Weekend Workout & Midline Stabilization Under Load

Greetings to all. We are still waiting for the final word on inspections, which will dictate our move date. We hope it is November 17th if not before. Until then the 6AM workouts will continue in the parking lot at 525 Lincoln, rain or shine, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. All other workouts are back at the ranch.

Workout this weekend on Sunday, 9 AM. Hope to see you all there.

And now for the real blog post:

Midline Stabilization Under Load

This week during CrossFit Total we revisited why it is important to hold your breath and tighten EVERYTHING before you move the bar. We practice it when grooving the movement and when going heavy. Here’s how you cement the ability to stabilize under load:

To begin, imagine your entire torso and butt in 360 degrees. You want that entire column of your body to be just that: a strong, immovable column that does not bend, does not shift, does nothing but keep your spine neutral and wedded to your hips. This happy marriage is often overlooked in the chase for extreme lumbar extension. While we initially want people who have problems with lumbar flexion to learn how to obtain a lumbar curve, we also want them to think about their entire body, and in particular their spine and hips, as one happily married piece.

In order to make this happen, do the following:

• Pull your shoulder blades down and back to stand as tall and proud as possible.
• Inhale and pretend like someone is about to deliver a life-threatening punch to your gut and you need to brace yourself for this. What you will do is contract your abs, obliques and a whole slew of muscles that make up your 360 degree torso as hard as possible. You are doing this because you are trying to protect your internal organs and your spine from any irreparable damage caused by this potential trauma. (To tighten your brace, exhale and squeeze even harder, maintain that tension and inhale again.)
• You should still be standing tall and proud – locking down your midline stabilizers should not cause your posture to change.
• Squeeze your glutes (your butt) as hard as possible. This helps to keep your spine and hips wedded together.
• Push your knees out to the sides and “spread the ground” by trying to kick your heels away from you as if you were trying to tear a piece of paper under your feet.

By this time, you should notice your whole body is about as tight as it can possibly get and you should feel like you’re working hard just to do this. This is the most extreme, dare I say ideal, bracing you can do. Aim to go through these steps in order to provide yourself minimum risk and maximum return while training. But beware, mastering the breathing takes some practice – so PRACTICE! Do it while you are warming up, going through basic movements, etc….

Just to provide yourself some individual feedback, try to do one air squat as you normally would. Now perform one air squat with the bracing process described above. You should feel more “integrated,” as if your entire body’s individual body parts are truly working in concert with each other.

Hopefully, everybody who reads this blog will learn to move their body with proper bracing and allow me to take the quotation marks off the word “integrated” in the future.

Giving credit where it is due, the majority of this blog post came from CrossFit Invictus, and they got it from whitewater paddling buddy of mine Kelly Starrett of San Francisco CrosSFit. Kudos to Kelly for putting it all together to keep us safe under large loads.

-Beth

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Announcements, Health and Sickness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.