Put the Pull Back in Your Pull-Up

Pull-ups might be the hardest body weight exercise that exists.

Not only does it challenge your back, arms, and shoulders, but the demand on your core is significant. Once you’re holding onto that bar and your feet leave the floor, gravity begins pulling your entire body down from your hands. Your torso is now being stretched and lengthening by your own body weight, constricting your abdomen’s free space, leaving your lungs struggling to fill up with air against the weight of your own body and gravity pulling everything down and tight.

I’ve considered for a while now that maybe one of the reasons people struggle with doing pull-ups is not just the lack of strength in being able to perform a pull-up, but from the panic signals being sent to their brain when the lungs suddenly begin to struggle to get oxygen. There are not many exercises that place this type of demand on your body and mind. So, we’ve come up with a routine to address building up both the physical strength needed to do a pull-up, as well as the mental fortitude needed to control yourself in that position.

Negative Pull-up

A good way to get started is by practicing the negative part of the pull-up, a.k.a. the lowering down part. This will get you more familiar and comfortable with your pull-up position while building up strength. You can use a Smith Machine or an adjustable squat rack and set the bar at shoulder height. From here get your hands just wider than shoulder width apart with your feet on the ground. Using a 5 count, slowly lower yourself down toward the ground, trying to use your legs as little as possible to support you. Once at the bottom use your arms and legs to stand back up again, and try to repeat for 10-12 reps, or as many as you’re capable of doing.

Seated Pull-up

Another good way to get better at pull-ups using a modification with a Smith Machine or squat rack is to do pull-ups from a seated position on the floor. This will be a more traditional form of pull-up except that you will primarily be lifting only your upper body weight. Adjust the height of the bar so that you can sit cross legged underneath it and you can reach up and grip the bar at arm’s length away.

Some key points to remember.

You want to follow a straight path up and down from the bar. The bar should line up over the top of your chest or just under your collar bone. And when you pull yourself up to the bar, you should follow that straight path up to the bar. You want your torso and your elbows to stay as vertical as possible. When you pull you should not have your elbows flaring out behind you, but pointing straight down toward the floor, and your hips should stay under you as well, not pitching out in front of you so you feel like you’re leaning back. This is where your core strength and control will come into play. Again, aim for 10-12 reps here or as many as you’re capable of doing.

Lat Pull Down

A very straight forward but effective way to build up basic pull-up strength is by doing lat pull downs, which basically mimics the movement of a pull-up. Try doing both the traditional wide grip, but also the closer, underhand grip, like doing a chin-up, to build up biceps as well. This obviously requires access to a lat pull down machine. But the principles are the same. Keep yourself and your elbows vertical and pull the bar to the top of your chest, just under your collar bone with your elbows tucked to your sides. Keep your shoulders from rounding forward and think about your shoulder blades pulling down and together in the back. This exercise will not do a lot for your core but it will most definitely build up your back, shoulder, and arm strength.

Rows

Another tool in your toolbox for getting stronger in general that will aid your pull-ups is doing any type of row. Seated row, TRX row, inverted row, bent over row, cable row, etc. The act of positioning and stabilizing yourself and accessing your back and arm muscles is key to being able to do pull-ups, but it’s also extremely important for back strength in general. Just remember to put your focus on your back muscles. Your shoulder blades and back muscles should be engaged and moving as you do rows, otherwise you’re just using your arms and basically doing a weird bicep curl. Posture and position are going to be key with all of these. Do not try to “over pull” so your elbows are way back behind you and your shoulders are rolled forward. Focus more on the pull starting from the back of your shoulders, and when you finish your shoulder blades should be pulled together and your chest and shoulders should be up and open, with the effort being on the muscles of your back.

Part of getting comfortable with your pull-up position is going to simply be getting used to the feeling of gravity pulling on you from that bar, so practice gripping and hanging from the bar. See if you can hang there, but then retract your shoulder blades down and together and engage your grip.

So rather than “hanging” from the bar you are actually holding yourself in position with control.

This is where you can practice breathing in the tight space of your abdomen as well has learning to control the small but deliberate movements of your shoulder blades. This will increase your grip strength but also get you more comfortable with that feeling of gravity dragging your torso down making it harder to get a good breath.

Grip Strength

If you notice that grip strength is more than a small issue for you try doing a couple of sets of Farmer Carries in between other exercises. These are pretty straight forward. Grab a pair of heavy dumbbells, and with a straight back and engaged arms, shoulders, core, and hips simply carry them around the gym until your grip begins to give. When it does just put the dumbbells down, give your hands and forearms a quick rest and then do it again. These can be worked into any exercises and be used as an active recovery until your grip strength improves.

