IOL Strength and Conditioning

You’re not going to believe this: I found another four pages of notes from Chuck Wolf’s IDEA presentations in Las Vegas. If you’re just arriving, you can catch up here at part one and here at part two. We’re going back to bullet points because of the volume. When you bump into a statement that catches your attention, a simple google search will fill in the gaps.

I mentioned earlier Chuck hammered his priority of training in multiple planes of motion, and nowhere was it more evident than during his discussion of the functional spine. You’ll see that throughout the following thoughts, a bunch of gems comin’ up.

1) Walking – gait – occurs in all three planes of motion. The hips move in the sagittal plane to propel you forward, in the frontal plane as you move from side to side (weight moving from one leg to the other) and on the transverse plane as the hips rotate. If there’s a problem on any plane, there’s a problem in the gait.

2) To help sort out the cause of and solution to chronic back pain, consider first in what plane of motion the pain occurs, bending forward and back, side to side or rotational.

3) In your back stabilization exercises, include something in all three planes. Front planks are great, but they’re not enough.

4) The proprioceptors that tell the brain where we are in space work when the muscles are lengthened, and don’t work when they’re shortened. Bent-forward walking, such as often seen in older adults, shortens the muscles, causing poor proprioception… that is, bad balance, increasing the chance of falling.

5) 80% of non-impact injuries occur due to lack of control in the transverse plane. In your program design, include rotational work, and do it before your linear training.

6) Calves turn on the abdominals during gait; they’re the neural switch. Inactive calves or the feet not fully involved means weak abdominal action.

7) With excessive kyphosis, look for posterior hip tilt and fix that before working on the kyphosis. Stretching the pecs and strengthening the back won’t work until the hip tilt is addressed.

8) The lumbar spine is controlled in large part by the psoas and the adductors. Make sure the psoas and adductor length and strength matches right side to left.

9) You need good hip extension in order to have good back extension.

10) If you lose thoracic spine extension, it’s hard to rotate.

11) Sciatic nerve pain can be caused by a pinch in the lumbar spine or glute weakness, inactive glute and tight piriformis. If relief is provided by reaching one arm overhead, start at the chiropractor for attention to the lumbar spine. Otherwise, roll the piriformis over a tennis ball (remember, the knee must be bent to access the piriformis), and work glute strength and activation.

12) Strengthen foot musculature to provide relief of piriformis problems and sciatica.

13) Your isolated stability exercises (planks, bird dogs, etc) should be done first, before moving to integrated movement patterns.

14) Chronic muscle tightness is a sign something is wrong. If it keeps happening, you have to figure out why. Muscles tighten up in response to instability at a joint.

15) Since mobility without stability creates a vulnerability, the body tightens up in protection. This means we have to strengthen opposing muscles in order to gain nearby flexibility, for example strengthening the hip flexors to loosen the hamstrings.

I triple-checked: This wraps up my notes from Chuck’s IDEA presentations. Now that we’re done with the notes, I’m ready to go back for more. Three tremendous seminars, outstanding stuff.