Barbell Shrugged - Top 3 Core Training Methods Your CrossFit Program is Probably Missing - EPISODE 33

Episode Date: November 8, 2012

http://www.FITR.tv  The Top 3 Core Training Methods Your CrossFit Program Is Probably Missing.  On this episode of the Barbell Shrugged CrossFit, Strength, and Conditioning Podcast we discuss core training in depth.  For more episode of the podcast visit http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Watch this episode on our website here: http://fitr.tv/blogs/barbell-shrugged/6852552-top-3-core-training-methods-your-crossfit-program-is-probably-missing-episode-33

This week on Barbell Shrug, we're going to talk about core training. Old school versus new school. Anti-movement. Un-movement. Stability. And programming for core training. What's up guys, it's CTP and you're listening to Barbell Shrug. Make sure you check out our video versions of all these podcasts on our website, fitter.tv.

In all of our video versions, we include TechniqueWOD, which is our series of technique instruction videos for CrossFitters. Free previews of some of the seminars we put out and then sometimes come out of the studio and have special video segments such as cooking in the kitchen with Brandi that one time and out in the pool with Lucas and who knows what the next thing will do is so make sure you check out our website fitter.tv and watch the videos as well. Two, one. Clap. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe, here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore.

You bet. Sorry, guys, we don't have a guest today. Chris is our guest. Chris hasn't been here in like a month. Yeah, I've been out for two, three years. Feels like we had to catch you up on how we do things now. I'm like, where do I put my hands when I podcast? Exactly. It's pretty tough.

You're going to have to relearn how to hold the new sweet barbell shrug mugs that we just got. We've been selling these mugs forever and we haven't had them on a podcast for months. They make the tea taste better. They do. And actually if you drink from this you will be stronger.

It's because of the specialty. That's right. We're not telling you what's in it. No, we wrap up some drugs in the ceramic formula. It leaches into whatever you drink. That's the explanation. Shh, don't tell the government. Dimethylamine or whatever that shit is in the ceramic.

Yeah. What do we want to talk about today? Core training. Core training. Core training. Oh, boy. I don't even know what that means. What does that mean, Mike? shit is an in the ceramic yeah uh what do we want to talk about today core training core training or training oh boy i don't even know what that means what does that mean mike means we're gonna make the flabby part into a six-pack spring break's coming up yeah is this the this is maybe seven months is this a big media pillar of the buzzword modern fitness culture we've taken on directly have we had another have you done like

a functional training episode yet i don't know what you're talking about i was just gonna say function power speed core shreddedness the core training still is i've been disassociated from pop culture in the fitness world for a long time now i have absolutely no clue and i like that but is this still a thing i think it's still a big buzzword. Core is still, core training. Intoxicates people. I think core training

and functional fitness or functional training are still the two big buzzwords that nobody really knows what the hell they mean. I can't wait. Is he still doing his thing? It's been since like 2005

since I even mentioned that guy's name, but he's popped in my memory. I haven't seen him present in a while. I have no idea. You know what? In his defense, he does a lot of like the core training stuff but it's always like the little stuff in between all the really important stuff that he just assumes everyone already knows how to do so i think people give him a bad rap sometime

and they're like all he does is push-ups on med balls it's like no like i think he he does heavy sets of squats and then as his in-between movement, he'll go do something novel. But does he attribute it to the novel movement? I don't think so.

I think, look at the guy. He's huge. He's a big, strong dude. I don't think he got that from doing push-ups on med balls.

He's got a big head. I'll give you that. Yeah, he looks like a big, strong guy. I've heard him speak a couple times. I like what he says in a lot of cases. Of course, I'm just joking. Yeah, the guy's a big, strong guy. I've heard him speak a couple times. I like what he says in a lot of cases.

Of course, I'm just joking. Yeah, the guy's probably perfectly fine, gentlemen. Big, nice, very super nice training facility with lots of cable machines that cost more than my car is worth. That's probably very accurate. Oh, yeah. Man, you just brought up a really good point. I just started thinking about what my cars are worth and none of them you cannot buy one i couldn't buy one treadmill you

couldn't buy one pneumatic chest press machine no no i'd have to sell three cars then get one of those so what is core training like and by the way i do have a truck for sale if anyone's looking to buy it. Don't shoehorn your emotions. I'll pose this to you because you tweeted. Somebody challenged you to or you challenged somebody else to give a political comment in 140 characters less. So I'll do the same to you. Core training in tweet form. That is your definition. How do you say it super quick?

Define it in 140 characters or less. Not that I can check. Core training? Yeah. Define it in 140 characters or less. Not that I can check. Core training? Yeah. Define it in one sentence. Training the musculature that is your core. That's silly. There you go.

That's it. All right, you guys can turn the podcast off now. Can you point to your core? It's a trick question. It's between the nipples and the genitalia there you go oh geez all right um yeah that's about it so essentially a training philosophy that puts maybe at a heightened focus, maybe an inordinate amount of focus on training the muscles of the midsection of your body. Yeah. Well, actually, if you look back, we're going to talk a little bit about old school versus new school. You look back at some of the Flex magazine and the core training that you'll get out of one of those and a lot of it's you know sit-ups and like all those

variations of like of uh core flexion i guess you could call it or my classic standing up with a dumbbell do a little side crunches right right yeah maybe two dumbbells you do this which just doesn't make any sense but you do this i've actually seen i was all i saw powerlifters doing that one day. They had the dumbbell on each hand and were going back and forth. I was like, this is retarded. What's going on? Try grabbing one dumbbell with one hand

and then do the same thing. See if that works better. It seems like the old school way or the bodybuilding way is to isolate the core. Try to find out which muscles are in the core and then isolate them and then flex them as hard as you can. So you're doing abs, basically, is what most people think. Yeah.

So you're doing lots of sit-ups. So you got your obliques. Trying to work your six-pack. Yeah, you got your obliques. Got your obliques. You got the rectus. They all work individually. Abdominus.

