💪 Training Valor Newsletter🦵
🔶 Sample Workout – 5-day Weightlifting, Strength & Muscle
This program is an advanced program including the olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk), barbell lifts for strength and hypertrophy (front and back squats and bench press) and various accessory lifts. This program shouldn’t be used as an introduction into olympic weightlifting but rather as an intermediate to advanced program to combine weightlifting, strength and muscle development.
🔶 Featured Stretch
The stretch will expose the hip flexors of the trail leg and the muscles resisting external rotation in the front leg. The adductors, hamstrings, and other smaller accessory muscles will limit you on the front leg. As you can see, my front leg isn’t quite at 90° at the knee. The closer you can get to 90° the more your hip will be pulled into end range external rotation..
🔶 Strength & Conditioning Science
Influences of hamstring stiffness and strength on anterior knee joint stability
J. Troy Blackburn a, ⁎, Marc F. Norcross a , Darin A. Padua
Knee joint stability is a significant factor in injury prevalence to the cruciate ligaments, menisci and other tissues supporting the knee joint articulations. The quadriceps extend your knee via the quadriceps tendon, the patella and the patellar tendon on the front side of your knee. While the hamstrings flex your knee by crossing the back side of the knee joint. Both provide support for your knee joint capsule to not allow excessive sliding motion front and back. Kind of like when the bread of a PB&J can slide back and forth. Your knee shouldn’t be doing that, if it happens even a little bit you can snap your ACL, PCL and or tear a hole in your meniscus.
For these reasons the strength of your hamstrings in particular are important for keeping your knee joint stable. This study looked at the correlation between hamstring stiffness and strength on knee joint stability.
Results
They found that hamstring strength did NOT correlate significantly with stability.
While hamstring stiffness did correlate with anterior knee joint stability
But what does that mean?
Typical HIIT classes include various power-based exercises like box jumps, broad jumps, medball throws and many more. These exercises don’t just require force output but encourage maximal rate of force development which trains your fast twitch muscle fibers. However because of the structure of many classes and inadequate resting times, the performance of these exercises isn’t always conducive to developing maximal power. Because your heart rate is elevated continuously, you can’t perform a box jump with maximal intensity for minutes at a time. Traditional power training typically has one repetition done with 10-20 seconds between each bout, leaving ample time for regeneration of sufficient nervous system drive for each rep. Although traditional power training methods, such as Olympic lifting, are essential for maximizing absolute power, HIIT is an effective complement by facilitating explosive training under high-intensity conditions
But aren’t stiff hamstrings a bad thing?
Yes, highly inflexible hamstrings can limit proper distribution of load across your legs hips and low back, leading to other issues. But how long the hamstrings can be and how quickly they react and therefore limit joint sliding are different things. One is the range of motion of the hamstrings and one is more related to the nervous system and muscle reactivity.
How do you build the right kind of hamstring stiffness?
Eccentric exercises: Nordic Hamstring curls, assisted concentric machine hamstring curls
High force: Deadlifts or RDL’s
Other: Sprinting & plyometrics (bounding & bridge hops)
🔶 Featured Recipe –
