Page 21 of 28

How to Coach Yourself in the Gym

September 4, 2014 / lancegoyke / 0 Comments

The deadlift is a big movement that utilizes every muscle and joint in your body. You better be good at doing it.

But how do you know you’re doing it correctly if you can’t see yourself doing the lift?

Today I want to show you a trick that can help you out. Check out this video below.

The first rep is without a cue to turn on the lats. The second rep is with it.

Watch the video again. Notice the bar’s path of travel.

During the first rep, the bar never really gets to my midfoot, which is about where I would ideally want it. When the bar is in this position, it has better leverage than I do.

During the second rep, watch the bar go back. There I can finally sit into it.

What’s funny, however, is that you may have watched the first one and thought, “Well… that wasn’t too bad.” Then when you see the second rep you think, “Jesus, that first one was terrible.”

Coaching yourself isn’t entirely a guessing game. You don’t have to fabricate a cue out of the blue that you think will work for you. If you’re an inexperienced lifter who lifts alone, film a few sets. Compare set one and set two.

What did you feel working?
How did the reps feel?
Which one looks better: one or two? Make your workouts like a visit to the doctor’s office.

When you aren’t sure what you’re looking at, you need more experience. Try something new and re-evaluate. The secret to the training process is understanding the scientific method. It is simply trial and error. What did I do wrong? How do I fix it?

Now go get strong!

-Lance

I’m Never Going to Need This

August 27, 2014 / lancegoyke / 0 Comments

Living the life of a perpetual student, I’ve heard many of my students and fellow classmates say, “What do we need to learn this for? I’m never going to need this.”

How can you say you won’t need something before you fully understand it?

The undertone here is that you think you are an omniscient being. Bertrand Russell would have called you a genius:

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

-Bertrand Russell, “How to Become a Man of Genius” (28 December 1932)

This thought process puts you in a fixed mindset, locking your ability to learn in a proverbial safe that protects you from actually growing.

How does it pertain to what I’m interested in?

Do you want to lose the most weight you can? I hope you paid attention in physics, chemistry, and biology.

Initially, the information crossover is not obvious. It’s hard to see how something pertains to your interests—sometimes it’s impossible to see—but that doesn’t mean that a relationship doesn’t exist.

I’m reminded of a quote from a book I listened to called The Genius Formula (the original author appears to be Waldo Tobler).

Everything is related to everything else.

If you’re interested in one thing, you’re interested in absolutely everything.

I want you to know what Isaac Newton discovered. How to do “work” in the physical sense. I want you to know why caffeine wakes you up and why you get so sleepy if you go without it. How your body uses food to make energy. How to use Excel to track your progress.

You will never know when you’ve learned everything you need to. That point does not exist. Thankfully, too, because now I have something to do for the next 70 years.

View learning as focus-oriented. If I’m interested in the brain, I’m going to start reading about that, but when that gets boring, I’ll pick up the next subject I want to learn. Maybe I’ll come back to the brain in four months. Maybe I’ll move on.

Experience = learning. Learning = experience.

Try new things. It amazes me when I do stuff these days and immediately think of a vivid memory from my childhood. Torque has always made sense to me because I used to climb the big tree in my backyard. I would go as high as I could go, but I had to make sure that, as the branches got smaller, my weight wouldn’t break them off (causing Newton’s gravitational laws to come back into play).

Coming spring 2015

Even the impression teachers can leave on you is amazing. I still remember making ice cream in 8th grade, or chewing that gum with the lights out to see it spark in 5th grade. Or that same 5th grade science teacher singing Barry Manilow, teaching us about music, rhythm, and setting aside the fear of what others think. In science class.

My lesson to you: do everything you can. Learn everything you can. When you wonder about the world, you have found optimal experience.

Now here’s a new song to experience.

Yellow VWs Err’where

August 21, 2014 / lancegoyke / 0 Comments

When Jen Poulin was here for our course, she said, “Yellow VWs are everywhere.” If you’re looking for a yellow Volkswagon, you’ll notice them more often.

The same thing goes for posture. When you understand the “pattern” that PRI talks about, you can easily identify it.

Taking pictures on a slow phone, however, is not quite as easy. Here are a few that I snagged. Let’s look at some postures photos.

There are #yellowVWs watching football.

There are #yellowVWs taking pictures.

