Training Strucutral Balance B

Building upon the concept of structural balance, the main idea is that equal distribution of pushing and pulling exercises is necessary for safer and more effective development. Focusing solely on specific exercises can lead to diminishing returns, structural imbalances, and decreased performance. It is important to diversify training and prioritize a well-rounded, structurally-balanced program for overall resilience and improvement. The allocation of exercise order and movement patterns should be considered to achieve this balance. It is not about the amount of time dedicated to training, but rather the quality of the training and the ability to maximize results. Building upon what we talked about in our last module, that structural balance essentially is this equal distribution of pushing and pulling in order to facilitate a safer and more robust higher-level development, right? And I know that might feel counterintuitive, especially if you say, okay, I've figured out the unified theory of training, and I know now what exercises to do and is all I need to do. The problem with that, though, is there is a deployment of diminishing returns, and there's an element of either structural imbalance leading to tendinopathies or excess amount of torque into one aspect of the body or altered length-tension relationships, and that decreases the availability of being able to perform at a high level. We could argue that, you know, you're always playing this game of probabilities, but in reality, you know, and I guess this could be categorically looked at the same way you would look at a bank account of should you diversify your portfolio or should you put all your money into a blue-chip stock, right? And I think when we know anything like the complex nature of financial markets and the human body, that both of those will have extreme anecdotal success stories, and probably more times than not, that being well-rounded and having structural balance or a diversified portfolio will generally make you more resilient or, as Nassim Taleb would talk about, anti-fragile. On the other end, it will maybe, just maybe, increase your potential from these other stocks or these other movement patterns, right? And I think that's the game here. It's looking at this objectively and saying the rate-limiting step is not how much time I can put towards something, it's literally how much I can actually get from the time that I have, and if that time is limited from reduced range of motion, from pain, from altered reflexes of the GTO and muscle spindle acting prematurely and diminishing and leading into this reciprocal inhibition, all this stuff. Now, the point of this is to go over the practical aspect of it, and when we're thinking about structural balance, I think the easiest and lowest hanging fruit to establish this is look at your training splits, and we can look at it right away of what is your primary exercise selection or your correlate exercise, right? And if you are a power lifting person or a weight lifting person, okay, just squat bench and dead or snatch clean squat, okay, there's going to be some issues, right? We know that. We know that those are going to reach some tendinopathy, so we can see elbow tendinitis, we can see knee tendinitis, we can see the prevalence of low back injuries or low back pain. All that stuff will have, over time, the cost of doing business. Just like a golfer has back pain or a NASCAR driver has back pain, from doing excessive one-sided movement will lead to potential disruption, so when we're looking at it from the camps that we could build our philosophy off of or who I am as a coach versus, again, as we talked about in our principal section, really strong, very well-rounded programming, it's looking at both novices from either young and inexperienced in terms of sport or training or old and inexperienced in regards to training as they are going to be better served from a very general, structurally-balanced program than not, and if I'm looking at where do I start, how do I give you feedback, I'm like, oh, what do I do, it's like a random person off the street, if I explain this to a three-year-old, start off with whatever you push, you pull, and that goes into how you allocate your exercise order, how you allocate movement patterns across frequency, so we're going to look at all that right now, right, so let's say that we're doing a two-day total body program, right, that's pretty much the gist of what you can do with a two-day total body program, and let's say that you strongly believe it should always start off with a total body, right, so okay, I'm going to do snatch on one day, clean on the other day, fine, that's going to be more of a hybrid thing, just like we talked about with how do you allocate rotational vector pushing and pulling, well, chops and lifts, but on the other note, we can look at this from the context of, well, what do you prioritize first, right, so if you're going to do snatch, clean, and then go B1 on day one, day two as squat and bench, you're automatically prioritizing anterior chain movements and pushing-oriented movements that are going to create, yeah, higher systemic load by utilizing lower gear ratio muscles that can create more force from just simply having more sarcomeres being a penna angle, go to our gear ratio module to learn more about that, or we can say, well, I'm going to go lower, I'm going to go a lower upper antagonist pairing, so whatever I'm doing for my lower body day one, B1, I'm going to do an upper body antagonist movement and vice versa for day two, so squat and row or RDL and bench, and I think as we look through that, you can go, well, that's going to diminish the performance of squat or that's going to diminish the performance of bench being B2, well, one, that's debatable, but two, does it really matter if it's facilitating greater overall development and improvement, and I think that's the rub here, I think as you're looking through it of like I am blindly looking at bench and squat are the superior exercises because I can use more weight and that's going to have a greater transference into performance, that's debatable, that's debatable because a lot of