Short Range - Athletic Range Strength

Athletic Range. Continuing on here.

Going to focus today on short-range strength. Why do we want to use these movements that are muscle dominant, that don't develop the connective tissue as much?

If they don't develop the connective tissue then why would we use them?

That's the question we're going to answer today.

Charles is really the guy who brought this into the light.

He brought my awareness to this topic.

I didn't understand it.

Charles never really explained it from what I’ve seen.

I’ve never seen him explain this concept but it was there within his arm training and I think that we have to credit him and Ben and I both credit him very often for the influence and impact and understanding that he's had on this concept.

I haven't seen anyone take it to the to the level that ATG has and that is exactly why when I saw Ben's work in 2018 I said, “this is something special, the world needs to know about this.”

The advantage that comes with this is being able to solve tendon issues to know where to start after an injury, to be able to gradually increase tolerance, to total training volume more safely, to train daily without injury, and set up new potential for strength gains by a neural drive, increasing neural drive and you prepare for the long-range strength work.

You're going to understand exactly how and when to use this to be able to be more dexterous with strength training.

We know that strength training is a very powerful tool and we know that tension is really what's going to upgrade hardware and hardware dominant athletes are the dominant athletes.

You want to work with someone who has the right hardware and then playing with the software is much simpler.

If you have the wrong hardware, it simply cannot work, you cannot have a high-level athlete.

If you have the right hardware then other changes can be made.

We can have very connective tissue dominant hardware in someone like Stefan Holm or you can have more muscle dominant hardware like Charles's arms and you make your decision about where you need to be on that spectrum but its hardware dominance, its tolerance to tension, and then from there we can install whatever software is needed.

We practice whatever movements are needed and great things are possible.

We sometimes you just need this short-range strength to be able to improve performance.

It's not really optional to use short-range strength and you'll see that it's not the ugly cousin that it sometimes seems when we're talking about the benefits of long-range and the adaptations to connective tissue and those sorts of things.

If we're going to go through the benefits then first we need to identify, what would be the benefit of this exercise.

It's going to train that shortened position, that shortened position might be really valuable for us if we are working really hard on a one-arm chin up or we're working really hard on locking off and getting chest to bar, the top of our chin ups because we're training the bicep specific to that position.

There's going to be a lot less connective tissue strain because the bottom part of the movement gets lighter and lighter and because the shoulder is flexed rather than extended the tension is already taken off the bicep.

It's going to require the muscle to do all the work.

The work is not going to be done by the connective tissue.

In this exercise similarly, because the shoulder is already extended than when we extend the elbow it's going to get that crampy feeling and it's really the mind-muscle that has to do the work.

The connective tissue is not taking any of the strain, it's the body, it's the muscular tissue that has to do the work.

The connective tissue will still be loaded.

It's still going to transfer force but it's going to be dependent on how much force the muscle can produce rather than gravity already putting the connective tissue under tension.

You might have seen the inner range hamstring work starting to come into ATG as well.

This was always part of how Ben trained athletes.

In his own gym, when he had the machine of the kneeling leg curl, Charles was a huge fan.

Charles was always talking about how you need to have three different types of leg curl machines but if you're working with a team and you have a limited budget, you have limited space.

I worked with the team with the smallest gym in the NRL, but we were able to, I think, have the best program or at least the program that had the best results in terms of on-field results.

We couldn't get those machines but you can still get the benefits of this movement.

I was chatting with Ben about if there are people that are getting issues with hamstring tendons by getting really excited about going super hard at Nordics, we do want to be really great at Nordics and some people will survive just going, doing them really intensely.

Some people will survive any type of training.

What ATG is built around is for the people that don't survive any type of training, people who've had injuries, and really to get the body back into balance with how it was designed to be.

Then a shorter range exercise for the abdominals, for the hip flexors would be something like the l-sit.

The muscles are already in a shortened position and then you're contracting them.

You'll see with the hamstring curl, the hardest part of the movement is going to be when the lower limb is parallel to the floor.

