018 Structural balance

my co-host Rob Malsary. We're going to talk about something called Structural Balance this

week. Basically, again, we're just going to treat this in a relaxed and casual way. I'm not

going to talk about a lot of physiology and biomechanics before we jump in. I'm just going to do this quick intro and then hand over to Rob to ask him to tell us a little bit about what he's been seeing in this topic. Essentially, it just does reacting a little bit to what we've been seeing or what Rob has been seeing in terms of what people are saying about this idea of Structural Balance, which is essentially ratios of strength in

different exercises. Without further ado, Rob, can you tell us a little bit about what you've been seeing and what this topic of Structural Balance is actually all about? Yeah, so basically, it's the idea that when you're training, especially athletes, now

“you need to look at the main barbell exercises and based programming decisions and where you”

take the athletes training around what lifts are stronger, weaker and typically you would be using like a shoulder with bench press, as like say the 100% value for the upper body lifts, and then basing where like dips, chin-ups, pull-ups, overhead press, some isolated external rotation work and things like that should be relative to that. And then for the lower body using the like a high bar bag squat, as kind of 100% value, and then basing

deadlift front squat, various clean variations and some like step-ups and things like that around that squat value and then you kind of use those numbers to pick like what you should train or wear an athlete might be weak and need of more work in that area. So, okay, understood. So, I think I can see why people find that idea attractive because it takes a lot of the thinking

out of a training program design. You basically test the athlete for these different exercise

strength tests and you write the numbers down and you can say, okay, here are the areas where the athlete is a long way away from the averages or the norms or the standards that we're aiming for and here are where they are kind of better. We're going to focus the training program on those areas and we're going to aim for this kind of holy grail kind of set of ratios which are suddenly going to make the athlete better at the sport that they're participating. So,

essentially it means that all of this stuff that we talked about is largely unnecessary.

“Just don't actually need to go, what does the athlete need in order to be better at the sport?”

You don't need to do any analysis of their kind of sport or the movement patterns in their sport. You don't need to do any designing of the training program to enhance the qualities that make them better at those particular movements. It's all just basically creating this list of exercise strength ratios and targeting development in that direction, which, as I say, makes things very easy which I can see why it is very attractive to people to use that particular type of

firm. Okay, cool. So, when you've been analyzing this, when you've been looking at this, what are your initial reactions? What are your kind of thoughts about this? So, I mean, I learned years and years ago and initially, you know, like you said, I've found it to be a cool idea and a bunch of big, big time coaches in that have been talking about it. And so, I've rolled with it for a little bit. Did not see any real significant benefits,

especially for like training combat athletes from myself in particular, anything like that.

So, you know, moved away from it, obviously. And I always see the idea, even now that if you're

somehow in balance, particularly in the middle muscles and movements with the external rotation work and things like that, that, like, you know, those little things caught on core, stabilizer muscles, things like that are going to be limiting your performance obviously in a bench press, but also in

“throwing and punching in athletic things where you need to be fast and powerful.”

Okay, well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that, because that's a really interesting kind of idea. And I think a lot of people hear that and initially kind of go, oh, yeah, maybe I was neglecting that thing and therefore if I include that thing, it'll help me achieve the goal that I'm trying to achieve. So, it's kind of like a hijacking of the logic process where the idea arrives and you go, oh, I hadn't thought of that and you initially just kind of

grapple with it and you run with it and you see if it actually makes a difference. But we were just kind of chatting a little bit about this before we jumped on the podcast today and I was like, well, if we analyse this idea as, as, as, as, as like, in the context of somebody who's been doing, say, powerlifting for a year or two, they've already got a relatively solid bench press or

kind of various different exercises and let's see whether you have a high level of external

“rotation strength or whatever or that's, you know, look at some of these stabilisermostal exercises”

and see whether you have low levels of those relative to your main lifts. And, you know, let's say they identify that those exercises, you know, do show a lower level than the standards show, which I would probably expect that they would do to be honest and that their in-lies part of the attraction of this kind of testing in reality. Because if you can find something that's missing, you can then, you know, start to present a solution. But I think it's interesting to say, well,

okay, but if I'm doing a bench press, let's imagine the time in a powerlifting program and I'm kind of been working on my bench press for, you know, a year or two. And I've probably got to a point where the sort of muscular development of my prime move is relatively high. So I've probably

got to a point where when we talk about platoes in strength training, we're basically kind of

identify them as either stimulus platoes or fatigue platoes. Now fatigue platoes, obviously poor programming,

