I find riding a pre 90s style racer bicycle helps my back, core and neck.
Bending forward to use the low bars of a drop handle bar rounds my back which forces only the legs to flex. My lower back cannot add to the movement and even when it flexes it can only flex in a stretched position. My core turns on involuntarily to hold the compacted, hunched position, so no twisting of the hips. Yet I need to look forward so my thoracic extends while my chest pulls and shoulder blades pull into each other so I can reach the handle bars. It is essentially a yoga cat stretch for the thoracic. And lastly, as my legs are the only drivers, the bad coordination between back, hips and leg is successfully interfered with and I walk a bit less spasticated afterwards.
Pre 90s, the frame was European. European frames were simple in measurement and increased in height but not in length as they grew in size. All you had to do was to choose a bike was find one where you could stand on the ground, over the frame bar, and the bar gave clearance for your testicles. The post 80s Japanese frames turned up with mountain bikes, are over complicated, and do increase in length, which leaves me stretching to lean forward to hold the handles bars. A lean instead of a hunch forward activates the back and my lower back becomes part of the driver and so my hips start twisting with each push. I found the Tokyo Bike line is an older style design, very close to my old 1984 Standish Adami racer, that lets me ride and retrain my strange movement patterns as well.
Sunday, 6 August 2017
Saturday, 5 August 2017
Problems with so called functional exercises and the glutes.
I once felt good. Good enough to feel like a real person. By that I mean for 18 months from 20 to 22 my body was not in a hidden struggle where my torso was at war. I dropped out of university and just let my body do what it wanted, and it worked. I even felt so good about myself I tried to get a girlfriend. 20 years before the word stabilisation exercise, I chanced on exercises that aligned my body and fixed my injuries. Until a bad deadlift then made everything worse than before.
Since that lift, 22 years ago, my torso wants to twist down to the right while my hips want to twist left. Deep back and hip muscle knots have given me 20 years of neck aches, spasms on my solar plexus and a back that can deadlift 150kg but collapses when I sneeze. Throughout that time I have been fumbling backwards through the symptoms and injuries to find what worked. One I just realised is my hips have been rotated and how to maybe fix that with a simple posture trick I never knew I unconciously did at 21. I did almost every leg exercise on the balls of my feet and that always activates the glutes. 25 km a day cycling on my "toes" turned on the primary hip stabilisers. I felt like I was walking on the moon.
The glutes (bum muscles) are the core of our lower body. They dictate if our hips sway, twist, rotate or whatever the latest name for not being balanced is. I have been doing all the bridge variations, squats, deadlifts, single leg, running, walking, and it has gone on and on. And yet, when I wake up the next day my bum is so disconnected I have to consciously flex it to work. I jog like a goose-step prance to deliberately activate them but hours later they are sloppy and almost refuse to operate when I move.
If they do not work properly you will twist, swagger and sway your hips. That is not good.
So I did this. Stand facing away from the mirror but so you can look at your own bum in the mirror. Stand on your toes and your bum muscles naturally tense into what they would of been as a teenager. Now lower your heels without losing that tension. Thats the goal of everyone from weight losing women to those who want to increase their cycling strength and running stride length. But if I am doing all the functional, rehab scientific and full chain bullshit, how does maybe the single most important movement connection still not work?
Sit down, push your heels out and feel what turns off.
I think the villains are functional exercises obsessed with using the heel to push and the answer lives back in the eighties. What's that old man? Everyone knows those gym rats did it wrong then. I disagree. Drugs and lifting suits "improved" weight training into the 21st century, not unilateral core cross fit nonsense. In practice drug free just means not standard or classic molecule steroids. I am saying this because sillier and sillier exercises are being vaguely attributed with miraculous changes in athletic records.
Weighted bridges have to use the back. Heavy weighted exercises work by turning off the little muscles that connect body parts that you really want to tone.
So today I did some on a 45 degree back raise today with a high heel position.There was almost no back (good!) and the glue hamstring connection/underbum did all the work. I walked the rest of the day straight and balanced. That should eventually make my stride longer without hip twist.
Which begs the question, why are the people who tell me heel running is bad are also telling me to squat for running, by over emphasising weight through my heels? Destroying the neural connection between effort and using the balls of my feet?
And I got fat. If you search hard enough there is an internet interview where Mr Rippetoe admits Starting Strength is a weight gain routine for teens, not a strength gaining routine. Heel dominant squats is a technique for people in powerlifting suits, wide stances and very odd posture habits. Think about it. On paper, at my school the powerlifter boy had more than enough raw strength/power/easily the highest strength to bodyweight ratio of all the boys, and should of at least been in the sports day sprints, but he never featured in any foot races. And no, he was not short in any way.
That book is ground zero for push through the heels. After publication, every expert preached through the heels. But, in the 1980s the various American Joe Weider magazines showed bodybuilders squatting with a piece of wood under their heels. High bar. But, people say it's bad and you cannot lift much with it. But I just tried it and my bum switched on and took the strain, it must of pulled some muscles into place as nothing seemed to try and twist. This is big progress to me.
Heel dominant squats are for powerlifting and make rhino butts, as old fellow pizza maker and bouncer Brayden was nicknamed. Is that useful to anyone outside powerlifting? The lift demands the buttocks and quads turn off to lower the bar, and leaves the hamstrings (sort of) and back to perform a different exercise called the good morning to stand up. Powerlifters can have very weak quads. Change to a high heel and my knee stops twisting, bum works to stabilise and quads get exercised which helps my knee. I can live without wanting to squash my spine with 500 pounds squats.
