WATCH: Programming Back Exercises for Mobility, Strength, and Joint Health
Our daily routines force us to live anteriorly dominant, meaning that everything we do is in front of us. These banded accessory and mobility exercises will build a stronger, healthier, more stable upper back.
The Candle Protocol for Deeper Sleep
What you will find in this article is an easy-to-implement solution that will have a quicker, more impactful, and longer-lasting effect on your health, your physique, and your progress than anything you’ve ever done before.
Common Behaviors of Lifters Who Know How to Improve
Lifters who succeed share a lot of qualities — and so do lifters who fail. I’d challenge you to honestly evaluate how closely you fall on the spectrum of each of these qualities.
ACL Rehab Phase One — Returning to the Weight Room
After an ACL injury, the athlete is first rehabbed exclusively in the training room. Once they’re released to me, we start this phase of the recovery process.
Loaded Carries for Improved Body Position and Health
The farmer’s walk is the single best exercise you’re not doing for shoulder performance, posture, and health.
Controversies in Recovery Strategies
This article will provide a scientific evaluation of three frequently-implemented recovery strategies: anti-inflammatory interventions (NSAID/ice baths), foam rolling, and nutrition timing.
Every Hip Replacement Has a Silver Lining
If life is a juggling act, some balls are rubber and some are glass. You can get another job, buy a new car, or pay someone to fix your house, but if you drop the ball with your family, it is broken forever.
WATCH: Table Talk — Feeder and Recovery Workouts
You can’t just throw in extra workouts or recovery protocols and expect to get the most out of them. Like everything else in training, they need to be programmed strategically and used at the right times.
Mental Visualization to a Better Total
The body is limited but the mind is unbelievably more powerful. With positive mental imagery, you can take successful rep after successful rep with a weight you have never even touched.
How to Heal Any Injury Overnight
When recovering from a recent hamstring tear, I started using a simple practice that can not only make training more intense, productive, and satisfying, but can also help you handle anything in training — including injury.
Using Continuous Positional Feedback: Three Exercises You Can Improve by...
The continuous feedback of the wall can provide the athlete with a sense of position, tension, and compensation, resulting in improved performance and benefit of the exercises.
Current State of the Injury Rehabilitation and Pre-habilitation Field
How do people begin to decipher what constitutes good injury rehabilitation or pre-habilitation? In this article, I’m going to describe in detail many different factors that will help you sniff out the bullshit.
Hack Your Internal Clock for Improved Sleep Quality and Sport Performance
Getting stuck in the routine of a disrupted sleep-wake cycle can turn a top-tier athlete into a complete mess. Understanding circadian rhythms is the first step to avoiding this.
Alternatives to Squat Training After Overuse Injuries
When looking at how to continue to train through overuse injuries, there are five main regressions and changes I have found able to lead to pain-free movement in the squat.
Back to Recovery Basics: Supplementing Your Recovery Plan
In order to best manage the time available to devote to recovery, it is essential to devise supplemental recovery methods that best target each athlete’s personal needs.
Peaking When Things Feel Off: Quick Corrections Before A Meet
Only five days out from an important meet, I don’t have much time to fix the issues I’m having. For this reason I’m approaching the idea of a pre-meet deload a little differently.
The One Thing Your Glutes Are Missing
Let’s take a quick look at some simple biomechanics, and then we will break down the squat so we can rebuild it with an emphasis on generating torque.
Methods to Improve Your Posture for Sport Performance
Now that we have a clear understanding of what posture is and why it is important, we can begin developing a plan to improve it.
Back to Recovery Basics: The Big Three
In part two of this series, the topic is the big three for recovery, which allows athletes to experience better performance, resistance to injury, and longevity in their sport.
Improve Your Posture for Sport Performance
As a lifter, and likely someone that sits at a desk a lot, the odds are you spend a lot of time slouching, with tight hip flexors, pecs and biceps, fueling the fire of kyphosis, lordosis, and medial humeral rotation.