“but as stimulus platoes, like at a challenge that you have to try and overcome, because it's”

kind of telling you that you're bumping up against your maximum muscular development in a particular muscle area, you're going to have to get creative about how you solve that problem. And, you know, we've talked about sticking regions and kind of accessory exercises and the context of powerlifting and how new you're going to come matching works in that kind of context. So if this is one of that says I'm familiar to you, then please go back and listen to that episode because it's so,

you know, basically answer the question that we're talking about right now, which is that ultimately if you're trying to meet progress and you've got kind of your bumping up against your maximum muscle size with one of your major muscle groups, then what you really got to do is try and find a way to get the bench press to rely more on the others instead, because you kind of maxed out. So in my particular case, I would probably find very quickly that I maxed out what my

triceps were capable of doing and I'd have to try and reorganize my bench press to rely on the other muscles instead. So it's kind of an accessory exercise process that you would go through

to try and make that happen. But the reality is that that plateau is happening because the main

muscles are bumping up against their maximum muscle sizes and you can't really make much more development in those particular areas. The reality is though that if my stabilizer muscles are being used in their exercise because they're needed, then they'll be used up to the point that they're needed and they will actually grow alongside my prime move for muscles and because their stabilizers they're not actually prime move is they look much lower levels of both

unit equipment. Ultimately, they will have lots of capacity to grow as I get stronger with my prime move and muscles and I start to sort of just push my bench a little bit higher. My stabilizer muscles work to make a little bit higher and immediately because they've got so much capacity to grow. They'll just immediately grow. The amount that they need to grow. I mean like they're just literally waiting for me to push a little bit harder in that kind of

prime move that areas and immediately they will just kind of not chop a level of activation and instantaneously those fibres that haven't been particularly work previous because the recruitment levels have been too low. Well immediately it become activated and loaded and grow

around everybody's happy. I mean ultimately growing stabilizer muscles is the easiest thing in the

world because they're literally just sitting there waiting for you to just pick up a level of motin increment and immediately they'll grow because they're just haven't grown prior to that point. It's like being a beginner really. It's like you can kind of think about it. It's saying well the stabilizer muscles are at the beginner level of kind of hypertrophy in that context whereas you're other muscles are kind of at the advanced level. This is one of the reasons I really

“don't like kind of saying that people have a particular training status. I think muscles have”

training status, people don't have trainings status. I've said that before, I think it makes no sense. It's just this kind of idea that stabilizer muscles are synergistic muscles are somehow going to be limiting us. It's actually impossible because as soon as you actually need them activate hypertrophy, everybody's happy. I just don't get why people don't see that. It's so strange. It's a huge focus and you want to be using tons of training time trying to adjust these things

and you spend 10, 15, 20 minutes whatever it is, doing a bunch of very isolated exercises. One of you just did, you're benching your rows and you pull downs, chin ups, whatever it may be, you know, things like that. Like those muscles of the cuff and that, they're going to get trained well enough anyway. Certainly like you said to the level that you need them to be, to be executing the lifts and it just doesn't, yeah, it doesn't to me. I was any more make sense to be

trying to target them and I mean if for some reason you wanted, you know, some giant lower traps

going to have at it, but if you think that it's going to give you 50 pounds or someone

“out of an bench or if you do like a weird goofy step-up variation, it's going to help drive your”

squat up, things like that, which is what I'll see. Or it'll drive your, you know, your jump performance and stuff like that. You know, you're not, you know, like getting into the out of all seem to do like a step-up and there, there are a person who can squat, you know, in the 400s, 500 pound range, you know, do some isolated posture and step-up where they have something like a, you know, 15, 30 pound dumbbell and there's doing kind of a top range for higher reps. We'll

say it's improving, you know, needs stability in this matter, you know, targeting the VMO, which doesn't work, is impossible. And, you know, you see, I see it all the time and, yeah, maybe on paper,

it sounds cool and you think maybe it could work and it just does not work at all.

