Structural Balance And Your Max Lifts

In my Training – Then vs. Now post I made reference to training rotator cuff and the lower trap muscles to help maintain muscle balance. I mentioned that my posture had suffered as a result of neglecting these areas. I failed to mention that improving performance is another very good reason for training these area.

Why will doing external rotation and lower trap movements improve your lifting numbers?

Metaphoric reason – a well tuned car will run better than a car that misfires on one cylinder, even if each car uses the same amount of gas in the same period of time. Well the body is the same way so if it is well tuned (has proper muscle balance) it will be able to move a greater load with the same amount of energy. When someone suggests that you do external rotation movements to help you improve any of your lifts, the goal is to restore or establish balance in your body.

Practical reason – balanced rotator cuff muscles allow the shoulder joint to move in a natural way thus reducing impingement’s while balanced trap strength allows an athlete to retract and set their scapula correctly before lifting to ensure proper movement patterns.

Balanced lower traps and rotator cuff muscles will allow for appropriate recruitment patterns given that the body does not have to overcome false load vectors due to bio mechanical compensation caused by misaligned force vectors (if your not moving the load in the right direction, part of your body needs to pull it into the right direction which will waste effort). What it comes down to is if you are able to use ONLY the muscles that move the load in the direction that is needed more of the recruitment energies go to those muscles and your lift numbers will increase.

Aren’t traditional shoulder pressing or lateral raises enough work for the rotator cuff and lower traps? No. There is almost no humeral rotation with laterals and overhead pressing so, with these movements, the rotator cuff muscles play only a stabilizing roll. These isometric contractions do not improve strength significantly throughout the entire range of motion so the benefit of these movements is mostly to the primary movers (deltoids). Therefore, these movements are not sufficient to correct strength imbalances in the rotator cuff and lower trap muscles; with someone who is balanced however, they will often be enough.

If you want to lift heavier you need to correct any rotator cuff and lower trap imbalance as soon as possible. Doing so will not only improve your numbers, but it will also improve the quality of the movement sparing your shoulder joint a lot of unnecessary stress.

Training – Then vs. Now

Recently I’ve reconnected with some old friends who I used to workout with at the high school weight room. Given what I know now, when I look back on those days I see that I did more stuff wrong than I did did right. The purpose of this post is to outline the 5 things I would do differently if I had it all to do over again.

1) I would train rotator cuff and lower trap muscles. For most of my life, my posture has been horrible – my shoulders have been extremely internally rotated and my upper back has been rounded. The day of my grade 8 graduation I dad told me to stand up straight. I didn’t listen. Worse still was that I started lifting weights in high school and trained chest every other day – essentially doing the exact opposite of what I needed to do to correct the problem.

Now I do a lot of external rotation movements and lower trap work along with being very conscious to retract my scapula when doing any lifting. I also train chest once every two weeks. Balance is being restored for the first time in 25 years and I’m walking taller, feeling better and lifting more.

2) I would train my weaknesses. I was a tree climber when I was young because I spent the first 9 years of my life in Ireland. I wasn’t exposed to any of the throwing sports until I moved to Canada so I had very little reason of raise my arms above my head. As a consequence, I never really developed the ability to recruit and fire the muscles in my shoulders and upper traps so these body parts tended to lag behind. Given that these body parts didn’t grow when I trained them in high school, I didn’t put very much time into them. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

3) I would train my legs more. Most than 50% of our muscle fibers are in our legs. Given that the body will only get as strong and as big as it needs to be, neglecting them is going to slow mass development. It is also going to eliminate any of the growth hormone and testosterone boosting effects that aggressive leg training promotes. More importantly, I wouldn’t have looked imbalanced for so long. A huge upper body balanced on tiny chicken legs is not a good look for anyone and it hurt my credibilty as a fitness professional.

While squatting 225 lbs isn’t exactly the most fun you can have in the gym, it is very rewarding to be able to lift that much. It’s probably strength that I will never use but my brain has adapted to the neurological motor unit recruitment requirements that lifting heavy loads necessates so lifting things is easier as a result. It’s better to have more strength than not enough.

4) I would rest more. I trained too much when I was younger and I didn’t allow enough time between workouts to fully recover.

You Model What Becomes Normal

This page from goes over some recent numbers about childhood obesity and the finding that 1 in 3 children is now considered overweight or obese. That’s a lot of young people who are suffering now and will be suffering for most of their lives. Carrying extra body fat makes all activity in life more difficult and there is an innate tendency for people to judge obese people more harshly as a result of their weight. I think some harsh judgement is fitting for someone who has control over the food they buy and eat, it is unfortunate for the younger obese person because up until a certain age, they have almost no control over what they eat.

I have little doubt that there are psychological reasons for many eating behaviours but when it applies to the escalating obesity rate with young people, I believe the obesity preceeds any psychological problems. If the young person’s brain is void of issues then the cause of the obesity is environmental in the form of poor eating behaviors taught by their parents or caregivers. Simply put, fat people breed lean people and then proceed to make them fat.

Fattening up a child is one of the worst things a parent can do because it harms their child but there is something even more insidious about it. Fattening up their children serves to make the obese parent feel more normal because it creates another fat person. Think about it this way, if 2 fat parents have 2 lean children, the ratio of fat to lean people in the family is 1:1. But if 2 fat parents have 1 lean child and 1 fat child, the ration of fat to lean is 3:1. If 75% of the people are obese, obesity can be regarded as the norm. If both children are fat then they have a 100% obesity rate making obesity completely acceptable. Obese parents, by making their children fat, create a life preserving fiction that being fat is normal and nothing to be concerned with or treated.

Fat parents rarely teach their children how they should be eating, what foods to buy and how to prepare these foods to maintain a lean body. They also never model lean as a way to live life. Their food choices are taught to their children, along with the obese lifestyle, as things that are normal. Lacking evidence that says anything different, the children learn that these things are how it is. They do not see a choice until much later in life when the habits are formed and their is a solid foundation of adipose tissue ready to soak-up the extra calories and store fat. By the time they realize that they do have a choice the odds are stacked against them that they will ever be a healthy weight because their body’s have become so good at storing fat.

For the obese parent it is not too late to stop abusing your child but you need to start now. You need to make a big effort to eliminate the behaviors that made you fat in the first place and begin to model the behaviors that will help to maintain leanness. You need to do this even if you will never enjoy a long lean life; just because you were victim to the consequences of poor eating behaviors doesn’t mean that your children need to be. There is more than enough information available that will help you make the right choices that to continue to make the wrong ones amounts to deliberate ignorance. The clock is ticking because your children are watching you and making your behavior the reality. How you act now is how they will act in the very near future. Give them a solid foundation to make their life easier than yours has been.