Without question frontal plane hip stabilization weakness is the #1 thing that I see every day in the clinic or in my bootcamps. As a result we have made frontal plane hip stabilization a regular routine in camp.
About 6 months ago I got tired of the hip training bands that were on the market for several reasons.
1. The thin ones broke within a month of using
2. The ones with the ankle cuff don’t allow me to shorten the lever arm
3. The ones that allow you attach to your thigh slide up and down not to mention it tears up your thighs
4. The tubular ones roll up your legs
So I created my own.
The dynamic stabilizer eliminates all of those issues but that is my opinion.
Take a look and let me know what you think.
Training Beyond the Bar
Dave Schmitz
If you interested in picking up a New Dynamic Stabilizer, I am including in any band package until 11:59pm Wednesday night. All you have to do is mention you read it in the this blog when you order.
I am blessed to have the chance to work with so many different groups of people who want to get better.
Last year I had the pleasure of working with an entire high school football team for 4 months. This is a team with a good winning tradition but had been bitten by the injury bug for 2 straight years. After 2 years we have a but eliminated season ending injuries.
Every day in my bootcamp, I work with helping 30-65 year olds stay active, stay injury free and get stronger by keeping themselves flexible.
2 days a week I help people get rid of low back and shoulder pain by rehabilitating them and teaching them how to elongate, lengthen, distract or rotate using a resistance band.
That pretty much covers the entire gamut of people that love being active.
When it comes to flexibility, it comes down when…. Not IF.
I believe there are 2 things that go along ways in helping improve flexibility and decrease injury potential and they both can be easily done using my favorite training tool. Any Guesses??
Here’s why these 5 groups will benefit from band stretching
1. Baby boomer weekend athletes are injury waiting to happen because they are doing high velocity activities with increased momentum while playing with limited joint range of motion and restricted muscle length. As the saying goes, if you’re going to play, you better pay the price to keep your mobility.
2. Working out to drop unwanted fat comes downraising the metabolic rate. The best way to do that is high intensity interval cardio and strength training. The greater your mobility
3. Athletes who want to get faster can do so quickly by getting rid of their own internal resistance. Eliminating this, especially in the hips, take consistent dynamic stretching and assisted lunge reaching. Done regularly, I have seen athletes cut tenths of seconds off their 40′s in a couple of weeks.
4. Continual history of shoulder and low back pain typically comes because people compensate through the shoulders and low back as a result of tight hips and mid back. Make the right joints start moving and the innocent low back and shoulders are free to enjoy life again.
5. Those 50+ fitness enthusiasts that want to keep golfing, playing a little tennis, or doing their morning jog need to understand it is not going to just keep happening unless you keep your body fit for this. In most cases it comes down to lack of mobility and poor integration between the shoulders and hips. The Assisted Lunge Reach Series does a great job of teaching everyone how to get their arms talking to their leg via the trunk which is the way it was meant to happen.
So if you fall into one of these groups… my suggestion is to start stretching with bands and get better.
In honor of my 47th birthday today, I decided to go back into the video achieves and share with you a fountain of youth secret I discovered at age 37.
As I moved into my 30′s and continued to be (in my own mind) a great athlete LOL, I suddenly realized I had lost my ability to move.
As a physical therapist, fitness enthusiasts and athlete want-a-be, I should have realized that joints that are stiff, muscles that are tight and fascia that is bound down, is not good for your body and definitely does not enhance function.
As a result I started to bend, stretch, elongate, and actively move in directions that were not part of my normal daily movements. One the key things I implemented into my new program was resistance band stretching for my hips.
Within 2 months of daily band stretching, I had eliminated nagging low back pain, was back on the track doing sprint works and could do workouts with my athletes 10 years younger than me.
Also as a bonus:
I had 10 times more energy to do daily task
Experience no more cracking and groaning getting out of bed in the morning
The ability to do real athletic based workouts was back
The respect from clients and athletes that I did what I taught became a great marketing tool
I had a niche to what had now become an incredibly fun and exciting career not just a hobby
I acquired a cool nickname… “The Band Man”
The ability to run with my 3 amazing children everyday
It was easy to motivate others and let them know they can get back what they lost
As we age we are going to lose mobility. Sometimes as a result of instability but mostly as a result of soft tissue shortening.
We all have physical activities in life that Jack us up and provide a sense of physical accomplishment. Doing repeat 100 meter sprints at age 47, full out and fast, is what gets me jacked.
