Latest / The Driven Athlete / Fixing Compensation Patterns & Muscle Imbalances w/ Warm-up | Ep 63

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Fixing Compensation Patterns & Muscle Imbalances w/ Warm-up | Ep 63 · The Driven Athlete

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: If you're a driven, active person who wants to reach and pursue a higher quality life with some ambition, then guess what this podcast is for you.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: This is the Driven Athlete Podcast.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: With our sports physical therapy practice, we see a lot of active adults and active individuals okay and a lot of the times we hear from them.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I want to be able to get back to working out intensely.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I want to be able to work out like I used to.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I want to be able to get after it.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: I want to be able to push myself.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I want to make some great physical changes and improve my strength and endurance and feel confident and all that stuff improve my physique.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: But I can't because my arm hurts, or I can't because my elbow hurts, my back hurts, my hip hurts, my ankle hurt, my knee and I don't know what's going on.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Right, we hear that all the time.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: That's what we do and we get people back to exercising or like moving at a high level.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Get back to sports.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: So I do their thing and the people that seek us out usually are tired of hearing from other practitioners Well, just don't work out anymore.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Why don't you just rest?
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I sit down and it takes a Madville, right, it's like I don't want to be or just don't run anymore.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Right, just don't do.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Your marathons are bad for your knees.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Why don't you just not do that anymore?
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: It's like I love doing that stuff and I love exercising and moving at a high level and I want to build it up for as long as I can.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I'm tired of being told not to do that the meantime.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: It's not going to happen today.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: You're not going to run a marathon tomorrow, but there's a pathway to there and we have to intervene with the right things over a long enough time horizon, with intervening the right way, and we're confident we'll get back to that because you were previously.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Let's get there again.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Let's exercise at a high level.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: You're not going to do, you're not going to max out bench press today if your shoulder's bothering you, or max out your power clean jerk press, whatever power lifting.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: That's not going to happen today, but we're going to make strides and do that and I'm very confident, based on what you're presenting with and what you're describing, that we can get there and oftentimes, the reactions that we get a lot of fulfillment in the reactions like oh, I thank you.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Oh, my gosh, I'm so grateful to hear that versus I thought I was never going to be able to work out again.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: It's like that's.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Is that a great life trajectory choice to never exercise or be physically active again?
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Probably not.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: We're here to enable that and we fit the right meld for the right people and the right messaging for the right population of people that like that kind of thing.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Um, we're your guys and girls, all right.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: So part of that and part of the things that we teach is a dynamic warmup.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: That's very important part of like a workout routine, and I don't even call it a warmup anymore, I call it movement prep.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: We have to prepare your body to move and groove at a high level to do athletic movements and high velocity things that are stressful for your body, right?
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: As an example, somebody, a sprinter, isn't going to wake up in the morning, walk to the track and just immediately max out sprint.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: They're not going to do that, right.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Well, they're not warmed up, right?
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Their hamstrings aren't going to tolerate that kind of level athletic activity again, a RIT, right, dynamic athletic, intense activity.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: So what do they do?
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: They do a warmup, right, and do some stretches and stuff, and I don't hate that, I love that.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: We could be more purposeful with particular issues that each particular person has and prepare those joints that might be lit up and compromised to be able to tolerate intense athletic movements without getting lit up all the time.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Right, we can purposely intervene with movement prep exercises, or dynamic warmup movements, called movement prep, um, so they can tolerate those intense athletic movements and activities without consistently getting worse over and over again.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Right, and uh, it just takes a little bit of purposeful intervention, okay, and we have to investigate what that is for you.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Plenty of people have unique and different dynamic mobility and warm-up movement prep exercises compared to other people.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: If we look at who the best are, that would be pro athletes that have been doing it for a while.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Let's mimic them.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Let's put that, let's put this into light.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: A lot of them are banged up off the times.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Do you think high level, all-star basketball players like LeBron or Michael Jordan today were they perfectly no pain all the time?
