Training Structural Balance A

Structural balance is about maintaining length-tension relationships between muscle groups. It's important to have balance in movement patterns and muscle areas to prevent issues like tendinopathies. The Golgi tendon and muscle spindle reflex systems play a role in force production. Training should focus on equal forces and range of motion in all directions to avoid limitations and improve performance. Strength ratios can help assess structural balance, such as comparing bench press and pull-up maxes. Charles emphasized the importance of maintaining these ratios and striving for improvement. The premise behind structural balance is to maintain length-tension relationships between agonist-antagonist muscle groups, right? So if we're going to look at any movement pattern, there's going to be a counterpart to that movement pattern, right? So the adage, if you push it, you should pull it. And that goes into flexor versus extensor-based muscle groups. That goes into mechanical actions of flexion-extension, of adduction, internal external rotation. The natural order of things requires that there's some sort of equilibrium forces that we need to utilize to maintain health and vitality. So when we're looking at structural balance, I think that's the part that, as we start to break down what is it and what is true, and then go into the next level of, well, what do we do about it? We can work from the back end of just whatever you push, you should pull. Or you can work from the front end of, there is a natural, a natural case to be made about if we don't have equal cross-sectional muscle area on the anterior and posterior aspect of a joint or part of the body. If we have unequal amount of forces going into a joint from a posterior or anterior aspect, if we have altered, altered cross-sectional muscle area from just being redundant with certain patterns, we start to see issues like tendinopathies and breaking down. But the other part is when we look at the relationship between length tension and forces and the ability is that reflex system of the Golgi tendon and muscle spindle are not going to be as as beneficial to stretch shortening cycle and producing force in a rapid manner. And we can look at it from the you're the product of what you repeatedly do and looking at specificity. So if you just have to run straight ahead, we should only train the muscle groups associated with that. The same logic to be said for if only thing you do is swing a baseball bat or a golf club or if only thing you do is throw a baseball or a football, why train the left side of your body or why do anything in the in the counter movement? Because generally speaking, the amount of forces, the amount of velocity, the amount of torque that happens when we do excessive redundant patterns. And you also got to look at it too of there's a reason behind having a side. There's a reason behind having a preference of a stance leg or or a certain approach is there's probably architectural and and non-influenced by training variables like like frame and axial skeleton and lever length and just overall like maybe that person who played basketball only had a left side of the driveway and essentially approached it the same way of jumping off their left foot to touch the rim with their their right right hand and that creates some sort of output you know and what eventually will happen is you'll get good on one leg and then over time that will start to diminish in terms of its improvement and then eventually over time is you try to squeeze out a little bit more and you are limited by the fact that your ceiling is lower, your resiliency is diminished, and the other big aspect it's it goes into you are very very limited with the amount of variance you can handle. And I think that's what we like to talk about with structural balance. You know we talked about this with variability, we talked about this throughout the movement modules. It's this idea that the potential for movement comes from having range of motion in the first place so therefore we should always prioritize range of motion but with this being said the potential for a movement is not only limited by the range of motion but limited by the agonist antagonist synergist stabilization muscle groups that support that movement pattern and if those are altered from a length tension relationship and the Golgi tendon organ which responds the tension is responding prematurely because there's an adverse amount of tension in agonist muscle group or a muscle spindle responding to stretches is responding too early because there's a premature stretch from the tissues being shortened and weak then you can go into this dynamic of all of a sudden you have reached a ceiling way too early and your chance for improvement is lessened and from a training standpoint this goes into this GPP SPP type of model you're really thinking about this from the concept of there's really no point to having an extreme limited focus on a couple exercises early in a training development as well as potentially if they have a limited training age and a very high skill but they're later in their overall career for instance you see this a lot with track and field and throwing athletes they don't really apply a lot of strength training to their their repertoire and then they start to utilize weight training golf the same way I started to utilize weight training down the road and they're almost looking at it they're like a thirteen-year-old even if they are 25 and and throwing 95 miles per hour you gotta