Latest / Making Muscle Memories / 4th Exercise Rule to Break After 50: Modifications Are Only for Beginners
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: In the series, the five exercise rules that you can throw out after the age of 50, I'm tackling the fourth rule, which is that modifications are only for beginners.
- 0:11SPEAKER_00: After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience.
- 0:20SPEAKER_00: I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work.
- 0:26SPEAKER_00: We are all building muscle memories.
- 0:28SPEAKER_00: One rep, one story, and one day at a time.
- 0:31SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast.
- 0:34SPEAKER_00: My name is Lauren Eric and I will be your host.
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this series called the Five Exercise Rules that you need to throw out after the age of 50.
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: But this may also apply to you if you're in your 40s or your 30s as well.
- 0:46SPEAKER_00: But these are the rules that I've heard not only as a professional, but also I've even heard this in the medical world that are just outdated and they really do need to go.
- 0:56SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to create individual episodes about each one of these because I feel like these messages are so important.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: I hope this has been helpful.
- 1:04SPEAKER_00: If you haven't listened to the first three yet, I highly recommend that you do that because this whole series is designed to work together.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: But today I'm going to be discussing modifications.
- 1:15SPEAKER_00: Modifications and exercises is really looked at as a lesser version of an exercise.
- 1:21SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this, you have probably felt this way at some point in your life.
- 1:25SPEAKER_00: I have taught and instructed and worked with individuals both in group atmospheres as well as one-on-one.
- 1:33SPEAKER_00: And I've also worked with instructors themselves in workshops.
- 1:36SPEAKER_00: And this is a pervading idea that for me to be considered in shape, I have to do the hardest version of something.
- 1:43SPEAKER_00: And this is absolutely 100% not true.
- 1:47SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to use this episode to make distinctive points of the different ways that you see people modify and why those are actually beneficial.
- 1:56SPEAKER_00: Sometimes modifications get you further along the pike than if you just continue to do seeing things the same way.
- 2:03SPEAKER_00: Now I want to start this episode by discussing a story.
- 2:06SPEAKER_00: This will sort of frame a little bit of what I'm talking about.
- 2:09SPEAKER_00: And this is something that happened to me when I was I was probably in my 20s.
- 2:13SPEAKER_00: I was commissioned and I was like so excited because I was going to be in this video as a DVD at the time.
- 2:19SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it's in somebody's recycling bin somewhere in somebody's garage at this point.
- 2:23SPEAKER_00: But I did a video with two other women that were very seasoned at the time.
- 2:26SPEAKER_00: I was extremely intimidated because I thought, oh my gosh, this is my chance, you know.
- 2:31SPEAKER_00: And I walked into the room and I was younger than these two women, but not as experienced.
- 2:35SPEAKER_00: And the cameraman said that they wanted me to do the lesser version of the two.
- 2:39SPEAKER_00: There was like a beginner, an intermediate, and an advanced.
- 2:42SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, you want me to be the beginner version?
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: I was so offended.
- 2:47SPEAKER_00: Like I felt that I was going to stand out as, you know, the stupid person in the room, or the one that everybody wouldn't look at, you know, the one that was kind of the nerd in the corner that wasn't in as good shape.
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: And I was kind of dejected.
- 2:59SPEAKER_00: But as I was going through that experience and I was watching this instructor in the front, and she was going through the routine, I had to be thinking into myself, like, okay, oh, she's doing that, how can I modify?
- 3:09SPEAKER_00: And I came up with all these little creative ways in that video to modify what I was doing.
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: And the feedback that I got from that was actually quite positive.
- 3:18SPEAKER_00: And being at the age that I was at that time, I was surprised by that.
- 3:22SPEAKER_00: You know, I didn't, for me, it was like so far down the road that I would ever have to modify something because I was still that mindset that I had to work out as hard as I could.
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: Like if I wasn't exhausted, that wasn't a workout.
