Step ups the ATG system.
Where do they fit?
What are they good for?
We're going live with Ben Clarfield.
Is the plan, the step-up is part of the ATG system it fits in alongside together with the sled.
Now if you're going really hard on the sled the step up might not be as key as if you're unable to jump in on the sleds.
We need that strength from the ground up.
We need to be strong.
We know that we need to be strong in the foot.
We know that we need to be strong in the calf.
If we're going to dominate single-foot jumping then it makes sense that we practice something that is a single-foot jumping mason.
How are you?
Here we go, we've got the man himself Mr. Clarfield.
How are you?
Here we go. We're good.
There we go rolling step-ups, we're talking step-ups.
When did the step-ups come on the radar for you?
Was that very very early in your training career or is it a little further in?
A little further in, I think.
It's funny. I talked to one of my coaches.
It's an interesting thing, sometimes we go to the thing that we're good at or that sort of makes sense to us and it's good and sometimes it's bad and for me weirdly enough, I used to play basketball and I thought lifting was stupid and I didn't care how people looked.
I thought that was also stupid, it's like “What if? So what” like “You got a 20 pack but I just crossed you and scored on you. Well, you suck”, there was no like “Oh but he's better looking or what”, there's no… I didn't care about that.
When you're athletic you don't.
When you think about athletic performance you think “Well did I or didn't I win?”.
So my back used to really really hurt after basketball and my knees hurt.
I just thought it was obvious and I started lifting late.
So I think I was 23 when I moved to Canada, 22, 23 and did some biceps randomly once
in a while but I never lifted seriously and my back used to hurt all the time I think I read in men's health deadlifting is good so I started deadlifting and my back pain disappeared.
I was like “Oh this is cool”, so I did various rep styles and whatever and I didn't really look up it was men's health garbage.
So I had no idea but at some point, I started figuring out “Well okay, well how about trying to lift more?”.
So I remember lifting 135 back in the day and we were like “That's heavy, not kilos pounds”.
So 60, 61 kilos whatever, I was like “Oh, this is weird” and meanwhile this is at a time where I could dunk so I didn't care about lifting.
I’m like “But my sport, I’m good at my sport”.
So deadlifting, working then I kept being like “Okay, well, how much can I lift?” and every time I would just put more weight on the bar.
The most basic conception of progressive overload without having that one was progressive over it's like “Okay next time you add more” and then I got a job as a personal trainer and I deadlifted and did some other random stuff and I would do chin-ups and say like “Well how much can I chin up? Can I do 10? Can I do 12? Can I add weight? Oh I can add weight. What if I add more weight?”, that kind of a thing.
So pretty decent before.
Yeah, so step-ups came afterward when I discovered Charles Poliquin that's when all of the stuff of the progression of step-ups, it's a Poliquin step up and there's no Patrick's, it was just a side step up, paul could step up, Peterson step up and just the whole discover for me was that.
Where you then incorporate it into a program and you would do it if someone had terrible knees.
You would do those first work towards split squats and all this kind of stuff before you even squat it.
So it was one of those like “Huh, this is a cool solution” but I never…
So it was pretty late I would say from a random lifting point of view.
So that's, I think it was an interesting thing for me, squats came late and they came because of all of this, all of the Charles stuff which I realized how terrible my squats were compared to other stuff that I was just naturally decent at.
You had a great point.
I think some time ago which is what's interesting is when you sort of measure a bench press as a capability of someone to exert force squats, if someone tells you they squat 450 or 200 kilos or I had a guy who said “Yeah, yeah I can squat 200 kilos easy”.
I’m like “You couldn't squat 130 kilos properly the way we do it”.
Ask the guy it wasn't even close it was 100 and whatever.
So there's such variance.
So in some ways, it's easy for us to be snobs and say like “Well, that's not a real squat”.
Okay well, then how do you measure and how do you have someone from afar tell you how strong or not strong they are?
How do you assess whereas the bench press the guy says “Well, yeah I’ve benched oh 300”, can bench 300 for eight and if you're…and then you
So you see if they're benching 300 pounds per eight or if they're or they're not really benching 300 there's it's an easier metric.
So I remember I could bench over 300 way before I could squat over 300.