There you go. Holy shit. It's too late in the day for my kinesiology knowledge thanks it's floated away after 5 p.m no no good yeah but of course it does include training the muscles of the back as well i mean it's yeah i think that gets left out a lot people talk about core and they automatically assume it's your six-pack maybe maybe the oblique these muscles don't function independent of these muscles when it comes to you doing something that's a sporting movement right let's all be clear in this readership yeah so and from a bodybuilding perspective or you know like if you're if you're trying to have like a

six-pack for the beach you can isolate those muscles and try and cause like some muscle growth. So you'll do a lot of reps. And good luck with that. Yeah. I mean, and it'll probably work. I mean, I spent probably a decade of my life doing abs pretty consistently. And they look pretty good. So I got married. And I got married.

But I'm not sure that had anything to do with the training. We know these big life moments like getting married and i got married and then you know but i'm not sure that had anything to do with the training oh we know these big life moments like getting married and having kids apparently your testosterone goes down maybe some evolutionary incentive for you to not go rambling that's a real thing dude brian you have a kid brian shilling was telling me about you have a kid your testosterone mysteriously does go down it's a control mechanism to keep you in the house watching the baby i'm not i'm not lying go go everybody who's listening go to pub med type in a series of keywords baby male testosterone neutering whatever you want to put in there it will come up the evidence so that's why the abs go away it could be a contributing factor that and you

sit on a couch eating ding-dings or something yeah that could that could be it and was it uh was it paul quinn put something together about uh where you hold fat i think you're more familiar than i am he put that together like you know if you hold fat in your upper body then you probably have more estrogen around your belly that might be. Yeah, I don't have all of it memorized. It had more to do with diet than it did with types of training. Yeah, Paul can put together his whole biosignature modification system where I don't know exactly how he did it. But he took, from what I know, he took maybe like 20 years of data. And he correlated all of the blood work that he'd done with all of his high-level athletes in Canada over the last couple of decades.

And he showed that so many people with depressed cortisol, for example, had a lot of trouble when they took their skin fold measurements, when they're measuring their body fat, at losing abdominal subcutaneous fat. And people that had trouble with their insulin levels had problems with this part of the body or the other part of their body. And I don't remember exactly which hormone correlated to which area of their body or which individual skin fold measurements. But from what I know, a lot of people follow his correlations and that system and have gotten a lot of value out of it. And, you know, when someone's trying to lose body fat and they're losing it overall, but they might not be losing it in one spot or another, they can go make very specific changes

to their diet to modify those very specific hormones if they're not losing fat in a very particular area. So I've never done it myself and I'm not an expert in it. I know he has some certifications for that. But go ahead and Google about biosignature modification and see what comes up everyone go spend money on that certification how much that cert is yeah i mean it's probably no more than any other cert really but yeah even even uh you know crossfit's 800 bucks or thousand dollars however much it is these days yeah i mean they're all good

certs they got they're plenty of value but they're definitely not cheap hit point one point one yeah talk about old school versus new school we actually haven't talked about new school core They're all good serves. They're plenty of value, but they're definitely not cheap. Point one? Point one, yeah. Talk about old school versus new school. We actually haven't talked about new school core training yet. That kind of falls into the whole functional part of things. Is doing crunches and side bends and all that kind of stuff functional? Is that new school? No, no, no. That's old school.

I'm talking about isolating movements. no. That's old school. I'm talking about like isolating movements. It's kind of old school. And new school is more of the functional. It's like, you know, you're doing... Balancing stuff, stabilization stuff. Yeah, overhead squats. Like you got to like, you know, say you double your body weight, you know, by putting overhead. Oh, you're talking about a different arc, like our arc approach to core training.

Like a new school. Yeah. Like, like how we do core training now, new school, meaning all the bullshit people try to sell now to train your core. Like no, no, no. Both suit ball banded. Oh, external infomercial core training. Yeah.

Let's talk about that too. So new school is basically what we know to be. We talked about old school training for the abs. We'll do new school in a minute. Let's talk about infomercial core training. New school is basically what we know to be performance training for the abs. We'll do new school in a minute. Let's talk about infomercial core training. I kind of put infomercial core training in the old school category because most of it is just buy the crunch machine and do 1,000 crunches a day and you're going to get six-pack abs.

It's easy. Infomercial always sells how hard it's not. It's like this won't be hard for you at all this you don't even know what you're doing you'll be just be watching tv you'll be watching game of thrones and getting a six-pack at the same time the best place for these gimmicks is like the sky mall catalog they got some crazy stuff oh yeah training yeah like you know while you're sitting on a toilet wrap this thing around and simulate it plug it into the toilet and it'll simulate your abs all kinds of things don't make any sense like one thing they sell is a low back stretcher

and ab uh isolating machine it's a like a t-shaped metal thing with like two curved metal brackets that like tie into it and like the t-shaped thing has a handle so you just hold it and you just put your thighs around it and then they t-shirt thing has a handle so you just hold it and you just put your thighs around it and then they showed a guy just laying on the floor with that in his legs like backstretch i go backstretch and then uh they show they show her holding this this lady she's holding it and she's like doing this on the floor like isolate your abs it's just it's it was a bizarre like a hundred dollar piece of metal that I'm sure somebody probably scooped that up off the online catalog immediately.

All kinds of bizarre little battery-powered stimulators, like the old Russian stem units, but some $20 thing you put on your abs and it's going to give you abs by causing muscle quivers, and all that kind of stuff. It's brilliant. It is. All right, that was easy.

So we'll close that point by saying just ignore all that you know all right and new school is more of that uh i guess uh wow i'm like uh uh uh anti-flexion um anti well not anti-flexion well i guess it would be yeah anti-flexion is what you would do in a squat or a deadlift or anything else. Anytime you're not rounding your back when you're doing front squats, overhead squats, deadlifts, RDLs, or anything like that is anti-flexion. That would be the core you can't see. Yeah. I mean, it's just the core muscles that are on your back instead of on the front of you like your abs.

I mean, your spinal erectors are core muscles like you said before anything that's any muscles that are in between your hips and your shoulders basically anything on your torso and your trunk is your your core muscles and the main role of those in in real athletics is to keep your spine from moving so when we're talking about doing heavy squats and deadlifts it's keeping your spine from going into flexion right so it's anti-flexion and then the other types of movements your spine could do is it could go into extension or it could go into lateral flexion like side bending or it could rotate. So you have those other functions of your core muscles too where you have resisting flexion like we just mentioned.