- 3:33SPEAKER_00: But what I realized is that that experience taught me so much about exercise and what I would need going forward in my career.
- 3:41SPEAKER_00: Now, having had instructors work for me, because I've had, I used to own my own studio, I've had several studios in my life.
- 3:47SPEAKER_00: I always knew that the instructors that had the most tools in their tool bag were the most invaluable to me, right?
- 3:54SPEAKER_00: And if somebody came in and wanted to work for me and they only had one thing, they said, Oh, I teach bikram yoga, or I teach HIT training, or I like working with the BOSU.
- 4:03SPEAKER_00: It was like, well, that's great, as long as every person that comes into this place wants to do that.
- 4:08SPEAKER_00: Because if somebody didn't want to, you know, you're useless to me.
- 4:12SPEAKER_00: And so I've always felt that when you have a lot of tools in your tool bag, whether you're a physician, a physical therapist, or a chiropractor, or fitness instructor, whatever, you're gonna help more people.
- 4:24SPEAKER_00: Because nobody is the same, no two people are ever going to move the same way.
- 4:28SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna I want to now kind of take a look at some of the modifications that we consider to be bad, demonic in the in the exercise world, and sort of blow apart or give you some specific examples why these things might actually be a good thing.
- 4:45SPEAKER_00: So the first one that I want to talk about is reducing our range of motion.
- 4:50SPEAKER_00: Now, range of motion is a big deal for some forms of fitness, such as let's say I was going to do martial arts, or let's say I was gonna be a gymnast, or maybe I was gonna do yoga, maybe Pilates.
- 5:02SPEAKER_00: We tend to look at somebody that has a lot of range of motion as being advanced.
- 5:07SPEAKER_00: When in reality, their range of motion might just come to them because of their genetics.
- 5:11SPEAKER_00: They may have done nothing to achieve that range of motion.
- 5:14SPEAKER_00: But for I know for a lot of those activities that I just named, many people will seek out individuals that are able to go further into those ranges because they're thought of as being more skilled.
- 5:26SPEAKER_00: When in reality, their range of motion is their range of motion and somebody else's range of motion is their range of motion.
- 5:33SPEAKER_00: And so the person that was really you know advanced with these big ranges of motion, sometimes they don't have the ability to teach somebody with less range of motion because they don't know what that feels like to be in their body.
- 5:43SPEAKER_00: I've always said you need to find an instructor that has a lot of barriers because they're gonna be able to help more people.
- 5:49SPEAKER_00: They know what it's like to have to work around those barriers.
- 5:52SPEAKER_00: And what about people that are trying to lift weights or throw a ball or whatever or play tennis or whatever, and they're told that they have to do less range of motion?
- 5:59SPEAKER_00: We tend to think that they're not as skilled.
- 6:01SPEAKER_00: When in reality, let's say that I was doing a bench press and I decide I'm only gonna go down this far instead of all the way down here.
- 6:07SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm just trying to get a path of motion down first, and then over time I may be able to come way far down.
- 6:13SPEAKER_00: And this may be a way of improving my joint mechanics, improving my overall control.
- 6:19SPEAKER_00: Maybe I don't want to go as extreme into a position because I need to work on control at a lesser position.
- 6:26SPEAKER_00: And what does it mean to be a lesser position, right?
- 6:29SPEAKER_00: What if I can't squat to parallel, does this mean that I'm not a good squatter?
- 6:33SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's how far my body is squat.
- 6:36SPEAKER_00: You take somebody with a really long femur and a short torso, they're not going to be able to squat to parallel unless you collapse the squat and they have to round their back, which is going to place them in a position for injury.
- 6:48SPEAKER_00: For someone, for someone to squat to their end range, it may not look like the end range of somebody else.
- 6:54SPEAKER_00: And sometimes pulling somebody out of a range of motion and getting someone to work within the range of motion that they have is when that person is going to explode and be able to perform so much better.