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: No, they always have something going on.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: They just manage it right.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: They manage it with purposeful interventions.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: They have guys like me or girls like that do my job, girls like me no, guys like me or girls that do the same profession.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Travel with them 24 seven to do body work right.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Massage therapy I don't hate soft tissue work Massage can be very helpful and very, very good for intervening the right way, totally Um.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: And they have nutrition help.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: They also have strength and conditioning for their workouts.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: They have sports psychologists and mental game professionals to work on the mental game.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So from the physical standpoint, if they're always banged up, they always have issues going on.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: They have a shoulder thing and their wrist is bothering them, their knee has been given a little bit of trouble and now their glute, their quad hurts or whatever.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Their hamstring, they strained it or whatever.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Their back is giving them trouble.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Things always pop up because they're pushing themselves so much all the time.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: So for the general population like us that aren't professional athletes and we want to exercise and do stuff at a high level and play with our kids and our friends and our family and do active, fun things, we also are pushing ourselves and things come and go.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: We can set ourselves up for success by doing purposeful movement prep to prepare our bodies to tolerate those activities ahead of time, versus just not warming up and then just like getting hurt right, like I see it all the time, like the beer league softball players.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: I've seen that a bunch.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: I've seen Achilles ruptures on the field, sprinting to first base, hamstring pulls all the time.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: That's probably the most common with hamstring pulls, like sprinting to first base and hamstring pull right.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: They just weren't ready for that yet.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: We got to intervene more personally.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: But anyway, pro athletes, they're always banged up, they're always managing some stuff.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: So they have purposeful movement prep and little dynamic warmup exercises and mobility stuff for all of the joints that are lit up.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: If they have a shoulder thing, they have an elbow issue.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: The only thing right now they have their backs been bothering them, they have hip impingement symptoms and their knees bothering them.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: That's five body areas that are causing them problems and they'll interconnect totally.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: But they're going to have maybe four to six interventions per joint before they work out, before they do training.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Dynamic, just regular dynamic stretches just to warm up, um and other um and foam rolling and whatever.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: That's good.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: That's a long warmup, right.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: It's like you're taking forever to warm up, right?
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: I take forever to warm up.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: I mean I'm banged up from playing college football and college volleyball or I played two sports, so I'm I got some stuff going on.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I can't just jump into a workout and just do power cleans Like I gotta.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: I gotta be purposeful and take my time.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: I need to warm up, right.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: I need to get my body prepared to move athletically again.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Right, it takes a little while and I don't care what anybody says.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Like it takes me forever to warm up.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: They're like you're still warming up.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, I don't care what you think.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Like I need to do this If I want to feel good later and for the long time, for my life.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Right, like, what does this look like at 55,?
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Right, 20 years from now?
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: What's that look like If I don't intervene and purposely do some warmup and movement prep exercises to get ready?
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: If you're tight all the time and things hurt and you just work out through it anyway without taking purposeful action, nothing changes unless, unless something changes, what does that trajectory look like?
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Imagine doing the same thing with the same trajectory.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: What?
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: What does 20 years from now look like?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Or 10 years from now?
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Probably not great.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: So anyway, these pro athletes let's look at the best.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: What are they doing?
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: They're intervening at every joint, four to six types of exercises or little movement prep um interventions to get that joint set up for success before they do the dynamic and also foam rolling and stuff.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: So their warmup takes like an hour and a half.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: That's their warmup, and now their body is ready and prepared to get after it with a full length basketball game or a football game, baseball whatever, or their workout, their strength and conditioning programming right, their workouts.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Now they're ready so that when they're done they don't feel like crap or they're like now my back hurts, right, but I got through it.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: I did my workout, but now my back hurts.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: That's not the idea.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Consistently doing that over time leads to people having issues over a long period of time, and that's something we want, right.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: What does that look like 20 years from now?
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: What about when you're 60, right?
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: What do you want to move like then?
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Do you want to be pliable and feel good, or painful, stiff and everything's jacked up all the time?
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: It's a pretty simple answer, I think.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Right, we just have to intervene with the right things.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: So, with the movement prep oftentimes what we find for people with shoulder issues we have to get the scapula more active and involved and mobile.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: We have to move it overhead better and then activate and recruit the muscles that purposely activate the shoulder, the scapula to move it overhead.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: We have to get those active before we get the other dominant muscles overly active ahead.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Right, they're going to dominate the small stability guys big, large muscles like the pec major, the deltoid and the lat and Terry's major.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Those muscles are large, strong power movers.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: They generate the force.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: There's other stability muscles underneath that help move the scapula with the right mechanics.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And if those small stability muscles are more dormant and aren't super active, what do you think is going to win the strong, dominant muscles or the dormant, inactive, less recruitable small stability muscles?
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: It's a lose-lose every time and we see that very often and that's what we do with our movement prep.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Like, hey, what if we intervene with these little movement prep exercises to activate those little stability guys, little stability muscles first, and now they're more recruitable and active and contributory to the movement.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Before you strengthen and do workouts and stuff like that, that balance, muscle balance it's a recruitment problem.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: That recruitment muscle neural activation problem, balance is improved.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: And if we stay on that path, that's where we help limit compensatory moving patterns that ultimately causes things to get broken down over a long period of time.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Stay on that path.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: That's where we help limit compensatory moving patterns that ultimately cause things to get broken down over a long period of time.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: If some things are overcompensating or overwhelmed compared to other things, right, we can intervene purposely.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: The other really common with that, with low back pain, is hip mobility and core activation.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: The same way we would activate and prep the shoulder, the scapula stability muscles like the serratus anterior, the lower trap.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: We have to get those guys active to get the shoulder blade to rotate upward.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: We can do the same thing with our core.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Before we do power cleans or squats or lunges or sprints.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: What if we purposely targeted our core stability muscles to be more active and then we do intense athletic exercises and activity?