Yeah, the logic isn't there, is it? I mean, I just want to clarify for people that we are talking, we're describing very much the stabilizer kind of muscles here, the kind of the external rotation, you know, kind of stuff that you started off talking about, which is different from accessory exercises that we were talking about previously. So, accessory exercises trying to provide Prime mover muscle growth in a way that we're not getting it in the main lift because the main lift is,

you know, kind of pushing activation to another Prime mover and it's not allowing us to max out the, the kind of the other one that we're interested in. So, you know, I've seen some really great kind of accessory exercises along those lines. We did our own kind of version in the podcast previously, but I've seen other people doing other great ones as well and that comes from really creative ideas. This is not that, we're not talking about that, that's cool, that's Prime Movers

stuff. This is about exercises training muscles that are not kind of Prime Movers. Okay, with that being said then, what else are you seeing in this, in this kind of context, you're seeing, you know, you describe to us how, you know, your initial impressions of it, what else are you seeing

in this particular area? So, I mean, I definitely see, you know, basically, I see a program

all the time, I do obviously see cases where it appears to work. So, I figured, you know, you can

“address, you know, cases where on on paper, I think, though, this is actually working because it's”

improving structural balance, yeah, the other, but, you know, if you look at it, say someone's been just lighting and they happen to do a phase where they add in, you know, more, more dip work, more overhead press works, or more that. Yeah, but those would, those would be Prime Movers wouldn't they? Yeah, this is what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. So, this is exactly, yeah, exactly, this is the kind of the diversions, like, others, but that's still within the context of,

of the, I see what you're saying now. Okay, I just took me a moment to catch up with you. Yeah, okay. It'll look like it's working because you've improved these ratios, when in reality, you've actually been doing, yeah, you've got more recruitment in the Prime Movers, you've gotten, you know, very likely more size in the Prime Movers, you might not have been getting, so it's not a pretty, because the ratio is important. Yeah, okay, so for example, then,

if some, right, okay, so for example, then, to keep keeping the bench press example with, with me as the, as kind of the individual doing the benching. Obviously, I'm going to be very triceps dominant. And I also am going to have a monster dip compared to pretty much any of my other pressing exercises. So the person is going to look at my structural balance and invert,

“come as and go, your dip is way too high relative to everything else. You need to do a lot of kind”

of work on your chest and delts, and then you'll find that your other exercises will go up, and the irony is that they will, because what's happening in the bench press is that my triceps are going to do all the work, and I'm going to be limited by the fact that my triceps are maxing out, and I've got nowhere else to go, and I'm not training my delts, my pegs enough to really make progress in bench exercise, because I'm just continuing to send all the activation

to the triceps. This is what we talked about in the accessory kind of conversation in the powerlifting episode that we did. So yeah, absolutely, we'll actually work, but it's not working because of structural balance. It's working. Because I'm training the muscles that I need to train in order to make progress in the bench press, because my triceps are currently dominating, and if people get, we'll know that is structural balance, then what you're saying is that

structural balance is literally just following near mechanical matching. Yeah, I mean, we come right back. And a lot of people too, when they're doing accessory work, a lot of times they'll do, you know, if they're doing things like tricep extensions, direct shoulder work, stuff like that, a lot of times they're not doing it with the, when the enough intensity, they're not doing them, maybe do it for for, you know, high reps,

far from failure, not really getting anything out of it. So then they get, they go and do something like a dip or an overhead press. And involves those primers more. They use a heavy load,

and recruitment, they get these increases. And, you know, I'd prefer to read that they're not

“getting from just kind of doing some half-assed work at the end of a session on those muscles.”

And then yeah, it gives this great appearance that, while this, you know, worked so well because you improved the balance, but it just comes down to all the things we generally talk about. Exactly. And I guess really, you know, one of the things that we've kind of skated over is worth emphasizing is that it may not be possible and probably isn't possible for many people to actually achieve, you know, these kind of strength ratios, if their leverages

are, you know, kind of away from the norm. So if somebody like me who's got really extreme triceps leverage and not great leverage for very much else, then ultimately it's going to be extremely strange ways, just actually impossible. Once I got my sort of dip strength to the level I got to do, it was just going to be absolutely physically impossible for me to get my bench or any of my

other pressing exercises to those ratios. It would have just never happened, they might have what I did.