Rather than in the Nordic, where a lot of the forces when the leg is relatively straight, it's getting harder here, and then the muscle becomes weaker.

Getting above parallel is going to be much more difficult with the monkey foot.

Then another example of this is Patrick step up.

The ability to get through short range with a lot of strength is going to build this mind-muscle connection.

All the benefits that we're going to go through.

These are examples of short-range movements.

Some of them are going to feel more crampy.

Some are going to be more extreme than others.

To identify them you're looking for the crampy movements, you're looking for movements that don't create a lot of soreness.

If you use them in the extreme, then you will get soreness and if you actually cramp the muscle then there's, in general, you get some soreness that comes out of cramping because the muscle kind of locks on.

These movements will generally require concentration because you're really having to connect the mind to the muscle to get the work done and the opposition rather than in the long-range movements, the fascia supports the weight and that's why it doesn't necessarily require as much concentration.

When you're doing something like a Jefferson curl the connective tissue are going to take a lot of the weight.

In the bottom of the Jefferson curl, you're resting on the connective tissue where there's nowhere to rest in this movement that's why you're switching on the whole time, that's why it can be neurally quite demanding and draining depending on how tight your lower back is, and the hamstrings are.

The restriction is the opposing connective tissue, the opposing fascia muscle lengths, on the opposing side of the body.

That's really what we need to be thinking about with the extreme inner range is when we take it to the extreme, if you're trying to get into a v-sit or even for a lot of people in the l-sit, it's that tightness in the posterior chain that really makes us work hard.

The status quo here is for short-range motion movements to be well, actually, this is backward.

They are overused, I think, in the upper body and underused, well it depends on how you say.

In the ATG system, it's probably the other way around.

In traditional training, you would say that the upper body, a lot of people won't use tricep kickbacks, they won't use spider curls and those kinds of movements because they think that they're not going to be a big bang for the buck.

The pec activation exercises that I’ve been talking about, even banned pull-aparts are an inner range, posterior delt exercise.

Then the lower body, people will tend to do partial squats.

They won't go to full range of motion.

A deadlift is a partial exercise, trap by deadlift is a partial range of motion exercise.

It doesn't matter whether you're going from the floor or not on a deadlift or a trap by the lift or these movements.

It matters whether the body could go further if the restriction of the floor wasn't in the way.

You could go a lot further with those movements.

Therefore, they're partial range of motion exercises and you're not getting tension from both sides of the joint.

This overuse in a lot of short range of motion movements in the lower body is part of the reason why the lower body becomes very fragile. Yes, we could do with using them more in the upper body to increase mind-muscle connection and for specific movements like the one arm chin up for example, or the chest of our chin ups, strict.

The muscle dominant movements, these short inner range movements, short range movements are more so using this winch-type mechanism.

It's only going to move while you're telling it to move.

While you're forcing it to move versus the elastic type component, the connective tissue component.

The blue bar here, that's when the tendon and the ligament, the fascia is doing the work.

This winding mechanism, the brain is doing the winding.

You're telling the muscle to do the work and it's creating the movement.

The elastic band can't really be.

It has very minimal ability to be actively lengthened and shortened.

The muscle can actively lengthen and shorten a lot more.

We're talking about this winching kind of mechanism, a ratcheting mechanism neural dominant.

When we're talking about muscle dominant, we're talking about neural dominant, we're saying that it's really relying on the energy from the brain to the muscle as opposed to those long-range movements which use a lot of connective tissue tension and the resting tension of the muscle and therefore going to have very different results.

Just understanding this distinction, I might be sounding a little bit like a broken record to you, you might be like I said this over and over again, he said this in the other presentation.

Most coaches haven't heard this concept and I want you to understand it and to be second nature for you to sort of think about it, to to be able to speak about it, to know exactly what you're talking about, why would it be that the brain is so important in these?

It's because there is no resting tension in the tissues.

If this bicep is very short and then we go and throw a ball and we explosively extend the elbow, then we can get this breaking.

It happened to my father. He wasn't training weights when it happened, he was throwing a ball for a dog and his bicep detached and he had this little lump. He didn't get it reattached.

