A Case for the Gym
Below is a stream of consciousness partly on why you might consider exercising at the gym. The more I learn as a coach and personal trainer the more I understand it’s importance and the more I wonder if everyone else does. Another reason for this post is a response to some of the arguments against exercising at the gym.
My Rant
It doesn’t take very long on the internet to learn why, especially as an athlete, you don’t need to stretch. You can even read why you shouldn’t stretch! You will be informed of the studies that show that stretching reduces muscular power and strength. Articles will reference science that suggests stretching doesn’t reduce injury risk at all. If you’re a cyclist you might learn that strength training won’t increase your power output on the bike. Then you’ll start to wonder if it’s worth it to risk gaining a couple pounds of muscle for the hills.
These arguments are so plentiful that it makes me feel small in this world. When I worked at a health spa I met a man we called Basketball Bill. Basketball Bill was a very smart and successful doctor who visited every year and absolutely loved to play basketball. He never stretched because he read all the science referenced above. Every year he showed up more kyphotic, more off balance, more cumbersome and with more aches and pains. As a personal trainer and corrective exercise specialist I knew that strength and mobility exercising, which includes stretching, would help all of these problems he had. I also knew that if he started stretching twenty years earlier he probably wouldn’t have even developed most of those problems.
This is one topic that gives me problems with science. Actually now that I think about it, maybe it isn’t with science but with how people interpret it. Strength and mobility training is too vast and nuanced to be looked at one study or idea at a time. If researchers studying stretching didn’t see a difference in injury prevention over a three month period does that mean that they wouldn’t have seen it over a six month period? Three months isn’t even a full race season. Sometimes injuries play the long game. Some things take years to develop millimeter by millimeter.
If researchers find that static stretching can reduce maximum power for up to an hour would that even matter to us cyclists if we stretch, walk to registration, pick up our number, pin it, pump up our tires, warm up for thirty minutes, hit up the porta-potty and then stand on the start line for ten minutes?
If you dig a little deeper it appears that the amount of time you spend in a static stretch dictates the amount of strength and power that is lost. One study found that holding a stretch for up to a minute decreased strength and power by 1-2%. If stretching has benefits, is that 1-2% worth it to you to skip it? Another thing to remember is that static stretching is not the same as dynamic stretching and many times they (whoever that is) forget to mention that. It’d be too easy to justify skipping an entire mobility warm up just because of the 1-2% drop associated with static stretching. There are other types of stretching.
These arguments never mention how people with kyphosis (upper rounded spine) can have reduced rib mobility and lung function or how it can reduce lung volume by up to 30%. How would that not decrease performance?
In life and on the field we need to maintain our balance. Balance is being able to keep our center of gravity over our base of support (our feet). Kyphosis puts our head and center of gravity out in front of our feet and that is one reason why older people tend to fall down more often. The one year mortality rate for a hip fracture in the elderly is 22%. I’ve read it used to be a little more but the rehab process is getting better! One cause of kyphosis is osteoporosis, which can be helped or prevented by strength training. Stretching and mobility can prevent kyphosis if you start early enough and it can improve it if you have it already.
Balance is also an issue for young athletes. On the field of play limited mobility in the hips can make it harder to keep the feet under their center of gravity, aka stay balanced. If we start to shift our body weight in a certain direction and our hips can’t get our feet underneath us we will lose our footing or fall. Maybe a younger person’s bones are strong and but that doesn’t mean their ankle won’t roll.
I have had many personal training clients come to me after back injuries. The best thing to do to avoid reinjury, surgery, and drugs is to focus on hip mobility and core stability. There is a joint by joint theory that says that every other joint in our body should be either a little more stable or a little more mobile. It makes sense. You probably can circle your ankle and hip around. You don’t want your knee to circle around! We run into problems when stable joints are not stable enough and mobile joints are not mobile enough. Stretching is a huge piece of the exercise prescription to get those joints mobilized!