We have resisting extension which is like if you snake off the ground in a push-up, you hyperextend your back and then push away from the floor and then you come back to the top. If you stayed nice and straight and you resisted that extension, then you would stay straight all the way the whole time without snaking. If you have very weak abs and you're not strong enough to keep a straight neutral spine, then you're missing out on that benefit, that muscular benefit of resisting extension. Then you're throwing your back in a hyperextension, which is benefit of resisting extension. And then you're throwing your back into hyperextension, which is kind of wearing on your back the same way,

except the opposite direction that it would if you were rounding your back when you're doing your squatting. And you get very practical things, like if you go for a 30-minute walk, you get cramps in your lower back because you start losing position. So it directly affects your quality of life on every level. If you can't keep these positions, it's why you train. Yeah.

That's actually a really interesting point where anytime, you know, like if you're walking, you're on one leg and then you're on two legs for a second, then you're on one leg again. Anytime you're on one leg in single leg stance, you're doing some type of core training. If you're on one leg,

it kind of makes sense that if your pelvis is, I don't have any good props here. If you're on, that if your pelvis is... Do I have any good props here? If you're on... This is your pelvis. Drop it. This is your pelvis. I broke it. Not core training. Brilliant point, coach.

So if you're on one leg, then one side of your hip is being supported by the legs on the ground and the other hip should just fall down and your pelvis shouldn't be flat to the floor anymore it should kind of fall out but if you have strong core musculatures strong hip muscles on your side and strong obliques kind of on the opposite side then those muscles can contract and it can level your pelvis out again so doing you know yoke yeah doing yoke segue into what we may both agree is maybe the best core exercise you could possibly conceive of it really is super heavy carries are very hard on your core musculature especially lateral anti-flexion type muscles that we're talking about yeah just a second well let's cover this real quick let's talk about the the different

what what exactly your core is responsible for so uh let's say four so you have anti-extension uh anti-rotation uh anti-flexion right and then uh i guess like it was anti-lateral flexion yeah you almost had it so you're not so dumb yeah so yeah so we talked about anti-flexion anti-extension i have it written down somewhere i don't have to memorize my evernote that's right and then we briefly talked about anti-flexion anti-extension i have it written down somewhere i don't have to memorize that's right and then we briefly talked about anti-lateral flexion which probably the the easiest way to really feel that one is to do a very heavy one-armed farmer's walk like a suitcase carry if you put 150 pounds or put like body weight in one hand and try to walk around with it it's going to want to pull you to the side and you're going to have to resist that lateral flexing motion. And you're really going to feel that, especially on your, you know, kind of your obliques on

the opposite side. So you're resisting lateral flexion. The other one is anytime you're keeping your shoulders and your hips facing the same directions, then you are, and you're being, you're, you're, you have a force acting on you trying to make your, you rotate, excuse me, then you're training resisting rotation. That basically, in sport, the time that that would happen most frequently would be any time you're throwing something in rotation. If you're spinning and you're throwing something

or if someone's pushing on one shoulder and you're resisting that motion, then... Like what an offensive lineman may do when they're blocking. Exactly, yeah. Or any time you're pushing like on one shoulder and you're resisting that motion then what offensive linemen may do when they're blocking exactly yeah or anytime you're pushing somebody with one arm then all of all of this has to contract that way when you push on them you don't just rotate as you extend your arm that would include even something like golf yeah and that's actually was one reason golfers end up with back injuries is because they have a weak core and and their joints are not they don't have mobility where they need it so they end up sacrificing at their core causing back problems yeah so this all this all plays into that that joint by joint concept that i mentioned on a bunch of shows or on a bunch of episodes and and in the mobility

seminar and basically what that says is that you that you have joints that are supposed to move and those are your mobile joints. In the case of golfers, they tend to get low back pain in a lot of cases because they can't rotate at their hips very well and they can't rotate their thoracic spine, their upper back very well. And so the stable joint, kind of quote unquote, the stable joint in the middle is their low back. And if they can't rotate at the joints above and below that, then they'll destabilize their low back and they'll rotate the low back and they'll injure

their low back. Stability means being strong enough not to move. We just talked about anti-lateral flexion, anti-rotation, anti-extension, anti-flexion. Those anti-movement properties of your core musculature are basically stability-based. You're training your core musculature to keep your back in a neutral position where it's not flexed or rotated at all. But if you lack mobility and you can't get the range of motion from your hips, then you're going to try to since you just need to get the movement done, you'll intentionally turn those muscles off just so you can go through the range of motion necessary to hit a ball or throw something or what have you. I think that's a mistake a lot of people make. They're like, oh, my back hurts because I have poor core strength. It's like, well, maybe more of a mobility issue than a strength issue.

Word. Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely true. If you put somebody through a range of motion that they can do with perfect technique, then they usually can go through that range of motion with a decent weight for them for an appropriate number of reps, and they would only break down their technique on the very, very, very last few sets. When their legs are starting to fatigue, their legs are starting to fatigue their backs are starting to fatigue and all kinds of kind of starts to fatigue together but if you have them go extra low like you make them go lower than they're supposed to

then they'll start rounding their back before they're tired and they'll start having their knees dive in before they're tired and that doesn't mean they have a weak core it just means that they don't have the range of motion to do it at all and if they don't have the range of motion to do it at all then no amount of effort or have the range of motion to do it at all, then no amount of effort or coaching or cuing or yelling at them or them having the knowledge that they're supposed to keep their back tight is going to help. The same way that if someone says, hey, put your foot behind your head,

if you just can't do it, then you just can't do it. And no amount of coaching or cuing or telling them what to do or them trying is going to make it happen. They just don't have the range of motion to get it done yeah so the same thing if you tell somebody to hit a rock bottom squat if they don't have the range of motion at their at their ankles their hips and their thoracic spine for extension to get it done then they just can't do it reminds me yesterday when mcgordick was yelling at somebody he's somebody was doing fran he goes breathe come on breathe yeah he's telling david. You yelling at him won't help him breathe.

He can't breathe. He just can't. Look at what he's doing. Yelling more won't go. Oh, yeah, you're right. Casual breathing. I was trying to do toes to bar in the spring. Somebody goes, come on, just touch your toes

to the bar. I don't understand. I go, look at me. Mechanically, my thighs and belly are hitting. This won't happen.