If you wanted to tear a muscle, if you wanted to tear a tendon then obviously, you really want to increase the resting tension.

You make the muscle as short as possible.

If the muscle just stays like this and then you try and throw with it then of course there's going to be huge amounts of tension in the connective tissue or the muscle somewhere along this chain, something is going to break, whether it pulls off a bit of bone on one of the ends, wherever the weakness is, that's where the issue is going to happen.

By understanding this concept of when it's straightened, there's a lot of tension on the tissues.

If the muscles actually shortened then it's going to be close to breaking just by straightening it.

Then if we put it behind the body, then if we put some load on it or we put some speed, then we can get this kind of a result and that's the way modern strength training is actually setting athletes up.

They're just going to have more trauma every time they train because even if they don't get that full rupture, they're getting more rupturing because there's more resting tension because it doesn't know how to handle these lengthened positions.

The more we can train to handle length in positions and get adaptations in all of the passive structures, the tendons, the connective tissue inside of the muscle, the bone insertions when they're all adapted then we're going to be able to handle a lot more. You can see that again here in this shortened position.

It's going to be the brain doing the work.

It depends on the joint angles here and obviously from the shoulder as well but as we lengthen the connective tissues are going to take more of the strain, therefore, the muscle is contributing less relatively than the connective tissue.

Therefore, you're going to have more connective tissue adaptation.

If you're having more stress on the connective tissue then obviously you're going to get more connective tissue adaptation.

Where here, you're going to have very little connective tissue.

Stress, it just depends on the size of the weight or the speed that you're moving it out in these in this more shortened position.

The muscle dominance, think about this applied to the hamstring, if we wanted to create hamstring tears then we would only train the hamstrings in the shortened position and we wouldn't apply a lot of load time in those lengthened positions.

Then it's looking again like, why would we use this short stuff?

The muscle dominant movements are extremely valuable and extremely important.

We just need to know how to use them, and when to use them and that is the ATG coaches’ advantage that we're sharing here.

Find something you can do without pain and do a lot of it to bring life and neurological connection back into the area.

This is the one thing that a lot of people are able to do because by doing this one thing, you get to bring life back into the area.

If you can walk backward, if you can drag a slide backward, if you can run backward then you get some adaptation, you get the muscle switching on and you get to move without the pain feedback loop.

It's very important to find things that don't cause pain and then do a lot of volume of those things and by increasing the amount of stuff that you can do without pain you find one thing you can do without pain.

You do lots and lots of that and then gradually you'll find there are other things on the fringe of that that you can also do.

By doing concentric-only knee dominant short-range work for the quadriceps, then we will be able to start to be able to handle the eccentric.

Then we'll be able to start to handle the split squat or the VMO squat.

This is just exactly how the ATG system is laid out but now you know how to reverse engineer it, you know the underlying technology that will allow you to take it to any muscle group.

We need also these short-range positions because they are specific to sports.

We can't ignore them.

As much as we might fall in love with the end-range positions, the short-range positions also have their part to play.

You're going to get rewiring, increasing neural drive, increasing mind-muscle connection, very important.

We're going to get massive circulation, heat, and regeneration with these movements.

When you're doing your sleds, you're going to get a lot of circulation into the area.

Life brings life. You bring a lot of blood into the area, you're going to find that function increases.

You get those position-specific gains.

It's another reason why we need to do this and there's relative unloading of the tendons because the tendon isn't under stress already from the position as well as the muscle-producing force.

We tend to use these movements for really high reps, pauses work well with these movements, and going slow on the concentric can also work well with these movements.

They're concentric dominant movements.

Slower eccentric is less important because we're not so much trying to load up the connective tissue.

The connective tissue tends to take on the load when we go slow into long-range movements.

They also work really well for potentiation.

That's the system with ATG and the ability is to do short-range movements before you do the long-range movements and then you get crazy strong, crazy bouncy.

The same principles can be used for our hamstrings, for our biceps, for our triceps, potentiate with the short range and make everything feel really good, and then go to the long range.