- 7:05SPEAKER_00: So reducing range of motion, even staying at that range of motion forever, is not a bad thing.
- 7:11SPEAKER_00: Now, what about the changing of a joint angle?
- 7:14SPEAKER_00: Changing of a joint angle.
- 7:16SPEAKER_00: For instance, let's say that I am doing, I'm going to go back to that bench press, and I had this one guy that used to come into my facility and he would always try to work in these chest flies.
- 7:27SPEAKER_00: And for him, he wanted to go way far out to the side and he dropped his dumbbells way far behind, and he actually wanted to tap the floor every single time so that he could pull back up.
- 7:39SPEAKER_00: Now, if you ever studied anatomy, you are way past the point that the chest is even involved.
- 7:43SPEAKER_00: You are now moving into the capsule of the shoulder, and that's very detrimental.
- 7:47SPEAKER_00: But to him, that joint angle had to be there, otherwise that the exercise didn't count.
- 7:52SPEAKER_00: Well, you start taking and you do something with a lot of load across that range, you will get injured.
- 7:58SPEAKER_00: So changing the joint angle for him was very important to make the exercise better.
- 8:02SPEAKER_00: But for some people, changing the joint angle may actually make something harder.
- 8:07SPEAKER_00: So let's say that I'm only used to doing an exercise at the extreme, but I've never tried to work on the exercise in the middle.
- 8:15SPEAKER_00: So let's say I'm going from point A to point B, but I've never practiced this part in the middle.
- 8:19SPEAKER_00: And every time I go in the middle, I blow past it.
- 8:21SPEAKER_00: You know, if I'm trying to hold a weight up, let's say this is a dumbbell, when my weight is directly in front of my shoulder here, it is actually the furthest away.
- 8:29SPEAKER_00: It's actually the heaviest here.
- 8:30SPEAKER_00: When I go up to here, which is where people seem to think as I'm going up higher and higher, I don't want to go up too high because I might go off camera.
- 8:36SPEAKER_00: But if I'm going up higher and higher until the point where I'm, you know, all the way up over my head, sometimes people think to themselves, well, it only matters if I'm up here.
- 8:44SPEAKER_00: When in reality, I've blown past the part of the range that's the hardest.
- 8:47SPEAKER_00: So working at a different joint angle will actually make you stronger.
- 8:52SPEAKER_00: Now, another way that people do this is by using external support.
- 8:55SPEAKER_00: This happens a lot of times when let's say that somebody needs to sit on a chair or hold a chair or put a blanket underneath them or put something behind their head.
- 9:04SPEAKER_00: If I use an external device and I make the joint more stable, you realize if my nervous system doesn't have to deal with the instability of sitting on the ground, right?
- 9:16SPEAKER_00: My back is all rounded and I'm trying to sit on the ground because my lever lengths won't allow me to sit on the ground.
- 9:21SPEAKER_00: How in the world am I going to focus on something else?
- 9:25SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 9:25SPEAKER_00: We want somebody to sit on the ground and do an overhead press or to be able to lay on the ground and do a Pilates roll-up when they haven't held their ankles.
- 9:33SPEAKER_00: Some people will never do a roll-up because of the length of their torso versus the length of their legs.
- 9:38SPEAKER_00: And so for them to anchor their feet on something or maybe hold something heavy in their upper body, that might be the very thing that allows them to do the exercise because what was the goal in the first place?
- 9:48SPEAKER_00: To work the abs, right?
- 9:49SPEAKER_00: So we need to rethink this idea that adding external support is going to make an exercise easier or somehow less effective than something else.
- 9:58SPEAKER_00: That example that I just gave about a roll-up actually makes the roll-up more effective and not less.
- 10:04SPEAKER_00: Now, what about the idea that I should never slow down?
- 10:07SPEAKER_00: I should do everything fast.
- 10:08SPEAKER_00: Now I think that, you know, being that I am I used to be a cardio junkie, I am so not a cardio junkie anymore.
