Break Up Those Hips and Fix That Squat

by Adam Vogel – 1/12/2012

Ever hear a trainer try to explain why their client can’t get below parallel on a squat? Once you get past the token explanations about bad knees, aching backs, or tight body parts, the next issue is usually the hips.
It’s no secret that to have a great squat, you have to have great hip mobility. Unfortunately, saying that you need hip mobility to squat deep is like saying you need a lot of money to be rich; merely acknowledging that you need it doesn’t make it so. As any personal-finance guru will tell you, if you’re going to get rich, you’d better have a plan.
The hips have many different functions. They must be both stable and mobile at different times and in different planes, along with being able to abduct, adduct, extend, and rotate on demand. But when we discuss hip mobility in the context of the squat, what we’re really talking about is hip flexion.

Hip Flexion

Hip flexion is the technical term for a decrease in joint angle between the femur and pelvis. This occurs from either side of the joint, by raising the leg towards the abdomen – like when you run – or by lowering the upper body toward the leg – like when you squat down.
If you want to have any chance of squatting below parallel with a weight on your back, then you’re going to need at least 110-125 degrees of hip flexion. Achieving full squat depth with anything less than full range of motion at the hip requires your body to make a number of biomechanical compromises.
Following the joint-by-joint approach, when the hip lacks flexion, the joints above it (the lumbar spine), and below it (the knee) will overcompensate to make up the difference.
It’s something of a Ponzi scheme our bodies have developed, robbing stability from one joint to provide mobility for another. But while this type of compensated movement may allow you to achieve certain positions, it puts excessive strain on the back and knees.
When your body isn’t ready for these positions, the repetitive stress eventually leads to structural overload, inflammation, and a long-term relationship with your orthopedic surgeon. Show me a guy who says that squats hurt his knees or tweak his back and I’ll show you a guy with a hip mobility problem.
Typically when we see lifters struggling to reach full depth during a squat we immediately think of the posterior chain – tight hamstrings, glutes, lower back, etc. Yet limitations in hip flexion can come from the front or the back, depending on what’s being restricted. Hip restrictions come in three main flavors – muscular, capsular, and structural (bone) – each requiring different solutions.

Structural Problem

Structural restrictions occur when the femoral head and neck don’t “fit” properly into the acetabulum (the cup-shaped cavity at the base of the pelvis). Because this is often a genetic trait, sometimes you can’t do anything about it other than curse your parents for passing you their lackluster DNA.
However, these can also form as the result of increased exposure to activities that promote anterior pelvic tilt, like hockey and distance running. The forward tilting of the pelvis is usually the result of a shortening and tightening of the hip flexors and lumbar erectors, coupled with a lengthening and weakening of the glutes and abdominals. Vladimir Janda labeled this “lower cross-syndrome.”
This type of alignment sets the bottom of the pelvis on a crash course with the top of the femur every time you flex your hip. According to Janda, to fix this faulty posture, the tight hip flexors must first be inhibited through stretching and massage followed by strengthening exercises for the glutes and lower abdominals.
Exercises and articles on glute and abdominal strengthening are a plenty and don’t require much repeating – basically, don’t skimp on your planks, leg raises, bridges, and deadlifts.
Here are two drills to help melt away the layer of ice that’s likely formed around the front of your hip over the last decade:

Hip Flexor Stretch (Wall or Bench)

This is one of the most effective and universally-despised stretches ever. Perhaps this is because most lifters’ hip flexors are shorter than Gary Coleman ducking under a subway turnstile, or maybe they just don’t put enough effort into their stretches. Either way, grab a bench or a wall, pour yourself a glass of Scotch, and settle into position for 2-3 minutes a side.

Psoas Active Release with Plate

Psoas stretches might be a dime-a-dozen, but soft-tissue techniques are almost nonexistent. Because the psoas sits so deep within the body, it can be very difficult to access through touch. Here’s an easy way to get pressure onto this stubborn muscle using a common weight plate and some elbow grease.
Make sure to place the weight plate slightly off center, between the ribs and the pelvis. I like to center the pressure about two-inches from the belly button laterally, and about one-inch down. Once you feel weight pressing on the psoas, move your leg through hip flexion activation to breakup any scar tissue or fascial tightness.