Assisted Pull-ups

Lastly you will need to begin practicing your actual pull-up by using a resistance band for assistance. By this point you should be comfortable with the form of your pull-up and have attained the grip strength necessary to hold yourself on the bar. Find a band that provides enough support where you can do between 5 and 15 reps. Attach the band to the bar and use a box, step, or bench in order to safely get your foot into the band before you step off and practice your pull-up. Once you get comfortable with these it’s time to get rid of the band and try a full body weight pull-up, and by this point you should notice a significant increase in your strength and your ability to perform a pull-up. Thanks for reading, and please follow up with any questions!

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Plantar Fasciitis: Steps to Fixing It (Hint: It's not insoles)

Probably the most overworked and underappreciated part of our bodies is our feet.

If you’ve ever experienced that pain in your heel when your foot first hits the floor in the morning then you probably know what I’m talking about. It’s hard to walk because with each step the part of your body that touches the floor is sending up shockwaves of pain. So you end up limping around, searching for those “arch support” insoles to stick in your work heels or dress shoes. They’re supposed to help but for some reason the problem never seems to go away.

Without even knowing it you’re making the problem worse.

Our feet are the last part of our body that comes into contact with the ground, with our entire body weight bearing down on them. All day, every day. No other part of our body has so much constant demand put on it. Given that fact you’d think we would want our feet to be the toughest and strongest they can be. I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

Big tobacco, fossil fuels, for-profit insurance; these scandals pale in comparison to the marketing lies of Big Footwear.

Just kidding, those industries are far, far worse, but big footwear is pretty bad. Every day they show you ads and tell you about the next generation of shock absorbing, arch supporting, physics defying footwear that is going to make you run faster and longer and charge up more stadium stairs than you ever have in your life. Because you gotta protect your feet, right? They need cushioning and support, and a huge sole that dampens the damaging impact of the ground. Your feet are soft, delicate flowers that need to be wrapped in a protective layer of cushioning and shock absorption. Hopefully at this point you don’t need me to tell you that’s complete nonsense.

Who makes it through the jungle alive, Indiana Jones, or the pampered prince sitting on his fluffy pillows being fed grapes by his servants?

If you want to avoid foot pain and all the things that go with it then you want your feet as strong and tough as possible. Plantar Fasciitis can be caused by a myriad of things. Stuffing your feet into tight, cramped shoes all day is one of them. Sitting all day is another one. Even standing for long periods can cause this problem. But the biggest problem is not knowing how to address these issues to preserve the strength of your feet. When you shove your feet into tight, uncomfortable shoes for long periods, the muscles in your feet get tight and cramped up themselves. This can lead to your calves getting tight also. As anyone who has had plantar fasciitis knows, your feet hurt, but if you rub your calves, they feel pretty tight and beat up too.

When you sit all day your hamstrings become shortened and your glutes inactive. This can also lead to sciatica but it can also severely impact plantar fasciitis. To put it simply: you’re inactive. And even if you go to the gym or do some form of exercise, chances are you’re not undoing the damage you’ve done from sitting all day, or having your feet cramped up in terrible shoes, by working the knots out of your feet, foam rolling and stretching your calves, stretching your hamstrings, and then doing some glute bridges or something to get your glutes active before you start your routine. It also helps to activate the tibialis muscle, which is the muscle on your shin and helps support the arch in your foot. You can do this by putting some type of weight or resistance around your toes and then flexing your toes up toward you against the resistance so your shins warm up.

In conclusion.

So there you have it. Ditch the awful, tight, constrictive shoes, along with the ones that pad your feet up in some kind of pillow. Have at least one day a week, or maybe the evenings when you’re done with work, be a barefoot session where you walk around with no shoes or flipflops or anything on your feet. If you have plantar fsciitis or even just foot pain in general, use a foot massage ball (my favorite small massage ball), or a rope at the gym, or a frozen water bottle, or anything really to break up the tension in your feet. Then foam roll your calves, stretch your calves, stretch your hamstrings, activate your glutes and tibialis, and you should be good to go. Depending on the severity of the condition you might have to do this routine for a week or two before the foot pain goes away.

If you have any questions feel free to hit us up in the link below!

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Push-ups, Planks, and Modifications

Struggling with push-ups is a real thing, just ask my sister. She was recently asking me why they were so hard, and how you ever get better at them. But when she described what she was doing it was either struggling to do even just two or three regular plank position push-ups where her core would collapse and her elbows would flare out, or doing a ton from her knees that were super easy.