When our hips are not mobile other parts of our body can suffer. Usually those parts are the joints directly above and below the trouble area. For the hip this means our knees and lumbar spine (low back). If we are asking our body to move and our hips aren’t up to the job our knees and low back will take over some of that movement. They are not designed for that type of compensated movement. Your knee has some other movement (tibial rotation) but it mostly wants to hinge forwards and backwards. When our hips are tight our knee will be like a door hinge on a door that is off center. After enough repetitions the hinge and our knee will wear out. That hurts.
Above the hips our lumbar spine can suffer. Our lumbar spine is not designed for movement and when it takes some of it over from the hips it is more likely to sustain injuries like herniated discs. There are so many opinions on the internet about flexed spines during deadlifting. In terms of nuance this topic has no shortage and could be its own post. There is no debate, however, that if you have a low back injury you don’t want your lower spine moving too much, especially during loaded exercise or quick, powerful movements. If you are competing to see how much weight you can deadlift then okay, you may explore that nuance of spinal flexion during deadlifting. For everyone else, in my opinion, it is worth it to keep a neutral lumbar spine.
I don’t think that people realize how many things require a lot of hip mobility. When we walk it’s easy to figure out that we need our hips to go forwards and backwards. It’s less obvious that they also need to internally and externally rotate. When we walk our front leg’s hip externally rotates and our back leg’s hip internally rotates. If we are lacking in either something even as simple as walking can wreck our knees or back (or feet). Add speed and impact if you run and it’s even worse. Imagine your low back taking the rotational load during a golf, tennis, or pickleball swing instead of your hips? It’s vitally important to mobilize our joints before exercise, especially if we know we have limited range of motion or a left/right imbalance somewhere.
But I digress. If tight hips can hurt our knees and low back then tell me again how stretching can’t prevent injury? For us cyclists that have tight hips how could our low back not hurt on the bike? I’m not - not a fan of bike fits but I often wonder how often the problem is a lack of hip mobility and core stability rather than our saddle position.
In order to save my favorite topic for last allow me to go slightly out of order with this next thought. Although studies show that strength training may not increase our power on the bike it has been shown to improve fatigue resistance. We train to of course increase our power but we should also train to prevent losing power by the end of the race. There is a big difference between sprinting to the state line on the group ride versus sprinting to the finish at the end of a race.
And finally my favorite point. When I first heard of glute amnesia I was younger, dumber, and less open minded. I thought it was funny that people thought muscles had brains and could forget things. Now I understand it is a real thing. Surrounding our joints are muscles. Some muscles are the main workers, some are helpers, and some are antagonists. When they all work in harmony it’s a great system. There are some things that can cause disharmony and one of them is repetitive movement. Eighty RPMs for one hour a day equals over 1.7 million pedal strokes for each leg a year. Because of the position that we are in on our bicycles and the amount of repetitions we perform we are prime candidates for some disharmony. That includes glute amnesia.
You are not immune if you are not a cyclist. Another thing that can cause disharmony is spending extended periods of time in a static position, like sitting at a desk at work all day. Long story short this can also create glute amnesia.
Repetitive pedal strokes or sitting down all day both cause tight hip flexors. When our hip flexors get tight, it creates something called altered reciprocal inhibition and our glutes stop firing efficiently - glute amnesia. Our butt muscles are responsible for the majority of the power into the pedals. If they stop firing properly they cause problems everywhere else, especially our low back and knees. I think it’s obvious glute amnesia would reduce our performance and help create injury. The exercise prescription for glute amnesia includes stretching.
There is probably so much more to say but if this random bunch of thoughts doesn’t convince you then more won’t. I got into this line of work because making progress is most important to me. Progress athletically, healthily, mentally, spiritually, professionally. It brings me joy to help other people towards their own progress. A topic like this makes me feel small because of the amount of conflicting information out in the world. It is so conflicting that it often sends people in the wrong direction. I have seen very smart and successful people like Dr. Basketball Bill fall prey to it. How you interpret and use this type of information literally can influence how long you have on this earth. If you made it this far, thank you. You’ve helped me make progress towards my goal.
