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Thread: Glute deactivation/amnesia. Devil's advocate question.

  1. #11
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    I have a friend who went to a commercial gym now. I had him train with me for a while but the poor sucker got drunk and climbed a fence, and got stuck, tore his thigh open. Like, to the bone. So no training for three months.

    Anyhoo. Now this trainer has him do stuff with these balls, all sorts of balancing acts and who knows whats to "correct imbalances" and the poor guy is paying and is convinced that this is important. To get his muscles "firing" again.

    At least he is doing some squats. But not the program. Not before he fixes his unbalances. Cheez. I need to show that comment to him. Für Elise. Brilliant.

  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by dfclark68 View Post
    Okay, I see where you're going now.

    There's no point in arguing with these quacks, but here are two points:
    1) There is neuromuscular redundancy, but as the load goes up, more motor units that could contribute do. Then there are fewer ways to generate the net force to lift the load.
    2) The motor system is going to also trend toward the path of least resistance for energy conservation. The most mechanically advantaged muscle and motor units are going to be used first in a given movement.

    Unless you interfere with it somehow, the glute is just going to contract when you need it to.

    Even laying aside the absurdity of the supposed "severe gluteal amnesia," it's their proposed solution that is the most ridiculous. The note E occurs with high frequency in Beethoven's 'Fur Elise,' so it must be critical to the piece, right? Now let's spend several weeks striking the E key with the right ring finger on the piano so we can master the song. The muscle activation specialist's program is no less silly than that...
    Thanks, that makes a hell of a lot of sense.

  3. #13
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    "Severe gluteal amnesia." What else has your dumb ass failed to remember?

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    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post
    Rip, my question to you is whether there is a better answer to this objection than the appeal to evolutionary common sense.
    Dfclark's answer is spot on. I'd add this in response to your comment here:

    "See? Because of this redundancy, there is no guarantee that just because a movement looks correct from the "outside", that the proper muscles are being activated. This poor patient, who suffers severe gluteal amnesia, may look like he's squatting correctly, but in fact, the hamstrings are doing a larger share of work than they should be, and the glutes are just going along for the ride without generating the amount of tension they should be.
    I wanted to pull this particular argument out and hammer it because I hear it often. Your hypothetical devil's advocate neuro-functional-patterns coach won't be able to see a fault in the movement, but their premise demands that the fault be there, so they will resort to some sort of test to manufacture the fault. In the case of "gluteal amnesia," the prone lying leg lift test is particularly popular.

    Let's face it: if a movement looks good under load, only one of two things can be true:
    1) It's good, or
    2) As a coach, you're unable to detect why it's bad, either because of inexperience or due to a problem that's probably outside your scope of practice.

    After the test is done and the client is convinced they've got a defective ass, I've always wondered... how could it be possible for someone like Dave Tate, a 900-pound squatter (inb4 suits/depth/etc), to get that squat with a giant piece of muscle mass out of the equation (he wrote an E-book about it entitled "Gluteal Amnesia")? How has no one with 'amnesiac glutes' wondered why their ass still got sore during training? Shouldn't 'activation' in these people lead to phenomenal increases in squatting and deadlifting strength? [/RANT]

    Here would be my quick summary response:
    Heavy loads, when moved correctly, demands proper muscular coordination.
    A non-pathological neuromuscular system will do a pretty damn good job of coordinating things if you load progressively and insist on good movement.

    If it's a control-systems optimization problem, you solve it by presenting the brain with the problem and demanding a solution, preferably under the eye of a coach who can ensure all the 'other' stuff is taken care of. It's how we learn every other skill: how is barbell training any different?

  5. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by CJ Gotcher View Post
    In the case of "gluteal amnesia," the prone lying leg lift test is particularly popular.
    Oh boy. I started looking into the prone lying leg test, and was led down a rabbit hole. Ended up reading a few references by Stu McGill, who seems to be responsible for a lot of this stuff. The man's clearly intelligent, and appears to have deep knowledge of spinal health. I traced back the origins of his gluteal amnesia (reference 27 in this paper). In pages 110-111 of the referenced book, he discussed how, along with Dr. Vladimir Janda, who was a mentor of Stu, he discovered a relationship between chronic back pain and glute inactivation during squatting like movements. He proposed that the glute deactivation may be both a cause and consequence of back pain.

    Here's the part that I don't understand:

    Quote Originally Posted by Stu McGill
    From measuring groups of men with chronic back troubles during squatting types of tasks, it is clear that they try to accomplish this basic motion and motor pattern of hip extension emphasizing the back extensors and the hamstrings--they appear to have forgotten how to use the gluteal complex.
    Then, when describing patients and athletes with back pain:

    Quote Originally Posted by Stu McGill
    Traditional strength approaches to rehabilitating their backs have failed since strength squat patterns were attempted on aberrant motor patterns: Specifically, the gluteal complex was not able to contribute its share to hip extension, loading up the back as the erector spinae crushed the spine.
    What is he getting at here? As far as I understand, the back extensors extend the spine, not the hip. Is the idea that if the hamstrings are left to do all the hip extension work (rather than sharing the load with the glutes), then this creates a larger flexion moment on the lumbar spine? I think I can grok that, but I'm not sure if this is what he's getting at.

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    "crushed the spine"? Can you fix this quote?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    "crushed the spine"? Can you fix this quote?
    I had a similar reaction when I saw it. But that's the quote, verbatim (McGill SM. Low Back Disorders: Evidence Based Prevention and Rehabilitation (2nd ed). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 2007. p. 111.).

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    Then I have no idea what the hell he's talking about.

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    Clearly, strength squat patterns make the erectors so strong, that the mere contraction of which crushes the spine like an aluminum can.

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    Quote Originally Posted by spacediver View Post

    <regarding gluteal amnesia, referencing Stuart McGill>
    What is he getting at here? As far as I understand, the back extensors extend the spine, not the hip. Is the idea that if the hamstrings are left to do all the hip extension work (rather than sharing the load with the glutes), then this creates a larger flexion moment on the lumbar spine? I think I can grok that, but I'm not sure if this is what he's getting at.
    I think you have interpreted that correctly.

    I read a book by Stuart McGill regarding back pain after seeing hime referred to on one of these forums. I was expecting some kind of KStarr type of balderdash, but found that his work consisted mostly of looking at studies that had been done and commenting on them.

    He wasn't dogmatic and I didn't see any suggestion that there was a plague of gluteal amnesia that must be treated with lying leg raises. In the present instance, the group of subjects appears to have developed a bad habit from trying to avoid pain, thus compounding the situation. I assume that the 'crushing' happened when the subjects were rising from the bottom of a squat in extreme lumbar flexion and moved into lumbar extension as a result of using the erector spinae in a concentric manner rather than the isometric manner. Basically anterior pelvic tilt.

    Training the erector spinae by means of the 'superman' lying leg raise would seem to be a solution. Once lumbar extension is trained, the glutes pretty much have to remember their job.

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