The answer, which is true for most exercises, is finding modifications.

It’s also important to understand the positions you’re attempting to achieve and finding ways to isolate them individually. The problem with attempting to “muscle through” standard push-ups when you don’t actually have the strength to do them is that your form is going to be awful. You’re just going to reinforce an improper movement pattern since you can’t achieve the correct one, or you’re going to hurt yourself, and maybe even both. So here are some ideas for how to progress your push-ups, as well as brush up on the movement itself.

Let’s quickly look at the Push-Up itself.

The start position for a standard push-up is a plank. Arms are straight, hands are under your shoulders, head is in neutral position, hips and core are engaged, and your body should be relatively straight from your shoulders to your heels. You don’t want your back arching so your stomach is falling to the floor, but you also don’t want your hips hiked up behind you, so your butt is sticking up in the air. A solid plank should be the first position you are able to get into. If you can’t get into this position then doing a push-up is a tomorrow problem.

Pretty much every exercise has a start position and a finish position. If you can get into both of those positions then the movement between the two should be relatively easy.

The focus then becomes on moving more weight, doing more reps, or increasing the tempo. The finish position for a push up is elbows bent and creating about a 45 degree angle between your body and elbows from your armpits, and your body braced a few inches above the floor. Hips and core are still fully engaged. If you could draw a straight line from one thumb to the other it should run across the middle of your sternum, or what some refer to as nipple line. A push-up is just alternating between these two positions in a controlled, stable manner. “Screwing” your hands into the floor (generating tension with the floor by applying clockwise pressure with the right hand and counterclockwise pressure with the left) will help stabilize your shoulder by engaging your lats and shoulder muscles as the head of the humerus bone rotates in the socket.

Now let’s get to the tips and modifications.

·        Planks – If you struggle to do a plank then this is where you begin. You need to have the arm, shoulder, core, and chest strength to be able to maintain a plank if you want to be able to do a push-up.

·        Incline Position Push-Ups – If you have access to a squat rack then you can set the bar to the height you need in order to be able to perform a push-up while practicing your form. With this method, “screwing” your hands in becomes “bend the bar. You can also try using a chair or the back of a couch, or anything that elevates your hands off the ground so you can work on building up your strength.

·        Negative Position Push-ups – With this you will start in plank position and slowly lower yourself to the ground. From there, bend your knees and put them on the ground with your feet in the air and do a knee push up back to the top. Get back into plank position and slowly lower yourself down again. These will most likely be difficult but will help a lot in building strength.

·        Finish Position Hold Push-ups – These start with you laying flat on the floor, hands just outside your chest, elbows 45 degrees off your body, and thumb line going across the center of your sternum. Push your self about 3 inches off the floor and try to hold the finish position of a push-up for 3 seconds, aiming for 10-12 reps. The time and reps should increase as you get stronger.

·        Up Downs – This method is essentially alternating between a forearm plank and a straight arm plank. Start in a forearm plank and then alternate between the arm that helps push you up into a straight arm plank.

·        Plank Walks – Any kind of movement in plank position will help strengthen your arms, shoulders, chest, and core. You can plank walk side to side, forward and backward, rotate in a circle, anything you want, get creative. As long as you’re in control of your movement and maintaining a stable plank position. I suggest doing this as a timed exercise for 30-60 seconds.

·        Dumbbell Press and Tricep Extensions – A very straightforward way to build up the strength you need for a push-up is to work the muscles that are part of the movement. Doing flat bench or incline bench dumbbell presses will build up the push muscles in your chest, shoulders, and arms. And then you can specifically target your triceps by doing tricep extensions to both increase their strength, which will help with your push-up, but also tone your arms. Toning bonus FTW!

 It’s likely that there are plenty more modifications out there besides these, and maybe there are even some that you come up with yourself. Be consistent, keep practicing, and make note of your progress so you know when to challenge yourself more. It may seem daunting at first, maybe even impossible, but you will definitely see progress and will end up fully capable of doing a push-up.

What Does It Mean to Hip Hinge: An Introduction to Deadlift

A Breakdown of Hip Hinge and Deadlifting

Successfully executing a deadlift is akin to having all the stars align. For anyone who has struggled with this form and mastered it, you probably know exactly what I mean. For whatever reason this movement seems to come very easily to some people, but for others it is weeks, if not months, of practice. Part of this problem is due to tight hamstrings or hips, leading to difficulty in sensing the lengthening and shortening of that muscle group. Another obstacle can be underactive glutes, or a lack of glute strength, that also leads to difficulty in sensing the movements and engaging with the muscle group. Both of these are pretty straightforward fixes: stretch, foam roll, activate, and strengthen these muscle groups. The more active muscle fibers you have operating, the easier it is for your brain to communicate with them and vice versa.

