Ab Wars
August 11th, 2007
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by Mike T Nelson · Filed Under: Uncategorized
There is a battle going on. In the blue corner we have abdominal hollowing and coming from the red corner we have abdominal bracing. Abdominal hollowing is generally defined as where you pull your belly button to your spine and “suck in those abs man.”
Abdominal bracing is gnerally defined as preparing like you are about ready to take a punch in the gut. Each side has its proponents and recently it seems like abdominal bracing is taking an early lead.
Research done by Grenier, SG from Dr. McGill’s (big name biomechanics/spine researcher dude) lab recently published a study looking at this debate even! (1).
But wait, what is this, a third competitor has entered the ring! Oh no, more confusion!
I think that NEITHER of these methods are optimal and/or practical. “Oh no honey, I bent down to pick of fee fee the cat and forgot to suck in my abs and I blew my back.” Pleeeze. I know people can have back issues by picking up pencils, but I can gaurantee most of them had some pretty large compensations for some time.
The crazy idea that I picked up at the Z Health R Phase training is to axially lengthen your spine. Imagine someone set a book on top of your head and you are lengthening up against it and pressing your heals into the ground. Keep a nice neutral spine with your head forward (don’t tilt your chin up).
By axially lengthening (tall neutral spine) your body is so smart you will AUTOMATICALLY fire ALL your stabilizing muscles. This is much stronger (although it will not “feel” that way) than either ab practice in my opinion.
Ok, do not do the cannonball drill at home!
Try this instead
Stand normal, close your eyes, have a buddy push you in various directions as you try to resist him/her.
Now stand tall, axially lengthen, close your eyes and stay tall (in Z Heath it is also referred to as dynamic postural alignment) and repeat.
What you will find is that in the tall spine case you are much more stable since your body is firing ALL its stabilizing muscles.
Tall spine (dynamic postural alignment) allows you to stay in various positions withOUT tension AND it is more (at minimium as effective) as any other ab method in my book. Ok, so it is a short, small book, but nonetheless.
Words to the wise
This takes some practice, just like everything else and you need to get your reps in. Start in a neutral position, and then just do various body weight partial lunges. Once you lunge, re-lengthen. If you can re-lengthen, that means you were not in a tall spine. Practice this with just body weight first and when you add weight, make sure you stay in a tall spine.
After some time, you will find that you will almost automatically lengthen before you pick up anything heavy. Makes more sense that this should be more of a reflex action then something you need to think about each time you pick up something heavy!
In another study done by Krajcarski, SR et al. (2)states “pre-activation of trunk extensor muscles can serve to reduce the flexion displacements caused by rapid loading. The abdominal oblique muscles, especially external oblique, will rapidly increase their activation levels in response to rapid loading. ….resulting in lower initial trunk stiffness and spine compression force”
Hmm, sounds good to me. The faster you can fire the correct muscles to oppose an external force the better off you are. Sign me up!
If you live in Minnesota and want to learn this and other “cool stuff” click here
Mike
References
1) Grenier, SG, McGill, SM Quantification of lumbar stability by using 2 different abdominal activation strategies. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2007
Comments RSS 
I think for sure there is something to this Mike. More and more I have been teaching to clients over the years and it does work. However in a sporting condition like getting tackled in football athlete’s must react and not really “think” at all. But that opens up a whole new discussion which I realize is not what you were posting about.
Thinking too much would paralyze the athlete. Of course when you are training a client in a controlled environment that is something entirely different. In that situation you have the ability to monitor and “perfect” movement skills, tall spine, etc…
That challenge with that type of thinking exclusively is that it doesn’t take into account that rarely in sporting environments is posture always perfect or the athlete in axial extension. I guess with some sports like figure skating, gymnastics, fencing, sprinting and others that might be possible.I assume you are hoping that the athlete in a sporting environment would revert to what he learned in his training? (”Under stress we revert to training”)
Great post!
Thanks for the additional post. Lots of good stuff to think about (and, eventually, do without thinking, eh?)… One additional question, though: In terms of building core ‘endurance,” what do you think about planks (i.e. front and side…etc.).
Thanks for the post Franz! I really appreciate your comments.
Yep, I think we are talking about the same thing. It should be almost a reflex and you are correct that an athlete will revert back to training. I think it was Tim Larkin that was found of saying “you do what you train”
Remember that dynamic postural alignment applies to ANY position.
Take a bench press for example. You do the same thing and “lengthen” up through your spine all the way from your feet as they make contact on the ground.
A similar concept is “rooting” as Steve Cotter talks about in his DVDs.
Yep, nobody should ever get hurt in the weight room as that is a controlled environment. The field of play is not however.
