One Concept to Improve Your Strength
Understanding how to proactively control a muscle will enhance your strength and reduce the risk of injury
Every movement we make with our body requires muscles to contract and relax. Muscles are the engines that drive our body. An engine cannot start without a signal—pushing your foot on the accelerator, for example. Every movement we make with our body requires a signal from the brain to contract and relax a muscle.
Why is this framing so important? You are likely sitting while you read this, so let’s start there. Here is an exercise you can do to test your awareness of your body and ability to mentally contract your muscles:
Step 1: While sitting, try to contract your glutes by squeezing your butt.
Step 2: Now, stand up and try to contract your glutes.
Did you notice a difference in the strength of the contraction? This is because the gluteus maximus’s primary action is to pull the hips forward, or what’s called hip extension. When we’re sitting, our hips are flexed, putting the gluteus maximus into a lengthened, weakened position.
Last week, we discussed how muscular imbalance is a common source of neck pain. What causes muscular imbalance? Frequency of use.
Take our sitting example. When we sit, roughly half of the muscle groups around our hips shorten and contract while the other half lengthen and weaken. Previously, I discussed “dead butt syndrome” where the glutes lengthen and deactivate as a result of prolonged sitting. Conversely, the hip flexor muscles each shorten and contract. Over time, this imbalance will create an “anterior pelvic tilt”. In other words, the hip bone will begin to tilt forward because of the tension placed on it by the hip flexors and the lack of strength of the glutes to counteract them. The glutes are not being used, while the hip flexors are being used constantly.
“If I apply a force to a structure, it deforms.” — Stuart McGill, Ph.D.
The key piece of this formula is that the glutes have lost the contractile strength—their ability to shorten—and cannot hold the pelvis in balance. If we go back to our earlier exercise, let’s add a third step:
Step 3: While you are standing, place your hands on your hips. Now, contract your glutes and feel what it does to your pelvis. You should notice that it flattens. With your glutes contracted and your pelvis level, what is happening to your spine? Are other muscles engaging as well?
Muscular Adaptation
Our body adapts to the movements we do most often. As Stuart McGill suggests, someone who practices yoga should never lift a heavy load where they’re compressing their spine:
“This is why I say, ‘please never mix up deadlifts and yoga.’ If you adapt your spine to be very flexible, you adapt the type X collagen holding the type I and type II, the heavy, grissly collagen, and the elastic collagen, all those fibers together. A powerlifter wants those to be stiff and tough… But a yoga master, that would be the kiss of death. They want nice, pliable, flexible spines.
… The powerlifter bends forward and crushes the disc bulge posteriorly; but when the yoga person, or a very flexible spine, when they bend backwards, the collagen under compression buckles. So one gets a disc bulge from extension and one gets a bulge from flexion.
Don’t mix up the adaptation schedules. If you want to be a powerlifter, train your hip mobility, shoulder mobility, but torso stiffness. Versus the yoga master, please stay away from the heavy loads.
Let’s go back to our example of the hip flexors and sitting. The diagram below shows each hip flexor muscle. We know that if we sit too much, these muscles shorten. Observe the Psoas. It originates on the lumbar spine, the lower back, and comes down to insert on the femur. If this muscle shortens, what will happen to the muscles in our lower back?
Origin, Insertion, Action and Progressive Lifting
Now we get to the even more fun stuff! Every skeletal muscle has an origination point, an insertion point, and an action it performs—what is referred to as O.I.As.
Origin: the point on a bone where a muscle originates.
Insertion: the point on a bone where a muscle inserts.
Action: The movement(s) that muscle performs. Usually, it involves pulling from the insertion to the origin.
One example is your bicep. Your bicep consists of two muscles that originate on the scapula and join together to insert on the radius in your forearm. Here is how you can practice your neuromuscular strength of your bicep:
Step 1: Place your left hand on your right bicep. Keep your right arm and shoulder relaxed.
Step 2: Squeeze your right bicep and observe it pulling your forearm up toward your shoulder.
Step 3: Slowly relax the bicep and feel your elbow extend back into a relaxed position. Repeat several times and even try adding a small amount of weight.
This is a version of what is called a “proactive” movement. You are controlling the muscles to move your joints. This increases the stability of the surrounding joints, increasing strength and reducing the risk of injury. Conversely, if you’ve ever seen someone performing a bicep curl where they are throwing their entire body into the movement, that is a “reactive” movement. There is no stabilization involved, so no one particular muscle is dominant. This puts an enormous strain on the tendons and ligaments of the surrounding joints.
In summary, if you know where a muscle originates and inserts, you’ll know its action. If you know its action, and can control it, you will greatly improve your training. If you sit for long periods of the day, you’ll know which muscles you need to strengthen and which to stretch in order to counter the effects of sitting. If you know which movements you perform the most, you can create a routine uniquely beneficial to your body.
If you struggle with neck pain, lower back pain, or would like help improving your body’s movements, please send me an email at eweiner@envisionfitnessmn.com to schedule a virtual one-on-one meeting.
Next week, we will apply this concept to the core muscles and how much of a difference it can make to your physical strength and health.
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