- 10:15SPEAKER_00: I definitely don't think that faster is better.
- 10:17SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: I used to work with a couple of gentlemen in my organization that I used to work with, and their focus was to do things really, really slow.
- 10:26SPEAKER_00: And they would just, you know, take something and they would pull it down so slow and they would try to own every single part of that, and they would just be sweating.
- 10:33SPEAKER_00: And I can remember looking over at them and thinking, that was really, really interesting.
- 10:36SPEAKER_00: And I actually did this once in a conference setting.
- 10:39SPEAKER_00: I had a room full of people, and I was like, okay, we're going to practice a seated squat, which it was a chair yoga workshop.
- 10:46SPEAKER_00: And we practiced sitting into a chair, and I have them time it for an entire minute.
- 10:50SPEAKER_00: And they told me that they had never worked that hard before, just with body weight, with no weight whatsoever.
- 10:55SPEAKER_00: So sometimes slowing something down will help us to control things better, and we're we're actually teaching our muscles to be involved in experiencing load versus going really fast past something where I didn't experience the load.
- 11:09SPEAKER_00: If you pick up something that's heavy and you that's what a kettlebell does, right?
- 11:12SPEAKER_00: I have to accelerate that thing, I have to overcome the mass of that resistance to pick it up and swing it over my head so that I can stop it at the top, which is the definition of inertial-based training.
- 11:24SPEAKER_00: I'm only experiencing the beginning and the end of the exercise.
- 11:28SPEAKER_00: I'm not experiencing anything in between.
- 11:30SPEAKER_00: So really slowing down might be a strategic thing to making the exercise harder depending on that person's individual goal.
- 11:38SPEAKER_00: Now, what about not moving at all?
- 11:40SPEAKER_00: Some people say that an isometric is only there for uh physical therapy.
- 11:45SPEAKER_00: It's when I'm injured or maybe when I'm a senior and I can't do anything else.
- 11:49SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you something.
- 11:50SPEAKER_00: If you put a squat, if you're trying to just do a squat and you put a bar into a rack and you uh are trying to pick it up, you're bending a little bending over and trying to pick it up.
- 12:00SPEAKER_00: It says sitting there and I'm and I've contained it where I haven't, I can't actually lift the bar.
- 12:05SPEAKER_00: It's stuck, and I and I'm just trying to move an immovable object.
- 12:08SPEAKER_00: And I tell that person to pull as hard as they possibly can for a minute or two minutes or five minutes.
- 12:15SPEAKER_00: That is that exercise blows people out, and I'm not even moving.
- 12:20SPEAKER_00: I'm always amazed when someone tries yoga for the first time and they have to hold warrior two and they have to sit there with their arms out to the sides and hold this for like 60 seconds, and they've never done it before.
- 12:32SPEAKER_00: And I'm telling people things to engage muscles in their shoulders and their elbows and their fingers while holding a lunge.
- 12:38SPEAKER_00: That can be so hard because for the first time that person may have worked on control.
- 12:44SPEAKER_00: We always define an exercise as a movement from point A to point B, but we rarely define what that looks like from point A to point B.
- 12:53SPEAKER_00: We're focused on the end of something.
- 12:55SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like business.
- 12:56SPEAKER_00: Everybody likes to look at the beginning of business.
- 12:58SPEAKER_00: Oh great, they started a business.
- 13:00SPEAKER_00: And oh great, they succeeded in business.
- 13:02SPEAKER_00: But what they don't see is all of the everyday failures of business, the the late nights, the failures, the tried things, the things that don't work, the clients that stop, whatever.
- 13:13SPEAKER_00: They don't see that part.
- 13:15SPEAKER_00: That's the boring part.
- 13:16SPEAKER_00: They don't want to know how you got from point A to point B.
- 13:19SPEAKER_00: You go to a powerlifting competition, I've never been to one, I'm just gonna put that out there, but I've seen I've seen videos of them.