So that was one of those pounds kilos.
Yeah, but that tells you the nervous system works, it's not something to write off.
The bench press can be criticized but if an athlete has a big bench press and they're not injured then it's a good sign, it's not a bad thing.
Yeah, it's funny because it became a tool that was denigrated but it's still a tool.
And it's very funny and I train a whole bunch of jiu-jitsu, very high-level jiu-jitsu athletes in Canada and there was a whole bunch of “Well, I don't really bench press", one other guy says and I’m like “Why?”.
It's like “Well some trainer said that bench pressing isn't my mindset” but it's a very very closely correlated tool for the sport of jiu-jitsu which is lying on your back and getting someone to get the [ ] off of you.
So actually there's technique involved and all this other stuff but really there's force production and if you can bench more your defenses become easier.
So he was like “Oh, I never thought of that”, the answer's because it's been demonized and I think that's the thing, it shouldn't be demonized, it's another tool.
It's when people say “Well a barbell, I would never use a barbell”.
Why? it's a great tool, it's one of the best tools.
It's like “Oh I never use dumbbells well” just because you don't have any dumbbells.
They're all great tools.
The people that make kettlebells to be all end-all no it's a tool but the people that dismiss kettlebells and say they're useless, they're not useless, it's a tool.
Each one of these things is a tool for us to use in space and time to either get stronger or not stronger and there's better tools for various things and worse tools but again that's how to use the tool.
I think the philosophical point is to realize these are tools and yeah we should use them with our brain and our body, it's such an important thing because anyone can make a cake but only some people can make a really world-class cake and Wolfgang Unsold said that when I went to visit him down in Stuttgart and he's like anyone can put food on a plate but there's only so many Michelin three-star chefs and so we can all be doing the same thing and we can all be doing something very very different.
We can all be using flour, eggs, and sugar and coming up with very different concoctions that people will pay different money for and have a different experience with and I think that's important to acknowledge because a lot of coaches will write themselves off and say “Look we all squat, bench, deadlift.
We're all everyone. We're squat bench cleaned then basically the same thing so it doesn't really matter too much.
No, the details make all the difference of whether someone becomes really successful or they you put them into a position where they get injured and they go out the back door and they end up on painkillers and it's literally life and death difference between whether you're getting these details right.
So speaking about this in relation to the step-up, how do you use the step up?
Where does it fit in how important is it?
Is it peaking?
Is it prep? What is it?
I think the best answer always is it depends.
So I would say if someone comes in and their knees are blasted and they're just garbage, it's easy for all of us that are in any way, shape, or form associated with ATG because then Ben Patrick is doing such a great job for us but the thing that's interesting is I had a guy contact me says “Well, I like what Ben's doing but my knees are fine. I’ve got really crappy back”.
So with this guy step-ups aren't going to be the primary thing I’m going to do.
I’m going to make him split squat until he has split squats coming out of his leg and every pore of his body and he's going to do a bunch of stretching and he's going to do a bunch of stuff for his low back and all kinds of different ways and I might throw in a step up once a week for him because his knees aren't the number one thing but I would say the worse a thing for someone the more I attack it and that doesn't mean attack it in the sense of like “Okay you've got a bad back and bad knees, all right it's 500 pounds back squat for you”.
It's like no we get there it's if someone has bad knees, worse knees then I’m not so quick to back squat them and I’m much quicker to do all of the other things.
So it might be during the week, I think I did a call where I talked about how would you use the step up in a way that the person can step up for the rest of their life because really when we're getting paid as coaches you have to figure out how and that's this.
We can talk more about what I’m discussing with Ben and yourself of how we need to coach our coaches which is to understand that we're trying to sell Ben had a great line, he's like we're trying to make the unsexy sexy and Ben's doing a phenomenal job at that.
So the question then is “What are the details of it?”.
So let's say we have someone that is lower body hurt and they need step ups once or twice a week, again the other question you always have to ask is “How many times are you seeing them?”.
So let's assume that I’m seeing these people minimally three to four times a week which is what we generally do here, sometimes it's more and again we're talking gen pop so if it's an athlete, it's a whole nother ball game where the return on investment and the time frame is much faster.
