So yesterday, in the wake of the big response and share-fest of my post 75 Ways Deadlifting Just Plain Rocks, I was checking some of the major news outlets and stumbled across this little story about how Sketchers is now having to refund about $40 million due to their unsubstantiated claims that their “toning” shoes could actually reduce body fat and increase muscle activity.
Now the funny thing is their advertising said that they had clinical research trials that showed a greater muscle activity in the hamstrings and greater calorie burning capacity versus normal shoes, but there’s been a lot of studies, one being on the American Council on Exercise and available HERE that shows there’s no real benefit in muscle activation in any muscle, caloric burn, or even the ability to cook a ham sandwich by wearing the shoes.
This just goes to proove my theory that anything Kim Kardashian walks over turns into a liability. Let’s look at the examples:
Ray-J
Reggie Bush
Kris Humphries
Sketchers
Ryan Seacrest
Kanye West better be praying to Jesus or Buddha or Jay-Z or who ever is writing his life story that her gypsy curse is coming to a close or he’ll have a lot of material for another angry album.
Now as much as I would love to continue ripping on Kim Kardashian and her inability to produce anything as beneficial to public consumption as a monkeys fart in a windstorm, this is about the Sketcher toning shoe debacle.
Having worked with a few clients who have developed tendinitis from wearing these contraptions for a few weeks, I can pretty much tell you that the physiology of “toning” shoes is completely out to lunch. The concept was that by standing on thick soft cushioning that your muscles would have to work harder to to maintain balance and stability, which would give you more of a chance to work your muscles through low intensity exercise.
The downside to this logic is that the area that is getting worked more is the neural receptors throughout the ankle and knee, not the muscles. The receptors that maintain balance would be activated long before the muscles, seeing as how the receptors are what tells the muscles to work.
After a few minutes of wearing these midevil torture devices, the receptors would begin to fatigue which would lead to more muscle DE-ACTIVATION than anything else, which would have a great impact on destabilizing the ankle and knee and creating some sweet compensation patterns, which would help develop some good tendinitis issues in the prime movers as they try to keep you from shearing the hell out of your big joints.
To give some more info on this, THIS ARTICLE from Hiemstra et al in 2001, showing that a large body of research indicates that receptor fatigue leads to muscle downregulation and joint destabilization in the knee which can increase the likelihood of injuries.
This makes sense as muscles themselves don’t contract on their own, as evident by people who have had spinal injuries or suffered paralysis. The nerve tells the muscle to fire, and if it gets tired from always suffering embarrassment from walking around in those gawd-awful shoes, the nerves won’t be able to tell the muscles to fire.
Here’s a simple test to replicate this feat. Find an extremely long set of stairs and run up them at full speed. I’m not talking about the set that takes you from the first floor to the second floor. I’m talking about the of stairs that makes you feel like you’re going to touch clouds when you get to the top.
If you can feel your left arm and can actually feel feelings by the top of them, see if you can stand on one foot and do a very small jump without falling to the floor as your neural receptors and muscles ability to support your ass has just packed it in and gone on hiatus for a few minutes while they contemplate organizing a coordinated effect of making you simultaneously have to cough and fart, and not providing an adequate line of defence against the certain unhappy ending that will result.
I can’t say I’m really happy that this company had to repay this much money, because that means there was that many people who were stupid enough to buy into the fact that a pair of shoes could replace hard work, dedication, and deadlifts as a way of getting stronger, leaner, and a more sexified build that would be the envy of every friend and foe they had.
Until the day comes when people stop buying crap with absolutely no merit to their claims, we will always have to be vigilant and on guard, because one day there will be a pill capsule that claims to help people lose crazy amounts of weight, and will instead create a race of sub-intelligent zombies, hell bent on eating brains from people in health clubs, simply because they contain the two things the zombie-tards desire most: brains and hot bodies.
Be wary, my friends. Be wary of the zombie gym apocalypse.
I loves me some deadlifts. They drive me in my training as one of my main staples of almost each and every workout. In one way or another, I’m pretty much working towards lifting greater and greater amounts of weight without snapping my back in half. They get me jacked in a way very few things other than the thought of steak, mowing my lawn, or watching Roadhouse on late-night television can accomplish, which is saying a lot.
I need more deadlifting like I need more cowbell. Nobody puts baby in the corner, primarily because they don’t know how to deadlift. If they knew, she would go to that corner.
She would get put right the hell in that corner.
