Nothing like a shout-out to Craig Mack to get the day started right. Ya Heard!!
So after getting an earful from a few friends about why I need to have an email sign-up list (namely Rick Kaselj and Rob King), I decided to bite the bullet. Rob recommended a service called iContact.com, and I figured for the $10 a month I could swing it. So if you would be so kind as to put your email address and name in the box to the right of this little post, I’ll keep you up to date with all the latest posts, plus give you first dibs on any prizes, contests, giveaways, new products, etc that I may be involving my person with, so that way you can feel ultra cool. Plus, I’ll be releasing a few “email only” posts not available to the general public, so your 2 seconds of effort will sooooo be worth it.
I’m still working out how to set up a few cool features on it, like making different lists for fitness professionals, average Joes and Janes looking to get their swole on, health professionals (physios, chiros, doctors, etc), stalkers, whatever, so bear with me for a few more weeks on that. Also, I’m looking to update the site a touch. You know, lay down some lace doilies, throw some potpourrie in the corner, play some Miles davis in the background to jazz things up a bit, nothing fancy. Hopefully I’ll have that all done in a few weeks, or at least by the end of the Mayan calendar, because if it’s after that point, well we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter anymore. But hey, they’ve been wrong before.
This past weekend The Missus and I took a gift certificate to the Keg for a lovely night out. Since I was eating on someone else’s money, I decided to go protein-crazy and order the steak and half lobster, which was just as fantastic as it sounds. It came with a small baked potato, which I assume was solely a garnishment of the meal. I mean, come on, you have a steak and a freakin lobster sitting on my plate and you dirty it up with your twice-baked non-animal side dish? A much better side dish would have been another 6 ounces of Alberta grade A beef. But I digress. After hoovering through the tail and thorax, I started working on the claw, and had to use one of those cracker things that’s kind of like a nut cracker, but for lobsters. Now I know I’ve been doing a lot of deadlifts and chinups, and have a set of forearms that would make Olive Oyl swoon, but this is a little ridiculous.
I have a running bet with any canfitpro class that I teach, and if anyone can beat me on the handgrip dynamometer for grip strength, I’ll buy them lunch. To date no one’s been able to match me.
Then a friend asked how to increase grip strength for her deadlifts, what should she do? I responded by saying to deadlift, to which she wasn’t amused. I told her to work on rotator cuff exercises, specific biceps exercises, and narrow grip chinups to get her scapular muscles fired right up. My premise for this was to strengthen the entire chain, not just the forearms. Now I know there’s a correlation between hand grip strength and muscle activity of the rotator cuff, as shown by this study HERE, but I wasn’t too sure if there existed a reciprocal relationship that has been shown in a scientific study. What I mean is that when you grip something, your rotator cuff lights up, does the reverse happen? It would make sense to need to have strong biceps and rotator cuff to have a strong grip, seeing as how they have direct connections with each other and the common flexor groups, plus the fact that one of the more common deadlifting injuries is a biceps tendon tear, it would stand to reason that doing some dedicated arm strengthening would be beneficial to grip strength. If you strengthen your rotator cuff and biceps, does it increase your grip strength in any appreciable manner? If anyone knows of a study on this, pass it along to me.
If I was to tell you to “engage your core,” what would you do? This isn’t some sort of meta-physical question that’s going to make you feel like the world is just a big ball of dust on the back of an intergalactic dog or something, but just curiosity. Do you flex your rectus abdominus and flex your spine? Do you get to crunch your obliques? What about your low back muscles? I’m guessing if you’re sitting there reading this you’re probably unable to get your low back muscles to tense so you can feel it, kind of like if I said to flex your bicep you could actually feel your bicep contracting.
So let’s say you “engage your core” but fail to tense your low back muscles. Does that mean you actually have a strong core or a dysfunctional one? Are you more likely to develop a back injury if you can’t conciously contract the muscles of your low back or not? These are some of the things I’ve been considering with the rehab programs I’ve been developing for some of my low back pain clients, and I’ve even been experimenting on the Missus to get her back into the saddle next year at her all-time peak. We’ll see what happens. Will it result in a level of low back strength rivaled only by elite powerlifters and yogi masters, or will it be an epic fail, sort of like this guy.
As anyone who writes a blog like this can tell you, figuring out what you want to write about is one of the biggest challenges on a daily basis. Hell, I can talk for hours about something as simple as a variation in bar positioning during a back squat, but that doesn’t mean it’s something you want to hear about. So I want you guys to help direct what you want me to discuss with you in the future. Don’t be shy now, just leave me a comment below and let me know a topic you want to know more about, hear my thoughts on, or watch me unleash a nuclear ungodly warcry of a rant upon.
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