Yeah, I agree. Some things just aren't going to happen unless you take some profound long-term interventions. Yeah. Actually, we can hear Ashleyley ashley's downstairs laughing i was gonna say on the kind of on the the other side of that coin if you do have very poor core

strength then what will happen is your your body can actually lay down stiffness at your mobile joints as compensation for lack of stability. So if you're a very immobile person and you're also not very strong and you're trying to learn all these new crossfit movements and get better and have more range of motion. Just for these yogis out there. Yeah, well, you can get more range of motion sometimes you know by by doing yoga and things like that but oftentimes you're not going to do well under load um if you don't have stability as well so i'm saying this for this is a message to the yogis okay so so anyway it's like whatever um so anyway if you don't have very good um very good core stability and you and as a result you compensate and you lay down stiffness

at those mobile joints, then even if you try to stretch those mobile joints but you don't work on your stability, it's going to be hard to make that change in mobility stick because your body still, since it's not very stable at the stable joints, is laying down more stiffness at the mobile joints. So you can't just stretch or just work on stability you got to do it both at the same time which is kind of a roundabout way of saying you should have good technique all the time right on very cool that was that was mine you stole my thing makes two strong points any time i'm not listening to somebody i say right on right on and then i walk away

that was pretty funny you told everybody your secret just now i know well everyone learned a while back i changed it to something else anyway now figure out the new word uh let's let's go ahead and take a break real quick and we'll come back. We're going to talk about how to program for core strength. All right. And we're back. More talking about core training. Core training. So we were just talking a little bit about –

I have no idea what we were talking about before the break, but we're going to go into – We're going to talk about programming a little bit. And we want to talk about... So, maybe our favorite movements or our favorite... Maybe un-movements for training the core. Un-movements. Un-movements.

That's a new one. New term. Anti-movement core training. Un-movement. Un-movement. training un-movement un-movement is it deloading or unloading i hate that we're anti-unmoving so okay whoa that's a whole that's a whole training program we can put together we call it the anti-unmoving training program anti-kinetic training that's right sit on the couch what we do is we save up a bunch of potential energy. Let's talk about anti-extension first.

I guess we will dive right in. The most popular anti-extension movement in CrossFit would be the GHT setup. I guess it's the most forceful one, right? Yeah. A bitch of an exercise. It will fire you up. It'll make you pee. I have actually heard of more cases of rhabdo due to that movement over anything else.

They say GHT setups, and then behind that, it's like jumping pull-ups. Oh. Yeah. And the jumping pull-up is because they're not doing a real jumping pull-up. That's right. It's because they're letting themselves down too slow. To add to that, the, I don't know what you officially call it, basically planking with the rings,

or like Marcy does with her elbows on the rower. So basically throwing it right out in front of you and keeping a flat back. Oh, you're talking about just a ab roll out yeah this is like a week you know grab a wheel or a barbell or a set of rings i did them on the rows yeah like three weeks ago or the rings right as you know with a little bit of a bent elbow position to sort of and standing to sort of spill it out just enough where i started going and then ratcheted it back so it's like two sets of 10 and then was sore for like a week and a half. I actually programmed that,

uh, pretty frequently with our CrossFitters. So the, the ring, fantastically hard. We call them a ring fallouts. If we do them with the rings, if we do them on a barbell,

we just call them rollouts, ab rollouts, or we've got a wheel or two floating around the gym. Um, I like this for anti-extension for um the classes i have i really don't program the ghd sit-ups which is a big anti-extension for the regular classes too much just because too many people have like jacked themselves up you know two reasons one uh it causes a large range of motion probably a range of motion that

your abs have probably never experienced before so it's it's got a lot of potential to cause damage and the other just a lot of eccentric loading um there also well then you have to spend like 15 minutes of your class trying to get people confident enough to fly back without feeling like they're going to fall off the thing most Most people don't need to be doing it. It takes experience to do that well. Yeah. And people that have back problems, you're going to have to throw them on a GHD machine. All right, go in a hyperextend your back and then flex it. As fast as possible.

Under the load of your body. So, yeah, it's not the safest thing. It's probably something I would have never done for speed. Had it not been for CrossFit, uh, I had done, uh, sit-ups on a GHD prior to discovering CrossFit, but it was like slow methodical and we would wait them.

Um, and then Doug was talking about, we talked about a little bit in the break, how, um, people doing sit-ups period. We'll just talk about sit-ups in general. Um,

and now that we're talking about like anti-extension and sit-ups fall in that category and the dangers people run into with their pelvis and not being able to rotate. Sit-ups are considered flexion, like trunk flexion. Right. So it wouldn't be anti-extension. It wouldn't be anti-extension. Yeah, just because you're flexing doesn't mean you're training anti-extension necessarily so i actually i wouldn't put gsc sit-ups in that category for that reason just because you're just because you're working your abs doesn't mean you're

you're training anti-extension because the gsc sit-ups going from flexed to extended or even hyper extended for most people and then back into flexion you're moving your spine a lot it's not anti-movement at all it's a lot of movement it's probably more movement than you get with any any other ab exercise so to speak yeah so the fallouts and in the rollouts that stuff i would consider anti-extension because you're not getting a lot of lumbar movement you're just you're you're putting your hands out in front of you if you're you know doing like a ab wheel rollout, and you're in that position where you could fall into lumbar extension if your abs weren't strong enough and you're trying to maintain a position

rather than moving this area at all. So for sit-ups, I would consider it to be trunk flexion rather than anti-extension. Same muscles, but different action is happening different action is happening right it's a different action so it doesn't doesn't necessarily mean that that gc sit-ups are are bad and only anti-extension are good it's just kind of a different classification and the thing about um resisting or anti-movement is it's primarily an isometric contraction where the muscles trying to actively shorten but it's not actually changing length and you tend not to get a lot of muscle damage like that and so you tend not to get a very

potent growth response so it doesn't make you sore and it doesn't really hypertrophy or make those muscles grow so i mean if you're trying to grow your core a lot of people aren't then that's great but if you're if you're trying to gain muscle mass and you're or you're trying to win a physique contest and you want to you knowexfer your abs and get some deeper cuts or anything like that, then you could do that. Deep cuts. I mean, there's nothing wrong with working the muscles. Right. But it's not primarily how we think about training.

