This article is about fixing imbalances, not injuries.
In my last Instagram post, I mentioned that I’m working on addressing the muscular imbalances I’ve accumulated in the course of my training. I also mentioned that I’m not sharing anything about that work, because I don’t want to encourage anyone to waste their time trying to emulate me.
Look: I’ve been training for over twenty years. I’ve set all-time world records in powerlifting, won major international meets, and earned my IFBB pro card. At no point during this career did I worry about details like developing textbook training technique, perfect muscular symmetry. I focused on big goals and trusted that the details would take care of themselves — and that’s exactly what happened.
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The only reason I’m “sweating the small stuff” now is because there’s no big stuff left. I’ve eked out literally every ounce of progress I could from the basics. Unless you’ve done the same, I recommend putting your effort into training hard and eating right, not on what I’m writing about in the rest of this article.
That said, I received an overwhelming number of questions about my current training, so I’m going to share my strategy for fixing muscular imbalances.
What Won’t Work
First, I want to be very clear: you can’t just train through a muscular imbalance. Except in very rare cases of structural deformity, imbalances arise from poor movement patterns. (Problematic movement patterns aren’t limited to gym lifts; your posture, gait, and other lifestyle factors can contribute to imbalances.)
You can’t fix a poor movement pattern by repeating the pattern. Think of “hunt-and-peck” typists: no matter how hard they practice, they’re never as fast as touch typists. If hunt-and-peckers want to reach their potential, they have to completely overhaul their old patterns. It’s the same with lifting.
However, the most popular “strategies” for overhauling technique and resolving muscular imbalances are awful. They’re so bad, in fact, that I think it’s unfair to call them strategies: they’re scams.
The two worst offenders are corrective exercises and manual therapy. By “corrective exercises,” I’m referring to unloaded (or minimally loaded) isolation movements for stabilizing muscles. Examples include wall slides, terminal knee extensions, hip lifts, and much, much more. Manual therapy comprises all sorts of passive interventions, like massage, dry needling, cryotherapy, and more.
While corrective exercises and manual therapy aren’t necessarily useless, they will not resolve muscular imbalances.
Why Those Strategies Fail
Corrective exercises and manual therapy fail because they address problematic movement patterns in isolation, not in their appropriate problematic contexts. If you have shoulder pain, for example, you might perform an exercise for your rotator cuff, or get massage on your pec minor. And you might experience some relief — but chances are, you won’t fix the underlying cause of your shoulder pain, because when you go back to bench pressing, you’ll expose those muscle groups to the same movement patterns that stressed them in the first place.
That’s because individual muscle groups never work in isolation, and certainly not in times of dysfunction. Instead, your body (well, your brain, really) compensates for a lack of strength, mobility or perception in one area by upregulating other areas when performing complex movements.
Everyone is familiar with this type of compensation, at least at the most obvious level. Let’s say you sprain your right ankle — you instinctively place more weight on the left ankle, right? Well... not quite. You place more weight on your entire left side. You’ll subtly shift more weight to your left leg and lumbar spine. Now that you’re twisting a bit to your lower left side, your right upper body — your shoulder, arm and maybe even neck — have to do more work. Pretty soon you’re turning into a pretzel.
Now, in cases of simple injury in a sedentary population, that’s not a big deal; once the right ankle has healed, full function will return pretty quickly. That’s because “full function” for a sedentary person isn’t much to write home about. Full function for a lifter is much different. When you’re supporting a 5, 6, or 700-pound bar instead of just a 200-pound body, you’re dealing with an exponentially more drastic compensation.
I know what you’re thinking: no sane person is squatting 700 on a sprained ankle. That’s true — but this is just an extreme example to illustrate how poor movement patterns arise. The exact same compensation pattern can arise — albeit much more slowly — from seemingly innocuous discrepancies in structure and function. If your left leg is slightly longer than your right; or if your pecs are disproportionately strong relative to your lats; or if you had surgery on your wrist when you were a kid, you might be dealing with a serious compensation pattern. And, because there was no obvious trauma involved in the development of that pattern, you’re probably not aware of it.
All of this explains why corrective exercise and massage will never resolve a muscular imbalance. In the example that opened this section, your sore rotator cuff or tight pec minor are both part of a larger pattern of compensation. Addressing them directly does nothing. You must change the pattern to resolve the imbalance.
What to Do Instead
So, how do you change the pattern? Well, it’s complicated. That’s why I recommend not wasting your time until you’ve completely exhausted every ounce of progress you can get from straightforward training. But if you insist on trying, here’s what I did:
Learn fascial anatomy.
Every lifter should invest in a good anatomy textbook. If you can identify the major muscle groups and their attachment points, you’ll have a much easier time using those muscle groups in any movement you perform. In short, learning anatomy is an easy way to fast-track your mind-muscle connection.
However, the traditional anatomical paradigm is a bit limited. As I explained above, no muscle group works in isolation. In many cases, it’s not immediately obvious how muscle groups do work together. In contrast, fascial anatomy conceptualizes the body as one piece. Understanding fascial anatomy and common patterns of fascial dysfunction can help you to identify and resolve the source of “kinks” in your kinetic chain.
Thomas Myers has an entire textbook that’s essentially a cheat sheet for understanding patterns of movement dysfunction. You can buy it here or on Amazon.
Practice mindfulness.
In my opinion, this is the hardest part. Remember what I explained at the beginning of this article: your imbalances come from repeating poor movement patterns over a long period of time, both inside and outside of the gym. In other words, you’ve developed bad habits of movement.
As we all know, breaking bad habits takes a lot of time, patience, and discipline. Breaking bad movement habits is especially difficult because we’re usually not aware of them. When you reach for a cup of coffee or buckle your seatbelt, you’re probably not thinking about your scapular movement — you’re thinking about the coffee or your seatbelt. And, in doing so, you’re repeating your bad habits and ingraining them even more deeply into your “muscle memory.”
The only solution is mindfulness: paying careful attention to how your body moves, all of the time, inside and outside of the gym. If that sounds impossible, that’s because you haven’t trained for it. Again, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel: I suggest downloading the Headspace app and practicing some of the mindful walking lessons. You’ll get the hang of it quickly.
Move.
Once you understand proper movement patterns, and are aware of your own dysfunctions, the last step is to fix those dysfunctions. Again, this is not easy, and it’s not simple, either. I’ve written extensively about technique already, so I won’t rehash that here. I just want to reiterate that fixing your technique in the gym is only one part of fixing muscular imbalances. If you skip the first two steps, you’ll get nowhere.
At this point, you’re probably thoroughly overwhelmed. I get it. That’s why I keep saying you probably don’t need to worry about any of this. But if you insist, and you want more help, click here to contact me for coaching.