So let's say we have…
Will they sled before that?
Yeah, sure it all depends like with a bad knee.
Yeah, I actually really like sledding before so it's really easy.
So let's assume this is the workout.
We're going to go and they're going to come in and I’m going to go reverse sled.
If someone gets a bit more advanced, they'll go forward backward but reverse slide is the easiest thing because it's such an easy buy-in and you love buy-ins.
I love buying spines are great because it means that someone isn't just “All right, put the bar on your back” and it's like squatting that's big or the deadlift they pick up the butt it's like oh by the time they get to that I don't believe it should be 40 45 minutes into an hour workout that they touch the bar, that's stupid but if it's 10 minutes in, cool where they've done some calves or they've done…
So it depends on how crappy their calves are and how much work they need but I would say we're gonna go sled depending on what it is.
I just did a video on it which is an easy one on two minutes off you're not trying to kill them, you're shooting, they're grabbing the water, they're slowly warming up, three sets, three to four sets depending on how one they get and they can start to speed it up on their own pace but really it's just blood flow proven the grease moving not technical.
Their brain is going to start rolling then I do one of two things, I’ll either start with the step-ups or I’ll start with their calves and tibialis raisers.
Yup some people they're so garbage and they're so tight in the lower extremities that it's even good to start with a certain calf tip see and so I get them on it.
So it's standing calf, seated calf, tibialis or tibial raise first usually because it's just so nice and easy it just blast into it three sets 25, 20 to 25 depends on where they are, 15 to 25 really if we're gonna play intensification and if we're going to really play all the way.
15 reps is when they're squatting heavy but again they're not there yet.
So then we get into probably a Patrick step up because it's just the easiest to start off and it could be low and we start going and I’ll load them pretty quick because then they'll feel they're working so it could be 20 20 reps.
Have you been a fan of the side step-up?
I do remember that was in the PICP too but I never really used it.
The thing is, the problem with Charles and it's not a problem, it's in some ways the gift that keeps on giving, there was so much.
I was talking to, it's funny, there was a lady who's a friend of mine who lives not far from Ben and she visited the last time I went down and she actually introduced men she biosigged him and told him about strong madness.
This is over a decade ago and Ben went off on his way and did all his stuff and whatever but it was great to have her come and work out, is it Ashley or not?
Lexi could no okay.
Anyway, she's great. She's a good friend.
She's great and what's interesting is that she's gone off and done very well and she's very intelligent and she's in the functional medicine world.
The thing is with Charles you can go off on that and you could have gone off on that and being very successful and very deep diving on all kinds of very complex stuff.
Yeah with nutrition and brain health and gut health and microbes and molds and all kinds of crazy stuff and help a lot of people which is so cool and then you could be Ben who's the one could say the preeminent knee expert in the world or whatever you want to call it and there's a whole myriad of people that do all kinds of different stuff in between, there's bodycon people that have never touched an athlete in their life and bodybuilding and all kinds of stuff and there's people that have never touched a bodybuilder in their life and their athletic performance.
So there's so many different things that you could go down the path and what's my point?
My point is Charles gave us so many exercises, he was the absolute master of saying “Oh you have advice, I think I did a video on this”, “Oh you've got a dumbbell well okay great this is one curve oh this is one curl well if you have your pinky on this side it's a different curl if you have your thumb on the other side it's a different curl and if you semi-supinate supinate supinating pronated pronate it's 20 different exercises and we haven't gotten into the rep ranges or the periodization model or pauses or he was a master of every different angle exercise because he knew that variety really, he lived by a variety of the spice of life and we could talk up or lower but the idea is that lower body doesn't need as much variety but our brains need variety so you can do.
So I think I talked about this or we've talked about this where you can do a step up with dumbbells, that's fine, then you can do a step up with a barbell on your back, that's fine, you do a step up with the hex bar, that's fine and you do a step up in all kinds of different ways.
So you can do it sideways, so you can do forwards, you can do stepping on, you can do stepping off, so the thing is that's the genius of a coach if we think “Oh well all we have is one thing”.
So you have the side step, if you use it, great, awesome.
What I mean “Oh this is what, where does it fit for you though?”