We tend to think about movements or anti-movement rather than muscles specifically. Big abs, GHT setups are the way to go. It'll make them make them grow yeah i'll give them that because it's going to make them real sore because they do have that big eccentric stress through a big range of motion a big stretch at the bottom all right so that's uh we'll say ghd sit-ups that would be uh probably your biggest uh core flexion exercise and then say ab rollouts, ring fallouts, whatever you want to call them. Those would be a big anti-extension. Any other big anti-extension ones? Really, anytime you're maintaining a plank or push-up position,

for the most part, if you're in the right position, then you're training anti-extension. But a lot of people just rest in that position with a hyper extended lumbar spine and a bent hip so they're not really training anti-extension because they're hyper extended the whole time so assuming you're doing you're in a good spot and you're doing the push-up correctly you know go to the technique watt episode on push-ups i think i mentioned that very specific thing uh then yes you're training anti-extension so if you're if you're doing push-ups and you're kind of slacking in your core then you're doing yourself that shit bro yeah if you're doing what you're doing you're doing yourself a disservice so you get more out of your training don't take shortcuts with stuff

like that don't think oh it's only a push-up focus on what you're doing that's even if you're experienced yeah a lot of people i think are going for time you know they just want to like all right this is how the beginning of the rep looks and this is how the end of the rep looks and as long as you get from A to B, it doesn't matter how you got there. From a training perspective, it does matter. If you're in a competition, I say rules go out the window. Sounds good for refrigerator magnet quotes.

Get to point A, point B. It doesn't matter how you get there or whatever. That's why I'm going to run for office one day. I'm good with those. I'll get us to where we need to go. Don't ask me how I'll do us to where we need to go. Don't ask me how I'll do it. Close your eyes and look away.

No one ever does. Actually, on the note about sit-ups, I wasn't going to talk about sit-ups, but I'm going to say a quick thing about that. Most people, when they do core training, they do 100 sit-ups in the morning and 100 sit-ups before they go to bed. Then they get to the gym and they do more and more sit-ups. That's all they ever do is sit-ups in the morning and 100 sit-ups before they go to bed and then they get to the gym and they do more and more and more sit-ups.

This is what I was trying to get you to say. And that's all they ever do is sit-ups, sit-ups, sit-ups, right? A lot of people have kind of bastardized sit-ups over the years saying, well, you don't really work your abs. It's all hip flexion. It's all working your hip flexors as if working your hip flexors was bad for some reason. But a lot of people have gone on rants about how bad sit-ups are for your, for your low back.

Um, you know, Stuart McGill's come out, come out, you know, when he wrote all of his low back books about, um, how, you know, repeated lumbar flexion is basically going to give you a, give you some type of a, um, of a bulging disc or something eventually if you don't have one already, which a lot of people do, eventually if you don't have one already which a lot of people do even if they don't know it but anyway um uh mike boyle a while back put out an interesting uh interesting video where they were he was talking about um most people that are doing sit-ups you know they're heavy especially especially guys tend to have a lot of their weight in their upper body and so just from a balance perspective in a center of mass perspective, they, uh, if they have a lot of weight up top in order to sit all the way up, you have to get to your center of

mass on that side of your hips in order to pull you all the way up. So you can try this. If you lie on your back and you try to do a sit up with your feet really, really, really close to your butt, you know, that, that raises your center of mass up. And then you try to sit up to the top and you can't do it at all. But if you put your feet all the way straight out in front of you, it's similar to anchoring your feet on a kettlebell or something. When you anchor your feet on a kettlebell or you do a sit-up with straight legs, your center of mass is really far down. So it's really easy to pull yourself up. What happens, though, for a lot of people is in order to get their center of mass down, is they curl their trunk. And by curling their trunk and going into maximum lumbar flexion, now their center of mass is low enough where they can actually sit up.

But in order to sit up at all, they have to maximally flex their trunk. And when they maximally flex their trunk, that's when they're bending their back and they're stretching all the muscles on the backside of their spine, or not muscles, but all the ligaments on the backside of their spine. And they're putting themselves at risk for a bulging disc because they have to they have to take all their ab strength to flex their spine just to put themselves in a balanced position where they can actually sit up that that shit makes a lot of sense thank you so it makes good sense so that's really what i thought when i read that i was like holy shit he's fucking right it's not it's not the. It's not that sit-ups are bad for you.

It's the technique. Yeah, again, if you practice proper technique, there's nothing wrong with it. So if you lack flexibility and or have a very large upper body, I would recommend extending your feet and kind of externally rotating where you're pushing your knees out a little bit. It'll make it a little bit easier on your hips. Just like pushing your knees out super wide or having a really wide stance when you squat makes it easier to kind of sit into the hole.

It's easier to flex your hip. So if you're a big person, then it'll help you to anchor your feet. It'll help you to anchor your feet or to extend your legs a lot to bring your center of mass down and then won't be quite as hard on your spine. Would you doug that i have a big upper body yeah it's bulging you have a ridiculous i'm just wondering you have a childlike physique uh then the other point i was like i was like the whole time you were talking i was thinking i was like like i can't get up on a sit-up is that why i can't do sit-ups these huge pecs and shoulders my yoke my yoke is too thick no the other thing is that you shouldn't do sit-ups every single day of your life

you have other options which we're going to talk about next would you do shoulder presses every day probably not yeah do you squat every day yes if you're crisp more than yes but the rest of the world probably not like you wouldn't you wouldn't train hard on you wouldn't do the same load or the same volume every single day you would vary it in some way you might squat heavy one day and then do bodyweight squats in your normal in your warm-up the next day so this is actually something doug introduced me to and i started using it when uh now when i program for weightlifters and and anyone who's doing like sports specific training is you know on day one you have anti-extension day two uh anti-rotation day three anti-lateral uh flexion achieving balance right so you can train the core every

single day without uh over training the core i guess you could say that way that's funny man it reminds me of the approach I was taking over the last year or so with squats, about squatting frequently. Oh, yeah. You say how you don't do it the same way. One thing I realized is that if I combine squats strategically