So today’s First 2010 RBT Live episode is my gift to you on my birthday. Here is your RBT Fountain of youth Secret…. Good luck and trust me if flexibility is your issues, resistance band stretching will work it just takes a commitment to keeping what you got or getting back what you like to do.
Training beyond the Bar
Dave “The Band Man” Schmitz
Make sure you Check out my Birthday Special Below!!!
Band Training for Shuffle strength… do you work on it??
Our body was designed to primarily to move forward which is why we can run the fastest in a forward direction. Ok now that I have enlightened you with that wisdom… Did you know that in order to be powerful forward we must be incredibly stable side to side.
Yep, we lose power forward when we have to spend time working so hard on stabilizing in the frontal plane. It’s called having a frontal plane force leak.
How do you correct it??
Start strength training and running sideways as well as forward.
Have you ever done a high speed shuffle workout?? or all your strength training in a sideways direction??
I have and continue to do this often with bands. It’s the easiest way to get cardio in and work on dynamic lateral stabilization at the same time. Now add a little pulling or pushing action with this and you can really rock your frontal plane stabilizers.
As promised a frontal plane cardio-strength workout. I hope you get a little laugh from the screen shot.
Now I know that the real benefit of resistance band training in the way the band man does it is its ability to integrate multiple force vectors and planes of movement with any given exercise.
This allows for greater muscle activation which leads to greater calorie burn and thus greater fat loss.
But sometimes you just want to work your arms and that’s it… and I get that.
I mean we all have an area of our body that we just like to attack and then show off in the hours between workouts, right
And for me, like most guys, that area is my arms.
Whenever I feel like hitting my arms after completing my strength training (10-15 minutes) and total body metabolic training (20-30 minutes) components, I add in a little 4-minute 20-10 Tabata finisher performing band drop sets.
Here’s how it works:
I select 2 movements, one that works my biceps and one that works my triceps.
Then I perform 4 consecutive sets of one exercise, starting with the highest band tension I can handle for at least 8-10 reps and then dropping band tension from set to set.
I then immediately repeat this process for the second exercise as outlined below:
Set 1- Band Shoulder Presses- Green XLarge Band
Set 2- Band Shoulder Presses- Purple Large Band
Set 3- Band Shoulder Presses- Black Medium Band
Set 4- Band Shoulder Presses- Red Small Band
Set 5- Band Curls- Green Band
Set 6- Band Curls- Purple Band
Set 7- Band Curls- Black Band
Set 8- Band Curls- Red Band
Band training allows you to very quickly and easily move up and down in resistance without needing much space.
I use 20-10 interval workout music powered by Workout Muse to get the job done. I just press play and the music tells me exactly what to do so I can focus on getting nasty with my bands.
Check out the video below to see me crank out this awesome arms workout:
BJ Gaddour is not only a tremendous friend but also an outstanding fitness professional. His revolutionary ideas using workoutmuse have not only impacted my workouts, but have made my bootcamps using bands unmatched by my bootcamp competitors. Bands and Workoutmuse can give your bootcamps a definite market abvantage.
All the workouts found in the FitnessBandBootCamp are set up to be used with exclusive Resistance Band Training Workoutmuse sound tracks that come with the entire kick . Bands and workoutmuse will not only jump start your workouts but now it can jump start your camps.
Have you every seen a Boxer that was good and fat. Ok maybe a few heavy weights but when you get into any weight classes below that, these guys are ripped through the trunk.
Is it any wonder, when you look at how functional the art of punching occurs.
From a neuromuscular standpoint, punching uses the concept of reciprocal training to enhance punching power. Simply stated, your body uses pulling to enhance pushing. See our body often use the opposite side of the body moving the opposite way to enhance movement on the other side of the body.
This happens with running all the time.
As a result a few years ago I started to do band reciprocal training to enhance my arm action with sprinting. This training helped but what I got as bonues benefits were a great reactive trunk workout and a alternative way to maximize my heart rate without running.
Seeing and trying is a must when it comes to reciprocal training. Here are a few tips to doing effective reciprocal push – pull training.
1. Don’t always emphasize number of reps. Instead see how fast you can push each individual rep by reloading on each rep. You will see how I do this. Interestingly, I think quality reps burn even more calories than if you just try to knock out a lot of reps.
2. Also don’t keep your feet the same. Change it up on every round. Your trunk and hips will hate you but your back will love you. By the way if you are into hitting the heavy bag. Do this workout first and then go hit the bag. Look out because you may bring it down.
