Exercise of the Week: Learning to Hip Hinge

One of the more difficult movements to teach a "newbie" to strength training is the hip hinge. We've talked about the importance of these movements in people who may have cranky knees or other issues that prevent squatting or lunging motions.

It's an important movement to understand as it serves as a precursor to an entire category of exercises for most trainees. Any RDL, deadlift, rack pull and even single leg deadlift variations all require proper hip hinging in order to protect the spine and ensure correct timing and sequencing in the pattern to optimize strength development.

I actually remember my first attempt at teaching the pattern to a high school athlete back in 2007. Another young coach and I spent a solid 10 frustrating minutes trying to turn a half squat into a proper RDL. Luckily since then I've gained a little experience and have found a few tricks along the way to help speed along the process. Here's one...

Kneeling Hip Hinge

By getting down on two knees, we prevent the possibility of driving the knees forward at all as you might in a squat. The only way to get down is to push the hips back. The one issue you might run into is keeping the torso vertical and pulling the shoulders back along with the hips when in reality you should see the shoulders come forward (with a neutral spine, of course) as the hips go back.

This might not seem to exciting from a strength building standpoint but it's important to get the patterning down before adding any serious load. In the meantime you can use various bridging variations to fill in the strength gaps while you're learning the new movement.

Happy Deadlifting!

Mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned in coaching and in life:

I turned 30 celebrated the 9^th anniversary of my 21^st birthday earlier this year and started thinking about some of the mistakes I’ve made as a coach and in life. A lot of coaches and motivational speakers try to teach from their mistakes. "Don't make the mistakes I did." While that can help sometimes, I believe people succeed often because of, not in spite of their mistakes. If you've read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell you've seen this before.

Here’s a list that I stopped at 31 but certainly not because I ran out of mistakes. I'm still working on improving a lot of these.

1.       Teaching hang clean to 14 year old introverted girl day 1:

The first program I ever wrote was for a 9^th grade athlete who was as shy as they came. The first exercise on that program was a Hang Clean. 4 or 5 older, male coaches stood around (just trying to help, mind you) critiquing and cueing and trying to correct. We didn’t see her after a couple of weeks at the most.

2.       Dropped medicine ball on face of client in supine position

In an adult bootcamp-style class I had the bright idea of using supine explosive chest passes (where I could catch, stabilize and drop the ball) as a station. A 26 year old woman at her first workout caught one in the nose with a 6 lb ball on the first rep.

3.       Had my uncle try to perform a split-squat and strain a hip flexor without screening the movement first

My uncle started to train with me at one point and day-1 I sidelined him for a couple of weeks.

4.       Trained people too hard

I once used prowler pushes for “Tabatas” (20 seconds on, 10 seconds off for 8 rounds) with personal training client. Luckily she was a good sport and I became good friends with her and her husband. I was even more fortunate that she didn’t have a heart attack as a result of my stupidity

5.       Trained people too easy

Better safe than sorry, but there were certainly times where I let athletes and clients leave a lot on the table or just got too soft with their programming

6.       Talked bad about other programs based on what I’d heard and not what I knew

It’s funny how much I knew before I knew anything at all

7.       Not asking enough questions

I feel like I got a great head start in the industry out of grad-school thanks to my mentor Lee Taft but I wasted a lot of years after I knew I was interested in strength and conditioning as an athlete of his by not taking advantage of his experiences to learn from.  I worked hard and did what was asked but it would have been a much simpler road if I recognized this at 18 instead of 22 or 23

8.       Not making mistakes

Yes, I made a mistake by not making mistakes. In other words I didn’t put myself out there or “Go ahead and be crappy” to take my lumps and learn some lessons. I was waiting for “perfect” when I should have been simply striving for “better”. 

9.       Being afraid to say “I don’t know”

When I was younger I felt like I had to have all the answers. People were really appreciative when I started saying “I have no idea”

10.   Slept in on clients one morning

Yes, this happened. Yes it was early but it as shameful and embarrassing.

11.   When things were busy, not allowing enough time for myself

I have a tendency to overestimate my superhuman abilities to effectively coach, program, educate (myself) and just schedule work in general. Instead of trying to find time for myself I should have been making it (This really shouldn’t be past tense).

12.   When things were quiet, not working hard enough to get busy

There was a lot more I could have been doing when I wasn’t busy to prepare myself for when I was.

13.   Not tracking results

I tend to trust programs I write based on stealing them from people much smarter than me.  This has worked well in the past mostly because I think I was lucky enough to meet the right people to be stealing from although my own philosophy and programming would have been much improved and accelerated if I started tracking more objectively (in addition to subjective assessments of movement quality) results on a regular basis.

14.   Listening to my professors who said I “didn’t need to take anatomy”

Because I didn’t ask enough questions when I was younger, I went through college with the attitude that “this is just what you do after high school before you get a job” without having a more specific target to shoot for. Teaching yourself anatomy is not something I would recommend and learning it earlier would have saved me a lot of headache down the road.

15.   Not listening close enough to client’s goals

Sometimes I get so caught up in what I think the client should be doing that I forget what they actually want. If they get the work on that I know will help them, will it really kill them if they want to do a couple tricep kickbacks at the end of a workout?