and did them all heavily but differently in a sort of sequence way and get good result, meaning that if I did a paused box squat on squat on day one that i sit back further it's a little more hip dominant somewhere lower back dominant that's going to be really tough to to recover from if on the next day or the day after that i also did something that was low back dominant like a another low bar back squat but if i let's say, a front squat on that day, I'm squatting heavy, like a squat heavy to max, very heavy stuff, but now my thoracic spine

and maybe a little more quadricep is being taxed. So I'm doing the same looking thing, but they're complementary exercises. It makes sense to what they're saying. If I'm doing an ab exercise, I'm training abs every day, but there are fundamentally different ways of doing it then the sum of those things is a comprehensive training of your abs yeah absolutely that way you can train your your core every day but keep it different don't do anti-extension every day of the week i endorse that approach

we need some more of that on the podcast uh all right so we did anti-extension anti-flexion anti-flexion was doing squats and deadlifts and things like that anything where you're trying to to keep yourself out of rounding your back uh so we'll talk about anti-lateral flexion now okay that would be like a single arm farmer's carry so that's my favorite one by far you pick up a lot of weight on one arm and you keep yourself from falling over sideways yeah a one-arm a one-arm farmers walk and then for that matter any kind of farmers walk or yoke walk yeah anything anytime you're walking really cannot beat those for just building strength uh the favorite thing i did well the point i was going

to make earlier is that when I started powerlifting I assumed because the guys I was around did that you had to do a bunch of ab exercises you did a bunch of sometimes I did this dumbbell back and forth mumbo jumbo a lot of crunches, a lot of weighted sit-ups

a lot of spread eagle sit-ups way behind your head, gluham sit-ups a lot of band crunches and everything. And then for some reason I realized, this takes me like 45 minutes to do. I hate this shit. This is all so stupid. And I don't know if it means anything to do this.

I don't know if getting better at banded standing crunches really helps me deadlift more. Then I went a long stretch just doing uh lifts and noticed no difference which was interesting that whatever i needed for power thing i seemed to get by doing power lifts it's a earth shattering incredible uh and then i got to where i achieved some really good that should be the only thing you put on Incrediblur.com. Incrediblur. The sad principle. I went to that phase where I did strongman training.

You go into a phase of strongman training and do a lot of yoke, a lot of farmers, a lot of this, that, and the other. I also did a lot of suitcase deadlifts, which basically, I mean, if you do like a set of three to five to ten reps in a deadlift with just one arm. So you're picking your weight off the ground. I used to do them with bands. So you put a bar in the rack, tie bands around it, and then do a rack pull with just one arm,

standing sideways, not against the bar, but standing parallel to the bar. So all those things are just monumentally effective at teaching you to not bend. So if you want to train your core to have six-pack abs, then crunches are fine. But if you want to like train your core to have a six pack abs and crunches are fine but like if you want to if you want to train your abs or your core to increase your athleticism like if you look you got to do stuff like what you're talking about look at a guy like zadrunas avicus or

misha cochlea one of the top strongmen in the world someone be a little fat of course because they're huge men and they're not concerned with body composition. But if you just take a focused look at the way their abs are developed, it's insane. Their lumbar spine and their abs, they look like they are animations. They only look human. And doing a circus dumbbell pressing overhead

with 250 pounds in one hand for reps or running with 800 pounds in a farmer's walk this breeds insane development of your abdominal muscles so if you if you want strong uh abs i can't think of anything you should do other than that so if you're lifting something off the ground with one hand or pressing something with a single hand overhead or if you're taking steps you're loading one side of your body either from the from the bottom with your legs or from the top by picking some of your arms then you're having to resist that's like the lateral flexion mountaintop of ab training in my opinion but one caveat would

be you still have to ask yourself uh what you like to improve if you're a crossfitter and what do you want to get better at if you're a competitive crossfitter what will you be asked to do because like in my experience i thought i had extremely fit abs based on strength movements but then like doing a tabata workout one day for crossfit when i was fooling around with crossfit some i noticed i did a set of 20 hey this is all right i could probably do 100 reps of this the next set set of 10 and I felt a little twinge I try the next set and I go into a horrible

full body abdominal cramp that was just like 10 minutes long I was just on the ground going oh Jesus oh Jesus I couldn't even

straighten my body out I was like trying to push away from myself to straighten out yeah I think he was actually over that class CTP was coaching yeah but there's that

specificity thing where you can have insanely strong abs by doing tons of farmer's walk that's gonna be very great for you but if you think that that will translate to you being able to do a glute ham sit-up or just regular sips for reps and some other thing because you think you're a tough guy you're gonna be just blowing apart specificity still rules you have to have some ability to do all this stuff i have to work on some of it even if it's not a focus i have to maybe do some sit-ups you know i mean i think that's the difference by finding the balance between uh core flexion exercises and and anti sometimes you have to learn these lessons the hard way yeah so it makes sense to have somebody just tell you but that's too easy to just accept the lesson without having to go through the mistake.

Yeah, it's not nearly humbling enough if someone just tells you. You have to roll around on the floor like a fish that's dying. Oh, God. Fighting it futilely. The last core exercise or last core movement slash unmovement would be anti-rotation. And I would say my favorite anti-rotation exercise would be a kettlebell snatch. If you can do a nice heavy kettlebell snatch,

then you're probably pretty good with anti-rotation. So how does that work? One of the things I was wanting to talk about was with the snatch. I think Matt Hoff did kettlebell snatch in one of the technique ones paleo now.com paleo now.com that's right matt hoff um he friend of the show that's right he came and did a seminar with us it was great and he was telling us the importance

and it's one of those things that i had overlooked as a coach was um not keeping your your shoulders square when doing a snatch so i think i you know know, in my mind, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to let myself turn too much when I do kettlebell snatches, but he made it, you know, paramount. Like, do not let your shoulders twist when you're doing a kettlebell snatch. Keep your chest pointing forward. Don't let that happen. You really think about it.