An Argument for Post-Training Cardio Gains
Worried that too much cardio could hinder your muscle growth? Performed the right way, at the right time, low-intensity aerobic activity can actually improve muscle hypertrophy.
Surviving a Pec Tear
Seven years ago while benching 500 pounds, I experienced a partial pec tear to the muscle belly near the attachment to the pec tendon. These are the techniques I used to recover and the exercises I perform to safeguard my pec from ever tearing again.
Reborn After Arthritis
Surgery isn’t magic but sometimes it is the best option if you’re willing to take the time to recover and undergo proper rehabilitation. Here’s my story of osteoarthritis at 29 years old.
Back to Recovery Basics: Fundamentals of Recovery
Understanding the role of recovery is the first step to improving your health, longevity, and performance as a strength athlete. Think of it like this: your training is the sledgehammer and your recovery is the raw materials and blueprints for improvement.
Tools of the Trade — Popular Modalities for Soft Tissue Recovery and The...
This article will give a thorough understanding of the similarities and differences between modalities, which modality is best for certain injuries, how they are best used in your training, and what their overall purpose is.
Got Shoulder Pain?
The shoulder is a complex joint but keeping it healthy can be simple. Many issues can be fixed or greatly improved with certain exercises and stretching.
Priorities for the Powerlifter and Bodybuilder — Upper Body Mobility and...
The first article of this series covered quick, effective drills to use prior to training that will improve your lower body performance. Now let’s look at the upper body and address the three most common dysfunction in strength athletes.
Secrets of Faster Injury Healing
There are several things to understand when putting together a rehabilitation protocol, but if you create the right plan and stick to it, you’ll be recovered in no time.
Assessment of Shoulder Dysfunction: Getting Ahead of the Game
There are four joints that make up the shoulder and 12 muscles that act on the scapula. These simple range of motion screens can help you identify issues and develop a plan to train for correcting them.
Utility of the Overhead Press
Looking at lats, thoracic mobility, and the ribcage during an overhead exercise can tell you a lot about a person’s pattern, position, and movement quality.
WATCH: Dr. Ken Kinakin SPS Presentation — Pain when Overhead Pressing
If shoulder pain is holding you back when pressing overhead, the infraspinatus and AC joint are two likely culprits you should examine.
Metal Cylinders — Two Devices Helping My Training
I’ve used these items before training as a way to warm up and loosen muscle fiber, and I’ve used them after training as a form of relaxation and recovery. In every case, they’re improving the way I feel and lift.
WATCH: Dr. Ken Kinakin SPS Presentation — Treatment and Rehabilitation o...
If you’ve pushed your exercise intensity too far and crossed through the “training redline” into the zones of injury severity, it’s going to take some time to heal. These are several techniques to help you understand the extent of your injury and rehabilitation process.
Priorities for the Powerlifter and Bodybuilder — Lower Body Mobility and...
What mobility or stability drills should I do? How much should I do of them? Which days do I do them on? Here’s what to do, when to do them, how to do them, and how long you should do them.
WATCH: Dr. Ken Kinakin SPS Presentation — Subscapularis Strain and Testing
There are four common muscle injury patterns from the barbell bench press or “pushing forward.” The subscapularis strain is the most common, but there are ways to test for it and treat it.
Rehab Done Right: 7 Mistakes of Injury Rehabilitation
If you anticipate an extended period of time off, there are lots of things you can do right to avoid common mistakes. Your goal should be to come back stronger and tremendously benefit from time away from heavy weight.
My Strength Journey: Overcoming Adversity
I decided I was going to use this setback as a gift, to become better than I was yesterday. To become strong, pain-free, and resilient.
Four Keys to Manual Resistance
The half-kneeling y-raise is great at showing athletes correct scapulo-humeral rhythm without the common compensations of the over-dominant accessory muscles of the neck and back. To do it, follow the rules of manual resistance.
