hey guys my name is Steven Low and I am the author of overcoming gravity so today we'll be going through the fundamental knowledge base part one and we'll be looking at the chapter four on structural balance considerations and we'll be going over the why of structure balance and overview of shoulder health maintaining structure balance and then General recommendations so let's get started so the Y of structural balance generally speaking over the course of my training and coaching career you get a lot of weightlifters who mainly focus on the beach muscles so your chest your biceps
and abs and so those people tend to have poor posture similarly a lot of people are in school or they have desk jobs and so their posture is a little bit poor however newer research has tend to shown that imbalances do not necessarily cause pain or injury and so there is that fact to consider in most cases though being in quote unquote poor postures definitely is a risk factor for potential injury but we don't know who gets pain and injury just by looking at people so like if somebody was in a wheelchair for most of
their life and was slumped over yeah you don't know who specifically in those wheelchair instances are going to get say back or neck pain you just don't know so you can't say somebody is going to get pain based on their posture or if they're just working out Beach muscles some people just never get pain but it is the case that is a greater risk factor so that needs to be considered so for my own story when I was just starting the train for a few years basically I was doing an overabundance of pushing so dips
Blanche work handstand push-ups and then I was virtually doing no pulling at all with just pull-ups and so I started to develop shoulder pain myself in the front of the shoulder and so I wanted to figure that out and so I was ringing up online and got to places about and balances even though it's a little bit accurate now it did happen to me so my wrist was high enough that I did get shoulder pain from doing too much pushing and not enough pulling and so that contributed to my shoulder pain and then I started
adding more pulls did a little some rotator cuff work and my pain went away so very simple in my case can be less simple in other cases but for the most part balancing pushing and pulling does help a lot of people to eliminate potential risk for shoulder issues so additionally in my coaching and training I've seen that most people tend to progress the best when they have a balanced push and pull and maybe that is because the fact that when you're doing push push exercises and is working say the front of the shoulder the back
of the shoulder is used as a stabilizer maybe that does have a role to play in the fact that you can move higher loads when everything is more stable but it could be something else we don't know but generally speaking the balanced method of training does seem to help in progression and decreasing risk of potential injuries likewise athletes do have a wide variety of imbalances and so for example baseball pitchers since they're throwing you know 100 miles per hour with just one limb all the time say their right arm for baseball pitchers there's going to
be imbalances throughout their body just because you know they're landing on one leg all the time with most of their weights they're winding up through one arm and so there are a lot of bounces but we know that not all of them get pain or potential injuries and likewise with different sports like climbing and Rowing which are more pool dominant or pushing more pushing dominated sports like your power lifters who mainly do like bench press and overhead press as their main push movements we don't know who gets injured in those specific circumstances but we do
know it is a potential risk factor so you don't necessarily also need to bring up the imbalances to where they're even so like many climbers who get very strong and can climb at a high level can do one-arm chin-ups but if you take them and they have never even trained in the gym before doing pushing movements they might not even be able to do a single dip or maybe only a few bad form push-ups this imbalance might not necessarily cause an injury although it can present a risk but you do not necessarily need to get
their dips for example up to them body weight dipping their own weights so if they're 150 pounds strapping another 150 pounds of them and doing dips you don't necessarily need to get them up that high to reduce injury risk you just need to get them training at some in those cases and bringing it up so there's less of a potential imbalance there to reduce risk of injuries so a general overview of shoulder Health on the shoulder in general has the greatest capacity for movement of any drug in the body I can go fully overhead and
back for a great distance into hyperextension and obviously out to the side and back down and it also has a very good capacity for rotation as well and so as you can see in the bottom left corner picture of the skeletal humerus the upper arm bone and scapula you can see that the joint face is actually very small and the labrum around it helps the ball to sit in the socket and obviously since the joint contact space is very small although there is a great capacity for range of motion there also is a great capacity
for instability as well and so a lot of training especially when talking about structural bounce is making sure that the shoulder is strong in all directions and that it is able to move well in all directions and this tends to help to prevent those injuries so I have two axioms in the book basically keeping the shoulders and shoulder blades operating optimally is the key to body weight strength success and Axiom 2 which is the shoulder is the linchpin of the upper body just like the hips are for the lower body and basically what these action
axioms are driving at is if we carry plus shoulders healthy good Mobility good amount of strength and control then they're generally going to stay healthy and injury free so maintaining structural balance in the first edition of overcoming gravity I basically went into a lot of different shoulder articulations which are basically different movements of the shoulder so the common ones are like flexing where you bring your arm up in front and so there are different types of flexion where say you're moving your arm fully up and overhead when doing that but there also is flexion in
extension or hyperextension where your arm is back behind your body and you're moving it forward that is also considered flexion and so there's also extension inflection which is your arm is up and you're pulling down like this and then extension into hyper extension whereas you're moving your arm back like that which is used for things like v-sit and Mana where arms are going behind yourself overall for those without a good anatomy and physiology background or strength training background this was a little too complicated and I got a lot of people asking questions about that online