There are #yellowVWs dumping ice water on people.

And there are #yellowVWs holding up buildings.

P.S. Shout out to Brandon Brown for being my portable tripod. “You are NOT being discreet right now.”

Course Recap: She’s Just Jenny from the Block

August 14, 2014 / lancegoyke / 0 Comments

Boy, you missed a good weekend.

IFAST hosted Jennifer Poulin and her rendition of Myokinematic Restoration this past weekend.

We had a great group of people. And we had dinner.

And we welcomed our Nebraskan special guest, Matt Hornung!

Whether you’re a therapist or a strength coach, you need to take this course. And you need to start coming to IFAST for your PRI needs because we have too much fun.

I’m going to summarize some main points from the course, but keep in mind that the content of this blog post is everywhere. You should not proclaim you understand PRI solely from this blog post.

Posture and Senses

August 6, 2014 / lancegoyke / 0 Comments

In preparation for the Postural Restoration Institute course I’m doing this weekend, I have been reading through some of the course’s references.

Today, I wanted to talk about one I just read that shows you why sensory information is so important.

Inglis, J. T., Horak, F. B., Shupert, C. L., & Jones-Rycewicz, C. (1994). The importance of somatosensory information in triggering and scaling automatic postural responses in humans. Experimental Brain Research, 101(1), 159–64. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7843295

This piece of work compared normal people to people who had lost feeling in both of their legs from having diabetes.

What they did was they had the subject stand on a piece of floor that was yanked out from under them. It moved 6cm backwards, causing a forward lean of their body relative to their feet. You can imagine how startling that might be. They wanted to see how these subjects responded to this postural sway. What they found was that people with less sensation in their lower legs:

Take longer to respond to postural demands.
Don’t respond as appropriately to postural demands when the ground moves faster.
Don’t respond as appropriately to postural demands when the ground moves further.

Longer Response Time

These people might appear slower or take longer to get things done because they can’t gauge the demands placed upon them as quickly as those with full sensation.

The figure below is a good visual of this finding. Each set of bars is a different muscle (three in total). The asterisk means the findings were statistically significant. The higher gray bars means it took more time for people with less sensation in their legs to respond to the moving floor.

Less Appropriate Postural Response

As the demand for adjusting posture increases, people with less sensation don’t respond to the same extent as those with normal sensation. If the floor moves out from under you slowly, you would react with less UMPH. The patients have more UMPH (they try harder). If the floor moves quicker, you would scale your response to be stronger. The patients don’t scale as well.

Think of this in terms of unpredictable slipping-and-falling accidents.

Now with respect to how far the ground moves out from under them, they tried harder than people with full sensation in their legs, but they didn’t adjust as well according to how far the platform was moving. These people were all over the place with their postural responses.

Also worth noting is that they produced higher forces, so muscular weakness is unlikely to be the cause of their postural response issues.

Interpretation

This is a simple study that shows the importance of sensory information. When we start talking about sensation, my brain immediately goes to the right foot.

After I get past the erogenous zones, I start thinking about a right foot https://bit.ly/1zTE6j3

Click To Tweet

Due to our asymmetries and our desire to stand on our right legs, the right foot turns outward (supinates). If it stays out there, then my right foot’s inside arch and big toe don’t get much sensory information.

Given this, it’s likely that their postural responses will not be as appropriate as someone who has “found” the floor. It’s not likely that they will fall, but they will have poorer responses.

These people might get tired more easily and react more slowly because they’re trying to hard and doing too much. Those muscles are freaking out when they don’t have to because their feet are telling them to do so.

Practicality

This is why we have to think about sensation when coaching. So if that right foot is rolling outward, tell them to stick it to the ground like a tree’s roots in the ground. Spread your toes out.

Just last night I had a client who showed this. She’s having trouble getting her right glute max to work when it should, and it makes her right knee hurt when she squats.

When I asked her to show me her squat, her toes start singing and dancing. As she squats down, the toes come up. Squat up, toes back down. It’s like I’m watching a game of Whack-A-Mole.

But when we cue her right arch to stay on the floor, her toes go down on both feet.

The sensation tells her feet that they can relaxxx. It also tell that to every other part of her body.

When you’re coaching someone, make sure you give the feet the respect they deserve.

Lance Goyke

Become a fitness master

Programs, books, and more to come