Hip Accessories

Perhaps the least talked about or understood cause of limited mobility is tightness in the joint capsule itself. Like all synovial joints, the hip is encased in a flexible membrane – like a piece of fruit suspended in a bowl of Jell-O – that provides the hip with an additional layer of flexible support.
This membrane is referred to as your joint capsule. Although it might not receive much attention, it’s one of the most important pieces in the mobility puzzle. When the capsule becomes stiff and tight, it compresses the articulating surfaces of the joint and alters what’s called accessory joint movement.
Accessory movements at the capsular level are necessary for larger physiological movements like flexion or abduction to occur normally. For example, to avoid impinging the anterior capsule and psoas tendon during hip flexion, a slight posterior glide of the femur must occur. Without it, the joint must compress against these structures to achieve its goal of moving.
That brings us to the wonderful world of joint mobilization! This phrase gets thrown around a lot in the strength and conditioning world as a stand-in for any exercise that purports to improve range of motion.
However, joint mobilizations are actually very specific techniques that involve applying angled pressure to a joint to manually create accessory movement, stretch the joint capsule, and decompress the surrounding tissue.
Traditionally performed by a manual therapist with the assistance of a traction belt, many joint mobilizations can be recreated by yourself with a little bit of know-how and a two-inch stretch band.

Bottom-up Hamstring Stretch with Band

Loop a stretch band around a squat cage. Place your leg through the middle of the band, pulling it to where your hip and leg meet. Walk away from the cage, causing the band to stretch.
Once you have a good amount of tension, place the band-leg forward and the free leg back. Bring your hands to the ground, bending both knees. Then, keeping your hands in a fixed position, begin to straighten the knees as much as possible, pushing the hips back toward the cage. Repeat for 15-20 cycles.

Top-Down Forward Bend with Band

Starting from the same setup as the bottom-up mobilization, this time keep both legs straight and reach forward to touch the toes of the forward foot. Press your hips back toward the cage as you lean forward. Repeat for 15-20 cycles.

Squat with Band

Here the band is in the same position around the upper leg, but the anchor is lower to the ground (about 6-8 inches from the floor) so the tension is directed back and down. Walk away from the cage to increase band tension at the hip and perform 10-15 deep squats for each leg.

Soft-Tissue Restrictions

Last but not least are muscular restrictions. These are the big men on campus in the strength and conditioning world, receiving much of the attention from both trainers and clients.
These fall into three categories. First are soft-tissue entrapment issues, where tissue becomes gnarled or stuck together, like in the case of trigger points and myofascial adhesions. Second are problems with excessive stiffness or resistance to changes in length. Finally, problems involving muscle length, where a muscle has actually lost sarcomeres and therefore has become shorter.
Restrictions in the hamstrings, glutes, or lower back can all limit hip flexion. I find that a lacrosse ball works best to free-up entrapment issues, while a stretch band works best on length and stiffness problems.

High Hamstring Mash

The proximal hamstring attachments on the backside of the pelvis exist in an area of high stress and tension in the body, making them prone to stiffness and adhesions. Compound that with the eight or more hours most people spend sitting directly on this area each day – squishing it like an overstuffed flatbread Panini – and you have plenty of room for problems to occur.
To free up this area, place a lacrosse ball directly under the glute fold (slightly closer to inside) and then sit on something hard (insert your own jokes here) like a plyo block or the floor. Roll back and forth over the hamstring attachment, ungluing the ugly mess of matted down tissue that has likely formed there.

Hamstring Drive-Down

Loop a 1-inch stretch band about a quarter of the way up one of the columns on a squat cage. Lie down in front of the cage, with your head directly under the band and put one foot through the looped band. Keeping your leg straight, push the band down to the floor and then slowly control the movement back to the top. The heavy eccentric load forces a controlled lengthening of the posterior hip and hamstring, thereby increasing flexibility and decreasing stiffness.

Conclusion

Summing up, limitations at the bottom range of your squat can be coming from the backside of the pelvis through stiffness or adhesion, or the front side through capsular restriction and decreased accessory motion. Identifying the source of the restriction will have an obvious effect on correcting the limitations in range, as will taking the course of action described in this article.

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Complex Neuromuscular Training for Size and Strength

Squat and Sprint

Complex Neuromuscular Training for Size and Strength

by Dean Somerset – 8/16/2011

What’s the best way to pack on pounds of lean mass? Heavy loads with long rest periods? High volume with short rest periods? A combination of the two, with a sprinkle of P-90X thrown in for flavor?