It obviously has less impact on the knees, a little bit more posterior chain involvement, and less ankle mobility, funnily enough, I used a high step-up and I used it and I use it a lot.
Actually, I use it with a lot of my NFLs that didn't like squatting and Charles said that you could go all the way up to a high step up or a quad where the quad is parallel or higher for three reps to the peak.
So one of my athletes had a back hurt and he was a multi-million dollar athlete and I didn't want to fight with him but he wanted the stimulus.
So he loved split squats, they made him feel great, and he got really mobile, really strong.
He was extremely explosive. He would rock, pull a truck, would do all this kind of stuff.
He wasn't great at Olympic lifting and didn't really care about it.
I made him do pulls, he hand cleaned forever because of the NFL and the collegiate strength and conditioning make you do that.
He's like “I don't really care. I just want to feel mobile and good and strong” but I got him extremely strong, he did chin-ups with 75 pounds on his waist for three on fat grips at 300 pounds, pretty good for alignment.
I got him in one off-season.
I got him down just over 280 pounds with abs, just abs at six foot five and a half.
It was like he loved it and he did phenomenally well.
He made a ton of money, he's great, and he's retired now but he loved step-ups like he loved split squats and he loved step-ups.
I would peak him before camps and before games with a high step up, he loved them and he would explode.
We're talking a lot of weight dumbbells in hand. He really liked that.
He didn't love marvel on his back, he thought it was uncomfortable but I’ve done that and you go all the way up to three reps all the way down to three reps.
Yeah, so I use that instead of like well but if you're not front squatting or back squatting, I don't know what to do with you.
He's like “Well that's not true, you have to be creative, you have to figure out a solution”.
That's a great story.
I think that's super powerful and I think this whole conversation, anyone who's listening or listening back, you get that feeling of the love of the art and the dexterity within the art, where it's very difficult to answer questions without the context but you're getting some perspective of what I love.
That example that you give in there from there James Broughton's asked step ups short or long range?
They weren't really thought about in that way.
Right, in the day it was just that they were an important movement.
We've started to classify movements in that way because we've found that when tendon health and rehabilitation is the primary objective it's valuable to think about that.
Bodybuilders also found it valuable to think about the joint angle and position and the amount of stretch they were very conscious of whether the muscle was stretching or it wasn't stretching within a movement and they would sequence the movements and they were thought of as being quacks or thought of as being crazy for doing that whether comes from Vince Gironda and probably before him that they really targeted whether the muscle was stretched or not and where that fit in the workout.
I think John Meadows did great work with that, who was a good friend of Charles.
So the step up, short or long, if it depends on which joint you're talking about as well, right, and yeah how you execute the step up and I’ve done a step up from the lowest of…
I mean listen, you can do a floor where there's no elevation, you do Patrick, Poliquin, Peterson, it doesn't matter.
We start on the floor.
Yep, you can start with someone on the floor.
That's the other question here is the recommended increase in weight or height.
First, so we can maybe get both of those.
I like weight first actually, I like weight first.
Me too.
Yeah, it makes people feel they're training and you're getting load on something which at the end of the day is what we're trying to do now, it sort of goes against the squat.
So if someone asks me about a squat, I would say range before because 100 goals to actually get a great squat, not a well your biomechanic all that I never believed that it never made sense to me that “Oh well different people have different femur length and hip so they can't go all the way down”, I’m like ”Okay, well then let's figure out how to get them all the way down because truly they can” I mean the only person I’ve seen…
I have one client that I can't squat because he's got a new knee, and a new ankle and he's 20 years old. He got it, he's got his knee 20 years old.
He's got his ankle four years ago and he squats but it's a box squat onto a bench but he can't get all the way down literally, it will not go, it is confusing, and its quality of life but at that point, it's not the same.
We're talking this gameplay is both been blasted, it's a whole nother ball game.
So I would say “Yeah, find a way, but don't”.
I wouldn't look but so there's a lot of coaches like “No, his joint will never go”.
I think it's an amazing thing to say to people what will or will never happen and I say this with that client but that client it is fused and done, it's not well, he's different.
So unless it's fused you can get all the way down now not and that was it.
