perspective on things that will make every penny you spend on this DVD set worth it. I’m not going to lie though, it’s not for everyone. The material on the DVDs is pretty advanced stuff, and I’ll even admit that I was scratching my head a couple of times while watching Charlie speaks. But it makes for a great Christmas present for any up-and-comer strength and conditioning coach; and trust me, they will appreciate it (it was my Christmas present last year, and I certainly did!). You ca get Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training on Charlie’s website HERE.
Buuuuuut, the best Christmas present of them all remains a subscription to DavidLasnier.com’s newsletter! And the best part is that it’s totally FREE!!! All you have to do is enter the contact info below, and you’ll even get 3 FREE reports on sports performance training!
This week I’m on vacation and will give you links to stuff you should definitely read! There has been some great material on the internet the last couple of weeks, and I think you shouldn’t miss out on it. So without further ado, there it is:
Lose Tension to Get Quick – Kelly Baggett. To be quick, the focus is often on stiffness and rate of force development, but in this blog post featured on Eric Cressey’s website, Kelly touches an important, yet almost always forgotten point, on the importance of being able to relax to be able to get quicker. Confused? Read Kelly’s post!
In-Season Hockey Training – Kevin Neeld. My friend and colleague Kevin Neeld wrote a great piece about in-season training for hockey players. Now is a great time for everyone involved in hockey to read this post because hockey players across the country are starting training camps and getting ready for the next season. Kevin addresses what should be the focus of an in-season program.
Getting Into Your Toes – Charlie Weingroff. Yet another brilliant post from Charlie on the importance of the foot/toes complex. It is a very overlooked area of the body among the strength and conditioning crew. In this one, he talks about foot and toes position during various exercises, namely exercises that are performed in the 1/2 kneeling position.
Inverted Face Pulls – Ben Bruno. Just another creative exercise from Ben Bruno. Ben has been posting many new innovative exercises through his blog and his YouTube channel. He deserves some recognition for that! Aaand he’s been linking to my blog for a long time now, so I kinda owe him too!
Stability is often perceived as a good thing; single-leg stability, core stability and scapular stability are all terms that are commonly referred to when we’re talking about functional training and we see those things as being positive outcomes we want to get out of our training program. Referring back to the joint-by-joint approach popularized by Mike Boyle and Gray Cook, some joints in the body should be geared more towards stability and some others should be geared more towards mobility.
The Joint-by-Joint Approach
But this doesn’t mean that those joints should have only one of the two (mobility OR stability). Every joint in your body needs a healthy balance of both; some just need more of one than the other. It’s also important to acknowledge that every joint in your body needs some sort of stability. As physical therapist Charlie Weingroff puts it: “you need stability before mobility”. In other words, if you can’t stabilize your joint, taking it into a full range of motion might not be a good idea.
When this guy talks, I listen
Stability is very important per se. But stability is not always good. Confused? Perfect! Let me explain: as I just mentioned, you NEED stability in every joint in your body, but if you can’t get stability with proper muscle activation and balance around a joint, most of the time your body will find a way to get that stability. This is when compensation patterns occur; you have the wrong muscles trying to stabilize your joints because the right muscles that should stabilize aren’t doing their job. Some other times, when the muscles’ contribution isn’t enough your body will look somewhere else to find stability. This is when passive structures like ligaments and bones are being used for stability purposes, and that’s when things start to get pretty ugly.
When a baseball pitcher throws a baseball at 90mph and his arm rotates at 7,000°/second at the shoulder, if the the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizer muscles can’t control the deceleration, something else in your body will, because I can guarantee you that his arm is not just going to rip off his body and go flying in the air!
That means that something somewhere is stabilizing the arm at the shoulder in the deceleration phase. And again if it’s not the right muscles doing it, it might mean some added stress on the ligaments of the shoulder, some irritation to the labrum, compensation patterns taking place by stabilization from the wrong muscles, etc. There are plenty of examples like this one in athletic performance.
Always keep in mind that stability will happen one way or another. We just need to make sure it’s happening at the right places with the right structures. Otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for injuries.
Want to know how to get that stability at right places for optimal shoulder performance? Enter your information below to get my ‘Shoulder Injury Prevention Strategies’ report for FREE!!!
For those of you who don’t already know, I’ve been writing articles for 2 different membership websites in the last couple of months. If you’re not familiar with these 2 websites, I highly suggest you check them out today, as there is a ton of great content on both of them. One is hockey specific and the other one is rehab oriented.
Hockey Strength and Conditioning is a tremendous resource for anyone who trains hockey player, whether you are an on-ice coach or a strength and conditioning coach…and actually it is a great resource for anyone who wants to know more about hockey training. The information that is available on this site is unbelievable. There are videos, audio interviews with some of the best people in the hockey training, detailed programs from NHL strength coaches, articles and much more. For me to be a part of Hockey Strength and Conditioning as a writer is more than an honor for me; having articles posted on the same website as Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks), Sean Skahan (Anaheim Ducks) and Darryl Nelson (USA Hockey) is quite an honor. These guys know their stuff, and they stay on top of things, and when you see their programs and articles, it’s easy to tell. If you’re somehow involved on hockey, you NEED to check it out.
The second one, as I mentioned is more rehab and injury prevention oriented, but is just as good! On Sports Rehab Expert you can find articles, injury prevention and rehab protocols, new exercises, audio interviews and videos. There is some sport-specific material as well as more in-depth physical therapy protocols. With guys like Joe Heiler (who’s the founder), Eric Cressey, Charlie Weingroff and Gray Cook contributing to the site, you know right off the bat that there’s going to be some high quality information there. I still can’t believe that my articles are right there for everyone to read with all these smart guys! This is another site that you absolutely need to check out if haven’t before!
Then you can move to Rack Pulls, which involve a little more knee flexion (depending on where you set up the pins):