We could start trending “replace movie one-liners with “deadlifts”‘ all day long, and I would be all over it like stink on a monkey.
For these reasons, but not limited to these reasons alone, I wanted to compile a listing of the top reasons you should include deadlifts in your daily repertoire if you currently don’t. They range from the ludicrous (of course) to the logical (yup) to the purely egocentric (you knew that was coming). Enjoy!!
1. Most back pain comes from weak glutes. The best glute exercises is and will always be deadlifts.
2. Most back pain also comes from weak spinal erectors that cannot maintain a specific position. Deadlifts train the spine to remain stable while exposed to stupidly high shear forces, and thus making you Superman.
3. Chicks dig guys with strong powerful glutes
4. Guys dig chicks with strong powerful glutes
5. (Some) guys dig guys with strong powerful glutes
6. (Way more) chicks dig chicks with strong powerful glutes
7. Deadlifts are a total body exercise, working muscles from your toenails to your hair follicles.
8. It gives short guys a way to feel superior to tall guys.
9. It gives tall guys another reason to hate short guys.
10. No matter how many times you’ve done it, you can always do it better.
11. 2 words: Zercher Deadlifts
12. Very few people qualify to be able to do a deadlift as the required mobility from the hips, thoracic spine and ankles is incredibly high.
13. This means I’ll be kept busy for a very long time teaching and fixing people who pull stuff like this.
14. Your testosterone will spike with each 1 rep max, roughly 13246% your regular walking around levels, which means you’ll be more likely to impregnate casual observers with nothing more than an icy stare, disrupt gang fights with your mere presence, and become the next supplier of Red Bull by bottling your urine.
15. Squats don’t have the same effect on the scapula and rotator cuff in terms of their stability and ability to withstand distraction forces. This makes deadlifting a great rotator cuff exercise, while requiring a lot from the lower body.
16. The most enjoyable things in life require triple extension from the hips, knees and ankles. In the most pure form, we could say deadlifts are Darwinian, rewarding those who have exceeded in developing strong hip extension capacity.
17. The endorphin release from 1 rep of deadlifts is on par with runner’s high, meaning you can get the same fix with 1/100 the amount of time investment, and you can wear way cooler clothes too.
18. I would argue with anyone that your lats are the most important muscle group in your body. Deadlifts work the hell out of them in multiple planes.
19. Every athlete can improve at almost every dimension of their sport by becoming better at deadlifting.
20. “My back is weak/sore” is a reason to do deadlifts, not a reason to avoid them.
21. No crunch could train the abs to work as hard or to become as hypertrophied as learning how to breathe and brace for a max pull.
22. Your back doesn’t look like this:
23. Admit it, you just pooped yourself a little when you saw his lats and erector spinae, didn’t you??
24. Don’t worry bro, I did too.
25. Side bar: imagine kipping deadlifts.
26. Every pushing movement requires hip extension, whether you believe it or not. Hence deadlifting can increase your bench press.
27. Women can deliver babies easier by having control of the creation of intraabdominal pressure, a strong pelvic floor, and can survive the rigours of delivery with fewer soft tissue injuries by having a strong deadlift prior to third trimester, and those who are very strong prior to conception will likely deliver a baby that slaps the hell out of the doctor and changes their own diapers. That’s science.
28. Your mom likes it when you deadlift.
29. Your mom LOOOOVES it when I deadlift.
30. No matter how awesome you think you are, you need to deadlift with chains.
31. No matter how much you deny it, your nipples probably got hard watching that last video.
32. I’m looking at you, Gentilcore.
33. Growth hormone release is at its’ highest following maximal resistance training exercise that encompasses the greatest amount of muscle mass.
34. If you’re a guy who has trouble adding muscle, heavy deadlifts will help you out due to the testosterone and growth hormone alterations, which play on muscle hypertrophy.
35. Sorry ladies, you don’t have enough testosterone to get big from doing heavy deadlifts alone. Female body builders need a lot more than heavy deadlits to gain size.
36. Females won’t get “bulky” from lifting heavy things. Here’s the proof.
37. Bruce Lee did deadlifts with Franco Columbu. Chuck Norris did the Total Gym with Christie Brinkley. That is why Chuck Norris is now a series of jokes, and why Bruce Lee is no joke.
