Ground Up Strength

We hear about the rotator cuff. The all-important scapula. The trade off between mobility and stability. Sometimes I think that the experts have a vested interest in keeping the complexities of the shoulder, well…complex.

Have you heard of the shoulder girdle? What about the "shoulder complex"? No it's not a pun to say how complicated shoulder are. What about these injury terms? Your buddy got an AC injury? What the heck is an AC? Man oh man. How the heck can we keep our shoulders healthy when we're not even clear on what they are?

One of the problems is the terminology regarding movements of the shoulder and the so-called "scapulohumeral rhythm". When someone names a shoulder movement you must be clear on whether they are talking about the shoulder joint itself, the glenohumeral joint. Or the shoulder girdle, which is comprised of three joints, the sternoclavicular, acromioclavicular, and scapulothoracic (not a true synovial joint).

For instance, if I say, abduction of the shoulder I could mean the glenohumeral OR the shoulder girdle or scapula. Many times people are speaking of the shoulder girdle or shoulder complex (the shoulder joint and shoulder girdle) as a whole but never even make it clear. This causes, in the words of the Sir Topem Hat, Confusion and Delay. That's a Thomas the Tank Engine reference for all you non-hip peeps.

Eric Beard, a corrective exercise specialist from Boston, and all-around good guy, is always making videos about shoulder and other problems. There is a lack of videos concerning basic shoulder movements and especially the pairing of shoulder joint and shoulder girdle movements. That is, when you move at the shoulder the shoulder joint itself is only responsible for a certain range of that movement and there is a corresponding movement of the shoulder girdle with it. Without this co-movement, which is the scapulohumeral rhythm I mentioned, the shoulder will be compromised.

So I asked Eric to make a video showing the movement pairings. Instead, he decides to make a series of seven videos which we could basically call "Shoulders 101". He's done with the first two so we have a page at GUS waiting to begin your education. I've included some explanation regarding the shoulder complex and a bit of narration explaining some of the things that Eric says in the video since if you aren't familiar with all of the terminology it helps to be able to see it written down as well as hear them named and see them demonstrated. These videos are really great and I appreciate Eric taking the time to do this. All these will be collected on ONE page (don't you hate it when they make you click "next" for every paragraph?) and this page is called The Shoulder Complex: Demystifying the Shoulder with Eric Beard .

There is something I want to say about guys like Eric Beard. Most of the people involved in this industry are glory hounds. Pure and simple. They are too 'special' to educate people on the basics. They are busy making up the next great strength training program or being "innovative". They feel that the basics are just too darn basic for them to be bothered with. That's for people like me, the "grunts". Call us the infantry, then. I wish there were more people like Eric and less glory.

I actually had an "expert" tell me that I was wasting time going over basic information while trying to help a trainee on that forum. I couldn't believe it. He just assumed that everything I said was "common knowledge". What's even weirder is that it was in-depth physiology info I was writing so there is no way many would construe it as common knowledge unless, of course, they had gotten so caught up in their own "advanced" nature they had lost touch with reality. I told him I was trying to help the trainee and I could care less if the "experts" on the forum already knew everything, which I doubt they did. At the end of the day, guess who helped and who hindered that trainee? Well it wasn't the infantry that hindered him. Many times such experts seem to want to keep things sounding complicated and mysterious for fear we'll find out their making it up as they go along! Eric captioned the second video as "demystifying" the shoulder complex and I think that is a perfect way of saying it. Yes, it's difficult to understand but we CAN do it, at least enough to lead us forward in a reasonable way.

This brings me to another related subject.

In the strength training world there has been a slow but inexorable shift away from viewing performance related problems at just what they are to viewing them more as "deficiencies". Now, deficiency could be taken to mean much the same thing, couldn't it. You having a performance problem is the same thing as having a performance deficiency. But the word has taken on deeper connotation so that it has started to draw parallel with "insufficiency". These two words are VERY different and if you are a performance specialist, or corrective exercise specialist, or physical therapist of any kind your use of these words means everything to both your attitude toward a problem and your client or trainee. Where a deficiency is a simple lack of something and insufficiency is more a failure. Since I know you guy think in terms of muscles here is the difference. If a certain muscle simply lacked strength due to lack of training there would be a strength deficiency. But if that same muscle lacked one because of, for example, an interruption in the nerve supply to that muscle, there would be an insufficiency because the muscle would simply be paralyzed.

I saw this trainee's problem as a simple deficiency. That is, a simple "lack" of something performance-wise. I could say that a trainee has a conditioning deficiency, for instance. Simple solution, right? More conditioning. But the other "experts" were skipping over deficiency and going right to insufficiency. This trainee had reported no pain. No injury. Nothing like that. Yet their advice treated him as if he was a patient instead of an active and healthy young man, which is just what he was. Yes, he has biomechanical baggage, so to speak. So does everyone. But that is not an excuse to treat someone like they are broken. So their "assessments" were the same assessments that a physical therapist might use on an INJURED person in a PROFESSIONAL setting. This advice had nothing to do with solving a simple problem in performance with correct and simple assessments to get to the heart of the problem. Physical therapists are not necessarily performance specialists. Let's remember that. It is really not in the typical job description of a therapist to IMPROVE performance but simply to return to NORMAL performance. That does not mean that there are not Pt's and other pros out there who have bridged this world successfully. The problem is that much of the strength training industry seems to be losing grasp of the fact that it is two different worlds.

I will go into this in more detail in one of the upcoming eBooks but let me put it very simply for now. You can activate your glutes till you are blue in the face but if you want a big deadlift you will simply have to deadlift big at some point!

The Pain Relief Coach, Kathryn Merrow, a good friend of mine has a website called Simple Strengthening. She has lots of strength training exercises designed to help people who are in pain become more functional and pain-free. Now of course this is combined with a lot of other pain-relief information that can be found in her articles and podcasts. But Kathryn is not a strength trainer she is a Massage Therapist and pain-relief coach. Recently she plugged me and Ground Up Strength and the eBook downloads, etc. which was very nice of her to do especially since most of her readers are probably in pain and not really ready to start that next step. Ah, but that brings us to the point. Kathryn said in that plug that GUS is for those readers of hers that are ready to take that step once they have used her advice to rid themselves of pain, etc. Now I didn't have to tell her that and explain the difference between "lifting heavy stuff" and strength training as "therapy". She already knew that. Her job is to help people with their pain. There is plenty of the pain pie to go around believe me (I'm in a position to know). She doesn't have to have the strength training pie too. Yet these days I have to constantly contend with therapists who do not understand that all things therapy are not all things performance. They overlap, yes, but they do not overlap completely. So what is the difference between those people and people like Kathryn? My opinion is that it comes down to how much you care. At the end of the day, Kathryn does what she does because she genuinely CARES about the people she is trying to help and the results they get. That means she will do everything in her power to be better at her job without the ego driven need to be all things to all people, and to impress those people with their knowledge bag. Going from Eric Beard to Kathryn in one newsletter though that makes me feel that there are plenty other exceptional people out their. We simply must learn to look past image. So check out Kathryn's sites for pain relief info for the 'regular guy'.