To the other comment, I am not a huge fan of locking down the whole lumbar area for long periods of time. I think there can be a place for those drills and some athletes really need them, but by doing more basic stuff like KBs, trap bar deadlifts, etc in long spine I feel you can accomplish the same thing without adding tension and locking down the lumbar area. If I do planks,etc I have the athlete lengthen all the way from ground contact to the top of their head. For most, they will need to rotate their pelvis back and pull their had back also to achieve alignment.
If that is still too hard to keep alignment I will decrease the load (put their hands on an incline) vs having them drop to their knees as I would prefer for them to keep the mechanoreceptor info from their feet “going up” the kinetic chain. It is also rare that many movements are made starting exclusively at the knees (some wrestling moves perhaps).
Mike N
Thoughts?
Mike
Mike, as you know, I’ve been using long spine with all my lifting–no more bracing and feel great. I end up using muscles I didn’t know I had sometimes. I’m interested to see how your clients end up doing with this concept. I don’t even cue bracing anymore–I just tell them to “stay tall” or “stay long.”
Thanks Geoff. Nice feedback!
As of late, I have been revamping all my cuing. I have basically simplified it down to
–Tall Spine
—Bone Rhythm
Seems too simple really. Now some will need different cuing based on how they are compensating, but that is about it. I also do a Z drill for the area that they are compensating with to clear it up, then have them perform the lift again with a better pattern. If they are still having an issue, I try another drill and deload the movement.
Some times I just chuck that movement all together and do something else different (lately I have been leaning more towards this approach)
What do you guys do for cuing?
Mike N
Mike,
your explanation of the plank and how you cue it is fantastic. After attending a one Z-seminar a couple of years ago where Eric taught us how to do push up with the a tall spine, I started to teach my clients that. Boy were they shocked how much harder it was. I very often place a pole on people’s body so that there is 3 points of contact:
1) The sacrum
2) Thoracic Spine
3) Cranium
I believe this is trying to accomplish what Eric was trying to get us to do, although he told me he didn’t like the pole all that much.
Geoff,
interesting how you are finding much better results in training yourself with the tall spine.
Wasn’t it initially harder? and did it make you weaker in the beginning?
If it did, when does it get better?
I find myself very weak sometimes when I exaggerate the tall spine feeling.
Franz et al,
You probably are “Overlenghtening.” Try lenghtening only from L4-5 to C3. Lengthening up from C2 to CO will make you weaker. That isn’t the only direction of the musculature there.
Spinal Lengthening is an exercise just as any other – not a static posture – it is a dynamic posture. “Holding” posture is dysfunctional. “Holding” Full ROM pain free, high tension free Axial Extension is dysfunctional. Moving into and out of it is not.
Prolonged overlengthening is having too much tension and is inefficient.
In fact, I prefer to do a few reps of spinal lengthening before a set of any movement as opposed to starting off complex movement with yet another component for my clients to think about. There is a time for that, but that isn’t at the beginning of learning a complex motor skill.
Spinal length is just one aspect of movement – sporting, gym or otherwise.
When it takes too much effort to maintain posture in a movement set – it is already time to terminate the movement set. You don’t want to get good at effort at the same time you are getting good at spinal length or any skill, for that matter.
I train this principle with people who have postural issues in specific positions by doing joint area specific mobility drills (coordinated micromovements) as well as lengthening through that area and then going back to that movement set.
Someone can appear to be in perfect biomechanical form but if they have to be overtense to get into that form, it is not perfect biomechanical form.
I prefer to have people in positions where they do not have to overtense to be in – otherwise they are getting good at being overtense.
In Z speak:
If you are not moving with BTR (balanced tension and relaxation), then you are not successfully performing DPA (dynamic postural alignment)
Over tension is where perfect form starts to break down. If we can interrupt that pattern, we aren’t far from helping the client move into their perfect biomechanical form.
I prefer to teach manageable chunks of movement making not moving into excess tension the goal. I then add chunks until they have a full movement set without having to unlearn “overtensing.”
Thanks Frankie! Great explanations!
mike…very interesting. This reminds me of in college when we talked about “singers posture”. My voice teacher would remind us about lengthing from the back to support our diaphram for breathing. One imagary we used was imaging that you had a string on the top of your head, like a puppet; this would help to keep the singer from sticking out with the chin. Also, you mentioned pressing your heels into the floor – dancers talk about that when learning to balance spins. It’s an idea that I keep in mind when I do one-legged presses to keep me from falling.
Thanks for the great comments Frankie and everyone. Excellent discussion!
Interesting perspective from singers and dancers KB Lady–lots of great cross over. Good stuff!
Rock on
Mike N