Tools for Transformation

Unfortunately many people do not understand how to do basic movements. This lack of understanding can lead to joint and ligament stress, and even the sheering of some muscles. The argument for strict form at all times is simple: strict form equals balanced, well-executed movement. Such movement is not likely to injure you.

Most of us learn the hard way -- if ever. I've never met anyone who, after a time, hasn't developed some sort of problem, nor have I met many who understand that the transformation to healing leads to new opportunities.

And no wonder since most of our medical models support surgery and drugs rather than transformation.

There are excellent new training accessories available that can provide these opportunities which are elaborated upon below.

First, however, some common problems (or distortions) are outlined. Does one, or more than one of the following four distortions, describe you? If so, you are not alone!

The Four Distortions

Scapular Elevation: One shoulder is higher than the other, sometimes by several pronounced inches.

With this postural top-end misalignment, you are wide open for a host of shoulder injuries from exercises such as upright rowing and lateral raises to bench presses and curls. Such exercises executed with this condition create shoulder and bicep tendon strain. Done long enough, that pop you will hear someday is either a pectoral tear or a ruptured biceps tendon.

Humerus Internal Rotation: Do your arms hang at your side so that your palms lie almost flat against your hips or do your hands rotate forward with palms facing to the rear?

Shoulder Protraction: Shoulders hang down and roll forward. Consequently this condition causes the arms to be in a forward position and the neck to crane in an arch in order to look forward; otherwise, you'd be staring straight down at the ground.

Anterior Pelvic Tilt: The rear hips thrust upward resulting in the belly distending outward causing the gut to appear much bigger than it really is.

Carpal Tunnel, Pronator Teres, Bicep and Shoulders: It's said that one-third of all carpal tunnel syndrome diagnoses are actually misdiagnoses.

A small muscle forearm muscle known as the pronator teres becomes strained and painful, but this has nothing to do with the carpel tunnel which is a nerve pathway through an opening in the wrist bones. You'll feel it in the forearm area first, after which it can spread to the elbow, brachiallis, outer head of bicep and the shoulder. Repetitive movements abnormal to our evolutionary development trigger these problems. Working on computers all day is only one example.

All four distortions can co-exist within a given individual with the combined effect creating a propensity for injuries that are quite predictable. Visits to chiropractors and massage therapists will help for a while but they will not transform the problem.

Transformation depends onaddressing what's hurting you due to postural misalignments, how you move because of the incorrect posture, and having the knowledge and means of straightening yourself out.
If you have any of the above problems, this article assumes you're seeing a health professional, preferably one who trains with iron themselves and hence understands what the late cardiologist/marathoner Dr. George Sheehan termed "diseases of excellence."

The following accessories, when wisely employed with a full spectrum of your conscious awareness may then facilitate in evolving and transforming you from the inside out!

DAVE DRAPER'S TOP SQUAT®

The Bomber's really done it this time! His Top Squat® is a tool of sheer genius. Now if he'd just invent something similar for calf work.

Falling into a couple of the above described postural categories thanks to 40 years of resistance training and the normal wear and tear of life, I was busy trying to conceive of how to do what the Top Squat® does when I got an email announcing it as a new product.

Dave developed the Top Squat® as a way of being able to do squats without holding the bar in that awkward posture when it's on your shoulders that so many folks can no longer tolerate due to arthritis or other degenerative conditions.

The device snaps easily on to an Olympic Bar becoming one with it. Its padded bottom traverses the shoulders of the lifter who then holds on to break-out bars on either side, thus stabilizing the weighted bar. This puts the job of stabilizing the weight in front of you through a simple lever rather than having to reach backward, which is too painful for many. The shoulders maintain the burden of the weight, while the arms simply guide it. This totally relieved the pressure of the bar on my aching rotator cuff muscles, and, as I understand it, on Dave's arthritic shoulders.

Remember the anterior pelvic tilt disorder? With that misalignment, any squatting furthers the distortion and puts the effort on the lower back and glutes so a person is actually doing butt squats. Here's where the Top Squat® is ingenious. By keeping the guides tilted well upward and consciously keeping your head upward with eyes fixed toward the ceiling, you can easily learn to squat from the quads because the device used in this manner forces you upward, erect, and quad squatting. It doesn't do so automatically, but does facilitate relearning the movement so that it is healthy for you.