So ultimately, I think some people are just going to have leverages. And you know, you see people

“with amazing deadlift. So you look at them like, you know, if you want to get that structural”

balance equations correct or ratios correct, then their squat would have to be, you know, this level is you look at them again. Yes, it's not going to happen. You're never going to have them. I'm going to reverse you get someone to increase your arms and legs, you create a bunch of squat. Exactly. I've just developed that's never going to be never going to catch up. And if it's in athlete, there's not a need for it to catch up. You know, you have someone who's

dead yet is lagging. So you say, oh, I need to bring up the deadlift to improve, you know, posterior chain, hamstring, drape, whatever, maybe. Well, there's way better exercises for that. You just do a thrust and do a hamstring work and you're going to get way more out of that than improving a deadlift. The deadlift is going to be good. I think it's, um, so one of the, one of the, one of the kind of points that I make repeatedly, but probably not repeatedly enough, is that adaptions

are the thing that matters, not outcomes. So we're talking about strength or speed or power or whatever. My first question is, well, what was the adoption that you're triggering that's going to actually stimulate it and that's going to, you know, kind of benefit you in that outcome, that strength

“or that speed or whatever. And I think really, we've got, you know, something kind of similar here,”

because if somebody thinks about strength in a deadlift, they're thinking strength, weight lifted

and they're like focused on that number, that load to their lifting. But the reality is it's

the torque that they're producing at the joints in order to lift that weight, is being generated by a muscle force in a leverage and then the required torque is being generated by the body position and segment length, so that you've got certain external moment timelines required to lift the lower. If I've got, if I'm lifting a barbell from the floor and the external moment time length, there's a horizontal distance of the line of gravity going through the barbell to my hip joint.

If I change that distance, if I make that distance shorter, then I basically can lift a heavier load and I'm going to look like I'm stronger, I'm actually creating, I'm displaying more strength, which is true, from a load point of view, because I've made the exercise easier. So you can see some of the really kind of old kind of time lifters. They would have these crazy body positions where they would try and bring the barbell line of action really close to the hip joint, it would just

absolutely nuts from our perspective today. And so what the try to do is just kind of increase the efficiency of the lift. And so you kind of look at all that they're really strong in that's no, but in terms of torques and in terms of muscle forces, it's a different story, but the same

thing happens internally, so like in muscle force and the leverage, if you're an amazing leverage

on a muscle, you know, then ultimately it's going to be able to produce a really high joint talk, even though it's not producing really high muscle force. And so ultimately what these disconnects between what we see is the load being lifted and the muscle force being generated, and people are just going load lifted muscle force. Like hang on a minute, you've got an external moment I'm going to worry about and that could be very depending on the segment length and the coordination

and the way that the person is performing the lift and you know, all that kind of thing. And then secondly, when you talk about the actual talk at the joint, again, you've got a muscle force, but then you've got this internal moment of time length. And when you external moment I'll make the move around because of your segment length or your way of performing the exercise. And your internal moments are who knows what and can be massively vary between people.

It's literally impossible to get all of this person's strength as in muscle force producing capacity is not sufficient because I can see them lifting this load until that load. It's like it's nonsense because you've got two leverages in the middle of that chain of events. The people are just ignoring. And that's the problem. It's that people don't understand how torque works. And we've got these two different moment arms that are basically breaking the connection

fundamentally a strength ratio just isn't going to make sense because you could get one athletes

muscle force to just be a, you know, the maximum possible level. The other biggest muscle force you could possibly get, the muscle is absolutely fully developed. You know, you can't physically shoe horn anymore. My affiliate protein into that muscle is like absolutely done. And they still can't lift the kind of load that you're asking to let. And there's some other guy who just walks in and he's just like, oh, these ridiculous moment arms kind of peculiar way of lifting the way.

And he's just kind of moving the way with no difficulty whatsoever. You know, and that is just going to happen because of the inter-individual variety or variability rather. You know, and so

“I think just the fundamental approach to saying we know these ratios need to be kind of in these”

these numbers. I think it's just never going to work for most people most of the time.