38. If you use straps, you might as well extend your pinky. “Oh you fancy, huh!!??”
39. Chalk works best for outlines.
40. Kim Kardashian went to Gunnar Peterson. He said she had to do deadlifts. Then she went to Tracy Anderson. She said she didn’t have to do deadlifts. At that very point in time her series was renewed on television. Hence, deadlifts could have saved us from another season of “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” Their reach is large.
41. Short lifters can develop more strength due to higher degrees of torque through shorter levers, whereas taller lifters can develop more velocity due to higher bar speeds at the same relative speed if measured in degrees per second at the hip joint, due to their longer levers.
42. Chicks dig long levers.
43. Marathon runners need to do deadlifts to develop a kick and to improve velocity, efficiency, stride length, and sprinting power, all things important to running fast and to make your body more efficient.
44. Biceps are incredibly active during deadlifts, as they keep your elbow from distracting itself apart, and provide anterior shoulder stability. If you want arms, lift something heavy.
45. Deadlifting helps you poop better.
46. You want to poop better.
47. Trust me.
48. The development of intra-abdominal pressure helps train pelvic floor muscles and stimulate the colon to produce peristaltic wave contractions, which helps you to poop. Told you.
49. Power and strength are the two defining characteristics that, when lost, determine function on old age. Losing power and strength limits your ability to do everything, from standing and sitting on the toilet to getting in and out of a car, to climbing stairs, and even breathing. Heavy deadlifts, when done properly, can help retain and even gain strength and power through the entire body, which improves functional outcome measures in old age, which promotes independence.
50. It’s totally more functional than anything you could ever hope to do on a bosu.
51. Unless you could find a way to pull a max weight deadlift on a bosu.
52. Which is impossible.
53. To paraphrase Charlie Weingroff, a perfect deadlift is a mythical beast that you can’t really define unless you see one. It’s sort of like a unicorn. What is a unicorn? A horse with a horn sticking out of its’ head. What is a deadlift? A heavy-ass weight pull of the floor to standing. You’ll know a perfect one when you see it, and you really know an ugly one when you see it.
54. No other exercise has potential side effects like massive nose bleeds, reddened eyes, and possible projectile vomit.
55. Nothing builds muscle thickness and density more than heavy deadlifts. This feature is what gives people the long-yearned after “tone.”
56. Deadlifts have a greater affect on cardiopulmonary health than common cardio exercise, much in the same way that building a high-rise tower to withstand a 7.0 earthquake also helps prevent damage during a moderate windstorm.
57. Side raises with 15 pound dumbells won’t build deltoids in anywhere close to the same scale as when those same deltoids are screaming in your ear as they try to prevent your shoulders from ripping out of their sockets.
58. Contrary to popular belief, heavy deadlifts are not bad for your low back. Piss-poor deadlifts, be they heavy or light, are demonstrably destructive to your low back.
59. The ability to develop strength and stability through the lumbar spinal muscles is one of the primary factors in preventing lumbar discogenic issues, as it helps buffer shear forces the disc is exposed to, which if left unchecked could result in a bulge, herniation, or even spondylolisthesis.
60. Deadlifts build the strength and stability of lumbar spinal muscles.
61. Word.
62. Speed pulls suck when you forget to lock out your arms at the top of the movement. My kids may be born with headaches after those ones.
63. Lifting heavy weights through a stable and static base of support lets the core muscles work a lot harder and become more stable than any unstable surface could ever hope for.
64. Crunches can’t work the entire core the way deadlifts can, nor can you ever look cool doing them.
65. Same thing goes for pilates or yoga. They build endurance, but not strength.
66. A powerful deadlifter should have the hip mobility necessary to do the splits.
67. I’m 3 inches away from being able to perform saggital plane splits.
68. If you expect your milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard, you’d better have some deadlifts under your belt to give them a reason to walk on the grass.
69. If your nickname is “Ant” you’d better be able to lift multiple times your body weight.
4.5 times body weight to be exact.
70. Sitting in the groove of a flawless deadlift is like being in the Matrix. It doesn’t feel real, and everything is kinda tinted green.
71. One of the only exercises that can develop depth and thickness to the upper traps and mid back is heavy deadlifts.
72. Fat burning capability is dependent on the metabolically active tissue, as well as the rate of activity within that tissue. By having extra muscle mass and by having it cranked up to high neural activity means you have a greater chance of burning fat and getting lean if you lift heavy.
73. I had clients deadlifting bodyweight after abdominal reconstructive surgery. This helps to reduce the risk that they may have any follow-up issues, and will reduce their risk of re-injury and more surgeries.
