Quick Q about muscle balance

[Alexander Svensson]

Sorry if it's been brought up but I can't seem to find any info on this. I would like to know if anyone knows where I can find info on muscle and strength balance, like how much you should be able to lift and push to have some sort of balance. For example if you can do a HSPU you should be able to do a pull-up to keep good balance between the different muscles. And the same for quads/hams etc.

[Philip Chubb]

Great question! Poliquin has some of this written in one of his tips. You could look that up. A few general reccomendations are Ido saying to try to attain a 50 percent bodyweight cuban press and lots of strengthening for the external rotators. Besides that, try Poliquins test perhaps to see where you are in terms of balance.

[Guest]

I would also like to know more about this, especially in terms of bodyweight conditioning. Most information 'out there' (like Poliquin's) deals with weightlifting exercises where it is easier to quantify muscle balance/imbalance (Poliquin uses percentages relative to specific lifts, which is of course much harder for bodyweight exercises where it's the lever that's changed rather than the weight).

But it would be nice to get a ballpark guesstimate for the FBE, based on experience (Coach?).

[AlexX]

Balance is often a bit more complicated than pull vs push. How many people are aware that both the pull up and bench press train internal rotators? Are people at all aware of balancing scapular protraction with retraction and elevation with depression? Most just try to balance pulling with pressing and throw in some external rotation work for the hell of it, a good start but a poor system in the long run.

Here is a good place to start on shoulder girdle balancing: http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_art ... ers_part_i - scroll down to number 5 there is a chart with balancing scapular motion instead of just pull vs push.

Gymnastic strength work is even harder to balance because there is so many different movements that one trains - some are pulling movement dominant some are pressing movement dominant some do everything and depending on which type of work you concentrate on you'll need different exercises to balance yourself out. This requires at least basic anatomical knowledge which most do not posses (by basic I don't mean that you know where the muscles are but how they interact during movement).

Legs (Hips) need a lot more balancing than just worrying about hamstrings to quads ratios. Glute work is very import for balancing issues especially training all the Glute muscles equally, if you do a lot of single leg work your glutes won't be equally developed. Forearms require their own balance work and a few reverse wrist curls will usually not cut it at the higher levels of strength.

For leg balancing I'd recommend articles on elitefts.com there is quite a bit on there about balancing out the hip musculature written by professional trainers and physical therapists that also powerlift. There are a few articles on there about forearm balancing but if looking for very in-depth information grip enthusiasts and arm wrestlers know the most gripboard.com is one of the sites where there is plenty of posts on this.

The point I am trying to make here is that balancing is a very complicated and individual thing even when the activity performed is the same, people are different. That's why it's hard to give specific numbers for everyone.

[Joshua Naterman]

Many times the most important thing is to make sure the muscles keep firing and firing correctly. Strength is often less of an issue than shutdown and/or compensation patterns.

Weights are an exceptionally convenient way to test for muscle strength balance, and it won't matter if you are a weight trainer or bodyweight enthusiast because either way the tests with weights will show you where you are at. There are other strength tests that are somewhat more subjective but extremely good, but you need a knowledgeable practitioner to do those, they aren't self tests. If things don't feel right or feel different on one side than the other it is time to call in someone who is a professional to help you sort things out.

www.muscleactivation.com has some dvd products for sale that show you how to self test and use specific isometrics to "wake up" the muscles that aren't firing properly, but I do not know how well that works. I do know that the actual manual treatment is excellent, a friend of mine is going through their internship and really changed how my legs were working and his friend did my shoulder. I still have inflammation that has to go away but my right shoulder actually moves better than my left now, significantly so. Anyhow, the same site has a list of certified practitioners and a list of the current interns so that you can find people in your area. They aren't everywhere but the protocol is good. I do not know how skilled all of the interns are, but I am lucky that my friend is pretty good.

As has been mentioned before, pretty much any soft tissue expert will be able to help you out and they all have their specialties. ART, trigger point, graston, and MAT are all very good. They are also different, so learn about each and decide who you should see. Ideally people would know them all, but seriously that is an expensive and time-consuming thing to accomplish.

[Cole Dano]

Good points Alex and Slizz.

This thread got me reading through a few of Poliquins Articles

I found this to be a particularlly interesting article, well at least i finally found out what the infamous Klatt test is.