Yeah. And then other ones, I get a ratios I've seen used are attending to determine if someone is like powerful enough explosive enough. So they'll use ratios between the squat and like some of the Olympic lifting variants, especially some of the power variation. So I'm not the full lifts, but power snatch power claim things like that. Unlike, you know, we've talked obviously about speed and power. Those things, yeah, well, they may have like a decently high power output,

where they sit, doesn't not really matter and train in them directly to improve them, it's going to improve those, not your actual. Yeah. And I would be cautious about comparing movement patterns that are different like that. It's so much easier just to measure vertical jump height and then add a little bit of load and do a load of vertical jump height and compare those two numbers. I mean, that's going to give you perfect comparability more or less.

And you can even do like a force velocity profile and use a, you know, quick calculation to see what that tells you and you can get kind of some sort of line on a chart that will give you some information. But I would keep the same movement patterns if you're going to compare those. I mean, the thing is that is already out there. People can already use that. It's available. There's apps for it. And you know, it's not, it's not difficult. So I wouldn't want to dream. Yeah, I wouldn't want to

remember the wheel if we've already got the ability to do that. And in a much more valid way with

“two different, you know, two loads for the same exercise. Yeah. Yes, it's a lot of it. I think just”

Google looks like what you said at the beginning. It looks, you know, good on paper and theory. Give someone the ability to kind of take a lot of the, the guess work out of writing someone to program and then adjust the long term. And it's just not, not really necessary. And notes also a lot of it relies on overly depending on like periodizing programs and using different things as you go through a program and stuff like that. And obviously we said it

a ton of times now if you think something's important, just keep it in the program. Don't change program, do it all the time. Yeah. And then, you know, if your exercises are good and someone's made your progress, also don't change the program and don't change it because, you know, it's Y and Z are supposedly imbalanced. And yeah, also, you know, the idea around it, let me limiting injury and stuff like that, you know, you and I talk before the podcast,

a little bit, but it's not really good. Good data there. Have we done an episode on injury at all? Are we done anything on injuries yet? I think we have. We probably should at some point. Because I know that we, I mean, this is obviously does having a conversation in the middle of an episode, but we won't do this. We were thinking about doing something on running a economy because a lot of people have been asking us about doing some more on the aerobic exercise stuff.

And I'm not prepared to build a cardiovascular adaptions model. That's not going to happen. I'm too

“old. It's going to take me 10 years. I'm just not going to do it. So you have to find some”

nails to do that for you. But the best I can do is I can do running a economy and we can, you know, segue a little bit into things like cycling economy as well for the same reasons. But that

basically gives us a strength training for endurance running, strength training for

endurance cycling that kind of thing. We can do that. And we can also do something on injury prevention, I guess we could do something on muscle strain. Indrew could do a little bit on maybe tendon damage, but probably not much more than that because there isn't any data. And that's kind of the point I was going to make when we just kind of went off piece there a little bit, which is that a lot of people ask for, you know, how do I kind of target injury prevention

with strength training like, well, you know, there's almost no data. There's just, there isn't really any data out there. And certainly there isn't any data that says if you do, if you build your strength ratios to these levels, then you'll reduce the risk of injury.

spend spend time looking for it as we. I love so much really so we got message. I was digging and digging and digging. It's not a fine thing. It's in favor because I didn't in favor of any data I'm going to chat about. I just got came and I know I texted you and I'm like, I can't do it. Do you have anything you like? It's not there. It's just not there. You could have asked me how to told you. No, this is nothing that. So yeah, I mean, to be fair, it's because

it's actually really really difficult to collect that kind of information. Yeah, you know,

and the reality is that most of the time if you are going to collect that kind of information,

“you need to be part of a really big or tapped into a really big organization that is collecting”

that data for you. For the simple reason, that injury is aren't actually that common. So you need to be actually kind of monitoring and enormous number of person hours in the gym or person hours in a sporting context in order to be able to collect enough kind of data to be able to say, well, you know, this is kind of potentially what might be associated with an injury risk. And not only do you have to have those person hours collected and the injuries that happen in those person hours,

you also need to know what those people were doing outside the gym. Yeah, there's no much to go into. And honestly, it just, it's one of the people think it's really easy. Oh, yeah, we can easily find out what kind of risk factor for an injury, I'm like, no, you can't. There's the sheer amount of sort of data collection that would have to go into those kind of processes is just absolutely