If you're holding a kettlebell, say you're snatching a 70-pound kettlebell, and you got it in your hand, and it's swinging down, and it's pulling you're holding a kettlebell, say you're snatching a 70-pound kettlebell, and you got it in your hand and it's swinging down and it's pulling you and you're twisting, it's probably not too good for your back to be under that load and experiencing torsion. So anti-extension falls in that category, keeping those shoulders nice and square and letting the hips drive that power and not your back bending. So that's probably my favorite anti extension or anti uh rotation i know doug you i think your favorite i think i know what it is

oh yeah let's see what you say or do you want me to guess it um i'll make it harder uh what's my favorite for beginners versus advanced oh dude i don't know that one how close is your relationship that's right we're not real friends you're gonna marry this guy i know this bromance is over maybe maybe i guess the little band don't twist thing that's what we that's what we write on the programs when we write them. The banded don't twist thingy. And stuff. I love that one. Well, I know you like the program, the Pallof Press.

I like Pallof Presses for beginners. Pallof Presses. Especially tall kneeling Pallof Presses where you're kneeling down on both legs. And then the more advanced folks, you really like the standing power presser. I was going to say standing full contact twist with the handles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That actually, we don't do those.

Well, the reason we don't do them too much is because we have limited equipment in space. Yeah. And you're not going to, this is one of those things that you do on your own. You need a landmine or a, what is it we have? Grappler. Grappler. So that's louis simmons right rogue makes those little things you can you can attach onto the bottom of the pyrex now oh yeah there's always a new thing by rogue coming out but you know what that makes a lot of sense dude that modular concept makes a lot of sense i can't stop spending money because they keep on coming out with brilliant pieces of equipment.

Sometimes they miss. Sometimes they miss. I don't know. All right, so you want to explain what those two movements are for people that don't know what they are? What do you mean? Most people don't know what a pallet press is or a full contact twist. Pallet press, you're probably going to use a band in your place. Most cross-sets have bands and not cable machines.

So a pile of press would be, you know what? We're going to do technique wads on all this stuff, but you can tell them anyway. This is the banded, don't bend, don't twist thing. You tie a band around a post. You get some tension on it. Best thing to do is go from the knees, especially in the beginning, grab the band in the hand. Pull it to your chest.

And then from your chest with tension on it, the band is pulling from your side about 90 degrees. You're going to press that band out away from you. And you're going to basically resist that change. So you're going to try and keep nice and straight. Hold that for 30 seconds. Find a band and a distance that works for you and and uh you could probably change the progression by using thicker bands or creating more distance between you and and whatever you hook that band to if you're in a more traditional gym setting you could just use a cable machine and you could use different weights it might actually be a little bit easier to set up

a progression that way but yeah but i think in this situation, bands are beneficial. That elastic tension during ab exercises is really nice in my experience. Not that it's really worth anything. But using a plate, the mechanics of those plate machines and that kind of stuff, I don't feel like you get a consistent active pull against you. It's kind of hard to articulate what that means exactly but i mean that it's different and it's pulling back more aggressively to try to get you to twist versus the way we're kind of sometimes you can move the weight to position that's the hard part

but keep it there maybe it's not necessarily that hard that makes sense some of those devices don't yeah maybe if uh maybe the wheels aren't too gre too well. Yeah, the band just works pleasantly. I think the band has worked out. It doesn't seem like it should be different, but I agree with you. It does feel different. I can't necessarily wrap the words on what that means, but when you do certain exercises with the band. It sounds silly, but I agree as well.

Like a tricep extension is kind of similar, where you can do like 100 pounds on a tricep extension in a gym, and it doesn't really feel like maybe you're doing anything. You could double the weight, and it almost feels the same. But a band, that active tension of the band trying to retract you back as you're trying to extend against it. I understand if you're doing something where you're moving because the band's getting longer, and the tension's growing bigger

as you go through the movement. But an isometric hold like a pallet press, it shouldn't make a difference, but for some reason it does feel tougher. It's a qualitative difference. Anyways, let's move on. We spent way too much time on bands versus cables. And the weeds. That's right.

And then the other one. The full contact twist. I'll let you explain the full contact twist. Yeah, I'll probably do technique quad on that movement here in the near future that'd be the best way to go about it now i know i just told everyone you would i know announced it early they're gonna start email keep your eyes out for that um basically what it is is uh you you grab the end of a barbell and then the bar is just um extending down toward the floor and you're on this side and then you swing the bar over your head to the other side and while you're doing it you're twisting your feet kind of like you would hit a baseball where

you would twist your back leg and then you just go back and forth and if you have handle attachment it kind of goes in a v like this all it does is increase the range of motion that you're taking the bar through and it makes it feel a hell of a lot heavier and it's a hell of a lot harder so i'll do technique while on that in the future but that's my favorite resisting rotation exercise on that note if you don't have enough rotation in your hips then you're gonna then you're not gonna be able to do that very well yeah i see a lot of people that aren't as uh experienced and i i've done it made the mistake myself is is end up with a lot of uh a lot of rotating in my back and then

and you're like you're bending your back I go oh yeah oh yeah I knew that in that mobility where you also show like some hacks how you do it if you don't have a grappler

put it in a corner maybe lay a sandbag over to keep it in place grab the handle yeah a lot of times I don't even put it in the corner I just put it in the middle of the room

and it works fine it stays fine like especially with the handle like it's not moving so fast it's not like flopping around yeah but the handle's a lot slower and more controlled.

I prefer the baby method. You should get a small child. Lay the baby over the barbell. Or shove the barbell in the baby's mouth. That's just rude. Hygienic. The only thing we really didn't mention today that's kind of in that category that some people mention whenever they're having this kind of discussion is getting active hip flexion with a neutral spine. A lot of people don't train hip flexion above 90 degrees proactively.

And as a result, we were kind of talking about this during the break or before the show. I was trying to hear you talk about this earlier. It's finally come around. Jeez. Is that what Ashley does to you? She's was trying to get you to talk about this earlier. It's finally come around. Jeez. Is that what Ashley does to you? She's like, I wanted you to talk about this. And you were like,

I don't know when you wanted me to talk about that or why you said that. Why not just ask me to talk about it? Ashley's my other wife. What was your girlfriend's name on the other show? No, she was my, was that my other wife or my girlfriend? I don't know.

