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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Resolution to squat every workout day

That's right. I've finally resolved myself to do pause back squats every workout. I know. I know. I'm always whining about repetitive movement injury and how you shouldn't do the same exercise two workouts in a row. But there's no way around pause back squats. Sure, you can do acute angle deadlifts and they will hit the glutes almost as well as squats provided you maintain an upright upper torso position. The problem is once you lose that position and bend over at the waist your glutes are taken out of the range of motion and your lower back carries you to the top.

That's why I'm going to do pause back squats every workout. There's no exercise that smashes the lower half of the glutes like pause back squats. The reflexive back squat uses too much bounce to carry the upper torso out of the bottomed out position. That's good if you're trying to break a personal record, but that won't help you stimulate the lower glute muscles.

I think I'll avoid repetitive movement injury in the knees for the simple fact that any kind of pause added to any exercise's range of motion will require a less heavy load. Thus it will reduce the stress on my knees.

Also , a key component to any repetitive movement injury is the shearing action in the exercise's range of motion. Shearing action means when your joints shift out of position and the bones in the joint become misaligned.  If you place a load on the joint when it's misaligned, you're increasing your chance of injury.

When a bounce is added to a range of motion, the potential for that shearing action greatly increases.  When you bounce out of the bottom of your squat, you don't know where your knees are and how the bones in the knee joint are positioned. They could be out of alignment, so when you activate your glutes to carry you to the top, the bones in your knees have the potential for injury under the stress of a heavy load. That's why I think doing the pause squat will reduce my knee pain because it gives my knee joints a chance to settle in and align properly before I try to muscle the weight back to the top. When I used to do pause bench presses, my shoulder pain was greatly reduced as well because I was dealing with a lighter load and I was giving my shoulder joints a chance to align themselves and thus my shoulder pain was reduced.

There is really no way to have a strong deadlift without having strong glutes and quadricep muscles.   From the moment you step to the bar to the point where you reach the top of the lift, the muscle fibers in your legs are firing off to stabilize the weight your holding and to assist your lift to knee lockout. The pause back squat fully stimulates all leg muscles involved  in the deadlift.

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