Structural Balance and Auxiliary Exercises

The reading also connected to the FMS people. I've been looking into the FMS (Functional Movement System) as a simple way as assessing movement skill and imbalance.

The one thing that struck me in the couple of hours i spent reading last night is the tendency to want there to be one simple answer, and not want to look at the whole spectrum of solutions.

In this case it turned into an argument between the 'Functional' crowd and the 'Balance' crowd.

Slizz hit on it, as usual, in his post.

If we just have balanced muscles but don't know how to move there is the potential for problems.

If we know how to move, but its not balanced by other complementary movements, there again is the potential for problems.

Here talking about movement its important to note, that it means training the motor pathways, or in what i think is a more useful way of saying it, mindful movement, sometimes i will call this patterning work.

Since we talk about this because we want to avoid injury, or improve performance, understanding how patterning works the nervous system is important.

To keep it brief, performance wise, the nervous system 'knows' when there is an imbalance, and until the imbalance is corrected, it will limit how much an otherwise strong muscle group can output. This is the essence of Poliquin's point, and i think its a good one. By strengthening the antagonists, we can get more out of the protagonists. We are actually, telling the nervous system its ok to do more, because the whole system has now been aligned.

At the same time, one aspect of the injury side is that a large component of pain is coming from the nervous system. In other words say your wrist hurts. The pain isn't actually produced by the damage to the wrist, but rather, that the nervous system senses that this is a potential threat, and signals that through pain.

This kind of pain can stick around for a long time. Again training the body via movement will actually teach the nervous system that its ok to use a painful area after its healed. In that mindful movement, we are also teaching the body to work as a system, so that if its a case of one muscle group that has taken over for another, those systems have a chance to reintegrate.

An excellent example of this is our favorite band prehab for the shoulders.

I also have been dealing with a string of shoulder issues, and my left side shut down 9 months back.

Having consistently done band work, indian clubs etc, i have not only rehabbed the the muscles but the movement pattern.

The injury itself was almost certainly caused by a faulty movement pattern i was taught by a certain teacher, and which i constantly repeated over the preceding few years until the system broke, broke again on the other side, and then finally again on the left!

At this point, i thick headed as i am, realized i have to really do something about this. And thank the Lord, i also found this Coach Sommer! My own imbalances were unique, as my training caused me to overemphasize external rotation and keeping my shoulders back in inverted work. I actually had to teach myself to get the anterior side to work! So it goes both ways. Moreover if i just took a 'balance what everyone tells me to' approach the problem wouldn't be getting better now.

The take home message, is all of this needs to be approached mindfully, we need to actually put some effort into understanding how we move via this mindfulness, the body talks back when you learn how to listen. And i personally think this is the essential thing to lean.

Then all the advice can actually start to make sense and be useful.

[AlexX]

Functional movement screen and myofascial tissue work are both awesome. Although like Slizz said that can get expensive if done on regular bases. The huge upside to going to a soft tissue expert is that they'll usually point out all your imbalances. I use a lacross ball myself and have taught the girlfriend how to work certain areas out, not the same but it does help. In reality all these things that we mentioned go together and are used after a proper assessment which requires someone quite experienced in muscular balance.

My initial point to the OP was that he needs to invest time to learn these things and how to adopt them to himself because just some general recommendation of do external rotation work and balance push and pulls will usually fall quite short. You don't need to become an expert (although that would never hurt) but basic knowledge in anatomy (once again not just where the muscles are located and their names, that should be a given), soft tissue work and some mobility/movement patterns is a good start to being able to asses basic injuries and imbalances.

P.S. I have the functional movement screen DVD it's good stuff and has a few neat ideas.

[Alexander Svensson]

Wow. First off thanks for the response and that's a lot of information!

Didn't think the answer to my question would be so complicated. I checked out that Poliquin test and might see how it goes and will keep all the other advices in mind as well.

[Felipe]

I'm trying to have this sort of balance between exercise, but they are different depending on your structure:

press is 1

rows 1,2

bench press 1,4

squat 1,8

deadlift 2,05

which can be adjusted to strength goals in bw (not using strict math) if you weight 64 kilos or so:

press 1,2x

rows 1,4x

bp 1,6x

squat 2x

dead 2,25x

of course these are only for major balance between exercises.