look at them like I would train a teenager it's there they're literally a baby deer they're exposing themselves to strength training for the first time and structural balance should be at the forefront right we're looking at this GPP structural balance and developing equal forces on anterior-posterior medial lateral and then the rotational vector aspect because something like internal external oblique of what is the the forces going from top down to bottom up you know and it kind of goes into this idea of where are these rotational movements like chops and lifts happen and where does that go into structural balance well top down bottom up you know that's that's the way I would look at it it's a pushing pulling type action or pulling pushing type action and then the same thing with a pull versus a push whenever you push you got a pull Charles had some really great ratios and there's a little bit of I don't know like the same sort of biopsy goes some extrapolations that may be a little bit exaggerated but I do think it serves a point of majority of the folks get very very tunnel visioned on whatever they can see right so if I can see my pack typically going to work that harder than I do my lats and you see a lot more young folks get a little bit more preoccupied with bench than they would pull-ups then the same thing with squat versus hinging right and it goes into like other thing of silly folklore of like oh well you shouldn't deadlift more than once every ten day once every more than one more than once every ten days that's ridiculous especially if you're squatting with a more vertical position and a more knee dominant position there's really no reason not to but it goes into this point of when you're really early in the game and there's really no point to peak for a certain exercise or there's no such thing as a KPI there's no such thing as a correlate there's no such thing as anything other than just developing and getting strong it's you should have a very very even distribution of strength and one of the things that was so valuable from Charles and strength ratios was giving that reminder of you can get too wrapped up with certain things and you can lose these ratios that are critical right so for instance you know the the structural balance assessment will be close grip for biochromial bench that's what you work off of so whatever you can work up to a true 1rm and if you ever done a true true biochromial bench with a 3010 tempo working up to a true 1rm with the traditional like 10 to 13 sets of working up to a true structural balance 1rm then you go okay well what's that comparatively speaking right so what Charles would do would be a Scott curl or sometimes referred to as preacher curl I I don't like that because I think it takes a elbow or a flexion of the elbow comparatively speaking to extent or flexion extension extension abduction probably internal rotation of the shoulder I would look at it from the antagonist probably more vertical pull you know that that to me would be more of a a better indicator right so you can see and this is not in line with what Charles would say it's probably gonna be more 90% but I think generally speaking your biochromial bench max should be the same as your neutral grip pull-up max so whatever you biochromial bench home and you're looking at this from your your middle finger is in line with the shoulder so you just basically put your arms up and it lines up probably more times than that where the knurling knurling of the bar hits smooth you find your 1rm there and that should be comparably the same as your neutral grip pull-up which is the strongest grip that you have in terms of pull-ups and then you go from there and then you can look at the neutral grip pull-up versus various grips you can look at the close grip bench versus various angles so you're close to your biochromial bench compared to a low incline or a regular incline or an overhead press like the more vertical you get the more the less strength you have and the same thing with the more pronated grip you have the less strength you have in terms of a vertical pull and then Charles would go a little bit further and look at it from what is the actual structural balance of your shoulders so looking at like a power raise or a trap three raise or shoulder external rotation that should have some sort of a semblance of a ratio relatively speaking to what you bench right so the 10.6 for Powell or trap 3 or the 9.8 for 8rm that is kind of the ratio you work up and a lot of people they go we can no one can ever hit that but doesn't that doesn't it remind you of the fact that you should be striving to get a little bit more I think that was the genius of Charles where he understand human nature that they're not going to prioritize it until you create a really high challenge like the fact I very rarely see anyone coming close to be able to hit 10.6 of the biochromial bench right so when I did the structural balance assessment I want to say my structural about my biochromial bench was 145 in 2011 maybe 147 and I did it with my good friend Will Greenberg and then from there I had to go and hit my Powell raise my trap three raise and if you're looking at 147 times 10.6 that's about 15 kilos that's 33 pounds that's a lot of weight to do for a Powell raise or a trap three raise or 30 pounds for external rotation just very challenging and doing that for 8rm with a 3010 tempo not going to happen but the same thing for lower body one of the things that that I think is really important is the execution a little