Outside of these basic obstacles though is probably the biggest one of all: understanding what it means to hip hinge. I’ve mentioned before that sometimes terminology can sound good, but not carry any actual meaning for people. In other words, if someone asked you to explain what it means to hip hinge, could you? If not, or if you just want to double check your own understanding, keep reading.

Hip Hinge. It sounds simple enough. But a combination of tight or weak muscles, and a less than complete understanding of how to produce this movement can lead to a lot of frustration. So let’s break it down in the simplest terms. The main area being affected are your hips, so there’s the hip part. And in the same way a hinge on a door functions that gives us the hinge part; your hips are hinging. In my view the confusion mostly tends to rise out of one particular area: your back. Let me quickly explain.

If you simply looked at a hinge on a door you would see two flat, metal pieces, joined in the middle by intersecting, round pieces that form a cylindrical tube, with a pin that inserts into that tube to hold the pieces together. The center tube with the pin through it allows the two metal pieces to pivot off of one another, so when attached to a door and the frame, the door can open and close. Right now you’re probably about to stop reading this article because, duh Jamie, we know how a door works. But hear me out.

With your body, your thighs are one metal plate, your back is the other, and your hips are the tube in between with the pin through it. Your thighs, or more specifically the femur bone in them, are hard and strong and straight just like the metal plate. Your back on the other hand is ribs and spine, which not only is made up of interlocking vertebrae that can bend and move, but your spine itself is curved as it travels through your torso and inserts into the back of your pelvis (the SI joint). Therefore, maintaining a straight, flat back that might resemble a solid metal plate is going to depend entirely on your muscles to maintain control, stability, and straightness.

You can probably look around your local gym or almost anywhere on the internet and see people rounding their back as they perform a deadlift. This is generally a lack of awareness but can also be from a lack of strength, or trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for them. Or all of the above. The point is though: don’t be that person. Using a mirror at first is a great way to ensure that you are maintaining a straight back as you hip hinge. But beyond that it is pretty essential that you know what it feels like so you can ditch the mirror. In my view the easiest way to familiarize yourself with a hip hinge is to imagine you’re doing a hamstring stretch, except you have to keep your back completely flat and straight as you push your butt out behind you. Holding a broom stick or pvc pipe on your back as you do this and maintaining full contact with it along your back can help. As you do this you should feel the muscles of your hamstrings begin to lengthen and stretch. Stop before you get to a point where you can no longer control the stretch because the next part is important. In the same way your arm does a bicep curl, the bicep muscle lengthens when the weight is away from you, then the muscle shortens and contracts to “curl” the weight in, that’s basically how your hamstrings operate too. From that lengthened position, with your back straight and your butt pushed out behind you, pull yourself back to an upright position by contracting and shortening your hamstrings. The pull is through your glutes and hamstrings, not by arching and pulling through your low back. This is essentially a hip hinge.

While practicing this you’ll probably discover that there are various iterations of a hip hinge. Technically, when you squat you are performing a hip hinge. You load your glutes and hamstrings for stability as you lower into the squat, but then due to the flexion of your knees it becomes more of a push movement through your quads and glutes to drive back to standing. Similarly, with deadlift you might have been practicing a straight-leg deadlift in order to familiarize yourself with a hip hinge, but in order to generate more power and strength in a traditional deadlift, there is going to be some degree of flexed knees in order to create a higher concentration of overlapping muscle fibers in the hamstrings, leading to a stronger pull. If that’s confusing, think back to doing a bicep curl. If you had your arm completely straight and you put a heavy dumbbell in your hand, chances are you’re going to struggle to curl that dumbbell in from a straight arm position. But if you bent your elbow slightly and then put that same dumbbell in your hand, it would be much easier to curl it due to the extra overlap of muscle fibers. If you want to learn more about that, do a search on the actin and myosin filaments in a sarcomere.

 Hopefully this has cleared up any confusion about what it means to hip hinge and how the movement applies to lifting and really, picking up anything in general. If you can master the hip hinge and apply it appropriately to deadlift posture when picking things up, you’ll end up engaging your back in a position of stability while your glutes and hamstrings are the muscles that actually lift whatever it is you have off the floor, or out of the back of your car or truck, and basically anything of that nature. Understanding and mastering this movement will save you a lifetime of back pain and strain, and make your glutes and hamstrings strong, functional, and sexy!