Combatting Shoulder and Elbow Pain from Low Bar Squatting
Where you lack motion or motor control, your body will pass down the chain to the next moving part that can buy you an extra bit to help you get into position. This is dysfunction.
Unilateral Movements to Help Heal Nagging Injuries
I recently realized I’ve been looking at my back injury the wrong way all along. I needed to simplify the way I was thinking about it.
My Experience at the SWIS Exercise Muscle Testing Certification
The latest and greatest from Dr. Ken Kinakin includes specific muscle tests for upper and lower body exercises to determine if the muscles are functional and capable of handling the stress of weight.
Some Like It Hot — A Guide to Choosing your Liniment
One, two, three, or even four Screamin’ Daves. If you aren’t sure which liniment is for you, use this guide to direct you to the perfect product.
How to Optimize Your Biggest Recovery Asset
The benefits of improved sleep are just as real as the consequences of deprivation. Follow these simple rules for sleep and watch your recovery—and your progress—skyrocket.
Identifying Hip Impingement Causes and Solutions
If you Google “hip pain at the bottom of the squat,” you’re going to be left more than a little confused about what the cause might be and what you should do. Let’s sort through all of the information and advice.
WATCH: Table Talk with Dan Green — Keeping the Endgame in Mind During th...
If you’re forced to take time away from the gym, where should your focus be? Maintaining strength? Maintaining size? Getting healthy?
How Is Dave Tate Still Doing Dave Tate Things?
Every medical professional gauges how much slack on the leash they can give you without negative effects because everyone’s threshold is a little different. What’s Dave’s? And why?
WATCH: Table Talk with Mark Dugdale — How to Balance Training with a Phy...
You can control the physical demands placed on your body in the gym, but you can’t always control what happens outside of it. How can you ensure you’re recovered and in an optimal state once its time to train?
Use This ‘One Simple Trick' to Triple Your Recovery
Two weeks after a tear in my quad, I was squatting 860 pounds again. This is how.
Prework: The Best Thing Your Training Program Likely Needs
It really seems like most people don’t care about corrective exercises and prehab until chronic injury and age rear their ugly heads. Enter: my current life situation and the solution.
10 Big Lessons 2016 Taught Me
Your numbers will be subject to so many external variables, but your character is forged by intentionality.
RPR: Wake Up Your True Performance Potential
The purpose of this tool is to identify problems and compensations in an individual’s movement patterns and to restore neurological balance to allow the body to perform the way it naturally should.
Why Body Tempering Works
With all the buzz going on about body tempering, a lot of questions come up about why it works or what makes it different than other types of treatments. Here’s the answer.
WATCH: Anterior Pelvic Tilt Compilation Series — Dani Overcash and Casey...
In these six videos, Dani identifies and helps resolve Casey’s hip issues while squatting. How can Casey’s powerlifting setback help you?
I Can’t Touch A Barbell Without Hurting: Train or Take Time Off?
If you try to ignore an injury, you’re going to end up in one of two places: with compensated strength or accumulated injury. Is continuing to train, but simply using lighter weights, the answer?
A (Battle) Cry for Help
Is it a bad decision to stop performing lifts that cause an axial load on the spine when the back is injured?
Rebuild the Squat from the Bottom Up: Your Ankles May Be Shutting Off Yo...
If you’ve addressed pelvis position but your mobility, mechanics, or pain aren’t changing, consider that your neurological reference center may need to shift. Shift it to your heels.
Build Your Arch: Why Flat Feet Kill Your Squat
In today’s article, I’m going to show you how flat feet can harm you during your squat, and more importantly, give you exercises to fix it.
Another Setback, Another Challenge...Another Path to PRs
We experience breaks, tears, sprains, joint replacements, and other sundry surgeries. We could stop, but we don’t. We overcome, persevere, and come back stronger.
Impostor Syndrome — Identifying the Less Admirable
Training was so important to me. It covered my insecurity and kept me distracted from the ugliness that was brewing underneath.