that goes into how you alter your center of mass, a lot of that goes into how you alter your range of motion, a lot of that tries to create more mechanical advantage, all of that really ties into more absolute load isn't universally applicable to performance, what is though is people getting hurt from having altered length tension relationship between the anterior and posterior chain, the medial or lateral aspect or the rotational vector, and as we look through that, you know, okay, I'm just going to be same order, I'm going to go total, lower, upper, lower, upper, so if I'm going to do a bilateral lower body push, I'm going to do an upper body horizontal row, and then I get to my C-series, now I got to look at this from, I'm going to do some sort of incline or vertical, because that's the other part, and we talked about this with our structural balance, is we need to have, our principles is, we need not only have a structural balance between the anterior and posterior, we need to have some sort of a semblance of strength ratios from various angles or various stances, right, so, or positions of a barbell, or any kind of load, or anterior or posterior loading, right, so if I can flat bench 500 pounds, but I can only overhead press 200 pounds, there's a structural imbalance there that's not going to be leading into some sort of positive over time, that we lower the ceiling, so to speak, there's a great opportunity there, on the other end though, it goes into, well, I can low bar back squat 500 pounds, but I can't RDL 250 pounds, again, great opportunity, or maybe I can't do a single glute ham, or I can't do a four second eccentric nordic, whatever it is that I'm looking at from a context of, there's an opportunity there, so if I'm looking at this from, okay, well, I'm going to do a bilateral lower body push paired up with a horizontal row, I'm going to do a vertical or an incline in the C-series, and then I'm looking at it from what I need to do from a lower body posterior chain, probably means I need to do some sort of knee dominant, because I'm going to do a hip dominant at B1 on day number two, so now, not only am I looking at this from my anterior posterior aspect, I'm looking at this also as well as what is the difference in strength within a movement pattern, right, a vertical horizontal press, a bilateral unilateral lower body squat type pattern, a vertical horizontal pulling pattern, or pull up in row, or a hip dominant, knee dominant posterior chain, and then we can get into even more the nuance of, well, what if it looked like if we change the stance, or if we changed up the orientation, right, so we look at squat not only as a bilateral unilateral, but we look at it as a asymmetrical stance, a split stance, a lateral stance, a transverse stance, any of those tweaks in the sagittal frontal or transverse plane is going to have an impact on what happens from the ground up, or the bottom, or the top down, that there's going to be rotary forces going on that pelvis and thorax that we have to accommodate, and that's going to create more structural balance, and again, you got to look at this systemically, you got to look at this as what is the actual long-term consequence of being really locked in on a single pattern, and eventually getting to the upper limit of whatever that pattern can tolerate, and I have smaller windows of opportunity, and I start to accommodate the position of the bar, accommodate my center of mass, accommodate whatever mechanical advantages are in game, at the expense of further and further structural imbalance. Let's look at a three-day program, right, so maybe the extension of what we did with the two-day probably makes sense there as well, right, so if I'm looking at a three-day program, total body probably makes the most sense. Now this is where it gets a little bit more of the history, right, you can look at five by five and say, okay, the Bill Starr methodology was a squat pattern, a bench pattern, or pressing pattern, and a hip-dominant pulling pattern, right, very little emphasis on a horizontal row, and you saw this play out into Joe Ten's tier system, where he started to put upper back stuff later, knee-dominant posterior chain stuff later, it's kind of like this, knee and shoulder integrity type of philosophy. I would argue that later in the workout has more general fatigue and less mental focus, I would argue that early on, things get a little bit more of a precedence and priority, so I think subconsciously, inadvertently, you became, you make this, you make this focal point of structural imbalance without even realizing you did, and for me, I think it goes into what is going to be the areas that people are going to do really well with and do good regardless, I think always, probably people are going to give a concerted effort for a upper body horizontal press, so that should be the one that takes the the hit, that goes later in the workout regardless, right, so if I'm looking at this from a three-day total body, what is my primary, and we move past this total body, exercise like a snatch, clean, maybe a jerk, or a some sort of med ball, or kettlebell movement, or some sort of some rotational power-based movement, like a rotational row, or push-pull, whatever have you, goes to this next level of, okay, well, what should be your B1 or your primary in that given day, okay, we can go again a lower body primary, bilateral push, we can go a maybe a vertical pull now on our second workout of the week, and then we go a hip dominant posterior chain, like a stiff-legged deadlift or RDL, and then you go, okay, well, where does bench fall in, okay, well, that probably should go in a day that doesn't have as much systemic load as our first workout with back squat, but also should have some sort of synergy with the actual flow of the workout, and okay, well, a hip dominant lower body pull on B1, maybe we do a B2 of upper body horizontal press, and if you don't believe with antagonist pairings, I mean, that's up to you, just do C1, but for me, it's just more efficient to do that, and I think it makes a lot of sense from a structural balance standpoint to hold you accountable, that you don't lose sight of the real point of the