Personally speaking, the Top Squat® has given me a new lease on leg work and I couldn't be happier.

Editor's Note: The Top Squat® was engineered and tested by Torque Athletic. It can be purchased from Torque or from Dave Draper.

Power Hooks® I can give you a lot of good reasons for changing over to dumbbells for chest work, but they all boil down to one big reason: healthy shoulders. Dumbbells will help, if not force, those with protracted shoulders, humerus internal rotation, scapular elevation and even forearm problems to relearn movement and posture at one and the same time.

For those with menacing forearm and shoulder problems, the one setback for using dumbbells is getting them into and out of position. Power Hooks® introduces a new element of safety and control for dumbbell use, opening new possibilities for transformational healing and making new gains.

They are made of a heavy gauge rod that has been shaped to hold the dumbbell on one end, and hang it from a bar on the other. This allows the trainee to get under the weight just as he/she would with a barbell, making life much easier for spotters.

For those of you who train alone at home, I can assure you from personal experience that Power Hooks® are real lifesavers from a safety standpoint.

Barbells can become downright dangerous for a variety of shoulder problems, not because of the bar, but because people use them in a dangerous manner, particularly so when they train out of blind habit. Only recently have I once again been able to use a barbell for chest (not bench) presses. I spent some years doing nothing but dumbbell work and owe much of my transformation directly to the Power Hooks®.

How often are you asked how much you can squat or deadlift which would certainly be a much better indicator of strength. However, the question always is "How much can you bench?" Most young men learn very sloppy bench press form in order to support delicate egos. They learn to bridge, bounce, grip too wide, how to force the weight up, do partial movements and then lie about the poundage. You name it, we do ourselves disservice, except that we often don't know it immediately.

Dumbbells take the "dumb" out of training and put "smart" back into it. The movement should be called a Smartbell Chest Press, for a chest press is what you have to learn. What you want is focused, concentrated movements calculated to pump those pecs, not tear them out of your chest. To transform pain in the shoulders, transform your bench press into a chest, or pec, press and put the prescription pain killers back in the medicine cabinet.

Ivanko EZGRIP® Twenty years of computer use (especially with the advent of the mouse) started catching up with me 5 or 6 years ago with forearm pain near the bicep tendon and worked its way to other places. Several misdiagnoses by body workers did not facilitate resolving it. Only an Active Release Therapist was able to begin the transformational process. ART treatments have helped immensely, but a self-constructed program of transformative healing helped as well. Power Hooks® have been one part of that, Ivanko's EZGRIP® the other part.

I cannot imagine why both these accessories are not better known. Neither are new products, and neither have been great commercial successes, yet both deserve tremendous notoriety through a wider user base of transformational practitioners!

Prior to discovering the EZGRIP® my search for a remedy led to some "secrets" of the Irongame: thick handles on barbells of the past, those from super-strength competitions, and those on some of the newer machines in gyms. That contrasted with how some bars on the thin side tend to cause problems for me. I could understand a thin bar causing some flair up in the forearm, but not in the elbow until I thought about the interrelated neuromuscular system.

My first experiments were done with pipe insulation from a hardware store. While somewhat relieving the pain, it just didn't do the trick. Fortunately I came across the EZGRIP® while looking for something entirely different on the Ivanko site. I ordered a pair and was most pleasantly surprised.

EZGRIPs® are not for all movements, however. I would not think of deadlifting or doing lat work with them, but they're ideal for curls and barbell-based pec and shoulder pressing, or close grip triceps bench press bars or triceps rope attachments. With the EZGRIP® you suddenly feel in control of the bar, over the movement and the great pump that creates.

Another wonderful use for which they are not advertised is as an aid for the infirm and elderly. My elderly mother had more than one mishap with her walker. Think about it. Elderly or infirm people are placed in a walker for stability, holding on to a 1 to 1-1/4-inch round handle. Non-lifters might not get the point, but us Irongame trainees sure can appreciate the safety and comfort EZGRIPs® provide for those confined to walkers.

