IOL Strength and Conditioning

I was talking with my friend, Val, recently, and discovered I’d never told her about foam rolling. She’s a hairdresser, works hard with her hands outstretched at shoulder height hour after hour, day after day. If anyone’s a candidate for foam rolling, a hairdresser would surely be in the first balloting.

First you want to know what the heck is a foam roller. Simple: it’s a dense foam cylinder used (for this discussion; there are other uses) in self-massage of the legs and torso, and even for the front delts, triceps and forearms for the adventurous.

Think of it as a way to get a short massage daily, without driving anywhere or paying anything, where you get to zero in on exactly the spot the responds the most. Perfect! You’ll roll your way from calves to shoulders, staying on each muscle area for about ten short strokes, avoiding the joints and bony spots.

The key to enjoying the process and getting the most benefit is to settle in, relax and enjoy the process. Trying to hurry your way through this is a bit of a waste of time, unlikely to do much, even though it doesn’t take very long to run the body.

With regular foam rolling of the thoracic spine, my back stays loose and unbound, free and mobile with rare need of a chiropractor. Compared with pre-foam rolling, that alone is remarkable.

Those knots of spasming muscle you have, or those nasty, pain-referring adhesions in the fascia that connects the muscles into tendons and bones, those can all be released and relieved with your cheap home foam roller.

Calves, hamstrings, quads, IT band along the outside of the legs, glutes, spine, lats, back of the shoulder, front delts, triceps, top and bottom of the forearm, one tool, no waiting for a mate to feel like giving you a massage. I love this thing, and when you get one, if you have patience and try it daily for a week, you’ll love it, too.
I use a quick run over the foam roller as a pre-workout wake-up call that takes two minutes at most and prepares the mind and body for the warm-up moves to follow. Post-workout, five minutes becomes ten as the worked muscles welcome the gentle massage. A glance at the clock is required to remind me there’s still work to be done, time’s a’wasting.

It’s a wonderful feeling that will help athletes, week-end warriors, aging fitness enthusiasts, desk jockeys, hairdressers and construction workers alike. As those decades-old aches begin to diminish, you’re gonna write back and thank me for this one. In turn, I’ll refer you on to my pal, Dan Martin, who’ll tell you to thank Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson. I pretty much lose the trail there, and cannot tell you who first began rolling or who invented the foam gizmo.

Here’s our forum conversation on foam rolling if you’d like to read more or join in the conversation. Quick pointer: Spend a few extra bucks for the black or blue EVA rollers; the white foam seems to crush too easily for all but the smallest of adults.

One of our common complaints is the trouble we have getting a doc to order the blood tests we want. Or perhaps we’re just curious about something — Vitamin D, for a good example — yet don’t need any other doctoring at the moment. Most of us set our blood chemistry curiosity aside at this point, thinking we’ll remember the question during our next visit to the doctor’s office.

Or not.
Easy solution: Skip the anxiety, arguing or subsequent frustration and order the tests you’re interested in via Life Extension’s Blood Testing Panels.

The only downside I can see is that you don’t know in advance where the labs are. LEF is using LabCorp as their lab, so before you order, make sure there’s a LabCorp location near you. Here’s a link to the LabCorp locations.

In case you need a refresher, this is a list of recommended tests for the status of your heart. And here’s a link to a great deal of cholesterol information, three years of cholesterol posts pulled together to keep you reading for the next couple of hours.

In this link, Life Extension provides an in-depth discussion of blood testing protocols, and the value of bringing our blood chemistry to optimal levels.

Do you have time for some price shopping? Compare the Life Extension costs with those of HealthCheckUSA, where they also use Labcorp facilities for the blood draw. A couple test prices I checked were identical, but not all. It may be worth the trouble to check both places for your needs.

I’m a big fan of regular blood testing. Try the Vitamin D test, what a trip that will be if you discover your Vitamin D is low, which it very well might be. This one’s a biggie, and until recently very few of us knew it. Check out that Vitamin D link if this is a new one on you, then make a plan to get your bloodwork done.

The astute will have noticed a certain level of weirdness gaining steam in my training the past couple of months. It’s been all over the map as I jump to a problem area, make some progress and move along to another. The upside of training weaknesses is that progress comes fast; the downside is there sure are a lot of them to work on once you get to noticing, and hey, add to that the training sometimes looks ridiculous.

It’s a mess of small and large issues to write about, but since it’s a sure thing most who read this have one or two pain problems that are a result of weakness in another area, I wrote a long forum post describing all the exercises I’ve used over the past couple of months. Some are still in the rotation; others provided the needed results and have been dropped for the time being, if not forever.

My purpose was to try out a variety of movements to find out which felt most effective for me, what I personally needed the most. Those that were easy got dumped after the first try; the hard ones are the exercises that made it into the rotation. Remember, we’re looking for problems and fixes, not easy exercises.

That was my thought in making the long list for others to try. If it feels too random for you, pick the exercises you think you need and create your own workout/s.

I do think most people who’ve been training for a long time will be surprised at how feeble they feel on some of these easy-peasy exercises. Most of us have weak spots that need attention, and that’s why I hope you’ll continue on and give the post the time needed to simmer into your brain.

You’ll be surprised to discover the workouts each took only about 20 minutes to do a single set in the order listed. The first couple of times through will probably take about twice that until you get the hang of the exercises.