Interesting someone was commenting on the guy that just visited Ben Junsu, who's Korean and so there's the stereotype of the Asian squat but it is what it is, that's biomechanics and there's genetics involved.
It doesn't, it's better or worse and bends with just a slightly forward lean and mine, I have more of a forward lean because of my hips but I get all the way down.
So different people have different angles but it's not wrong to have a slightly forward angle, that's biomechanics with a squat.
So back to the step up.
I would say you've articulated the short range long range but if you see some of the step-ups like a triple jumper step-up type thing where it's full knee flexion and pretty much ass is touching the heel into a step up where you have a high box, I mean is that short range?
No, it's not short-range.
So the point is, it depends but I would say if we're starting new rehab even with someone who's an athlete, it doesn't matter here, we have near rehab, you start low and slowly add weight and then add height and the thing with these things is that is there a KPI or not.
KPI is there, a benchmark radical, a benchmark, the answer is no because the point is everyone's different.
Some people's tissue is so garbage and they're so ruined and they've done so much garbage that…
And I say that's the same thing with the split squat.
When do you lower the front elevation?
Well, that's the magic of coaching.
Yeah, and you try and if it's too much then you go back but you still have to progress but it might take someone three years and it might take someone's intro workout.
I think I tell the story of the same NFL guy.
He had a bad and he had a plate in his ankle from an injury and then he heard it in one game and then we were doing rehab on it and we were doing a wobble board split squat, front foot wobble board split squat, Charles says while the boards are pretty much garbage except once in a blue moon for two weeks of the year for some stuff like split squats and it is actually really good to recalibrate the neurological aspect.
So especially post-injury, it's actually not terrible.
So for some people, I think I rehab someone's knee and it was a month and a half on the wobble board until they can figure out and all this kind of stuff and for this athlete, it was one workout.
So they did one set, it was all over the place, they were like “Okay, let me try again” boom straight figured it out knee full straight split squat figured out.
So we did it twice, it was enough stimulus.
Next, moving on his ankle was fine, he got the treatment too but it depends on the capabilities of the person.
So the point is same thing with flexibility, some people's tissue just opens up and some people's issue, it's like Jesus Louise, it's nutrition, it's hydration, it's damaged, it's neurological, it's trauma all kinds of stuff.
So I think one of the genetics but when do you change and the answer is you change when it gets slightly better and you stimulate it right?
Yeah that patience and listening to what's going on and not forcing yourself into…
Well someone else said “I could do it” or “They can do it so I should be able to do it”, that's where a lot of things go south and people get themselves behind but the thing with the step up just to finish on the short long, the ankle range is one of the gains that can be really important as well from the Patrick's.
If you do max out the ankle range then you can look at it as a longer-range movement for the ankle.
Generally, the step-ups that we use, we would consider short range because there's no stretch.
So that's the way that you can think about it, “Is the muscle under stretch?”.
The difference with the step-ups though and why is because generally short-range exercises are less aggressive like the spider curls or the terminal knee extensions or tricep lockouts or kickbacks, they're less aggressive, they don't cause as much inflammation, they don't cause as much muscle growth.
The thing with the step-ups is because especially in the pedestrian because you're kind of replicating a movement that can damage the knee joint or with a weak knee you're going to feel that straight in the knee joint.
So you have to consider the joint adaptation as well as the muscle.
So for the muscle, it's short range and it's not going to cause massive hypertrophy or serious tissue damage but for the joint, you could tear it up, it is something to be conservative and considerate about.
So that's why I kind of have a concept of joint dominant movements where if the joint is really what's speaking to you then listen to the joint, don't worry about the weight, listen to the joint.
Maybe you can lift more but if the joint is telling you something or if it's not going to be good after the session then that was too much.
It's an interesting thing that you and I always get to the philosophical points.
I think there's very much something that “Ah man, I always go to Plato”, there's a dialogue called the theaters which is Socrates talking to a mathematician kind of and there's this conception that this mathematician can understand the universe.
I’m summarizing very much so that you can understand the universe in a formula and Socrates pretty much flips it and says that there's always the human element.
