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Thread: Article: Muscle Imbalances and Injuries

  1. #11
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    • starting strength seminar april 2024
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    Try some magensium

  2. #12
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    Unless that's different than magnesium, you'd better be damned careful with that.

  3. #13
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    magnesium supplements? can't hurt.

  4. #14
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    Take a gram of MgO2 powder and get back to us in an hour.

  5. #15
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    While Rip focuses on how to treat bilateral imbalances and not on how to define them, the treatment approach itself yields a better definition for a bilateral imbalance than the NASM's non-definition. Something like:

    A bilateral muscle imbalance caused by muscle weakness is significant when the weakness is sufficient to prevent symmetric movement of a loaded bilateral exercise at non-trivial loads

    In other words, the imbalance interferes with normal function. This is an objective criterion, better than "your right arm is stronger than your left, so you are imbalanced and must be at risk of injury!"

    How about defining the other commonly discussed kind of imbalance, an agonist/antagonist one? Since we are dealing with "opposite" movements or muscle groups, movement symmetry can't be used to reveal an imbalance. We have to look to strength ratios instead of movement. But this presents a problem because it's not generalizable. Strength ratios vary widely due to anthropometry, genetics, and training history. In order to define what qualifies as an "imbalance", strength ratios for every pair of opposing movements or muscle groups would need to be studied for athletes at different levels of proficiency in every sport in order to establish what is "normal" for this kind of athlete and how that correlates with performance and injury risk.

    For example, it's well known that elite Olympic weightlifters have a high quadriceps-to-hamstring strength ratio. They are very "quad-dominant" - are they "imbalanced?"
    Are they likely to injure a hamstring if they decide to sprint? If they are, then why should we care since they never do it anyway?
    Are powerlifters who never do curls "imbalanced" in their arms, or maybe it is the bodybuilders who curl all day that have the "correct" biceps-to-triceps strength ratio?
    Most regular guys I've seen can row more than they can bench press. Is an elite bench presser who can bench 450 pounds "imbalanced" if he cannot row that much?
    If a baseball pitcher wants to reduce his risk of shoulder injury from throwing really hard, is there any way to know how strong all the muscles in and around his shoulder need to be? How good does he need to be at pullups, various rows, whatever press variations his hypermobile shoulder can tolerate, and Face Pulls?

    If we actually did have all of this data, would it really tell us anything that we don't know already, like "stronger is better" and "the training program should be appropriate for the requirements and injury risks of the sport?"

    I have to conclude that the concept of agonist/antagonist "imbalances" is useless and that a large imbalance of this kind will not occur in the absence of a physical pathology or pathologically bad training program, and that any "imbalance" observed in athletes training with sensible programs is fine within the confines of their sport. In fact, athletes who are very specialized in a narrow range of movements, like the aforementioned Olympic weightlifters and baseball pitchers, will have imbalances or asymmetries as a result of training for and practicing their sport. This makes the concept of "imbalances" even more useless when discussing such specialized athletes.

  6. #16
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    starting strength coach development program
    Good post, Ben.

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