The Plank Variation That Saved All the Puppies

If there’s one exercise that sets the foundation for all others, it’s the front plank.

Think about it.

What’s a push-up? A moving plank. What’s a pull-up? A moving plank. What are we doing with our torsos during squats and deadlifts? Maintaining the flat back posture characteristic of, you guessed it, a plank!

Yet if there’s one exercise that’s notoriously butchered, it’s also the plank.

People often attempt to hold it for way too long (e.g. several minutes on end). And when they do, it’s usually ugly. They lose proper position (a straight line from head to heel) and, therefore, the desired training effect. They also kill all of the puppies in the process.

Over the last few years, likely in response to the puppy-killing plank epidemic, the RKC plank has emerged as a potential solution.

The Biggest Gimmick in Performance Training

“Sports-specific training.”

Everybody wants it for their athletes, but do they really know what it means?

Taken literally, sports-specific training is often interpreted as the act of mimicking sporting movements in the gym. This approach sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always pan out in practice.

Not only do “sports-specific” exercises tend to be awkward to load and perform, but the added load also changes the movement pattern subtly. This change can be just subtle enough to negatively interfere with the actual performance of the sport.

A classic example of this type of error is wearing ankle weights to run. The weights change the way you run, which can reinforce bad habits.

Wearing ankle weights could make you run like this.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the camp that believes strength and strength alone is sports-specific. Get freakishly strong in the gym, they say, and leave the sporting movements to the sports coaches.

As with most things, the answer typically lies somewhere in the middle of the extremes.

Nobody Cares About Your One-Rep Max

Earlier this summer I found myself sitting in on an exercise prescription lecture for second-year Doctor of Physical Therapy students at my university. I’ll likely be delivering this lecture next year, so I wanted to have a look-see at the material that was currently being offered. Plus, I just love being that guy who sits in the back of the room interrupting the professor to add his two cents every so often.

One of the things that struck me during the lecture was the emphasis (or overemphasis, in my opinion) on the one-repetition maximum (1RM). For those not familiar, a 1RM is the heaviest weight you can lift one time for a given exercise.

(Note: if you’re feeling fussy, you can differentiate between a “true” 1RM and a “technical” 1RM. True would be the heaviest weight you can lift, form be damned, just get the weight up any which way. A technical max would be the heaviest weight you can lift with perfect form.)

Devoting lecture time to the 1RM isn’t unique to exercise prescription for physical therapy students. 1RM and the testing thereof gets a lot of attention in most exercise textbooks and kinesiology curricula. This thorough treatment of the 1RM isn’t without reason, of course. Tons of training parameters are based off of it.

Conventional training wisdom dictates that if you want to train for a particular adaptation (e.g. strength/power, muscle gain, or endurance), you do a specified number of reps that corresponds to a certain percentage of your 1RM. In addition, 1RM testing can be used to document performance gains over time.

That’s all dandy, but here’s my beef. Unless you’re a competitive powerlifter or an otherwise advanced trainee, the process of figuring out your 1RM is often unnecessarily painstaking, risky, and uninformative.

The number just isn’t that important.

Adapting and Overcoming [Travis Mash's Barbell Life]

What’s the one thing that could be better than having one Travis on a podcast? Having two!

Thanks to Travis Mash​ of The Barbell Life Podcast, we were able to make this dream a reality.

In this podcast, we discussed

• My life story (or at least the cliff notes version)
• My quest for the Paralympics and how it led me first to personal training and now to my PhD
• How I approach new clients
• Advice on growing an internet presence
• The most important skills trainers should have
• And much more!

The episode is available for your listening enjoyment on iTunes and Spreaker:

Listen to "158 - Adapting and Overcoming with Travis Pollen" on Spreaker.

The Simple Pull-Up Progression You Haven’t Tried

A bodyweight pull-up is one of the most elusive movements to master in the gym, especially for adult female exercisers. It takes a rare combination of upper body strength, core strength, and low body fat.

The pull-up is an incredibly worthwhile goal, though. There are few feelings sweeter than conquering that first rep. Of course, one of them would probably have to be tasting that Unicorn Frappuccino everyone was going crazy about a few weeks ago. Mmmmm....

Starbucks drama aside, every trainer has their preferred method of working their clients towards a pull-up. Most pull-up progressions go something like this, with plenty of room for variation (you could argue about the exercise selection and order until the cows come home, and many trainers do):

1. Lat pull-downs

2. Australian pull-ups (AKA inverted rows)

3. Hanging hollow body holds

4. Band-assisted pull-ups

5. Bent-arm hangs

6. Scapular pull-ups

7. Negative reps

8. Pull-ups!

Progressions like these are proven: they’ve helped lots of trainees crush their first rep. But they don’t always work.

Where I see people plateau most often is right at the tail end of the progression. I’ve had clients who can do negative reps for days, but when it comes time to try the full shebang, they barely budge from the straight-arm position.

Fortunately, I believe I’ve discovered the last piece to the pull-up puzzle. It happened very much by accident, when my girlfriend (who coincidentally is working on her first pull-up) showed me a video of her performing a 3/4 partial rep. Because our doorframe pull-up rig is only so tall, she started with her elbows bent, as shown below, hence the ‘partial’ modifier.

Girlfriend not pictured.
But you CAN see what a doorframe pull-up bar looks like.

That’s when the light bulb went off.