“crazy. So yeah, so there isn't anything really. And this isn't, and to be, you know, kind of”

like you're saying, trying to be able to be objective, this isn't saying that, you know, you can rule out the possibility of these things playing a role. It's just that there isn't any supporting data, not only for that, but for anything else either. I mean, actually, the best we've got is a little bit on strain injury. You know, maybe a little bit on the on the tendon damage side. More than that, you're not going to find anything. People go, oh, well, if I, if I do this,

then I'm going to be less likely to get injured in my squat deadlift, you know, kind of bench personality, I'm like, I'm actually talking out, unless you're talking about not taking out the ballics. Yeah, that's absolutely. I mean, that's a pretty, pretty effective way of avoiding certain injuries. And honestly, I would say that's probably one that makes it really hard to determine what's

“going on in athletes too, because what it's about athletes are lying about doing natty. You need to”

break it to most people, but, you know, everyone thinks that athletes are clean and that's a really

big risk factor, especially for things like tendon ruptures. And, you know, so ultimately, if,

you know, that's probably one of the only things that you could point out and say, you know, is that likely to be a factor, but, you know, that's a separate issue. So, yeah, okay, cool. So, that was actually really interesting for me to go through that process with you, because I didn't, I hadn't really made the connection between people following a structural balance, kind of training program, and somebody probably making progress in a, say, maybe a powerlifting kind of context,

because it was inadvertently identifying the prime movers that they were actually kind of not using so much. Ultimately, as I say, if I was benching, I will be using my triceps, and therefore, my main progress would actually occur by using my delts and my pecs, that would actually register on a structural balance test. It would display the fact that I am a triceps, not an adventure, in a verb to me, it would tell me that my dip was too high and, unlike other pressing exercises

would do, though. And it would tell me to go and do some more of the exercises that would actually help me. So, this is really interesting, because there's actually that element of effectiveness baked into that program for that reason. In that context, it will actually have a positive effect. But, the reason that it's having that effect is because of the way near a mechanical matching works, essentially allowing us to use the muscles that we have, we have best leverage for

pushing activation in those directions instead of other directions. So, yeah, really cool. I didn't realize that before I worked through that. Yeah, it is cool to think about it, but it's definitely not because you're a little trapsor, not because of it. Well, the

stabilizer stuff is silly, because as I pointed out, those muscles can always just grow as

soon as you activate and they'll grow like a wee, because they're literally just been sitting there, you know, kind of with all these muscle fibers that aren't anywhere remotely fully developed. And as soon as you reach into that activation territory, they'll just grow. So, the easiest thing

difference between say a wide bridge bench and a narrow bridge or a dip or a heavy wherever pressing,

“that would actually reveal the kind of the, especially with reference to the bench press.”

If you're referencing everything, I'll for a standard competition bench press.

And it would actually reveal that as an interesting area of kind of development. So,

I mean, yeah, and I guess we already do use that when we say to people, one of the ways that you can see whether somebody is kind of dry so it's dominant or, you know,

kind of adult dominant or paint dominant in a bench pressing situation is to look at the ratios

of those there. So, I mean, we already were saying that, I guess, but they've kind of codified it into a whole kind of system. Yeah. Cool. Um, is there anything else that you want to say about

“structure about? So, how we covered everything? I think that's pretty much everything. Just if anyone's”

talking to you to use it for a gig preventing injuries, just just know that data doesn't exist. And, well, they didn't really say it to do anything for magically preventing injury popping. Stop, stop taking down the ballics. Yeah, there you go. That's your big one. That's the work, that will work for helping prevent injuries. Um, but yeah, pretty much nothing else has got any any data behind it. And that, as I say, just to repeat myself, that doesn't mean that stuff doesn't

work. It means that the data is really hard to collect. And the people who've done, like, tons of work on it like with the Nordic coast of Founding Strangery, they've done insane amounts of work to get the point where they can say we think this is helpful. Uh, trying to get, um, you know, kind of the data to be collected to support those things is just a monstrous effort.

“So, that's why it's really hard to say whether anything is helpful. It's not because nothing is”

helpful. It's because that we just really haven't got the data to back anything up. Cool. Let's stop there and we will be back with another topic next week.