That's pretty much the… I’m summarizing and I would say that the art of coaching is Socratic such that you always have to understand the human part as opposed to the mathematical which is a formula and I think we're always going to get up against the science guys to think that no, science hasn't come to the position yet where we're just one little discovery away from the perfect formula to do whatever it is with all humans and I think that what's amazing about a 2500-year-old philosophic tradition going back to Plato which in these books it teaches us to say “Not so fast”, the human element is always there and it's in anything, it's in any interpretive conception of data and I think that's the magic of it and that's what actually fascinates me and actually what drives me because I actually really really like humans or I like human interaction.
So for me, when I get an athlete whether it's gen pop or not gen pop or helping someone or whatever, I’m trying to human and all these factors we talk about which is their genetics and how quick they adapt or how slow they adapt allows me to play this game of how I can improve them and help them and interact with them in a way that I can coax them because it's coaxing because as Charlotte said muscles and movements are coaxed, you coax things you don't blast them and even hard training has to be coaxing, it doesn't mean gentle it just means you have to find the exact quantity that's a little bit too much for the person such that they go home and they the stimulus causes adaptation and they improve and I think that's the thing, that's for me.
What's so fascinating about coaching is it allows me to do that every day where I’m always trying to figure out how I can do a little bit more with the person because obliteration is easy.
So I think these questions are always good.
Is it long ranges at short range?
And I think the answer is it depends and when do I use this and when do I use that and the answer is it depends.
Well, what you do is you can push and try and you can assume certain things about certain people and not about others.
I’m helping an NFL guy, he plays on the cowboys and one would assume that it's blasting.
He's six foot seven, 255 pounds, and an absolute monster but actually, he needs the opposite now.
Right now he needs delicate.
He's on a second block of training and the first block was so gentle.
It was so gentle that I mean, it's not zero but it's because there was weight but it's not how most of us train which is much harder and it's an interesting thing to realize that was my judgment call because I knew where he was and I knew what would happen.
It was my call having seen some of his videos of how blasted he was and how worked after the season he was such that he actually needed a lot of stuff that would rebuild him and so he would buy in and say “Oh this is exactly what I need” as opposed to the feelings of another trainer trying to believe me and put me in the ground and that's the thing is that you would assume that a guy who's that big, while he's bigger than I am, he's clearly stronger and faster than I am and he's fighting gorillas
Well, we're going to have to actually make him.
It's gorilla training.
No, it's not. There's a pace to it and there's patience that takes smart coaching that you decide when to do what and where.
I love it. I think that's what you're going to get from Ben Clarfield is nuance and I think the ATG coach is going to give a lot more nuance to coaches and that's what coaches need.
I think it makes all the difference and there's different areas that you can find nuance in communication.
Ben Patrick is phenomenal with the way he communicates things and inspires people to take action you only have to look at what's happened over the last few years.
Yeah, we've all got our strengths with these things, and listening in it's going to help a lot of coaches go a lot further and just love what they do.
There's a question here about how to help 12-year-olds love step-ups.
Ruben Peratta is saying he's coaching a kid for Muay Tai and he finds that when he's doing the physical stuff he doesn't get the same buy and he's training twice a week, any thoughts about that?
Yeah, I don't think you have to, you can't train kids.
You train us, it can't be, it has to be fun.
You have to make it a challenge and make it a game.
Yeah and so I think having prescriptive system reps actually is a mistake.
I actually think a 12-year-old has to have fun and I don't even know if I would coach step-ups, to be honest, I would sled the kid and race him.
They can race it and make it be that kind of thing because actually, and Ben talks a lot about this sometimes, you can, you don't need to step up if they sled.
So I would sled the living daylights out of him.
I would sled in all kinds of different ways backward and forwards. There's also sideways-type stuff.
I would actually do squats, full squats.
I would do a heel of it. I would make him squat and the thing with step-ups is it's hard to quantify numbers for kids but you can get a kid stronger.
The 12-year-old kid can squat.
I mean make sure it's perfect and then add load.
That's what I’ve done. I’ve done it with my kid. I have a kid who's 21 now, he's serious, he's just started to get his pro.
He's a university player rugby scrum half I think I’ve told Keegan about this.
He's about 70 kilos squatting 150 kilos. He's a beef but he's a guy that shouldn't be playing.
