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Why Athletes Should Avoid The Bars

(An intemperate look at barbell-centric training)


Steve Myrland




Get out of the weight-room boys. I dont need you
weight-room strong . . . I need you farm-strong.

Irving Boo Shexnayder
LSU Track & Field Coach
(to his team)



Perhaps the most persistent blunder athletes and coaches make in
training to compete is regularly mistaking strength for
athleticism, so lets clear this up right away: Athleticismthe
ability to express ones physical self with optimal speed, agility,
strength, balance, suppleness, stamina and grace while avoiding
injuryis the goal. Strength, as you will note by re-reading the
sentence, above, is a single element of the collective term:
athleticism. You cannot be athletic without being strong; but you can
be strong without being athletic.

Peek into any high school weight-room and you will see big, slow guys
lifting weights under the misguided notion that strength is the holy-
grail. It isnt. Big strong guys are a dime-a-dozen. Big strong guys
who can move get recruited . . . get scholarships . . . get drafted . . . get
rich. Therefore, the strength you create in training must necessarily
be strength that augments the whole, rather than constrains it. It
must be athletic strength; that is, it must always promote better
movement.

Strength and stamina are among the easiest athletic qualities to
improveprovided you disconnect both from all other athletic
qualities (speed and agility, for instance). Absent any connection to
those genuine game-breakers, it is not at all difficult to create
stronger muscles and bodies that are conditioned to work for longer
and longer periods of time. Creating better athletes, however
athletes that are able to project the qualities most rewarded in
competitionrequires a more refined approach to training.

In the quest for athletic strength, the lines of the argument are
generally drawn between the free-weight advocates and the health-
club machine crowd. I tend to fall in with the free-weight folks in this
but such a simplistic line of separation gives a free pass to one
particular piece of equipment that is every bit as non-functional as
any chrome-plated, stack-loaded, one-plane-wonder health-club
machine: the barbell.

On a functional continuum of training equipment, I would place
machines well down towards the non-functional end of things and I
would place the venerable Olympic bar right next to them, even
though it sails under the free-weight banner.

Heres why: When you grab hold of a barbell with both hands, you
are virtually locking yourself into the sagittal plane. Movement in the
other two available planes of motion, frontal and transverse, is
theoretically possible, but it is unlikely, at best; and if you are doing a
traditional barbell exercise (squat, deadlift, snatch, clean, bench
press) your body will do all it can to minimize any potential
movement in those two unwanted planes. Effectively, the bar locks
you into one plane and out of two. It restrictsnot unlike health-club
machinery.

Unfortunately, the neural patterning that results from this kind of
training is decidedly unfriendly to a body that will be regularly
requiredin competition and lifeto move; to react, stop, start, twist,
generate speed and withstand impact. Strength-training programs
based primarily on barbell lifts do a poor job of preparing bodies for
the competitive environment because they teach the body to be stiff
and unyieldingbrittlerather than strong and supple.

If you think of the spine as a length of chain, with each link making its
individual contribution to movement in three planes, you get a sense
of what a wonderfully elegant, supple design the human spine is. If
several links in that chain are (effectively) fused together, all flexion,
extension, leaning and rotation that would normally come from those
links will necessarily be handed on to the nearest available segment of
the chain where the links are still able to move.

Moreover, with the exception of back-squats, a barbell puts the
resistance on the front of the body, contributing to the development
of shoulders that round forward. This front-emphasis affects all
bodies differently because of individual differences in lever-lengths
(arms, legs and torsos). Big-chested, short-armed power-lifters
always have the advantage when it comes to bench-pressing. Short-
legged, short torso, long-armed lifters make the best squatters and
deadlifters.

Barbells are an insult to the inherent uniqueness of human beings.
A bar treats all bodies as if they were the same by limiting things to
the sagittal plane and by requiring loads to be carried either in front
or behind, not where an individuals own center-of-gravity is
optimized. This requires all manner of nasty postural compensations
that are directly or indirectly related to many athletic deficiencies and
(even) injuries. After all: a barbell is designed to accommodate the
load rather than the lifter; while dumbbells and other similar
resistance tools both require and allow bodies to be wholly integrated,
connected and self-organizing.

I have trained two high level hockey players in the past few years (one
male and one female) who are both strong, but who suffer from
significant movement impairments and all the recurring pain that
generally attends dysfunctional athletic bodies. I realize that two
athletes hardly constitute a reliable research cohort; but even so, both
of these athletes share one significant training detail: both relied
(heavily!) on the barbell as their primary off-ice training tool. I
believe this to be a major mistake.

The female hockey player competed in the 2006 Olympic Games in
Turin, and was desirous of competing in the 2010 Games as well, but
she was struggling with chronic back pain and feared it would end her
playing career prematurely. Her strength-training and strength-
testing were predominantly barbell based.

