Strength in Numbers #154
A very strange thing happened this past weekend. I went to Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanview, California, to meet with the National Pitching Association, as they were hosting a specialized NPA event for their affiliated coaches.
While there, I caught the tail end of Tom House’s discussion of deadlifting and dead arm, and I was putting the pieces together for this article focused on the deadlift.
I’d like to say that great minds think alike, but I am a pebble on the beach that Tom House has built. His main message was not to overdo it on deadlifting, and he could not be more right. Here’s why.
WHERE UNMANAGED DEADLIFTING CAN REALLY MESS UP THROWING ARM LENGTH
I have a bunch of clients with anterior shoulder pain. It is very interesting to me. They start out with elbow problems; they are then pain-free and then begin throwing only to develop anterior shoulder pain. When I do a deep dive into their training programs, a consistent pattern exists in that they are performing heavy bilateral trap bar deadlifts.
Let me first talk about how this can impact soft tissue length. The shoulder in throwing moves all around in the delivery to stretch-shorten, and accelerate the arm, but tissues can shorten in some areas and lengthen in others to lose what is called joint centration.
What happens in the anterior shoulder gang is that they continue to increase anterior (front of the shoulder) laxity, and the humeral head translates forward with the increased space while the posterior capsule tightens.
The shoulder blade lacks scapular retraction and posterior tilting; it’s essentially tacked down and out of the scapular plane.
Okay, so now that you understand the hyperangulation problem, what is causing restrictions? Why is the humerus moving everywhere but not staying centered on the glenoid (the surface considered the joint center of the scapula) that the humeral head sits against?
Well, one culprit is an overactive latissimus dorsi, or “lats.”
When you perform a traditional heavy trapbar deadlift, your hands are in the suitcase position (hands at the side). To perform a heavy deadlift correctly, the athlete must first build tension in the lats at the bottom by squeezing and keeping the shoulders, elbows, and wrists as co-contracted as possible for the entire lift.
The activation of the lats in this position lifting 350+ lbs can be incredibly high, especially in athletes with tighter ankles that require more of a hinge position to lift the load such as my technique.
Most training programs bookend heavy trap bar lifting, typically putting Mondays and Fridays in the offseason and, at times, on Thursdays in-season if Saturday is a start day.
The rotator cuff, periscapular, and humeroscapular muscles can nowhere near activate themselves like the lats can, and as a result, the stronger internal rotators, being the lat, can really tack down scapular position, increasing the effect of hyperangulation.
WHERE UNMANAGED DEADLIFTING CAN REALLY MESS UP THROWING ARM STRENGTH
Long before I joined ArmCare.com, I learned from two people who I think are arguably the best preparation coaches and influences in my career as a human performance specialist.
Buddy Morris, the Senior Reconditioning Coordinator for the Arizona Cardinals, and his assistant, the late Paul Childress, a powerlifter competing with Westside Barbell.
Paul was featured in the Westside Against the World documentary and broke the world record for 40-year olds for squat with a 1205 lbs lift. If he performed the lift with a typical barbell, it would bend around his body from the load.
One of the things they mentioned to me was how the Russians used handgrip dynamometry to determine whether an athlete could lift a circa-max effort attempt in training.
A max effort attempt wasn’t undertaken based on being programmed but instead reaffirmed with data. Powerlifters train and compete in the same arena, much different than baseball players who lift. However, grip strength is the window into the neurological soul for all athletes.
With heavy trap bar loads, the handgrip is challenged in a strange way.
The grip force is distributed more around the medial elbow flexors, and because of the full body activation, blood flow is temporarily occluded to a degree to the forearms during co-contraction so that the upper half is ridged for the bottom half to work.
With even two sets of a 3 rep max, the athlete can fry their nervous system for a week and if the athlete does not have a de-load period, the sympathetic nervous system, your fight and flight system that releases adrenaline to enhance muscle contraction, can dull and strength loss and a host of other overreaching symptoms can set in.
SO, WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE, AND HOW DO YOU CUSTOMIZE YOUR DEADLIFT TRAINING?
This one is an easy answer and an important introduction to compound lifting with athletes I have who have returned from back injuries. We use a barbell instead of a trap bar, and we do single-leg instead of bilateral. We also begin with dumbbells, and below is the rationale:
1. Pitchers compete with individual legs and the back foot only grazes the ground for a split second, so we know that from a strength and coordination lens, a single leg hinge action makes most sense and it controls going too heavy which is a low back risk, especially in-season.
2. You want something to pull into. A lot of times with a trapbar, especially when done for speed, athletes move so fast into extension, that they cause lumbar extension, shooting through the hole in the trapbar and letting the hands actually move behind them. To prevent this you can use a band at the bottom to create decelerative tension past the sticking point, but this is more advanced and takes an athlete with experience to understand the motor control of going fast and handling the elastic tension to hold the center mass centered. With a barbell, your body is stopped by the bar.
3. The barbell also requires grip orientation that increases the activation of the pronator teres, a key contributor to medial elbow stability and helps share the load. That way muscles that are anatomically oriented right over the UCL are slightly offloaded from high levels of activation.
4. Hand position is very important when using the barbell and gives the exercise some adjustability for how much latinvolvement you want. For me, I get more lat involvement with the hands further away, while others feel more squeezing with the arms closer to the side. Some athletes prefer a mixed grip, one hand pronated and another supinated which is recommended with heavier training loads. Regardless whether you use the barbell or trapbar, it’s important to set the shoulder blades down and back (I use the cue of putting your shoulder blades in the back pockets). I am also looking into the muscle activation patterns of using a supinated grip (for athletes with wrist mobility) in activating the infraspinatus, an external rotator cuff muscle, that has the potential to improve Shoulder Balance scores with lower body lifting.
The video of the banded trap bar RDL is a variation of the deadlift that uses band tension to secure the body inside the hole of the trap bar. The barbell version uses the barbell, and on the concentric component of this movement, the body moves into the bar until it is stacked and neutral.
SO WHAT IF I AM A BEGINNER?
No problem here either. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, or have a history of back problems, dumbbell variations are going to great for all athletes.
You need to prime the hinge pattern and can do an RDL with dumbbells and lighter loads. This creates more freedom to control the weight and there’s some bonus proprioception as well.
The dumbbells move from suitcase position to in front of the center of mass and give a little more mobility and joint center control in the lift.
Single arm – single leg variations are also great that requires more core control than just increasing intra-abdominal pressure around the spine with bilateral lifting, and you can add a stability ball to promote shoulder mobility in the lift like I am doing below.
These videos show how lighter loaded lifts can be more strength and coordination specific to baseball. Remember, we are training baseball players that lift, not lifters that play baseball.
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
Both Tom and I are not saying you should throw your heavy trapbar deadlifts in the trash, but rather timing is everything, and further, customization is the only thing.
So, how do you know when to temper down the training stimulus. Well, that is the easiest question to answer in the book – you look at the athlete’s fresh exam and post-exam. It doesn’t make sense to load athletes with a heavy trapbar, especially when we have the data to show they are fatigued or not recovering well, and we are overreaching players all the time if throwing arm strength is not monitored.
If you are seeing grip fatigue, alerts on grip recovery, shoulder flexion restrictions, and internal rotation deficits, I 100% recommend pivoting.
Deadlifts do not cause dead arms. The inability to be dynamic and individualize does.
LEARN. MEASURE. BUILD – it’s the process in building an MVP player development plan.
Oh, and how could I forget – STRENGTH MATTERS MOST.
Ryan
Ryan@armcare.com