IOL Strength and Conditioning

Do you wake up in pain? When you are trying to get out of bed, does the pain in your back take your breath away? You move slowly. Your hips feel “locked.”  You make it into the shower and let the hot water run on your back and finally you’re “almost ok.” And it’s still early in the day!

As the day goes on, it seems to improve a bit. You rub your shoulders, and try to move your body around to find a comfortable position. Finally, you get into the car and drive home. By the time you try to get out of the car, the pain is back with a vengeance. This time it doesn’t seem to get any better, and you eventually go to bed, to repeat the cycle tomorrow.

Many people go to their chiropractor and it feels better for awhile, but the pain keeps returning. You try muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatory drugs, pain pills…anything to make the pain subside. You know that the drugs have serious side-effects, but you need to do something!

There is a very logical reason that it comes back.

These conditions can all be the end result of muscle spasms! While it seems incredible that a simple thing like a spasm can cause so much trouble, it’s easy to understand when you take a close look at the body. There are 600 muscles, and 206 bones, in your body. Unless you have a traumatic accident, the only reason bones move is because muscles pull on them. Muscles originate in one place, cross over the joint and then insert in another place. Muscles always pull on the insertion point. Visualize pulling your hair at the end. You don’t feel it at the end where you are pulling, but you do feel it on the scalp where it inserts. Likewise, you rarely feel the pain in the part of the muscle that is being pulled, but you do feel it at the insertion, the origination point, and the joint bends.

Although every joint moves by using the same dynamics, for ease of explanation about low back pain, we’ll just pay attention to the muscles that cause you to bend forward, stand up straight, or lean to the side. We’ll also take a look at the muscle group that pulls your pelvis down in the front.

The two low back muscles both start on your lumbar vertebrae. One, the iliopsoas, originates on the front of your vertebrae and either pulls you into a bent forward position or lifts your leg up so you can take a step or sit down. And the other, the quadratus lumborum, originates on the back of your lumbar vertebrae and enables you to lean to the side. There is a long muscle on your back, the erector spinae, that originates along the entire length of your spine and is responsible for bringing you up to the standing tall position. These three muscles are the reason you move in any direction at your waist. It will help if you visualize what happens to your pelvis and low back as these muscles contract and lengthen.

If you want to sit down, the iliopsoas contracts and you begin to bend at the top of your legs. While this is happening, your pelvis begins to rotate forward and down to enable the move. However, if you sit for an extended period of time, the muscle shortens and when you want to stand up, the muscle must stretch. The tight iliopsoas pulls down on your lumbar vertebrae, and it also impacts your thigh muscles, the quadriceps, requiring them to shorten in order for you to straighten your leg. The now-shortened quadriceps will pull your pelvis down in the front and put a further strain on your lumbar vertebrae. When you add all of this together, you have low back pain caused by sitting!

When you bend forward, you are actually stretching the muscles on your back, so they aren’t as involved in back pain as you would expect. In fact, the majority of time the only reason the muscles of your back are painful is from doing something like shoveling snow or lifting heavy weights from a bent position.

The cause of low back pain becomes more complicated and in order to explain it fully, and demonstrate how to self-treat each of these muscles, I will be writing a short booklet entitled Stop Low Back Pain FAST! Be sure to visit www.julstro.com soon for your copy.

© 2009 Julie Donnelly, LMT is an internationally respected expert in repetitive strain injuries. She has specialized in the treatment of chronic joint pain and sports injuries since 1989, and is the author of many books including Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You, Treat Yourself to Pain–Free Living: Discover the Secret of Why You Hurt and How to Stop It, and The Pain-Free Triathlete. Ms. Donnelly also has expertise at training individuals and groups the self-treatment methods that eliminate pain and can be reached through her websites, carpal tunnel treatment and www.julstro.com, or by calling 845.627.7035.

The weekend of October 9, 2010, marks our 10th annual IronOnline forum get-together; spanning the States over the years from Alaska to Florida, this year we’ll be in Kansas City at the historic Fort Leavenworth. Our speaker for the weekend is Glenn Pendlay, a top US Olympic weightlifting coach who trains primarily out of the California Strength Club in San Ramon, California. He’s a former Olympic lifting competitor with an extensive background in powerlifting and a Masters in Exercise Physiology.  He’s the manufacturer of the Pendlay barbell and bumper plates, and a guy who behind-the-scenes guides much of our training philosophies, even though you may not know it.

The IronOnline forum’s earliest introduction to Glenn was in this meaty section covering the 5×5 training scheme that Bill Starr made famous and in which Glenn was instrumental  in developing for the internet age.  This 5-set training program is real basic, simple training—quite effective, and very popular as a way to learn something about periodization and how to change up a program as a trainee moves from the beginning stages during which everything works to the intermediate place where we have to start thinking a little. Byron Chandler’s created an excel spreadsheet to help implement the program, and you’ll find scads of helpful suggestions in the forum threads to sort out the details that Glenn and his friends developed from Bill Starr’s work.

But before you spend all day reviewing that fascinating archive, beginning with the top thread of Byron’s 5×5 notes, let’s offset that with Glenn’s next set of thoughts:

“I don’t recommend specific programs really… at least not so much. What I recommend is a long-term outlook towards training, a step-by-step approach—in reality, a very simple approach.”