In watching this athlete move, it was evident that a large segment of
her spine didnt (move, that is). Her thoracic spine appeared to be a
single undifferentiated mass, never contributing its share of
rotational or lateral movement. There didnt (even) appear to be
much flexion and extension in that part of her back; so even in the
sagittal plane, she struggled. Her lower back-pain was a constant
constraint on her ability to performin training and on the ice. She
worked with a chiropractor/active-release therapist, a physiatrist and
me, and we all combined efforts to try to re-mobilize her thoracic
spine and provide her with training strategies that would permit her
to maintain and enhance that mobility, herself. Prominently included
in that sackful of strategies was the admonition to STAY AWAY
FROM THE BAR!

The male hockey player left college early, a high draft-choice; but he
spent three years in the up-and-down (minor-league NHL) holding
pattern that is often a frustrating feature of the professional
experience. When I first worked with him, he weighed 205 lbs, and
he moved pretty well. Two years later when we trained together
again, he weighed 215 lbs and he did not move as well as he once did.
His additional ten pounds wasnt fat; but neither was it muscle that
enhanced his movement capability. In fact, it detracted from it.

In both these cases, I believe the problem was far too much emphasis
on barbell generated strength. I know the female player agrees; I
hope the male player does toobut male athletes (and male coaches)
are far more easily seduced by the charms of the bar than females.

For both athlete and coach, the bar offers the ripest, low-hanging,
easily quantifiable fruit. It is so simple to measure barbell progress.
You can do absolute one-rep max-testing and force your athletes to be
power-lifters and Olympic lifters for one day each month (a risky
idea!); or you can project 1RMs using any of a number of
mathematical models. I learned this one from Jerry Martin (U-Conn)
when he was the head Strength & Conditioning coach at Yale:

(.03 x reps [failure]) x weight + weight

so: (.03 x 7) x 200 + 200 = .21 x 200 + 200 = 42 + 200 = 242.

An athlete who fails at seven reps using a weight of 200 lbs has a
projected 1 RM of 242 lbs. I found this formula to be acceptably
accuratefor barbell lifts. (Still do; I just dont have much cause to
use it, these days.)

It is probably the ease with which strength can be quantified that
makes the bar so irresistible to athletes and coaches. Walk into any
weight-room and ask any male in the place: Who benches the most?
Who squats the most? Whats your max in the deadlift? You will get
quick answers to all your questions. Or: you can simply consult the
inevitable record board listing the top bench-pressers, squatters,
deadlifters etc., etc., etc..

The bar is an easy way to measure strength and (I believe) easily
measured strength is the first refuge of a poor coach. We can happily
report strength-gains to convince sport-coaches that we are doing our
jobs in the weight-room and that the coachs athletes are benefiting
from the time they spend with us.

Unfortunately, easily measured strength is rarely competitively useful
strength. That is something far more difficult to quantify in the
simplistic terms of pounds lifted. Better measures of the efficacy of
any strength program would be such things as acceleration speed;
multi-directional speed and agility; vertical / horizontal jump and
lateral bound; balance; speed-stamina; and the real holy-grail of all
evaluative criteria by which any training program ought to be judged:
injury rates.

It is my contention that if more athletes were as devoted to gaining
true athleticism as they are to enhancing their numbers in the weight-
room, we would have more good athletes and fewer injuries.

The strength-training required to build bodies that are adaptable
rather than simply adaptedbodies able to survive and thrive in the
wholly unpredictable (and therefore dangerous) competitive arena
cannot be done using a steady diet of restrictive barbell lifts.
Rehearsing single-plane movements with an awkward, restrictive tool
does not provide performance benefits or insurance against injury
when the ball is snapped, the pitch is delivered, the puck is dropped,
the serve is struck or the gun goes off and chaos reigns. A barbell tells
a body what it can do rather than asks a body what it can do, and that
is the real line of functional differentiation.
Simplicity yields complexity. I heard Vern Gambetta say that in the
first seminar I ever attended as a young coach and the statement hits
the bullseye. Equipment that poses genuine physical puzzles for
bodies to solve has a far greater chance of being useful in creating
truly athletic athletes than equipment that dumbs em down as the
saying goes.

We work, after all, with people who are generations removed from
naturally physically challenging childhoods. Movement for all young
people is now entirely optional throughout the childhood years.
Indeed, movement is now the least likely choice for children and
adults, which partially explains our current health crises of obesity
and diabetes. We must coach physically inarticulate people to be able
to perform physical tasks that were once taken for granted in all
young people (like the ability to skip!) but which are often
maddeningly beyond reach for many these days.

Our job, as coaches charged with improving the performance
capabilities of athletes, requires that we be prepared to continually
evaluate and re-evaluate our tools and methods and jettison all those
that fail to achieve our desired objectives, even if the tools we must
jettison include a few sacred-cows like the much reveredand still
ubiquitousbarbell.

We have so many excellent ways to impose athletically appropriate
resistance challenges. Dumbbells, medicine-balls, kettlebells, stretch-
cords, water, sand and hills all share performance enhancing
advantages that barbells lack. All are (relatively) inexpensive and
most are also portable, as well, adding a huge measure of program
versatility into the bargain. Why not choose and use them?

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