I was sitting down the other day writing some programs out and got to thinking, which is usually dangerous. Fortunately, my head didn’t explode. Instead, I was thinking about how I like to program–balanced. For a general population, I’ll make sure to keep the pushes and pulls pretty even, accounting for volume and intensity. The knee dominant and hip dominant variety also remains pretty equal. Of course we have to take into account how the individual presented in the assessment piece, but keeping things simple, that’s how it generally looks.
If I see an individual come in with downwardly rotated shoulders that are painful or not painful (without going into the physical therapy), I’ll start thinking that giving that individual some exercises to encourage upward rotation would be a good thing so that I can get them back to neutral.
Bottom line: if I can keep opposition/apposition balanced, things will be all good.
Now, let’s cannonball right into this rabbit hole. Think about all those hip hinge and knee dominant exercises, those bench presses and those rowing patterns. We are just encouraging extension. Even if you consider the corrective exercises that you may or may not sprinkle into the program, extension of some sort…usually. In fact, trunk flexion has such a negative stigma attached to it. It was a witch hunt for a while I think.
Who doesn’t love deadlifts? They’re tremendously basic, reinforce movement patterns for the future for jumping or olympic lifting. Conventional, sumo, RDL, trap bar, single leg–so much variety. But, they’re still extension in it’s most basic form.
So now what, just do crunches? Not exactly. We can still think smarter when it comes to this whole flexion thing.
Taken straight from the “smarter people than me” playbook, the reverse crunch. Here you are getting some external oblique (because of the line of pull), rectus abdominus, and of course transverse abdominus. We can further challenge the exercise by getting rid of the wall or weight to hold on. Those pesky internal obliques are left out which is something beyond the scope of this article.
This is just one option. There are a number of different exercises you can place in here to combat the constant stress of extension.
Add your favorite.