I derailed the conversation. So anyway, so active hip flexion with a neutral spine and basically that means training um training hip flexion above 90 degrees a lot of people can't do you know this top range of motion very well because they have very weak iliacus and psoas muscles which are which are muscles that run from the top of your leg up onto your lumbar spine so people learn about this and maximum mobility um yeah they'll learn about that a little bit um i don't actually truth be told don't go into this specific

core training in that product but i do talk about having range of motion issues and how that affects um how it affects your stability which is kind of what we're talking about right now so but i don't i wouldn't i don't prescribe or suggest any movements to fix that kind of what we're talking about right now. But I don't prescribe or suggest any movements to fix that kind of core training in the future. You want to hear my Rocky soundtrack? Doug's Ringer. Is that your fiance calling you? No, this is my It's Time to Go to Bed Ringer.

What's with you guys having alarms to tell you when to go to sleep? It's all about productivity, Chris. All about productivity chris all about productivity you know if that's my go-to-bed alarm if like that's my bedtime if you had our schedule and like owned your own business you could sleep in as long as you want you could go to bed whenever you wanted can you imagine such a life it would be terrible it would if you don't have alarms and structures in place

to remind you to live a normal life. You're living stripped into an aimless void, right? Pretty much. If my wife went out of town for a week once and I just stayed up

later and later every night and then I would wake up at the same time and I was just more and more tired as the week went on. I was like, all right, I'll catch up.

I'll go to bed early. Nope, just stayed up even later. You demand a regimented lifestyle. I need somebody to say, your alarm's going off. You need to go to bed early. Nope, just stayed up even later. You demand a regimented lifestyle. I need somebody to say, your alarm's going off. You need to go to bed. You're right.

Did you finish that point about the neutral spine? Sorry. I'll make sure the readers, the viewers don't. This is why we don't do podcasts at night. This is all CTP's fault for suggesting. Well, Doug can pose this point, and we can make closing comments. We have derailed the conversation more than we have in the last few shows on this show it's fun so anyway um sorry if if you can

train a active hip flexion above 90 degrees with a neutral spine more often and you can strengthen your your psoas and your iliac muscles then you're less likely to get a synergistically dominant rectus femoris, which is one of your quads, the only quad that crosses your hip as well. It's that middle one that sticks out. Yeah, we'll say it's the one right here because that's usually kind of where you feel it when you pull it. But that's why that happens. Oftentimes, if you can't use your psoas very well or you have a weak psoas, then you'll

overuse that one quad that acts also as a hip flexor and then that's how people very frequently pull their their hip flexor or their their quad when doing things like sprinting so if you do have to do something like sprinting very frequently then it might it might be in your best interest to include that type of training in your in your program so low level-level exercises would be dead bugs. You can Google this stuff. It would be things like dead bugs. That's probably my favorite thing because they look like Pilates.

They look like you're not doing anything, but inevitably every time I ever show this to anybody, they think they're really hard. I like getting that 240-pound football player in who can do everything well, and then you give him dead bugs and he's like, which exercise do you hate the most? The dead bug.

That's how that's how the last football player we trained was for sure. Yeah, Chase was that way. He's like, can I back squat 350 pounds for five sets of five, please? I want to do that instead of dead bugs. I'm like, you're insane. That's right. That's probably the one that i use 90 of the time and there's ways to scale that maybe maybe i'll do it i'll throw that in the technique quad too but banded uh but i want to

throw that into the very end because that's that fits in the same category absolutely yeah very cool i remember the first time i dead bugs did. It was so hard. You should do them too. All right. Brilliant. Yes. All right, Doug, what are we talking about? We're going to close it up. What do we plug in here?

I think the most logical thing is to promote the – Most logical? Logical. No, the most logical thing is to – The most logarithmical. Logarithmical. To promote the mobility seminar because it really fits with all the stuff we've been talking about today we we primarily talked about stability and core training for our stable joint which is

our low back even though we talked kind of about the the uh core all together but the mobility product basically talks about how to make all your mobile joints more mobile and then also how to um how to keep stability at what i'm going to call your stable joints and and i i talk about that concept all the time and i mentioned a little bit here today but uh it really ties in very well with all the core training that we talked about today so if you want to if you want to kind of learn more about what good technique is and how to train each one of your joints for their very specific needs, then the product maximum mobility in the fitter shop can really tie together everything that we talked about here today. Chris?

Yeah. Well, speaking of fitter shop, you can go to the fitter shop and check out Simple Strengths. Is that what I named that? The Strengths Seminar. It's actually quite good. It is quite good. Enter the promo code ROGAN for a 10% discount. Not true.

Check that out if you want. And then you can go by my blog. Come read what I post there on the blog. Just put up a post today on a novel, very super simple take on how to approach getting better at some skill you're new at i basically boiled down what you should understand about periodization into like five little points and somebody posted that it was just what they needed today to help them keep perspective when they went to the gym so go there read some stuff see what you think reach out to me send me a message i'd love to talk to you so that's that's about it the chris moore blog.com that's about all i've got i read that article

today i thought that was it was it's occurred to me that to the point were you the guy i was i wasn't the guy but oh chris that article was so good thanks hot chick on facebook i created an account so yeah took my sister's picture. Did you just call your sister hot on the show? Oh, geez. Oh, boy. My sisters are both really ugly. All right.

Oh, wait. No, no. You can't say that. Oh, no. Sorry, Lindsay. She watches this. Just Lindsay? Oh, I probably shouldn't have said her name.

All right. Make sure you go to the FITR website. FITR.TV. That's how you spell it. Go there. Check it out. Sign up for our newsletter so you can get updates on things we're doing next. And check out the Barbell Shrugged coffee mug.

That'll hold your coffee and keep it warm. And any drugs you might want to put in there, too. I feel like people believe you, the way this episode's been going. We've gone off on enough tangents tonight where they're probably starting to wonder what are in our mug. It's not coffee. CTP can edit this stuff out. Don't worry about it. We always say that. He'll edit out the whole episode. Hey, CTP, could you edit this out?. Don't worry about it. We always say that. He'll edit out the whole episode.

Hey, CTP, could you edit this out? He's like, oh, yeah, I got it. And I'm watching. I'm like, he did not edit it out one bit. Thanks a lot. He's a busy guy. He has a lot to do. I don't know if he's lazy or just wants to see us embarrass ourselves.

A little both, man. Yeah. He says it's mostly embarrassment. All right. See you guys mostly embarrassment. All right. See you guys next week. All right. What a terse close. See you next week.