74. Max weight lifts help you see God. After each set you see a bright light, and are usually tempted to walk towards it. That’s what this guy did.
The bright light was the writing on the dumbells. He went for it. It didn’t go well.
75. Seriously, why are you still reading this and not deadlifting?? Grab the bar and make like you’re in Oz and you got the top bunk. OWN THAT WEIGHT!!!
Here’s an interesting timeline that seems to exist quite a bit. See if it sounds familiar.
Phase one: you go to school. You’re given information and told to remember it when you’re asked a question, and then produce the answer upon demand.
Phase two: You’re given a lot of information and told to find the answer to the question. This time though you are tested on your ability to find the answer through layers of potential options, as well as to find “the best answer.” In many instances, even if there are more than one answer, you are told to find only one and ask no questions.
Phase three: You look for and eventually get a job which puts your theoretical knowledge to work. You’re told to follow the rules and don’t ask questions.
Phase four: You’re told to start “thinking outside of the box,” and to begin asking questions of your own, even if they don’t have answers, and that the answer itself isn’t important, but how you arrived at the answer was the main thing.
So here’s the dilemma. After working our way through school in order to get good grades, we find our ability to answer the questions posed to us. Sounds good, right? The downside is that it doesn’t teach us how to ask questions, create new directions, or more simply, “think outside the box.”
It’s been said that the left side of the brain is focused on linear thinking. The ability to compute, reason, rationalize, and come to an answer. The right side is seen as the more abstract side, where thoughts, imagination, creativity, and emotion reside.
Another way of thinking about it: the left side creates the amalgamates the facts, and the right side determines the overall importance of those facts and creates meaning to relay to yourself and to others in a way they understand.
Let me give you a bit of an example relating to training.
I was teaching a workshop this past weekend in Calgary, and one of the overlying themes was simply to not look for individual muscles that may not be working properly, but look at the dysfunctional movements. The movements will train and effect the muscles, but the muscles won’t train or effect the movements. At this point, a simple squat becomes a collection of thousands of muscles, dozens of joints, interconnections of fascial slings and fluid dynamics affected by tens of thousands of neural connections that have influence not quite determined by science. It ain’t just muscles, baby. To reduce a complex problem down to a single issue is both pointless and futile.
A squat is like listening to a symphony. When it’s great, you know it. When it’s not, you know it. Sure, the tuba player got smashed last night and has no lungs to push, and the guy hitting the cymbols just pounded a gallon of espresso and is throwing those things like crazy, yo. The rhythm’s off. The acoustics are crap. The flute came in late. Whatever, it affects you when you hear it and you know it’s just not right.
We’re taught to reduce until we find the root of the cause. This is where we determine that the mechanism of injury in most rotator cuff injuries is a compression between the acromion process and the humerus, causing the supraspinatus muscle to wear down and get an owie. As a result, we start trying to work on increasing the strength of the rotator cuff through repetitive external rotations with an elastic or cable or 3 pound pink dumbell. 6 months later, we’re still trying to answer the same question without asking any of our own.
That’s the equivalent of sending the entire orchestra home and working on getting the cymbol player to hit them together with JUST the right impact and volume.
Screw the fact that the guy has their head forward so far they resemble Yurtle the Turtle, or the fact that they’re stuck in kyphosis so bad their scapula hasn’t moved in weeks, and their hips are stuck in so much posterior tilt that they have plumber butt bigger than Kim Kardashian could ever hope for. But sure, let’s make the rotator cuff do all the work.
Using linear logic and coming to a reductionist thought process is definitely important in many instances, but typically doesn’t let us understand how or why something works or happens. The left brain simply relays information that it has.
The right brain helps to synthesize this information into something meaningful and to produce novel or potentially counterintuitive solutions. One of the best ways to train this side of the brain and this method of thinking is through artistic expression.
One thing a lot of people don’t know about me is that I took a bunch of art classes in high school and university, and used to do a lot of drawing, painting, even fine wood working. I may never have a gallery showcasing my works, but you can rest assured my mom and dad have an absolutely fantastic corner cabinet hanging in their living room displaying my ability to make pieces of wood look like something.
I’ve got a bunch of art history books (most commonly involving Salvador Dali), watch shows on museums and Egyptian archeology, and went crazy over the DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, not for their story lines but for their use of masterful works of art in showing meaning within sculptures, paintings, and text.