For those with carpal tunnel syndrome/pronator teres disorders, the EZGRIP® opens new realms of freedom and functionality for your workouts. Having a larger working area for your hands to grab hold of the bar makes an immense difference. When you're healing from a repetitive stress disorder, you find out that holding on tightly to small diameter bars causes irritation to the very muscles you're trying to rehab. The larger surface of the EZGRIP® takes care of that problem without the cost of specially made equipment.

These gadgets are very easy to use. They snap on to all of my standard one-inch diameter bars and bells as well as my slightly larger diameter Ivanko bar.

Although I cannot explain why, I have found doing curls with the EZGRIP® results not only in a much deeper bicep pump, but also spurred some rather sudden bicep growth.

DURABALL® By the volume of email I continue to receive concerning the article I wrote on rotator cuff transformative healing (page391), it's obvious this is a common injury. Since then the Duraball® has come into my life and I'm thrilled to pass on information about it to others trying to improving cuff health.

The Duraball®, patented in Australia, is much safer to use than the standard Swiss Ball®. Most Swiss Balls® are rated somewhere around 500 pounds per square inch (psi) of break strength. That means they are not very safe for use with weights.

The Duraball®, on the other hand, is rated in the 2,500 psi range, which is a 500 percent greater burst point and one that certainly makes more sense to anyone who uses it with weights.

More than likely you've never heard of the Moon Bench, an old time invention that was basically a padded arc that stretched your rib cage when you lay down upon it. For doing flys and pullovers, there was nothing better. If you're rehabilitating rotator cuff or other shoulder disorders, you really do need a Moon Bench. Given that you won't find one, the Duraball® is an excellent substitute for the job, plus a lot more.

Paul Chek appears to have the North American distributorship for the Duraball® as well as a lot of good information. He breaks the spell about one's height versus the size ball that needed. Until Chek, I was supposed to use a 65 cm. ball; with Chek's schema, that dropped to 55 cm. which saved me money. Chek is entirely correct in that this smaller ball is far better for my use.

For shoulders/cuffs, be sure to incorporate flyes and dumbbell pullovers in very strict form. The Duraball® permits a deep stretch of impinged tissues, creating new flexibility and mobility in order to loosen those long-stiffened joints. The ball is also a good tool for abdominal work.

1-Ton Hooks®
1-Ton Hooks® are another of the best-kept secrets of Irongame tools I literally stumbled upon during a visit to another website. The Hooks are without equal in the market today, one of those unique products obviously envisioned by a creative mind.

For those of us with carpal tunnel or pronator teres problems, rehabilitation and transformation of the injury due to use disorder has two aspects to its success: healing and conditioning the injury while not inhibiting use of other muscle groups. In practical terms, when your forearm is painful, but healing, you still have the need to grab on to bars and lift or pull them.

Having a tool to aid in that process that offsets direct stress to the forearm is most welcome. The 1-Ton Hooks® do that job -- and more.

The tool is well engineered for heavy-duty use. The hook itself is heavy gauge steel formed to fit larger diameter bars. It has dual straps, one of which goes around the wrist for attaching to the arm; the other comes off the wrap-around at right angles, not only holding the hook but also permitting custom adjustment to the wrist/hand. The second strap also allows the hook to be reversed for some movements. Hence, this strong and durable hooking tool allows much flexibility for different users and uses. Unlike other straps and hooks on the market, 1-Tons are intended for the most serious heavyweight lifters and are well padded with neoprene instead of cheap foam. I have found them a joy to use.

Aside from the transformative use for the hands, having a solid grip on large weights is just what you need to maintain mindfulness and posture for transforming problems associated with both pelvic tilt and shoulder protraction issues: corrective lifts such as the deadlift and shrug call for a delicate balance between heavy weights and mindfulness of movement. Having your grip comfortably taken care of relieves the burden of responsibility in a vital area, as well as permitting even doing those lifts with forearm and elbow challenges.

If you are having any of the problems mentioned in the first part of this article, give the accessories mentioned in the second part a try. They have certainly made a difference in prolonging my lifting life.

Ken O'Neill can be reached at kayoneill@longlifefitness.net for consultations, home gym design, arrangement for personal training, or workshops.

Active wear in Top Squat photos available from Torque Athletic.
Active wear in EZGRIP photo available from House of Pain.