And that brings us to a most educational discussion on training as we age. You see, Glenn’s an expert on stress hormones and recovery, and as a guy who coaches Mary McGregor, a 62-year-old World Champion weightlifter, he’s got the real-life experience to back up his book learning. I’m going to send you off to the full archive, but here are the teasers from Coach Pendlay.

1) Fit your training around your life, not the other way around.

2) Be honest about what you are trying to do.

3) Make good health and staying injury-free the top priority.

4) And finally, least important, is the actual training program.

With those thoughts in mind, you can bookmark the rest of his thoughts, and see his other suggestions about cardio, strength and diet, here.

Another regular Pendlay reference you’re probably familiar with: Pendlay Rows. Everybody around here knows barbell rows are at the top of Dave’s must-do exercise list, and as it turns out, this is exactly how Dave does them. Quoting Glenn again:

The best way to do them is to start with the bar on the floor every single rep. Your middle back will have a slight bend to it. You pull the bar off the floor quickly with the arms, and by a powerful arch of your middle back. You finish by touching the bar to your upper stomach or middle stomach.

At no time is there any movement of the hips or knees, no hip extension at all, all that bends is the middle back and the shoulders and elbows. This is hard to do and you have to have good muscular control to do it, or you’ll end up straightening up at the hips along with the arching of the back. But if you can master doing them this way, you will get a big back.

Here’s what that looks like:

As we did with Dan John’s lectures last year in Utah, we’re going to be filming the seminars at the Kansas City event, and will have dvds available between then and Christmas. Glenn’s tentative topics:

Friday night: Training Elite Strength Athletes
Saturday morning: How Training has to Change as We Age
Saturday afternoon: Elite Olympic Lifting Workout

• You’re invited to join us at Leavenworth in the fall. Here are the details: IronOnline Bash 2010.
• Glenn’s got a forum on his site, where he’s a regular at providing insight, and he spends a little time with us doing the same. Imagine that, Dan John and Glenn Pendlay, along with our other outstanding participants, showing up to offer us a hand!
• Once you’re done goofing around Glenn’s forum and reading the articles on his site, jump on over to this ExRx link, where you’ll find a 35-minute podcast interview.

I’ll leave you with this: You can learn a lot listening to this guy.

I pulled the following from Dave’s newsletter this afternoon; Dave and Dennis were friends for over 40 years, sharing their bodybuilding careers, a lot of laughter and eventually their love of God.

The sadness, the pain, the irony, the stone cold truth and sudden reality cuts deep. We lost a beloved brother, bombers. Dennis Tinerino, left us Friday morning, the 7th day of May. None of death’s details are joyful, but most of this man’s life was. Shoulders a yard wide and a personality to match, he stood in my house in Playa Del Rey 40-some years ago as we laughed ourselves silly over nothing, like guys do when they’re in their mid-20s, from the east coast, eat iron for lunch and their muscles are piled up around their ears.

He introduced me as a poet to his buds from NYC and wanted me to make a preposterous desk and chair for his office. Neither of us knew what a poet was, but we were good at preposterous and he got what he wanted before the late-60′s summer sun went down.

Remember the ’60s? A lot of us do and have the scars to prove it.

Dennis grew into a real live preacher man in the emerging decade and spread the Good Word for most of his life through his ministry, Dennis Tinerino Ministries. He and his wife, Anita, and their daughters, Taka and Marissa, and son Dennis-John, together held firm to the same tight rope all their years in the tug-of-war that is life. They never let go.

Golden Age Mr. America and Mr. Universe, Hall of Famer and beautiful guy. We love you Dennis; we miss you—rest in God’s Glory.

He was a terrific guy, full of life and humor and love of God. His was a story of the toughness of an Italian from Brooklyn in the ’50s, the competitiveness of a multi-sport athlete who became a four-time Mr. Universe, leading to a time of crime and prison, where he was reunited with his faith. It’s a wonderful story of a passionate man.

This is how I think of Dennis, the photo below that I shot in the early ’90s… full of joy. But you see Lee Labrada there on the right, how Dennis has cracked him up almost uncontrollably? In that shot of Lee, we see a reflection of Dennis; we see a guy we’d like to be, one who can provide so much pleasure for a friend.

Dennis’ competitive career spanned nearly 20 years, beginning in Brooklyn in 1964 and ending with his fourth Mr. Universe title in 1981. You’ll find a list of his competitive events and the 26 magazine covers on which he appeared here at MuscleMemory.

Dennis Tinerino & Frank Zane

In this 1967 Strength & Health article, Dennis tells of his Mr. America win, carrying his silver trophy home to New York, reminiscing about his training with Joe Abbenda. Joe was Dennis’ earliest influence, and was instrumental in his career, helping him grow from an athletic 185 pounds to his competitive weight of around 225. During that time, he was a skilled fencer, and also competed in Olympic weightlifting.

Listen to Dennis preach—you can sure tell he was born for this!

Here’s a shot John Corlett took of Dennis and Tony Nowak at Arnold’s inauguration in Sacramento, 2007. Ironically, Tony, another terrifically friendly guy, died a few weeks ago, also.

Dennis’ book, Super Size Your Faith, is his autobiography in which he covers his rise, the fall and rise again. Most of the book is his early history, leading up to his ministry later in life. You can order the book, $14.95, or make a contribution to his wife via the tinerino.com website.

I leave you with this sweet slide show, and a smile in memory of a God-loving, fun-loving guy, Dennis Tinerino.

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Posted on May 12th, 2010 by Laree | Permalink | |  Email This

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