He's not genetically gifted. He's garbage. His body's garbage but I’ve made it not garbage.
He's kind of like Ben in the sense but for rugby.
He wasn't meant to be an athlete.
He's very very cerebral, very intelligent and I made him squat early.
I taught him the Olympic lifts early. I mean I could do anything with him, this kid, make him throw the ball, make him throw stuff.
I would sled the living daylights out of the kid and make him make it a race, make it fun, make him beat his times, that's what I would do.
I would not technical over technique the kid.
Yeah, I love it. It's a great answer.
It's a question from Joseph Weston, do you guys have a step-up equivalent for shoulders?
It's a really good question.
I think we were talking less in the group.
I think I was talking, I have a call at one and I’ve been talking about I think people make a mistake to think that the shoulder and the lower body are the same and I keep harping on this.
I think I like it when people are trying to see similarities and it's good to look back to our ancestors the apes and then look at horses and then how the shoulder is and isn't and we make different demands of our upper body than we do of our lower body and I’m going to get back to this point about the lower body is stupid, the upper body is smart.
The upper body is.
We make demands of our upper body.
What do I mean by that?
We make demands of our upper body that are fine, we're playing with no one looks at anyone and
says “Wow that person is so impressive they can text on a phone”, that's not impressive everyone can do that but if you do that with your toes, fine motor skills, would be impressive.
We demand fine motor skills of our upper body which mean that we need all kinds of different angles with our shoulder and our fingers and all this kind of stuff.
So the variety is different for the upper body.
You need different varieties of different angles and much more of a “Look, all the stuff that I’m doing, it's not impressive but if I could do all this stuff with my feet everyone would be oppressed”.
Our feet and our legs are much more for gross motor movement.
We're standing on them, we're running, we're jumping, and sometimes we're kicking, that's why soccer is an impressive game.
Not that I like it. It's because people can do stuff with their feet that is impressive but the point is that it's for explosive movement that you're sitting on and standing on it.
So thinking of this, of the shoulder in the same way, I don't think of it in the same way, the movement of your upper body is something that you have to think about that's why we encourage rotator cuff strength so much.
At ATG it's so neglected because everything has to come out of the shoulder, everything upper body needs the stability of the shoulder so I don't.
I wouldn't say it that way.
That's why it was a joke. I think I hashtagged one of the posts, what is it? Elbows over fingers guy, it's not the same and so to think that it's the same as a mistake, I think so.
I think trying to make analogies is good.
Being creative intellectually is good but we also have to be open to where it's not correct.
So I think I would say the upper body and the lower body are not analogous and the upper body has to be treated.
I’ll give a great example a significant quantity of people in the bodybuilding world get obscenely huge upper bodies that are shredded, jacked and have tons of muscle and their legs look terrible because they try to train their legs in the same way as their upper body.
The lower body needs repeated effort and I think I posted this recently, I think someone's talking about differences in squat or heel elevation squat.
Keegan mirror asked this by a great coach Nick about heel elevation regarding the squat and I made a comment that I learned this about the old Italian weightlifting team is that they just would change shoes every three weeks and their workouts were the same and that was enough for their lower body to have the stimulus for them to actually make gains and progress, just heel elevation.
Each shoe was slightly different and that was enough.
So for the lower body, you can hit the same thing again and again with slight variations.
Now there's compliance.
So the question of the step up is it's possible that you'll do, I think I wrote this 20 reps for three weeks of a Patrick step-up, where you slowly progress and load with dumbbells and height and then three weeks later you decide to do a Poliquin step up with the bar in your back for both height and load and then three weeks later you decide to do a Peterson step-up with dumbbells and then you go back to Patrick's step-up three weeks.
So it's all still a step up.
It's a lot of variation because you're like “Oh it's a Peterson, it's just a step up, you're doing the same thing again and again with slight variation just so that you don't get bored and there's some stimulus but the upper body is a different ball game.
The upper body you have to hit different angles.
So we have the rotator cuff and the video is going to come out very soon or I’m going to show multiple different variations of the rotator.
Yes we have our metric stance, our standard and Charles did that but there's a myriad different rotator exercise and all are good
So in some ways, I would actually say the upper body shouldn't be thought of as this step up because you could do well by just repeating the step up really.