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Things would probably be set up more for success.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Oftentimes, people, usually, if they have back problems, where are they usually more tight?
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: They're usually more tight in their low back muscles.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So what does that tell you?
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: If somebody has spasms, and back spasms like, where are those spasms located?
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: That would indicate to me the muscles that are very hyper, guarded and lit up all the time and hanging on for dear life, and very strong and dominant.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: What muscles are those?
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Usually the low back muscles, the erector spinae group, the multifidus spinalis, iliocostalis, longissimus, all those muscles, the erector spinae group, those are the ones that are usually hanging on for dear life and super guarded.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: We don't hear.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: And those are the ones then are going to be the first activated, highly recruited and very strong and active.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: People usually don't have abdominal spasms, right, like.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: There go my abs again.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: They're so strong and active that they're spasming again.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Right, it's usually the opposite.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: So what do you think is more dormant?
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Probably the core, right.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: What if we purposely activated those before we did intense exercise?
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: What if we added it as part of the workout program to create more recruitability and normalize that recruitment pattern which is going to create more muscle balance and keep things more stable?
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: And over time, the muscle tissue will follow suit and things will be less dominant and strong and spasmy and guarded all the time and tight it feels like you're tight all the time and more balanced and more fluid right and less tight.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Awesome.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Hip mobility is another big one for low back pain and hip issues because it's very correlated Posterior hip capsule mobility, which a way to target that would be like a pigeon stretch kind of thing.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: But if we're not able to target that, we had to manually intervene and target your posterior hip capsule first and access the capsular mobility of your hip joint first and then stretch some stuff.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Otherwise we're just like powering through capsular restrictions and second to cause impingement and it's not going to.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: It's not going to feel good, it's not, it's not as effective as it could be.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Um, and then the last thing being glute recruitment.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: So getting the glutes to actually recruit and activate first and then strengthen on top of that with like exercise, lunges, squats, kettlebell swings, um, running, sprints.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: If the glutes aren't very strong and active, they're not going to, they're not recruitable as easily as it could be.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: If we don't get them active first, the dominant guys are going to kick on first and be the first things that contribute to strength and activating for athletic movement.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: And as an example, take it from the best again, the people that push themselves the most track athletes for running as an example.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: I'll take it from the best again, the people that push themselves the most track athletes for running as an example.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: What is a very, very common muscle strain that happens in track athletes and sprinters?
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: The hamstrings.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Do people ever have like glute strains?
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: No, like, oh, there goes my glute again.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: It's so strong and active that I pulled it again right, it's just overly active, it's overly recruited.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: I should say no, the should say no the hamstrings.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: So what does that tell you?
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: That's usually more dominant and first easily recruited and relied upon to produce these athletic movements and strength training the hamstrings.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: So then what should we recruit?
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: First, on top of that to balance out the recruiting patterns, the glutes.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: And then, once they're recruited and activated and we can, we can find and recruit them better.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Then we can strengthen and normalize the recruit muscle patterns with exercise.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: It's going to strengthen them.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: If we don't activate them and we do strength training, we're only reinforcing more strength of the strong, dominant guys, which is the hamstrings.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: We're creating more hamstring dominance.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: It's increasing the disparity if we don't activate and recruit the right things first.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: So exercise is very helpful, but if somebody is battling an issue strength training and exercise and running all that stuff it can reinforce more muscle disparity, muscle recruitment and muscle strength disparity it creates.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It can reinforce more imbalances because we're strengthening things that are already very strong.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: And as an example, if somebody is battling hamstring dominance issues like the hamstring issues, I probably won't do RDLs.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: That's a hamstring strengthening exercise.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Do we want to strengthen something that's already very strong.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: They're strong enough, right?
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: No, we don't want to do that.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: We need to get the glutes more involved and recruit, normalize the recruitment pattern and probably get more core stability to help contribute to spinal pelvic stability the pelvis right as an example.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: That's what I mean by like movement prep.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: We're preparing the body to move to tolerate intense athletic exercise and activity and not reinforce poor movement recruitment patterns and imbalances and also joint mobility.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: It's another which is just joint mobility disparities.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: If some things are very hypermobile versus hypomobile, the hypermobility is already ready to move Like water, takes the path of least resistance.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The body and joints are going to take the path of least resistance and we're going to reinforce and move through hypermobilities.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: We need to get the hypomobilities, the ones that aren't very mobile and stiff joints, to improve their movement and mobility availability right now first, and it's going to improve the disparity of joint mobility imbalances and then exercise on top of that.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: So we have the joint mobility disparities improved and more balanced.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: We have muscle recruitment disparities and muscle activation disparities and balances improved.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Now exercise and exercise in a way that's going to reinforce the right moving patterns.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Otherwise we're going to reinforce the wrong moving patterns and reinforce more muscle balance and disparities and more joint mobility disparities, which is going to worsen things as an example.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: So that's why we do moving prep, which is your dynamic warmup, to help set things up for success and be more balanced.