- 13:25SPEAKER_00: I imagine that there's people in the audience and they're focusing on how much this person can lift.
- 13:30SPEAKER_00: Well, being an MAT specialist, I see these people after the lift.
- 13:35SPEAKER_00: I see these people when their body has actually, you know, gone through that powerlifting competition, and they rarely come back to a session with me feeling replenished.
- 13:44SPEAKER_00: They feel exhausted because they were only focused on moving the weight.
- 13:48SPEAKER_00: They weren't focused on how that weight was moved.
- 13:50SPEAKER_00: So sometimes non-moving can be the very thing that can get them stronger towards moving in that progressive step.
- 13:57SPEAKER_00: Now, for my final modification, and this is one of my favorite ways to modify an exercise, is separating the complexion, the complex parts of an exercise into little pieces and eliminating weaknesses.
- 14:13SPEAKER_00: Now, something that I used to do, I used to have a teacher training, and this was a 500-hour teacher training, and one of the hardest assignments for instructors to do is they would have to deconstruct a pose, and they would have to talk about the individual joints of the pose and where the resistance was coming from, giving a scenario that I handed to them.
- 14:33SPEAKER_00: I would hand them these, you know, resistances and I would tell them, you know, what to do, and they would have to break apart each individual joint and what that individual joint was being asked to do.
- 14:43SPEAKER_00: This was always the place where people were like, you know, white flag, because they really realized that their you know yoga position is so complex, right?
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: But let's let's just take something that everybody can relate to.
- 14:54SPEAKER_00: Let's say a pull-up, a pull-up exercise.
- 14:56SPEAKER_00: Aren't pull-ups considered to be like the benchmark?
- 14:58SPEAKER_00: I mean, how many women do you know that do pull-ups?
- 15:00SPEAKER_00: Very few, as they as they get older, even younger, younger kids.
- 15:04SPEAKER_00: But pull-ups, especially for men, are like the go-to.
- 15:06SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm gonna do 10 chin-ups today or 20 chin-ups today or whatever, and that's considered to be a strong individual.
- 15:13SPEAKER_00: But do you think that I could still do a pull-up with a weak bicep?
- 15:17SPEAKER_00: I probably could because I've got wrist flexors working, I've got my finger flexors are working, I've got my shoulder muscles, maybe my abs, things that could that could take over for weak biceps.
- 15:29SPEAKER_00: But what if I spent some time and doing some work on biceps, which some people would say is a waste of time.
- 15:35SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna be doing some basic dumbbell curls, right?
- 15:38SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna stand the corner.
- 15:39SPEAKER_00: I'm not working on my pull-ups, I'm just working on bicep curls.
- 15:42SPEAKER_00: Does that make me less than?
- 15:44SPEAKER_00: No, it does not make you less than.
- 15:46SPEAKER_00: Because guess what?
- 15:47SPEAKER_00: The body gets to take those strong biceps now back into the pulling up exercises, and now because my biceps are stronger, I don't have to put as much stress on the shoulders, on the elbows, and on the wrists and hands.
- 15:59SPEAKER_00: And I would argue to say that sometimes the reason why we get injured is because we are not allowing ourselves time to work on our weak lengths, right?
- 16:09SPEAKER_00: So, just as a recap of some of these things, changing our range of motion, right?
- 16:15SPEAKER_00: Making something working on a range of motion that's maybe less than what we're used to gives us the opportunity to experience strength at a different range that we haven't practiced yet.
- 16:24SPEAKER_00: We haven't worked on the control that.
- 16:27SPEAKER_00: Changing our joint angle, working at a larger joint angle, or working at a smaller joint angle, working at the end of the range.
- 16:35SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can do 300 pounds on a leg press, but you've never fully straightened your knee.
- 16:38SPEAKER_00: You may notice that you can't lift as much weight as you thought you did, but you decide you're gonna fully straighten your knee, and then I've changed everything for you.
