Sunday, February 23, 2014

FOR ANYONE WITH BACK PROBLEMS THIS MAY BE THE WAY TO GO:

Forget What You’ve Heard: 4 Reasons Why Full Squats Save Your Knees

Hips below knees, back more horizontal. No, it's not what your trainer told you.

by
MARK RIPPETOE

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February 21, 2014 - 10:48 am

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(image credit: Thomas Campitelli, The Aasgaard Company 2013)

The idea that below-parallel squats are bad for the knees is complete nonsense that for some reason will not go away. This mythology is mindlessly repeated by orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, registered nurses, personal trainers, dieticians, sportscasters, librarians, lunch-room monitors, and many other people in positions of authority with no actual knowledge of the topic and no basis in fact for their opinion.

I have been teaching the below-parallel squat for 37 years, and have taught hundreds of thousands of people — in my gym, through my books and videos, and in my seminars — to safely perform the most important exercise in the entire catalog of resistance training. Yet here in 2014, well into the 21st century, we still hear completely uninformed people — who have had ample opportunity to educate themselves yet have failed to do so — advise against performing squats under the assumption that they look scary or hard and are therefore “bad for the knees.”

Here are four reasons why this is not true, and why you should immediately start squatting correctly if you entertain the notion that you’d like to be stronger. 

1. The “deep” (hips below the level of the knees) squat is an anatomically normal position for the human body.

It is used as a resting position for millions of people everywhere, and they squat into it and rise out of it every time. There is nothing harmful about either assuming a squatting position — whether sitting down in a chair or into an unsupported squat — or returning to a standing position afterward.

If you look at the knees and hips, you’ll notice that they seem suspiciously well-adapted to doing this very thing. Infants and children squat down below parallel all the time in the absence of pediatric medical intervention. These things should indicate to the thinking person that there is nothing inherently harmful in assuming this anatomically normal position. The fact that you haven’t been squatting is no reason to seek justification for not having done so.

The world powerlifting record for the squat is over 1,000 pounds. My friend Ellen Stein has squatted 400 at the age of 60 at a bodyweight of 132 pounds. Everybody seems to be okay.

Yes, friends, we’ve been squatting since we’ve had knees and hips, and the development of the toilet just reduced the range of motion a little. The comparatively recent innovation of gradually loading this natural movement with a barbell doesn’t mean that it will hurt you, if you do it correctly.

You don’t get to do the squat incorrectly and then tell everybody that squatting hurt your knees.

Disclaimer: This discussion refers specifically to the strength training version of the movement, the one designed to make you progressively stronger by lifting progressively heavier weights. If you are doing hundreds of reps of unweighted squats, your knees and everything else are going to be unavoidably and exquisitely sore.

(image credit: Thomas Campitelli, The Aasgaard Company 2013)

2. The correct squat is a hips-dependent movement, not a knees movement.

The knees obviously have to bend if you squat down, but they are not loaded the same way the hips are. The hips absorb and redirect the majority of the stress if you do the movement correctly by pushing the hips back. The hip muscles consist of all of the glute muscles, all the internal hip muscles, the hamstrings, and the groin muscles (the adductors). This large muscle mass adapts to squatting just like all muscles adapt to exercise — they get stronger. The correctly performed squat shoves the knees out to the side and the hips back, placing most of the load on the hips and completely protecting the knees from whatever it is that everybody is afraid of.

This position also places the back at a more horizontal angle than is typically recognized as correct by most personal trainers. The squat is thus a back exercise. The hip-bone’s connected to the back-bone, and if the hips are going to do the work, they have to be in a position that also loads the back. The squat is supposed to stress the back. It’s a back exercise. The back muscles get strong along with everything else as the weight goes up. If you don’t exercise the back muscles, they can’t get strong. Strong back muscles keep you from hurting your back, and the squat is a basic back exercise.

3. The full squat is not only safe for the knees, it is the best exercise for knee health you can do.

Squats are regarded as the basic lower-body exercise by strength athletes because nothing else compares to its ability to strengthen the structure of the knee — the muscles, tendons, bones, and ligaments that form the knee anatomy.

The muscles on the front of the thigh are the quadriceps. They attach below the knee to the “tibial tuberosity” — the bump at the top of the shin bone — just below the kneecap. When they pull this bone forward, the knee extends and the force at the tendon attachment is directed forward relative to the joint. In contrast, the hamstrings pull backwards on either side of the knee at their attachments, which balances the forward force from the quads. This happens in a correct squat when the hips move back and the torso leans forward. The balance of forces is optimum at a position just below parallel, and protects the joint so well that a correct squat can be safely performed even without an ACL. (I don’t have one.)

(image credit: Thomas Campitelli, The Aasgaard Company 2013)

4. Partial squats are performed with a more vertical back angle that does not permit the hamstrings to tighten and protect the knees.