Often if you go straight into long-range whether it's with french presses or RDLs or any of these movements, they just don't feel anywhere near as good as if you've brought a lot of blood into the area if you do in a range work first.

If you do the short-range work first and then do the stuff with more fascial retention, you're gonna get a lot better results.

You can also use it after you've done your full range or long-range work to bring more circulation into the area, to start the recovery process.

If we know that sauna for example has been used in the strength training systems, the Russian system, using sauna before and after basically, it's free circulation.

Rather than having to do the sleds, you just get free circulation by the heat that's provided by the environment.

How we can do that for ourselves by using inner range movements?

Note that if you're only using these exercises, then you're going to shorten the fascia.

This would be the hip flexors of the CrossFitter or powerlifters pretty much across the whole body.

What you will notice about powerlifters is that can actually keep quite a good pec range because of their low bar back squatting and that's kind of one of the examples or exceptions now triceps will tend to still be really short but wherever we're using long-range positions then we'll maintain that ability but where we're not that ability will be lost, the ankles, the hips.

This is the dominant paradigm at the moment is using a lot of mid and short-range movements.

Ben here working with Mark Bell.

What results are you going to get?

Questions that might come up now when you're looking at this.

Eccentric versus concentric.

Should we be focusing on the essential component in short range or concentric?

Generally, it's the concentric that we should be putting more emphasis and effort into.

Initially, you can take out the eccentric altogether.

In the lower body, it's easy to take out the eccentric with using sleds.

Sleds also work for the upper body just fine.

Bands can also help to take out the eccentric component. You can use bands with the eccentric component like when people are doing banded squats and banded bench and that.

But you can also if you're doing band puller parts or if you're doing inner range pec work, then you can just let the tension off for the eccentric component and because the weight is not going to hit the floor or the weight just turns to nothing when the tension goes off the band.

Bands also allow us to work just with the concentric.

The concentric will put less strain on the connective tissue.

If we start with the concentric only work we're going to bring more life into the area with less damage and if it's shortened positions then there's less resting tension in the connective tissue.

Then that's going to allow us to bring circulation into the area without a lot of strain on the connective tissue.

Should we be going extremely heavy on these or should we be doing light for lots of reps?

Both can work, it depends on the goal.

If you're potentiating then you want to do that heavy super heavy work.

There are two ways you can interpret this question, I'll answer it this way first.

If you are more so for rehabilitation then you want to go for super high reps but if it's for potentiation then you don't need to go for quite as many reps and go a lot heavier.

When you are bringing life back into an area it's also good to do some super light long-range work which could be static stretching or just very gently basically going into and out of a static stretch without any sort of speed or load would be a way to bring life back into an area to bring end range function.

You challenge the connective tissue a little bit but not a lot and after you've done your short-range work whether you do that very heavy or very high reps.

Number three, high tension short versus long.

If you're jumping and things like that and you create a lot of tension in a shortened position, what's the impact of that going to be versus basically trying to jump into something like the KOT squat, sissy squat position, or a knee extension or RDLs, drop catch style versus if you do drop catch style with the monkey foot on, with the inner range work.

Because the connective tissue is not already under length and tension you would expect the body to tolerate a depth jump better than it would tolerate trying to jump in a KOT position or trying to jump in the human knee extension.

If you try to go really fast in those extreme long-range positions then there's going to be more tension on the connective tissue.

They're going to be even more connective tissue dominant and it's likely at some point there you’ll be able to cause some soreness to the bone or to the tendon.

It's important to understand tension from the previous presentation and then also for understanding the short and long.

Where is the force being produced?

It needs to be specific to the thing that the athlete or the person is trying to work on and then you just have a better framework for understanding.

It's these positions that are causing trouble these are the solutions. ”If these are causing tightness then why should we use them?”, people would sometimes say.

Hopefully, you know how to answer that question.

If you're only training shortened range of motion, movements, or short muscle positions then you're gonna get really tight.

Why should we use any of those movements?

Why would Ben be getting Mark to do this movement?