Though either approach can certainly “work,” you don’t have to look further than the nearest gymnastic training center to see that there are other effective ways to pack on appreciable muscle mass. Considering gymnasts often have some of the thickest arms and shoulders per pound of body mass of any athlete, it’s surprising you don’t see more gym rats hitting the rings or pommel horse.

And let’s not forget sprinters. Many 100m and 200m sprinters like Harry Aikines-Aryeetey from the UK have more beef on their arms, shoulders, and thighs than many gym rats could ever dream of building. On top of that, their muscles tend to have a “denser” look, possibly due to a higher concentration of contractile proteins than that of bodybuilders, where increased cell volume and intramuscular glycogen play a big role (sarcoplasmic hypertrophy).

I recall watching training footage of disgraced Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson before his performance enhancement drug scandal. For one particular workout, Johnson brought a squat rack onto the track and performed an extremely heavy set of back squats (I think he had over 500 pounds) for 3-5 reps, then immediately burst from the cage in a full speed sprint for 60m.

The reasoning behind this was to overload the nervous system in a sort of “pre-fatigue” manner with the back squats, and then have to generate power through the already tired legs to achieve top velocity.

To put it differently, he was working the fast-twitch fibers with high-force, low-speed contractions in the back squat, and then immediately hitting them with high-force, high-speed contractions in sprinting. It was two mechanically different activities requiring a high degree of neural activity to produce maximal force in a sort of bipolar manner.

This was interesting as much of the prevailing wisdom at the time regarding hypertrophy revolved around simply lifting heavier weights within an 8-12 rep range. As you got stronger you either lifted more weight or did another rep with the same weight in the subsequent workouts.

The idea of resistance and speed of contraction being inversely related didn’t take into account the muscle force production capacity, and the associated muscle activity to get it there.

This is why many athletes can generate huge muscle force components with relatively light resistance (baseball, punching, golf, etc.). If we were to crank up the resistance without significantly affecting the top-end movement speed, we’d see some explosive gains in size and strength.

So I started experimenting. I couldn’t take a squat rack onto the field, but I was able to position a squat rack and a cycle ergometer right next to each other. I’d set up the rack for a heavy set and then hop on the bike for a 6-second bout of very high speed sprint work that left my legs feeling like Jell-O.

After two months, both my squat weight and sprint speed were up significantly, along with noticeable growth in my quads and hamstrings. My acceleration and top speed in all the sports I was participating in was up, too.

I tried this workout again a decade later – being outside the fantastic adaptable teenage hormonal years – with similar results. I then tried it on a few of my “hard-gainer” clients, and found that with only two workouts a week in this scheme, both saw solid gains in size and strength.

One client gained 10 pounds of muscle in two months (going from 156 at 5’8″ to 166) without changing his diet, and after training hard for over a year. Another gained 14 pounds after already training for two years, but found that his diet definitely changed because he was eating almost anything that wasn’t nailed down.

By making the muscle contract in a high force/low speed and high force/high speed series, the body is put under a very high-intensity training stimulus, which provides three major benefits.

First, it extends the force production phase of the exercise beyond the 3-5 reps of the heavy squat and incorporates a cyclic natured movement that requires a high degree of muscle force production.

The increased time under tension of roughly 10 seconds of maximal power output will completely tax the creatine phosphate system and the neural systems’ ability to generate an impulse into the muscle for an extended period. The end result is a greater response from the endocrine system and muscle satellite cells to put everything back together, and a greater development and repair of muscle fibers.

Second, fast twitch muscle fibers, the ones that can grow to be the biggest within the body, are stimulated by both high force production and high speed production. By using a system that addresses both of these components, we’re getting the best variety of stimulation to the fast twitch fibers, as well as the highest intensity stimulation possible short of hooking our muscles up to a generator and redlining the sucker.

Third, although not a component of the exercise itself, the rest period is kept to just 90 seconds between bouts, allowing for an adequate recovery of strength and contractile energy sources while putting the body in the most advantageous position to pump out growth hormone and Testosterone.

Most powerlifting or high strength development workouts require the user to rest between sets for between 2-5 minutes, whereas keeping the rest periods short helps to continue the taxation of the growth hormone and Testosterone response within the body. What this means is that the maximal amount of weight lifted in a session is going to be slightly less as the sets wear on, so adjust the weights down as needed.

The Workouts

This program is meant to be used as a two-day-per-week substitution to an existing strength program for someone who has at least a year of good solid training under their belt. Make sure you have the finer points of lifting down for the specific lifts given, and that you have an understanding of the physical requirements for top speed sprint work. For those willing to give it a try, get ready to hate life for a few hours each day.