If you got really good at the Patrick step up over a year, really good things are gonna happen but if you just did the same things for your upper body actually bad things would happen.
So in some ways, it takes an intellectual switch and obviously, all of our fascial chains are connected but there are some things that we demand that are different than other things on different parts of art.
So I would say no there is not an upper body step up.
How's that for a long-winded answer on that but I think it's important to understand the desire to make things analogous.
Ah well, the knee is this, so we'll just do it for the elbow.
It's not the same. We make different demands.
Yeah definitely, I agree.
If you were using the step-up to help with knee tendon issues and that was the alternative that you're using to sled which you wouldn't do that, you want to use the sled but I have seen really good results with using tricep extensions for elbow tendonitis in all you've said is 100% agree with and for the shoulder there definitely isn't step up.
The hip doesn't do that much on the step up so the shoulder and the step up don't really relate very well but elbow tendonitis I would say that's maybe a little gem that someone takes away
from today.
I’ve cleared up elbow tendonitis with the same kind of philosophy thinking about “Okay what would the knee do for this?
Just getting a lot of blood flow to it lockout-type work before getting into your french presses or skull crusher-type movements that are much harder on the tricep tendons.
Yeah I would say there's still some value in they're not the same and yeah there's a lot more complexity possible but there's some tricks there that could help people as well.
Yeah again but that's back to the thing is that I think you're one of your brilliant gems or one of your most brilliant takeaways that I would say you've contributed to strength and conditioning is this idea of short, long and I think if you think of it that way then yes you can apply that to any joint reading even the shoulder.
You can apply that from a quote-unquote rehab or a warm-up point of view and I think you can get great benefits.
So if we're going to some form of tricep extension in the short, in the lockout type stuff that can bless…
Yes so then yes you could have some form of step-up type idea but I think the way I think about it is I don't know how helpful that is to understand the upper body versus the lower body and I think in some ways it's connected back to my major point which is the demands.
Even that we make of the elbow from a point of view of gripping and all kinds of different stuff.
Yeah I mean having come off elbow surgery last year from a jiu-jitsu injury and I did all your stuff and all your stuff is great and it helped but there's so much stuff that I needed, so much grip work for my elbow, so whereas the step-up I think can do so much for the knee it's not the only thing.
I just don't know if we're going to play games of how much of a percent of the thing that I don't know.
I mean that to get back to BJJ as well to get back to BJJ after an elbow surgery as quickly as you have, that's the ultimate demand on the elbow really where people potentially going to want to arm by you, you're grabbing things, you need everything from that elbow.
It's almost as if you were doing leg locks and all that stuff with the legs.
It's almost the most you can ask for from the joint.
So from surgery, from being cut to that, is a lot of rebuilding.
I was listening to Devin Larratt, I’m not sure if you've come across he's a Canadian right-arm wrestler.
He's a ch world-champion armrest.
I’m not sure if you've seen him better.
I love his stuff and I love what he's training, I think it's really important for coaches to look at “Okay this guy's a strength athlete” and what really matters is his elbow and his wrist but he says it's three years after surgery before you can expect to be a legit arm wrestler again after serious surgery.
It's like “Yeah this is no joke to come back from that”.
There's a ton of questions but I think that we should probably wrap it for this.
I can still hear you, I don't know if you guys can hear Ben but yeah sometimes things jump in.
So we do have a call in just under two hours live with ATG coaches and I definitely will.
I’m planning to use this Youtube channel more and connect you guys up with more of the coaches to share more value.
Yeah, Tim saying you're coming through.
We can't hear you Ben and I can still see you as well.
So I don't know if you can hear us or not but…
All right, I think might wrap up that today but it's great to have you guys on and great to have your questions and I’m planning to do more of these together with coaches.
I have Marcus Philly coming up.
I’m trying to get and see me in Yangon and some of the other top coaches from the community.
So if you want to see more of them then let me know.
Are you back there then can you hear us?
We'll wrap it there guys but appreciate it and if you want to be a part of ATG for coaches or if you've got any questions about it please just get in touch or message ATG for Coaches on Instagram to ask anything and get feedback.
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