If it's gonna shorten his quads, if he only trained like this, he would get super tight, short quads.

He would have strong patella tendons but he would have very short quads.

Hopefully, by this point, you know why you would use it.

To regenerate because you need those positions for sports in preparation for the long-range stuff so that you tolerate the long-range work and there are lots of reasons that we still need to use it, to rehabilitate, to bring blood flow. It's not good or bad.

It's just understanding what the tool is, and what it does, which I didn't understand for 20 years of working hard to become an elite strength coach and solve problems for myself.

Now I have a much deeper understanding.

There's more possibility for better results.

It's not the whole puzzle but there are definitely key things here.

Extreme short range is another.

What about the movements where it's really crampy, should we take this to the extreme of like bicep curling behind our head with cables or with bands?

Should we take it to the extreme of the v-sit and try to really touch the shins on the face?

Is that valuable? It depends on the goal.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Children don't tend to cramp and I think whatever we're becoming more childlike it's a good thing. As we increase circulation and health in the tissues then they should become less crampy.

As you do things like the l-sit and extreme inner range, hamstring, and calf work then those muscles will become less crampy.

My feeling is that that can only be a good thing.

I am a fan of taking it to extremes.

Ballerinas have great extreme short-range calf ability, foot ability, the plantar fascia, the muscles, and intrinsic muscles of the feet have the ability to be in that shortened position.

I think that those are things that should be regained.

The whole system of human engineering, rebuilding human ability, being more childlike, that's what we're working towards.

Should I prioritize long to short?

This periodization method does exist like we're going to do full-depth squats in the preseason and then we're going to do partial squats in season.

There is some logic to it and it does kind of make sense.

You don't want to cause as much extreme eccentric and connective tissue damage in season and potentially close to events.

It's something that we need to explore further, as is all of this, it's all relatively new concepts that need further exploration.

I don't think you can leave out either of them.

I don't really like the idea of periodizing them too much but I do like the idea of periodizing intensity within them.

Going really hard and heavy on short-range movements closer to a competition would make more sense to me and then using minimal load through the long-range exercises, not really trying to develop them but just maintaining the ability to use those positions, be it splits or natural knee extensions, etc.

We always want to keep those positions but generally, it will take less and less time to keep positions as they become more normal to the body.

Generally, once a week, once a fortnight, some things will even only be once a month, that they'll need to be used to be retained.

Hopefully, that gives you some thoughts about periodizing long to short but generally, you want to keep it in.

It depends, for athletes you can have a bit more dexterity with that around competitions.

The long-range work is going to work better after short range.

Why is that? Because it's hot and cold. If we're trying to make some change in this sword then we're going to heat it up first.

If we want to change tissue we should heat it first.

That's why we should do short-range work before our long-range work to allow the tissues to become more pliant, more pliable compliant whichever the word is.

I was listening to Matt Fraser talking to Joe Rogan and he talked about like tearing his lateral, collateral ligament, I guess is what it would have been, you're tearing lateral ligaments in his knee while stretching them during a competition, I think he said it was at the CrossFit games.

My thoughts and suggestions, my theory around this would be that the connective tissues were becoming more lax because of the amount of work that had gone in, heat, and challenge to the body that had gone in before that.

Stretching through all the work that he'd been doing like it was everything was becoming more pliable and if you sort of think about the woman's body going through labor, there's the contractions, there's a lot of shortening happening in that area, creating a lot of tension and then the baby comes out.

I mean the contraction is I guess on the inner stuff but that may not be a good example but it may be as well like there's a lot of warmth and energy being created in that area and then that's probably part along with a lot of other hormones that get released during extreme effort whether that be giving birth or CrossFit.

Not that this is that similar but I think for all those reasons the long-range work is going to work better after short range.

It doesn't really make that much sense, you only want to go light with long-range stuff, cold, you don't want to go to high intensity.

If we're talking about the scales.

If you watch the lecture about the three scales, then you only want to be doing sort of one, two, three type intensity, mostly one and two, on the long-range work before you've brought a lot of life into the area circulation.