program, is to really establish structural balance, and you can do the same thing for the C's, is, okay, whatever exercise I haven't done, if I did in day two, right, and I can go unilateral, I can go a split stance, a lateral stance, a transverse or posterior lateral or anterior medial type of stance, and then we can look at single leg hip hinge, we can do knee dominant posterior chain, we can get various angles of pressing, so the vertical incline, low incline, flat, we can do the same thing for rowing, we can do a more vertical, we can even get an incline, we can get a inverted or a parallel stance to the ground or inverted row, whatever have you to get all of the stability function going on in that shoulder girdle, as much as we are doing with that hip or knee, but then we get into the four-day program, and you'll see a lot of different emphasis, you'll see a lot of different focal points here, right, you'll see a four-day total body program, which is a lot, you'll see potentially this push-pull type program, which may be a good idea in terms of structural balance, but I do think, and I think the push-pull takes precedent if you don't believe in antagonist pairings. I think that's where you really see this a lot, but if you do, then you look at it from an upper-lower perspective and you go, okay, I'm just going to flip whatever B1, remember we're doing a total body exercise every single time or some sort of power-based exercise on our A1, so we're just skipping that right to our B1, but we're looking at this for more from a structural balance perspective, this is why the focal point's there, but let's say that we're going to do a lower-upper program, so lower body day one will open up with a bilateral squat, maybe this is the day we do a knee-dominant posterior chain, but then we look at lower body day two or day three of the workout, we might look at this from, say, on this day, I'm going to do a hip-dominant posterior chain, I'm going to pair that up with a single leg or split stance squat pattern like a split squat, and then I can look at the same thing for our upper one, upper two, so I open up with a vertical push and then I do a incline bench, which is going to be a lower systemic load, and then on the other day, I'll do a horizontal press in some sort of incline type of row, like a chest-supported row, and then I can look at that from, okay, well, I have equal distribution of pushing and pulling, I am matching higher systemic loaded movements with lower systemic loaded movements, and then we just invert that for the B series, or the C series, right, so if I'm doing a lower body push, knee-dominant pull, okay, then I'm going to do a, maybe a lateral stance or a transverse stance for my lower body push, and then I'll do a unilateral hip hinge, like a single leg RDL, and then looking at it from our day three, we go into this concept of, okay, well, if I did a lower body, or a hip-dominant lower body pull paired up with a split stance type of movement, like a split squat, maybe in this next series, I can look at this from, I can change the position of the squat pattern, so instead of a posterior position, like a back squat or a safety squat, maybe I do an anterior position, like a zurcher or a goblet for my squat there, and then I can look at this from, okay, I just did a knee-dominant movement, maybe I do a more adductor focus, like a windmill, and I work hip hinge in a frontal plane, right, and that's the same concept we're talking about with, with a lateral stance, instead of feeding a more sagittal plane hinge, we can feed a more frontal plane hinge, or transverse plane hinge with a windmill type action, right, or something where we're working abduction and rotation, ab adduction and rotation of the hip, as opposed to just strictly staying in a sagittal plane, and feeding that hip from the bottom up and top down, and the same thing for our upper body, we can get a little bit more rotational movement in there, we can get a little bit more of this rotational chop and lift, whatever have you on those given days, but the point being is, as I'm looking through structural balance, two day, three day, four day, whatever it is that you do, just try to think about where are you going to get structural balance first and foremost, and how are you going to evenly place stress amongst the hip, the shoulder, in a constant and really well thought out manner, that it's almost foolproof, that you can't even screw it up if you try, that it's going to always play out, that structural imbalance is going to take precedent, and then you can start to look at that, the distribution of, or the, the, the amount of pushing and pulling exercise, right, so if I have, let's say I do almost a two to one pulling to pushing, or two to one pushing to pulling, which to be honest, like, the idea, like, oh, you got to do twice as much pulling as you do pushing, like, the lat and the pec are still internal rotators of the shoulder, I find that's a very, like, limited perspective, I think you should equally out the pushing and pulling, but I would argue that you should make sure that you have equal distribution of vertical, horizontal, inclined type pushing and pulling to create a really robust amount of stimulus for that shoulder girdle to function in a high manner, same thing for the hip, should bilateral, unilateral, unilateral split stance supported, unilateral unsupported, so single leg stance, all that has precedence, and from the hip, hip to the knee dominant, to a closed chain, open kinetic chain type of format, whatever it is, you just should think about constantly good progression, good variance, making sure that your program is very, very well thought out from a structural balance standpoint, and good things happen, and you'll find that performance goes up, right, the bigger thing, the KPIs that really matter, running, jumping, changing direction, that gets better, because people can train at a higher level longer without breaking down and now diminishing power or force or velocity, bottom line, you're performing at a higher level just simply because you have a better program. All right, I'm going to stop here, hit up that case study, and we'll see you next time.