less execution standpoint for upper body versus a lower body I think upper body is pretty straightforward you can't you can't wear lower body you can manipulate your center of mass and organize yourself in a way and hit a certain range of motion that might not be as indicative and you can look at total body ratios of things like clean to snatch and getting this 100% to 85% ratio but with high bar back squat or front squat which I think is probably a better marker you can look at things like RDL or you can look at things like a traditional deadlift right what is your ability to push versus pull right so for front squat that should be 85% of your high bar back squat you'll see a lot of folks that front squat a lot more so I remember we used to only front squat at USC so we see that number gets skewed quite a bit right that's that's now they're 90 95% right and if you have a more vertical torso when you squat anyway you'll see that ratio a little bit more skewed towards front squat which I don't think it's a bad thing I think it's actually a mere pure squat to be honest but then you look at that comparatively speaking to maybe a trap bar deadlift which apples to apples range emotion wise not really there right so if you look at a a front squat comparatively speaking to a trap bar deadlift that's going to get up to this 150 175 percent range versus if I look at it from a snatch grip RDL or is that the snatch grip stiff like a deadlift that might be a better indicator of what your ratios are and if I have good structural balance of my shoulder and my hip and my knee and my elbow in theory that when I go to jump or when I go to run I'm safer in theory that when I go to run and jump I'll be able to produce more force when I go to run a jump I'll be able to produce more force at a more rapid rate and the end result is better performance and better resiliency and this is so important early on right who cares about if I can back squat 500 pounds what really matters is that back squat whatever that is doesn't lead prematurely to a performance decline or injury then it's probably better served to do a bodyweight goblet squat for 10 reps of the 3010 tempo and then be able to deadlift double that or be able to deadlift deadlift maybe 1.5 times that way for 10 right whatever that number is right and go Dan Jenna Dan John on it can you carry your body weight for for a hundred yards you can go some of the progressions I would highly recommend going to that podcast we did with Joe Gilfeder at Fordham talking about the the progression that he uses going into one development group to the next Joe Conley and I did a podcast talking about progression like a lot of really good resources talking about this that the book on movement over maxes again another really good example of this but it's all based off this idea of what is your structural balance and then what what progression should you go from there right and if you have good structural balance the sky's the limit if you have poor structural balance you're going to fix it because it's going to be a rate limiting step or it's going to cause premature injury and that's what we're looking at the principles of of something like structural balance is understanding the risk-benefit ratio of accentuating a strength and further versus fixing or overcoming a weakness sooner and I think that's the part that when we're thinking about structural balance we usually get them after they're structurally imbalanced right we get them to the point where we see them they have a natural tendency to do certain exercises because they feel like that's going to fast-track them to a certain result we are the ones who have to reverse or put shred back on the tire so we have this preconceived notion that everyone's going to be structurally imbalanced but if you get them early and you start them in the process of figuring out how to create a structurally balanced program over time you can start to increase the bandwidth of not only their performance we can start to get a little bit more specific with certain correlator KPI exercise with less risk associated that and in my mind is the whole point of all this it's looking at this in the context of if we want to set up for long-term success we have to look first at what their actual ability is to push and pull things or what the ratios of exercises are antagonistic and then say okay that a is that a cause to keep developing both simultaneously at the same rate is that a cause to start to get a little bit more focused on one versus the other so let's say that we think that front squat more so than deadlift is a stronger correlation to acceleration and I'm doing a a long to short progression so I want to I want to peak with something like acceleration so I'm going to do front squats later in the program great I think that's really sound fundamental logic but it's off the pretense that they're structurally balanced to begin with that I can add more focus in an area based off the idea that they are not going to be at risk when I do it that in a sense is what structural balances okay I'm gonna stop here structural balance looking at ratios looking at length tension relationships looking at the the impact of having structural imbalance and saying that's going to cause either a premature Golgi tendon muscle spindle response or reflex response or potentially limit the ceiling of what we can do from the exercises that are going to have a correlation or KPI relationship with performance all right pause here get over to that practical module and keep rolling