I’d do one set of each exercise the first week, two the second and up to three the third if you can spare the time. By that point, you’ll know which are hard, which are easy. The easy ones get set aside in favor of those that are difficult for you… those are the ones you need.

Off you go then: Bodyweight Rehab Introductory Workouts.

Physical therapists and coaches for professional athletes have not always been ahead of bodybuilders when it comes to building a muscular body. In fact, in terms of nutrition and weight training, the guys of Dave’s competitive years led the charge for today’s athletes. Yet I must say that leadership role has been reversed over the past decade, and these days it’s the strength and conditioning coaches and the athletic PT folks who are making remarkable strides in revamping how we think about our training programs.

What a great time this is to be a young athlete, and what I mean by that is that over the next few years the new generation will get corrective exercise, movement screening and instructions such as daily foam rolling as part of their athletic training. Soon this stuff will be done by coaches down to the high school level, and, as the athletes age, they’ll take this knowledge with them into adulthood. Those athletes have an excellent chance at less pain in their golden years, something the Golden Era bodybuilders unfortunately were not able to demonstrate.

Corrective exercise and movement screening is how this is filtering down to the average weight training athlete.

I’ll give you a brief introduction so when your kid comes home spouting his or her coach’s instructions, you’ll be up on the lingo. Better yet, you’ll start taking note when the terms come up in forum conversations and exercise newsletters, because there are gems in this new work that can truly reverse some of your nagging aches and pains. I kid you not.

The term corrective exercise broadly refers to specific exercise or stretches designed to target a defect in a person’s physical movement. What happens is in our lives, either through our day-to-day work, unbalanced exercise selection in the weight room, lopsided sports activity like golf, tennis or softball, or just plain sitting around too much, muscle groups work at diminished capacity, letting others take over the tasks.

Often the wrong muscles doing the work, or one side of the body working better than the other, will cause a cascade of physical problems, such as back and knee pain. Sometimes the problems have gone on long enough they can’t be fixed without surgery, or can’t be fixed at all, but more often than not, a month of attention to corrective exercise rehab will reverse a future of pain, and with surprisingly little effort.

The guys leading us into this bright future come from two basic schools of thought: movement screening and structural assessment.

Gray Cook, the author of Athletic Body in Balance, and his business partner, Lee Burton, have designed what they call the Functional Movement Screen, a set of physical tests used by physical therapists, strength and conditioning coaches and, increasingly, forward-thinking personal trainers. Their philosophy in creating the screen is to test the movement and use the exercises they’ve come up with to correct the faulty movement pattern. The point with the FMS is to fix the problem, not dissect it down to the various causes; to their thinking it doesn’t matter what caused it, just fix it.

On the other side we find guys like Gary Gray, Justin Price and Anthony Carey, who prefer to assess the athlete or client’s structure, discover the discrepancies and prescribe exercises to fix the various issues.

Many of the suggestions will be the same, regardless of the method of discovery. The real problem for most of us in today’s environment is that, while increasing rapidly, the professionals able to do the assessments are still few and far between. Chances of a skilled pro in your town are relatively rare, which leaves us looking at the movement screening for our at-home fixes.

As an aside, I will say if I lived in San Diego, I’d be at Justin’s or Anthony’s clinic in a heartbeat, or if near Danville, Virginia, I’d be over at Gray and Lee’s place as soon as I could get an appointment. Ditto Gary Gray’s in Michigan. Another guy who can help you out in Connecticut is John Izzo of StandApartFitness.com. The beauty of this stuff is it can be as little as a one-time visit – get tested, get your assignment and get to work, so even if you have to make a drive to get assessed or re-assessed, it’s not like it’s a weekly appointment. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Assuming you don’t live in those areas, here’s whatcha do next: Gray Cook took the Functional Movement Screen that he and Lee designed for the pros to use, and dumbed it down for the rest of us. In Athletic Body in Balance, you’ll find five simple tests (don’t read that to be easy tests) you can do at home to determine your weakest link. From there, the book goes on to tell you exactly how to fix it, which exercises or stretches and in what order you should best tackle them.

On Tom Incledon’s recommendation, I tested myself when the book first came out in 2003. I failed so miserably I bagged the project, thinking a book for “athletes” wasn’t for me. Failure in movement means pay attention… Get a clue!Unfortunately, I didn’t pick that book back up until a month ago.

This time, however, I knew enough about the corrective exercise movement to know the failures were signposts pointing me in the right direction. I followed the instructions and re-tested a month later, last weekend in fact, and the success of February’s exercise effort was remarkable. Instead of ramming the pvc marker into the doorway, falling over (yes, I’m talking about to the floor) or missing the position entirely, all five tests received a passing grade. I’m not done; nothing was perfect, yet the progress in four weeks was truly outstanding.

Lest this not sound like it’s simply about passing a test, let me tell you a bit about how things feel: My back feels better, my shoulders move better and without pain, my posture’s straighter, and my stride is longer and more athletic. I want more of that and have targeted the exercises suggested for last weekend’s lower-scoring tests.

I want this for you, too, so just go ahead and spring for Gray’s book, Athletic Body in Balance. Yes, I know you don’t feel like an athlete. Just do it anyway.

Late edit to cross-link posts: Finding a local corrective exercise specialist.