3. Make sure you stay athletic and let the system load. As I always say, learn to load and you are guaranteed to explode with incredible punching power.
4. No low back pain. This means you are not loading and instead are trying to muscle with your upper body. Your punch starts from the floor and must go through your hips…. Use them.
I hope you enjoy this weeks RBT Live 43 Episode and as always please leave thoughts and comments below.
Reactive Training.. Powerful Results
Dave “The Band Man”
PS.. The Advance Total Fitness Package is the perfect package to learn about tons of other band training options to enhance reciprocal strength. It provides you all the bands you need as well the the training DVDs to get you strarted and the really good thing is you save about 30% automatically.
Resistance Band training has long been considered as a secondary option to strength training when compared to dead weight resistance like dumbbells, barbells and kettlebell. However it is really comparing apples to oranges when you evaluate the 2 from a strength curve standpoint.
Dead weight follows the traditional bell shaped curve with muscle recruitment being on the vertical vector and range of motion on the horizontal vector. Muscle recruitment increases to mid range and then slowly decreases as you complete the full range of motion.
Resistance bands are a progressive straight line that reflects a continuous increase in muscle recruitment as range of motion increases.
So the question is not which is better, the question is why not implement both types of strength training into your program or why not combine the two and make dead weight training a full range of motion muscle recruitment training tool by adding bands.
This week’s RBT Live does exactly that. It combines the best of dead weight training with band training. The results…… a tremendous total body workout that maximizes muscle recruitment.
Reactive Training … Powerful Results
Dave “The Band Man” Schmitz
With this week’s RBT Live all about getting under the bar, I have to let you in on a new program we are using at my local high school to develop absolute strength!! It was developed by an outstanding young performance coach and good friend of mine, Ryan Englebert , who used this program to get himself super strong to play for the Cincinnati Bengels and now uses it to get HS kid freakishly stronger.
I have the incredible opportunity to see first hand how Ryan does it so and I am really glad he is finally gettng this out to everyone. If you are looking for a program to develop “incredible absolute strength in your athletes the E-Test Drop 2 System is something you need to check out.
I’m a band guy but when it comes to developing “Freakish” absolute strength in my athletes, I just talk to Ryan about what we need to do under the bar.
Now I have to teach him about pricing because at $49 the E-Test Drop 2 System is a steal.
Make sure you at least take a moment to see what the excitment is all about
Using resistance bands to train split squats or single leg bench squats is so easy and like with other RBT exercises, doesn’t require you to carry around 30lbs of weight.
This weeks RBT Live Training Episode not only shows you how to do split squats or single leg squats with bands but shows you how to adapt to those special clients and friends who were not blessed with the tall genes…
Enjoy this weeks Training episode of RBT Live and make sure you let me know what you thought of my special addition. Look forward to hearing from you on the comment section.
Have a great Halloween weekend and crank out some Band Split squats for me.
Reactive Training.. Powerful Results
Dave Schmitz
PS.. If you are interested in learning about how to train your entire body with bands using the split stance, you may want to check out Resistance Bands Unleashed DVD Series or if you don’t have bands yet.. The Total Fitness Package will set you up with everything you need. It is all about getting reactively stronger and reactive fit with resistance bands.
If you have not watched this video please do so before you continue reading. I do not know Mr. Boyle personally but I have read many of his writings. I respect him for his unwillingness to never settle for what is but always analyzing what could be. He simply never stops learning and trying to teach others.
Mike’s theory on Single legs squat drove home why I find the staggered stance to be so effective at teaching people how to integrate their lower torso with their upper torso which when all is said and done is how this body was designed to work.
Mike’s states that the low back is the limiting factor not the glutes when it comes to bilateral squats. Subsquently by going into a split stance the lower extremities, especially gluts and quads, are more effectively trained. I would say it is not just a low back but globally a trunk limiting factor.
If we are able to assist the trunk (specifically the lower abs) to stabilize the low back (specifically L5-S1) than we create less of a force leak at that point and allow the weight or vertical vector force to be dealt with using the lower torso.
Keeping the transition area of L5-S1 stable is what allows us to transfer force production to the lower torso when the load is coming from the top – down
I thought it would easier to show you than tell you so.. Here you go.
See you tomorrow to discuss why the scapula and shoulder love the split stance as well.
47STRETCH…INTO YOUR ORDER FORM.