- 16:46SPEAKER_00: So changing the joint angle is not a modification that we need to fully embrace.
- 16:52SPEAKER_00: Using a support, deciding that I'm gonna bring in a block or a blanket or a strap or whatever, or wrap my hands up so that I can actually control a weight better, would actually help me to improve my ability to execute an exercise, and by default, I could maybe get more muscle growth because of that.
- 17:12SPEAKER_00: Maybe I want to experiment with the weight, lowering the weight.
- 17:16SPEAKER_00: Using less weight and actually experiencing the weight is not a beginner-wussie thing.
- 17:22SPEAKER_00: That is smart.
- 17:24SPEAKER_00: That is actually going to give you better results than saying, I'm Chuck and my name is Chuck, and I'm stuck on Chuck.
- 17:30SPEAKER_00: That's what Steve Harvey always used to say, right?
- 17:31SPEAKER_00: Don't have so what?
- 17:32SPEAKER_00: You can bench press 200.
- 17:34SPEAKER_00: Today we're gonna bench press 100, and we're really gonna go to the top of the range and the bottom of the range and see how that feels.
- 17:38SPEAKER_00: Slowing down is not a problem.
- 17:40SPEAKER_00: Stopping completely is not a problem.
- 17:42SPEAKER_00: Slowing down and stopping and experiencing some weight will absolutely make you stronger.
- 17:48SPEAKER_00: So I want to finish this episode by telling you something.
- 17:51SPEAKER_00: You can modify for the rest of your life.
- 17:56SPEAKER_00: Progression should never be something that is forced.
- 18:00SPEAKER_00: Progression should be something that is enforced, not forced.
- 18:05SPEAKER_00: If you have to do some modified version of an exercise forever, let's say that you have long femurs and you have to sit on blankets to sit on the ground.
- 18:13SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's where you are.
- 18:15SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you.
- 18:18SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that something is telling the world that you're not in as good a shape as somebody else.
- 18:24SPEAKER_00: So we need to throw this rule away.
- 18:27SPEAKER_00: You're allowed to modify for the rest of your life.
- 18:30SPEAKER_00: And as a matter of fact, I would encourage you to modify on any given day.
- 18:34SPEAKER_00: You're never the same, depending on your sleep, your stress, your eating, whatever.
- 18:38SPEAKER_00: You're never the same from one day to the next.
- 18:40SPEAKER_00: Heck, throughout the day, you're never the same.
- 18:43SPEAKER_00: So modifications are necessary.
- 18:45SPEAKER_00: And I would say this one thing about aging, and we are aging from the moment we step out of our mother's womb.
- 18:52SPEAKER_00: You're smarter in your 30s than you were when you were in your 20s.
- 18:55SPEAKER_00: You're smarter in your forties than you were when you were in your 30s for some reason.
- 18:59SPEAKER_00: You're smarter in your 50s and your 40s and your 60s and your 50s and your 70s and your sixties, it's on and on and on and on.
- 19:05SPEAKER_00: That's why when you see someone in their 80s and 90s, I'm filming this episode just after the death of Dolly Parton, and we're sudden we're suddenly going back and listening to all the amazing wise things that she said.
- 19:15SPEAKER_00: You know why she learned those things?
- 19:18SPEAKER_00: Because she lived a life.
- 19:19SPEAKER_00: So let's think about this stupid rule that modifications are for beginners and throw it out.
- 19:25SPEAKER_00: You have my permission.
- 19:26SPEAKER_00: I hope this episode helped you.
- 19:28SPEAKER_00: If there's anyone that you know that could benefit from this, please forward it to them.
- 19:31SPEAKER_00: If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to follow me and please give me a comment.
- 19:36SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear what you thought about this episode.
- 19:38SPEAKER_00: I really hope that this helps somebody and I appreciate you listening.
- 19:42SPEAKER_00: I can't wait to see you on the next one.
- 19:44SPEAKER_00: Take care.