I've learned this lesson and it's now a running joke in our facility: 

Coworker: What do you want to do for lunch?

Me: Well, that depends Nick, what's the goal?

Coworker: The goal is to get full, Jon

16.   Gave away too much time to people who never appreciated the time that was given

This is one that’s hard to learn without the experience but it’s still a hard one for me to correct giving the field I’m in. I want to help people. The trick is ciphering out the ones who actually want it from those who think they should want it

17.   Worried too much about what other people thought to put myself out there and be myself – in coaching and in life

You can't please everyone - you hear it all the time but is a hard one for me to live by sometimes.

18.   Not setting goals after athletics

 

19.   Let myself get weak/out of shape and not putting my own health first
By not having clear long-term goals, once I finished college athletics why would I need to keep training? Getting out of the habit made it much harder to get back in, even after 7 or 8 consecutive years of good training

20.   Didn’t form good eating/cooking habits at a young age

21.   Had an athlete throw-up after Airdyne sprints

In fairness he told me he ate Taco Bell on the way to the workout – the mistake was not finding this out beforehand

22.   Took (and and still take) criticism from clients/athletes personally at times

23.   Spent too much time thinking I could change people instead of focusing more on the people that actually wanted to change

24.   Not  writing sooner

I put this off for years because I looked at writing articles as a way to teach but underestimated how much I could learn from the process

25.   Didn’t make enough decisions because they were the right thing to do and for the right reason based on my goals – made them because I thought other people thought they were the right thing to do

26.   Limiting my potential in my own head

I would look at people more successful than me and assume it was out of my control to get to the same position. As hard as I worked physically and academically I did this for years.

27.   Letting clients and athletes dictate workouts when they could have been pushed harder

Again, better safe than sorry but sometimes I need to trust my coaching instincts better

18.   Got excited and told a high school girl “Now that’s a good rack!” after the first time she caught the barbell correctly for a hang clean

First year out of grad school. Luckily she had a great sense of humor and now it’s just funny but damn – that was embarrassing

29.   Spent too much time talking during sessions about the proper way to train instead of letting the training talk for itself

I would get excited about learning something and instead of just applying it I’d have to explain it to people. They don’t care. They usually wanna sweat and trust me to train them well. That’s it.

30.   Not realizing being happy is a choice and being a slave to things outside of my control

 

BONUS: Not taking more computer and/or business classes when I had the chance.

Formatting a simple blog is a nightmare for me...someday I will be able to outsource all of this

Deadlifting & Training the Lower Body with “Bad Knees”

In the post-rehab setting we see a lot of adult clients who have knee issues ranging from general pain with use, to meniscal scopes, ACL reconstructions and knee replacements. Many of them understandably have been frustrated in the past trying to maintain a training effect without aggravating any of these lingering problems.

The trick can be finding functional, multi-joint exercises that carry a big “bang-for-your-buck” load of your training while still leaving you with the confidence to push yourself in a safe environment.

Here’s a basic approach to how we may go about exercise selection in this case:

1. Deciding what we can’t do. After our initial assessment (Functional Movement Screen, collecting exercise history, injury history, etc) we may find that loading (adding weight to) what we call knee-dominant patterns is a no-no. In my programs this might include split squats, lunges (forward, reverse, lateral), step-ups, single leg squats, squats and anything else that requires a large range of motion at the knee.

Again, this can be incredibly frustrating to see a long list of stuff you can’t do. Luckily there is plenty that you can do and that’s where we’ll focus your training.

2. If we’re lucky you will have been cleared by the assessment to load more hip-dominant patterns. These are lower body focused movements that require little to no motion at the knee. Examples of this include trap bar deadlifting (yes – deadlifting!), Single Leg RDL’s, RDL’s, bridges of all sorts, hamstring curls on stability balls or TRX, and any variations of these exercises that are appropriate to the client.

Minimal knee flexion required

This is the same exercise as above in my book. 

Where do you fit?

It should go without saying that all of these exercises are programmed with the experience and goals of the client in mind. Not everyone is doing low-volume, heavy deadlift sets but almost everybody I have is learning how to deadlift in some sense!

 3. So we just work on these hip-hinging patterns and ignore anything that puts the knee through a range of motion and we’re good, right? Not exactly. Going back to the screen, if we find there is no pain but considerable movement compensation (this is often the case) with basic movement patterns then we can take a step back and use regressed “corrective” type exercises to improve your patterns without loading until these movements are cleared (hopefully) or until we decide that there are issues that are beyond the scope of the coach. This may include something like TRX assisted split squats, which we use extensively in the early stages of training.

The handles allow us to "deload" the movement and

take stress away from the knee. 

If there is pain, and we’re not sure why, the client is handed off to someone with the skillset to deal with this – in my case they go across the room and see a physical therapist until I get the green light to train normally. If we get clearance, we work through a pain-free range of motion using clean form until we can work through the full-range. This may take a few days or several weeks before it becomes safe to load up but luckily we’ve been getting good strength work all along.