As a result of persuing a different thought process on occasion, it allows me to reach new conclusions, think through different concepts, and view the world through a different lens. In many instances, I’ve even used concepts from architecture to come up with an exercise for a client looking to recover from back pain or put on mass for their calves.
Looking at art makes you slow down and look at the details and wonder why they’re there. For instance, Mona Lisa has an unlevel horizon and a discongruent back ground. In a time where absolutely no portraits involved smiling she holds a mysterious one. The position of her hands is incredibly unusual, specificaly as they seem to be holding a blanket across her lap and midsection. The lack of eyebrows is glaring, but again, why? Looking at such trivial differences may seem almost unimportant, but so would looking at a toe touch and picking out a hinge at L3-4 in a client with low back pain. The devil’s in the details.
The left brain would logically conclude this individual touched their toes, therefore it should technically be impossible to have their posterior chain have any negative involvement that would cause low back pain. The right brain would say that it’s irrelevant that they touched the ground, and that the hinge was the result of too much movement in one vertebrae, too little movement in adjoining vertebrae, potentially both, and that it would be the most likely cause of pain.
Personal training is considered to be a blend of art and science. There has to be a utilization of scientific principles and paradigms to create a boundary structure of what will work and what will not in producing a specific quantifiable result. Within those boundaries, there’s a huge umbrella of opportunity to create movements, alter variables, and make people either suffer and hate life or revel in the brilliance of an amazing workout. Look at someone like James “Smitty Diesel” Smith and Joe DeFranco when they team up to make a video product like HARDcore, which can feature so many different training variations and exercises that work within specific training principles, but stretch the imagination and boundaries of what we think is possible within a gym setting.
Look at someone like Steve Jobs. He made computers that looked, felt, and handled in a way that made people want to use them. The aesthetic of Apple products has meant they are now ubiquitous. People buy products for more than their functions, which explains fancy toasters, toilet paper cozies and designer handbags whose sole purpose is to hold shit, but can cost as much as a compact car..
Jobs studied calligraphy and transcendental meditation and revolutionized 4 major industries. He found meaning in design, then hired engineers to build that meaning, and didn’t stop until he saw his vision in reality. The initial inspiration was always wanting to create a feeling in the individual holding one of his designs,not merely in what it could do.
Studying or participating in art of some form or another can help to expand thought processes, find solutions to novel questions, and expanding your ability to use the right-brained thought processes. Everyone should take some time to involve some level of right-brained thinking in their lives, in order to expand their abilities to solve problems, create new questions, or even to help them find meaning outside of their normal persuits. It has an amazing ability to influence emotions, stress, and even sleep quality (all right brained functions, by the way).
Who knows, you might revolutionize an industry of your own.
Something seems to be in the air lately, as I’ve seen a lot of new blog posts on sacro-iliac joint issues. It seems there’s a lot of people dealing with this, not just this big goofy dork from Edmonton. As a result of seeing these posts, I wanted to share some of the best of the best with you to help you get more know-how of how to tackle this tricky little bugger.
However, before we dive into the good reads, today is the last day you can get a sa-weet deal on Muscle Imbalances Revealed: Lower Body edition, including some additional free bonuses. You can pick it up for the low low cost of only $67, so pick up a copy before tonight at midnight.
THis was a post I put together back in October, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of people. I got a lot of great feedback on it and had a lot of people share it through social networks.
Tony reached out to me to ask for some help with a nagging issue he’s had for the last little while. To be honest, I was somewhat shocked and humbled that he would reach out to me, seeing as how he’s got a guy like Eric Cressey right across the room from him, and also has a legion of physiotherapists and chiropractors available to him through his business and through the internet, but I was honoured nonetheless and went at it as best as possible.
This was one of the best written explanations on some of the more compelling research on the SI joint I’ve seen in a long time, and Bret even throws in a relation to SI joints and wildebeasts in heat. Well done, sir.
THis post is more for clinicians and trainers who know their ass from their acetabulum, and gives a lot (Read: A LOOOOOOT) of info on how, why, and what it takes to assess the SI joint and determine if it’s a bucket of fail or a bit of alright.
THis is a book written by a physiotherapists which is one of the best uses of clinical and research-backed techniques I’ve seen relating to the SI joint and other pelvic dysfunctions. Some of it is out of my scope of practice, but it’s still good to know, and there’s a lot of information that I’ve been able to take with me to use with my clients successfully. For any trainer of clinician, it’s definitely a beneficial investment.