One of the functional staples, hinge forward and back. Works my hamstrings, but not my flute/bum. I do lots of exercises that tighten my hamstrings but fail to work the glute, the bit that holds me stable. So I put something under my heel and turned it into a bum exercise and felt better. Again, it seems to rely on turning off the glutes to lower into a posture that demands a different muscle do most of the work to return to standing.
Enough ranting for now.
Since that lift, 22 years ago, my torso wants to twist down to the right while my hips want to twist left. Deep back and hip muscle knots have given me 20 years of neck aches, spasms on my solar plexus and a back that can deadlift 150kg but collapses when I sneeze. Throughout that time I have been fumbling backwards through the symptoms and injuries to find what worked. One I just realised is my hips have been rotated and how to maybe fix that with a simple posture trick I never knew I unconciously did at 21. I did almost every leg exercise on the balls of my feet and that always activates the glutes. 25 km a day cycling on my "toes" turned on the primary hip stabilisers. I felt like I was walking on the moon.
The glutes (bum muscles) are the core of our lower body. They dictate if our hips sway, twist, rotate or whatever the latest name for not being balanced is. I have been doing all the bridge variations, squats, deadlifts, single leg, running, walking, and it has gone on and on. And yet, when I wake up the next day my bum is so disconnected I have to consciously flex it to work. I jog like a goose-step prance to deliberately activate them but hours later they are sloppy and almost refuse to operate when I move.
If they do not work properly you will twist, swagger and sway your hips. That is not good.
So I did this. Stand facing away from the mirror but so you can look at your own bum in the mirror. Stand on your toes and your bum muscles naturally tense into what they would of been as a teenager. Now lower your heels without losing that tension. Thats the goal of everyone from weight losing women to those who want to increase their cycling strength and running stride length. But if I am doing all the functional, rehab scientific and full chain bullshit, how does maybe the single most important movement connection still not work?
Sit down, push your heels out and feel what turns off.
I think the villains are functional exercises obsessed with using the heel to push and the answer lives back in the eighties. What's that old man? Everyone knows those gym rats did it wrong then. I disagree. Drugs and lifting suits "improved" weight training into the 21st century, not unilateral core cross fit nonsense. In practice drug free just means not standard or classic molecule steroids. I am saying this because sillier and sillier exercises are being vaguely attributed with miraculous changes in athletic records.
Bridges
Get on the balls of your feet like you're wearing high heels and bridge.My back down not even try to do the movement and the lower glue/underbum is too weak to get very high. If I use the heels my back does all the work, so normal bridges barely exercised the hips at all. High heels may be a good thing after all.Weighted bridges have to use the back. Heavy weighted exercises work by turning off the little muscles that connect body parts that you really want to tone.
Back Raise
In that 18 month feel good period my university's old gym had the best back raise machine. It was just a custom-made stand toped with wide hessian bands along the lengthways. You used it by climbing in between the end band , leant forward and the other bands held the entire back of your legs as you hung and back raised off the end. Your weight was distributed over the largest possible surface area, your entire lower torso, so you could not develop any other points of tension except your glue ham hinge. Your legs would not try to kink or bend to take a strain focussed on your ankles or calves. The hamstrings could not tense up. As a result, I could focus on just rebuilding my lower back and hip muscles as the only point of tension. And now I remember, my feet were in the pointed or high heel position, meaning the reflex contraction between my glutes, hamstrings and feet occurred without thought.So today I did some on a 45 degree back raise today with a high heel position.There was almost no back (good!) and the glue hamstring connection/underbum did all the work. I walked the rest of the day straight and balanced. That should eventually make my stride longer without hip twist.
Squats
Today people go to Starting Strength for squat knowledge. A short, fat man teaching the ultra heel focussed version called the low bar squat. Which works great for sagging backs even more, shifting weight, odd posture habits, adding numbers on sheets of paper, short men, and that's about it. The more I tried to low bar squat the quicker my running technique devolved and hips twisted.Which begs the question, why are the people who tell me heel running is bad are also telling me to squat for running, by over emphasising weight through my heels? Destroying the neural connection between effort and using the balls of my feet?
And I got fat. If you search hard enough there is an internet interview where Mr Rippetoe admits Starting Strength is a weight gain routine for teens, not a strength gaining routine. Heel dominant squats is a technique for people in powerlifting suits, wide stances and very odd posture habits. Think about it. On paper, at my school the powerlifter boy had more than enough raw strength/power/easily the highest strength to bodyweight ratio of all the boys, and should of at least been in the sports day sprints, but he never featured in any foot races. And no, he was not short in any way.
That book is ground zero for push through the heels. After publication, every expert preached through the heels. But, in the 1980s the various American Joe Weider magazines showed bodybuilders squatting with a piece of wood under their heels. High bar. But, people say it's bad and you cannot lift much with it. But I just tried it and my bum switched on and took the strain, it must of pulled some muscles into place as nothing seemed to try and twist. This is big progress to me.
Heel dominant squats are for powerlifting and make rhino butts, as old fellow pizza maker and bouncer Brayden was nicknamed. Is that useful to anyone outside powerlifting? The lift demands the buttocks and quads turn off to lower the bar, and leaves the hamstrings (sort of) and back to perform a different exercise called the good morning to stand up. Powerlifters can have very weak quads. Change to a high heel and my knee stops twisting, bum works to stabilise and quads get exercised which helps my knee. I can live without wanting to squash my spine with 500 pounds squats.
Single leg deadlifts
One of the functional staples, hinge forward and back. Works my hamstrings, but not my flute/bum. I do lots of exercises that tighten my hamstrings but fail to work the glute, the bit that holds me stable. So I put something under my heel and turned it into a bum exercise and felt better. Again, it seems to rely on turning off the glutes to lower into a posture that demands a different muscle do most of the work to return to standing.
Enough ranting for now.
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