Partial squats usually leave the hamstrings out of the exercise, because they are usually thought of as an exercise for the “quads.” This is muscle-group thinking instead of movement-pattern thinking. The beauty of the squat is that it works so much more than just one muscle group.

Since a partial squat doesn’t require you to move the load very far or to use the hard part of the exercise’s range of motion, it allows the use of much heavier weights. Kids playing around in the gym will always squat this way, and it doesn’t help that most of the personal trainers in the gym think partial squats are not only okay, but correct.

Unfortunately, high school football players under the guidance of coaches motivated by the lust for a defensive line that “squats” 500 pounds are often subjected to more spinal loading than their young backs are prepared for. As a general rule, if the bar is so heavy that you cannot squat below parallel with it and stand back up, it’s too heavy to have on your back.

The below-parallel squat is unparalleled for the development of strength, balance, bone density, and health. It works all the muscles in the body at the same time, while allowing increasingly heavier loads to do the magic of progressive adaptation. If you are afraid of squats, you need to rethink the situation.

I WISH THIS WASN'T THE CASE BUT I BELIEVE HE'S ON THE MONEY.

Our Economy Is About to Implode

By Jack Kelly - February 23, 2014

 

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"Beware the Ides of March,” the soothsayer warned in Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar.”

A Roman religious holiday, the Ides (15th) of March was the day on which Roman consuls assumed office — and the day Caesar was assassinated.

For the United States, and the world economy, the Ides will be around March 4 this year, predicted Grady Means in October 2012.

Mr. Means isn’t a doomsayer who’s predicted 11 of the last two recessions. He isn’t trying to sell gold, silver or freeze-dried food. He was managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and wrote well-regarded books on international finance.

And he isn’t alone in issuing warnings.

“We expect the bottom to fall out by the second quarter of 2014,” Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente predicted last October.

Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, America is, in effect, the real world bank. Soon there’ll be a run on it, though, because our massive deficits have eroded foreign investors’ faith in the safety of the dollar, Mr. Means said.

The run on the bank “will start suddenly, build quickly and snowball,” Mr. Means said. “Interest rates will skyrocket, businesses will fail, unemployment will go to record levels.”

It will start when we add “another trillion dollars or so” to our debt, Mr. Means wrote in The Washington Times Oct. 25, 2012. The national debt — $16.3 trillion when he wrote those words — is $17.3 trillion now.

The Federal Reserve Board has financed much of our debt by, in effect, printing money. This has kept interest rates near zero, which has been good for banks and the stock market but has clobbered savings and investment and slowed economic growth.

The Fed must stop “quantitative easing” before all our seed corn is consumed. But when it does, “interest rates will go up and the economy will go down,” Mr. Celente said.

The decline in manufacturing orders in January was the steepest in more than 30 years, the latest evidence the U.S. economy is “exhausted,” said David Goldman, who used to oversee bond research at the Bank of America. A little nudge could push it into recession.

Obamacare could provide that nudge — in March.

The entire health-care industry will be at risk if the Obamacare website isn’t working better by mid-March, said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in December, in explaining why there isn’t enough time to select a contractor to fix it through the normal bidding process.

Healthcare.gov is like “the facade of a house with nothing behind it,” said Larry Kocot of the Brookings Institution. People no longer have (much) difficulty accessing it. But the “back end” — the portion of the website that calculates subsidies and passes on to insurance companies information about enrollees — remains under construction.

Many experts doubt the “back end” can be fixed in time. After the CMS document was made public, Moody’s downgraded the outlook for the health insurance industry to “negative.”

Obamacare has a problem more fundamental than its website. If sign-ups continue at January’s pace, enrollment will fall about 1.4 million short of the 7 million the Congressional Budget Office estimated by the March 31 deadline.

To arrive at her figure of 1.146 million signups in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius counted those who’ve filled out a form but who haven’t paid their first month’s premium, a prerequisite for actually being enrolled. At least 20 percent haven’t paid, according to some reports.

Enrollments fell 29 percent in January from December, with the pace of signups slowing as the month wore on. If enrollments were to continue to decline at that rate, then by the deadline, only a little more than 4 million may be signed up — far short of what’s required to make Obamacare viable.

All of the world’s largest economies are struggling. China is about to prick a credit bubble much larger than the one that subprime mortgages created here.

Deflating so large a bubble gently is tricky, writes Patrick Legland and Wei Yao of Societe Generale. A misstep by China’s rulers could send a deflationary tsunami through world equity markets.

Some folks are passing around a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since July of 2012 that also shows the average for the year and a half before the 1929 crash. They’re eerily similar. The parallels may not continue. If they do, the charts indicate we’re about two months away from the big plunge.

Beware the Ides of March.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/23/the_end_may_be_near_thanks_to_obamacare_121687.html#ixzz2uBRGMwlp
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