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Avoiding Back Injury in Deadlifts With Neurological Priming
Avoiding Back injury in deadlifts and Olympic Lifts
The spine alone is a flexible stack of blocks that is vulnerable to buckling under compressive load. With the surrounding musculature removed, the ligamentous support has been demonstrated to buckle under as little as 20 pounds of compressive load. (first noted in 1961 in cadaver studies by Lucas and Bresler.) We are very good at fixing those injuries here at SMNW, but prevention is king.
There is no single muscle that stabilizes this osteoligamentous structure so forget about targeting the multifidus or transverse abdominis. The system that supports the spine is the collective tension of all of the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles firing with equal tension from all sides. It is a guy wire system.
image from Low Back Disorders 2nd Edition.
The guy wire system only functions when all “wires” in our case muscles, fire equally. This is why I see athletes vulnerable to back injury in deadlifts during light weight (warm-up) weight pulls. They lack the ability to engage all of the tissues necessary for stability at lighter loads and their spines buckle. At higher weights they are less vulnerable as all of the tissues fire necessarily just to move the bar. The key to avoiding this warm-up weight movement fault is priming the tissues to fully engage by firing first with speed, then with load.
I use a lot of corrective exercises in practice but what I’m demonstrating today is more of what I’d call Joint Prep Movements. These are to be performed immediately before a loaded lift to prime your neurologic sequencing and set the table for for successful and coordinated firing patterns.
Here are two good examples:
Dr. Pond featured on CrossFitFootball.com @ CF West Regionals
It was a good weekend of gritty work and unexpected results. We held a top 10 spot all three days keeping us in the championship heat for all seven events. We had a plan and when our bodies broke down, we didn’t. We helped each other up and kept grinding. This was my 6th trip to the CrossFit Regionals and it is that human element that has made this the year’s run the one that I am most proud of.
While there, the good people at CrossFit Football sponsored the team with some free swag securing my “volunteer professional athlete” status for another season. We even made the site! Which is awesome. http://crossfitfootball.com/training/todays-training/
www.crossfitfootball.com
Come catch the CFFB peeps at their upcoming “How to Build a POWER ATHLETE” Seminar here at Northwest Strength and Performance June 13th and 14th. More info HERE.
Seattle Crossfit Chiropractor in West Regionals
Dr. Pond wearing two hats as team physician and competitor in events 1&2 of the 2015 Crossfit Games West Super Regionals. Skip to 1:11:20 for the deadlift / syncro pull-up event then to 2:52:10 for the power snatch/rope climb/ thruster event. After day 1 we’re holding on to a top 10 placement. Two days to go.
https://youtu.be/NianFspD7fg
Whens searching for a good Seattle Crossfit Chiropractor you’ll find that there are several great Seattle Sports Chiropractors out there. Here’s one putting the biomechanics he preaches to the test.
The Double Kettlebell Turkish Get-Up
This racked version of the double kettlebell turkish get-up takes the mobility and stability demands off of the shoulders and places it instead on the hips. That makes this an accessible transition for those with limited shoulder flexion mobility. If you have difficulty with this movement, it is likely because you lack the capacity for internal rotation at the hip. Try warming up with the Tactical Frog mobility the hockey stretch mobility before hand for greater range of motion in the transition. Balancing out your internal/external active range of motion is always a good idea anyway so if this applies to you, you may see you hip hinging patterns improve as well.
Here’s a quick reminder on how to do the hockey and tac frog mobilities:
We’ll be addressing the overhead version of the double kettlebell turkish get-up on the quick and dirty as well. That version is very difficult to perform correctly. Even for high level movers, attention to detail and excellent shoulder and thoracic mobility are prerequisites along with midline rib flare control. I’ll post up a different set of joint preps to go along with that version of the movement.
The Best Sports Massage In Seattle
After the sports massage work I had done by my staff last week, I had to fight the compulsion to right a gushing Yelp! review as I typically would when someone goes above and beyond. I’ll go the blog post route instead.
About 8 months ago I partially tore my vastus lateralis in a snatch pull. It began as a typical quad pull but has settled in as a deep visceral ache in the lateral hip that keeps me from being able to put any pressure on that side and sometimes gets in the way of squatting motions. This is a nuisance as it wakes me up at night. I work the rehab/ prehab moves regularly and that keeps it functional during training but I haven’t caught any heavy snatches successfully in 8 months and the direct pressure issue is persistent. That is, until I had some deep tissue work done last week.
The work was indirect focusing mostly on the posterior side of the joint and distally near the lateral side of the knee at the muscle’s insertion. I can’t say that it was a pleasant experience but the local tenderness was gone immediately after the session. The next morning I woke up to the sound of my alarm for the first time in 8 months. I realized then that I usually wake with hip pain a couple times per night. I can now sleep on either side and I’ve hit 4 consecutive snatches at 95% of my 1RM. I’m now 100% for the 1RM snatch in event #4 of this weekend’s Crossfit West Regionals. These are the sorts of results that people need when they come to me for help here in the clinic. I am fortunate to work with such a talented team. I can say without reservation that when searching for the best sports massage in Seattle, look no further than Shannon Lindstrand and Sonya Rosenberger here at Sports Medicine Northwest.
Thank You!!!
The Single Kettlebell Sit Up, your spine, and why the GHD sit up hates your discs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gCEGQyZDq8?rel=0
This is the time of year when athletes such as myself and my teammates at Northwest Strength and Performance steel ourselves for the Crossfit Regionals. The events aren’t too bad this year. We just ran through a 3 day trial run and we’re all a little tired but in good shape otherwise. We’ve been through years where it feels like the attitude is “Any athlete who made it here without cheating is invincible so why not do 100 overhead squats after 100 pull ups?” This is when we see what I consider “competition” movements. Those are movements that are not good for me but are measurable and part of my sport. Movements such as the sumo deadlift high pull and the GHD sit up are “competition” movements. It is well documented by McGill in research compiled in his text Low Back Disorders that the discs of the lower back are vulnerable to injury when loaded in compression and then moved from end range extension to end range flexion. This is exactly what happens in every repetition of a ghd sit-up. In training we take these reps to neutral only, but this is competition and competition is not always gentle.
There has to be a better way to build midline strength and stability. Enter the Single Kettlebell Sit Up. This version of the kettlebell sit up is a spine sparing alternative to the ghd or long sets of unweighted sit ups. The reason is that this weighted version is extremely difficult from a positioning standpoint and a maximal work load can look like 5 sets of 5 in each arm rather than hundreds of repetitions unweighted, or end-range of motion movements such as the ghd sit up.
This motor pattern also helps to reset the glenohumeral alignment to correct shoulder impingement issues. The arm remains fixed perpendicular to the floor and the torso extends beneath it. Thus creating that same flexion as a waited raise without reinforcing any of the faulty firing patterns that are causing impingement. It really just cuts to the chase on the effect of the turkish get up.