Workout One

Warm-up: General conditioning, movement prep, and foam rolling.

Series One: Barbell back squats plus sprinting (Airdyne, spin bike, or ideally 60m track).

Set	Exercises	Reps	Weight	Speed	Rest
1	Squat	10	60% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint*			80% Top speed
2	Squat	5	80% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint*			90% Top speed
3	Squat	3	90% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint*			Top speed
4	Squat	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint*			Top speed
5	Squat	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint*			Top speed

* 6 seconds on machines or distance on track, from dead start

Series Two: Weighted chins plus countercurrent vertical jumps (swing arms down and back in preparation of the jump, then reach for the sky when you leave the ground). Optimal to use a Verta-Max or wall or other surface to gauge height.

Set	Exercises	Reps	Weight	Rest
1	Chin-ups	5	Body weight	90 sec.
	Jumps for max height	5
2	Chin-ups	3	45 lbs.	90 sec.
	Jumps for max height	5
3	Chin-ups	3	45 lbs.	90 sec.
	Jumps for max height	5
4	Chin-ups	3	25 lbs.	90 sec.
	Jumps for max height	5

Workout Two

Warm-up: General conditioning, movement prep, and foam rolling.

Series One: Barbell front squats plus Concept rower sprints.

Set	Exercises	Reps	Weight	Distance/Speed	Rest
1	Squat	10	60% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint on rower			100m < 80% Top speed
2	Squat	5	80% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint on rower			100m < 90% Top speed
3	Squat	3	90% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint on rower			50m – Top speed
4	Squat	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint on rower			50m – Top speed
5	Squat	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Sprint on rower			50m – Top speed

Series Two: Bench press & Prowler push, sled drag, or other resisted run device.

Set	Exercises	Reps	Weight	Distance/Speed	Rest
1	Bench press	10	60% 1RM		90 sec.
	Resisted run device			25m < 80% Full speed
2	Bench press	5	80% 1RM		90 sec.
	Resisted run device			25m < 90% Full speed
3	Bench press	3	90% 1RM		90 sec.
	Resisted run device			25m – Full speed
4	Bench press	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Resisted run device			25m – Full speed
5	Bench press	3	87% 1RM		90 sec.
	Resisted run device			25m – Full speed

These workouts are insanely intense, but considering the goal is to increase peak strength, peak velocity, and build muscle, you need to create a systemic strain on the muscular system that evokes the largest response in growth hormone and Testosterone.

Alternate these two days once each per week with at least two days in between. For instance, workout one would be on Monday, and workout two either on Thursday or Friday. This will give your nervous system a chance to recover before going into the next workout.

Once the first month (four times through each workout) is in the books, add 2-5% to each lift you’re performing for the second month. For instance, on day one, set 3 of back squats will move from 90% 1RM to 92% 1RM. For the theoretical lifter who maxes out at 315 pounds, this means the weight they will move from 285 up to 290 pounds. A 5% increase would mean going from 285 to 300 pounds.

This systematic increase in resistance is necessary to keep the relative intensity high throughout the workouts. Do not perform heavy squats on any other day of the week, although after the second week you may not be able to even walk, let alone squat on the alternate days.

What this workout program lacks in variety must be made up for in raw aggression. As T NATION contributor Tony Gentilcore says, you have to intimidate the weights when doing this program. Yell, scream, kick, and claw to get every rep out, and put every ounce of your being into every second of the sprint work. Since the rest intervals are only 90 seconds long, you won’t have full recovery before beginning the next set, so it will definitely be a mental test to get through these workouts. That said, the end result should more than make up for going through hell and back.

References

Shoenfeld, B. (2010) The Mechanisms of Muscle Hypertrophy and their Application to Resistance Training. J. Str & Cond Research Vol. 24 issue 10, pp. 2857-2872.

Rahimi et al. (2010). Effects of Very Short Rest Periods on Hormonal Responses to Resistance Exercise in Men. J Str. & Cond Research Vol. 24 issue 7, pp. 1851-1859.

Cristea et al (2008). Effects of Combined Strength and Sprint Training on Regulation of Muscle Contraction at the Whole-Muscle and Single-Fibre Levels in Elite Master Sprinters. Acta Phsyiol. Vol 193, issue 3. Pp. 275-289.h

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