Crawl, Walk, Run
By: Clint Russell
This past October, my second daughter was born. She started off helpless, and is quickly gaining weight and getting stronger. When a baby is born, do they start off running? First they hold their head up. Then, they sit up by themselves. After that, they roll over, then they crawl. Next is walking while holding on to stuff, then they walk by themselves. And finally they run around and get into everything and drive my wife nuts!
What does this all mean? All skills are progressive. In fundamentals, it goes body weight, pvc pipe, and then a bar. In order to get to the next step, you must master the previous one. Before we move with speed, you need to be able to control yourself with strength and form. Some people don’t like hearing that they need to slow down, take weight off, or scale the movement back. But, “I can do it!” is what they say. Understand that the goals is to move well, and addressing position first. Movement is a game of angles.
Angles create mechanical advantage. I’ll give you an example. Someone that cannot get their elbows up when they front squat. This will cause the chest to tip forward, the weight to shift to the toes, and the knees will go in. If the weight is heavy it will drop, if it is light, the lower back and knees are at risk. It is not an issue of the load, its the angle of force production. The grip needs to be thumbnail on the edge of the bar knurling, so that the shoulder is locked into external rotation, and the upper back in extension. If this position is maintained, the torso will remain upright. In the previous scenario, at Outlier CrossFit in San Diego, the coaches would adjust the athletes grip, scale them back on weight, and show them some front rack mobilization. Sometimes, in order to lift more, you must spend time mastering the basics. For that reason, the basics get most of the attention here at Outlier. We are going to squat a ton because it carries over to just about every other movement that we do. Another example is our warmup. We constantly wall squat and do our 30/20/30 (banded squats, PVC Pass Thru, Overhead squats) to reinforce good mechanics. No matter what your ability level, the fundamentals are the most important thing.
If you have not made progress on a lift in a while, talk to any of our coaches and have us check you out. Maybe it is a simple body position issue or technical glitch that needs correction. You will make your biggest gains by addressing the angles that create optimal mechanical advantage than anything that will ever happen to your muscles. It is our job to catch this stuff and help you fix it. It is foolish to go to the gym and try and pr every time. Sometimes, you just need to focus on moving better. We tell people that they need to scale back sometimes because we care!
Here is a video of me demoing what I described above regarding front squats.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152829918334800&theater