I think this is really clear by now but the vast majority of the strength and conditioning or do not understand this concept, the overuse of short and mid-range movements is doing massive harm to human movement.

These movements create muscle-dominant athletes as opposed to connective tissue-dominant athletes.

There's a spectrum, there's a degree of connective tissue dominant from the extremely connective tissue dominant guys maybe like Kadour Ziani and Stefan Holm and then you have guys that are maybe more muscular like a lot of the NFL players, Cheetah, and the thicker set athletes but they still have enough connective tissue that they're really healthy but they may have better acceleration and someone like Keller and Stefan Holm they would have had good acceleration like they would have been fast but they probably could have been faster by becoming more muscle dominant or bringing more muscle into the equation.

That wasn't their objective, they just needed extreme connective tissue ability for those last couple of steps that they were going into with momentum but if you want to look at athletes, acceleration is the key.

Change of direction, being able to run through contact then you need to come further along the spectrum towards muscle dominance but you don't want to go to such a muscle dominant extent that the connective tissues are weak and there are chronic issues around that which is what is happening with modern strength training.

It gets worse.

When athletes get an injury because they then get rehabilitated from a muscle perspective and not from a connective tissue perspective then which creates this negative cycle.

Often once an athlete is injured once they will, especially if it's a lower-body injury, they'll generally become even more upper-body dominant in terms of their strength and muscle mass distribution and the smaller muscles particularly, tibialis, calf, soleus, foot muscles, all these muscles will tend to atrophy if there's a quad or a hamstring issue or a knee issue and so then it just becomes a long way back and often people never emerge from this cycle until they find ATG online or an ATG coach and they make a change.

If we can give the gift of athletic range strength, we can restore child-like ability and make people doing these movements not need to feel like they need to warm up or they're never going to be able to get back to doing what these people are doing and what they're doing is jumping for joy and it is really a natural joyful thing, that running and jumping and our strength training, our tension training, the preparation work that we're doing with people should bring them back to these abilities.

That's our opportunity. We can solve tendon issues. We can increase tolerance to training volume, potentiate, we can prepare well for sessions, and set up new potential for strength gains by increasing neural drive and neural density.

This is a key part of the new era of strength.

It's just better technology.

It's better terminology.

You can have a better understanding of what you're actually doing.

We can reverse this ticking time bomb of modern athletic development where athletes become top-heavy and neglect the muscles that are playing the biggest part in performance.

What's happened in the past is that the fieldwork in itself, running and jumping has done the job of the strength coach.

Keep things in balance enough and if the strength coach builds the muscle dominance and then keeping the athlete if the athlete on the field then they keep enough connective tissue dominance, and it kind of works but it kind of doesn't work and it's caused a lot of damage and a lot of harm.

We've probably all experienced this and played our part in it it's not about demonizing other ways of doing things.

We've all used different methods and we've all made mistakes in life but what we have now is a new opportunity of a deeper understanding of a better way to do this stuff.

We just have to do our best to share it with everybody, share.

Anyone who's going to the gym, any coach, they need to understand these concepts and to be able to apply them in their own programs and when they can I think we're going to find that injury rates will decrease significantly, performance will significantly increase.

Ben Patrick is a great testimony to that as are many of you, coaches.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this.

Ultimately, this is about you.

This is about creating the best network of coaches where if Joe Rogan goes and trains with anyone in this network if he's traveling around the world and he goes to an ATG gym or finds his local ATG coach through the app that you're going to do an amazing job with them.

You understand exactly what you're doing and you know why you do what you do.

If you are deviating from the exercises that are used in ATG, you understand exactly what you're doing, why are you doing it, and how you're doing it rather than just doing something else, that's cool.

I think that this is going to give us a much greater depth of understanding about the tools that we need to use.

Short-range is definitely a blessing.

It really all starts here, reversing out knee pain, and step-ups.

Such a huge blessing to be able to do those movements and move into things like the split squats and the KOT squats.

I hope you enjoyed this today looking forward to hearing your feedback and have a great day.