For the past few years I have not allowed
myself to lift heavy weights. Doing yoga and pilates and a lot of isometric
stretching has shown me that lifting weights that are too heavy causes muscle strain
and cramping all over the body. I used to lift heavy weights every day and it
took a huge toll on my muscles. In fact, I used to wake up every morning in
disturbing amounts of pain. My chest, my shoulders, my neck and my back felt
like they were “locked up” and the pain was often “crushing.” I felt like I was
in a straight jacket and I knew that it was not natural to feel this way. It
got so bad, and the flexibility of my upper body became so poor that I knew I
had to change something soon. Upon waking I would try different stretches and
this helped, but to reverse the cramping I had to stop my unhealthy lifting
routine.
I would lift weights that were too heavy
for me, and I would breathe very shallowly. Lifting heavy weights causes the
muscles that you are using to grow in size in the short term, there is no
question about that. But it can actually be bad for those same muscles in the
long term. Several masseuses have pointed out to me that I have silver dollar sized
patches of scar tissue along my pectoral muscles. I developed these from bench
pressing too much weight. I actually have inflammation, muscular knots, and
scar tissue all along my shoulder girdle. Excessive weight puts too much strain
on the muscles responsible for the motion but it can be especially damaging to
the muscles responsible for stabilizing the weight. Every exercise involves
stabilizing muscles which contract isometrically, keeping parts of the body
steady so that the primary muscles can do their job. These muscles are integral
to posture; they literally hold you together. Excessive strain makes them
painful, tense, reduces their oxygen supply and leaves them more susceptible to
injury. In fact, I sprained my shoulder
in a fall from a skateboard and I am sure that the muscles that I injured were
the muscles that I had strained from lifting weights improperly. Because of the
shoulder injury I had to stop lifting weights and my upper body muscle mass
atrophied very quickly. However, the pain, the tension, the knots, and the scar
tissue remained as if I had never stopped working out at all. What this tells
us is that lifting heavy weights has benefits that are easily lost, but comes
with costs that persist. The muscular bulk comes and goes very quickly. You can
quickly lose all of the bulk but retain all of the strain. I felt that I had to
get this tension out of my upper body, and so I developed an alternate way to
lift weights.
When you lift heavy weights there are a
lot of muscles that never rest in between reps. This is especially true of the
weaker, stabilizing muscles (such as the muscles surrounding the scapula during
bench press). As you do each repetition you want there to be moments where even
the weakest links in your muscles can relax. You can sense the overused muscles
because they will usually feel sore and tender as you are doing the rep with
low weight. You will feel a pinch. Now I go to the gym, sit on practically
every machine on the floor, and use the lowest weight setting to do between 20
and 80 repetitions trying to achieve, and work through, that subtle pinch. For
example, there are muscles around the periphery of the scapula that are very
tense. During a deep tissue massage these will be very painful. You want to
make it so that during each repetition there are moments where these painful
muscles both rest and flex. When you work out with very heavy weights, only the
strongest muscles are given a chance to rest between reps, the weakest muscles
are forced to stay tense the entire time. This overuse is what forces them into
a low metabolic state that is painful, causes them to get weaker, and inevitably
destroys our posture.
There are even muscles that don’t even
rest in between sets. These are the stiffest, most painful and most susceptible
to injury. These muscles generally stay tight even when we sleep. If we can get
these to relax, then we can exercise them and strengthen them, but lifting
heavy weights will only keep them atrophic. The best way to get them to relax
and become stronger is to use the machines at your gym at a very low setting in
an attempt to stretch and flex in to them. Pinpointing them with low weights
will get them to open up. Bulldozing them with heavy weights will force them to
close down further. My goal is to slowly build up to lifting heavier weights,
and since I started my routine I have been able to increase the weight a little
every month.
Most everyone lifts weights from a
compromised position. When you lift weights that are too heavy, you brace and
lock up your entire spine. Most people perform, not only their bench press, but
all of their exercises with their spine and shoulder girdle in the same
invariant position each time. This is crippling, and leads to weakness rather
than strength. If you reduce the amount of weight you can lift without bracing
yourself. Now you can alter and vary your posture with each rep, changing the
distribution of weight loading, and stimulating growth in areas that are
usually stiff. I used this method to reach the weakest points throughout my
neck, shoulders and spine. Notice where these weak points are, and try to
engage them. Exercise them until you can “feel the burn” lightly.
I spent 6 months lifting very light
weights and have slowly moved up to moderate weights. I try to do it
athletically, with perfect posture and perfect breathing. While going through
the repetitions I stretch constantly, pushing and pulling, twisting and bending.
I flex kyphotically and lordotically throughout my spine while lifting. I do a
few reps with my neck flexed to each side, then again with my chin to my chest,
with my neck retracted, with my neck flexed backwards. In a way it is like yoga
for your upper body. It is also an intense, high energy workout, for the little
muscles. In another blog entry I try my best to describe the feeling of high
muscle tension and how to flex into these particularly sore muscles. You can
read more about that here.
I used to always tilt my neck a little bit
to the left so that I could come across to others as nonoffensive. This lead to
a soft tissue injury that I could only exercise while doing pull-downs in the
gym. I would position my neck at that angle and perform the pull down slowly
and easily. It took weeks to work through it. There are many orientations of
skeletal muscles that reveal these types of weakness, we must work through
them.
When you build muscle from lifting heavy
loads your create tension in your muscles. Whether your chest and arms grow
from bench press or your glutes and legs grow from squats, you are also
introducing strain into these muscles as well. This strain makes the muscles
painful and unhealthy. It also makes it so that the muscle can quickly and
easily atrophy back to its original state. You want your muscles to be large
but you don’t want them to be hard and tight because hard and tight muscles
atrophy quickly once you stop lifting. Compression, massage, deep breathing,
and light weight lifting complement your workout routine, removing the excess
strain and making your gains less temporary and more permanent.
Thank you for sharing . Thanks to these information, my trainning was more effective
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