through social media and so in the second edition I basically simplified it so that we would be able to understand things a lot better and it's pretty much just as effective so the two distinctions I made was with pulling exercises and pushing exercises pulling exercises are where the center of mass is moving towards your hands and so for example with pull-ups with your arms overhead your Center Mass is about where your hips are as a composite of your whole body and so when you're doing pull-ups the main movement is pulling down so your Center Mass
is moving towards your hands similarly with pushing movements the movement like a push-up your Center Mass is moving away from your hands as you do the push-up so that's an easy way to understand the pushing and pulling movements and they generally also work the shoulder in those two different ways so with pushing movements as you're pushing your Center Mass away you're usually moving your arm and flexion same with handstand push-ups you're moving your hands away from your center of mass and it's moving your arms up into flexion and so you're working your anterior delts with
pulling exercises obviously you're pulling down so you're moving your shoulder into relative extension same with rolling movements you're moving your shoulder into relative extension and so you're working mostly your posterior adults in those cases so there's four distinctions that I like to make just as a gross simplification of movements and those are vertical pushing horizontal bushing vertical pulling and horizontal pulling now not just in my book but across the internet there is some criticism of this as you know a gross oversimplification and obviously I I've known that it is a simplification and so like a
lot of people prefer basic movements when starting body weight exercises to be a horizontal push like your push-ups or your planche progression and the vertical pushing which can be like something like dips where you're pushing down or handstand push-ups where you're pushing up so obviously these two work way different ranges of motion of the shoulder with dips your arms behind your body and coming to even whereas with handstand push-ups it's starting from forward in your body and pushing all the way up into a full flexion with your arm overhead and so since there is a
distinction between them a lot of people like to start with horizontal bushing like with push-ups and planche progression and start with handstand push-ups I tend to not like that I tend to prefer starting with dips and push-up replacement progression and there's a couple reasons for this one most people have body weight goals such as muscle up and muscle up requires obviously a Pull-Up a transition phase and a dip and so getting strong with dips is a very good idea secondly dips are similar to the squat of the lower body so they're good for building a
lot of basic strength and especially in your chest your into your adults and your triceps and so that is very helpful in the long run and then with most body weight or gymnastics or calisthenics routines you're also doing some form of handstand work as skill work and so you're already getting some max range overhead work with the shoulder and traps and scapula and so you don't necessarily need an overlap with the handstand push-ups progression and hands doing handstands so those are the main reasons why I like starting with dips as one of the main movements
instead of handstand push-ups whereas if you do start with handstand push-ups you can do that but generally for most people I like transitioning dips around a level four five six area over to handstand push-ups if you don't have like a dip goal in the long run so if somebody has enhancing push-ups goal they'll eventually transfer the dips into handstand push-ups to get the more movement specific training but starting with the dips just to build a good foundation with body weight exercises so I'm horizontal pushing I basically covered before basically it's horizontally pushing the hands so
bench press also fits in this your push-ups and your planche work where your hands are hands are in front of you and you're working the shoulder like that vertical pulling very similar to vertical pushing in that there's Pull-Ups but there is also inverted hang where you hang upside down and pulling your hands up and raising yourself up upside down so that is an option generally most people have discounted the vertical pulling inverted pull-ups just because the range of motion is not as good in that specific exercise and because one of them chains have more strengths
conference to most exercises and so you don't necessarily need to train inverted pull-ups the main exercises they would be useful for are things like the elevator so the inverted muscle up and so it's not really needed much in that case and so most people just generally skip it horizontal pulling is your general inverted rows your back lever and front lever so those are the the main standout ones there so as you can see it all these four different categories two from pulling and two from pushing well three from pushing they tend to Encompass pretty much
the wide variety of movements and you can have them all together in a routine at once especially since most routines can accommodate two maybe three pushing and pulling elements and so you get a wide range that helps to build that base of strength especially in the long run so my general recommendations I like to pair handstands and l-sit Visa Mana work but if somebody doesn't have the goal of doing L-Sit V-Sit or Manna I like to just have them especially work through German hanging skin cat where you're hanging with your arms behind your body and
the reason for that is because you're working basically the Shoulder Through the full range of motion that is capable of and so when you have that strength and Mobility through that full range of motion tends to keep the shoulders healthier than if you had been limiting yourself in specific ranges of motion likewise with handstand work you get that full overhead deflection and then the Mana and skin the cat you get that full range in the reverse of the shoulder so generally the variety of vertical and horizontal pushing and pulling work tends to get the best
strength gains from what I've seen and it does Shore up any movement weaknesses and so like I explained before with the specific working through all the different range of motion basically you're getting hitting the shoulder and all the scapular muscles around it in many different ways and so that tends to give the best strength gains over time and so that's why I tend to like a more variety movements instead of what some people do in the beginning is like do two variations of pull-ups and ignore rowing so maybe they'll do be doing pull-ups or chin-ups
and so maybe they'll get slightly better at chin UPS than normal but usually with a pull-up and a row you tend to get at least the same amount of good progress and you're hitting your biceps back and your scapular muscles in a good way that often leads to faster progress in the long run than had you done just chin ups and pull-ups as your two main exercises other exercises that can be useful for body weight training are strain arm press hand Sands especially if you have lever aspirations Believers themselves the handstand push-ups rope climbing and
maybe some other exercises as I talked about in a previous overcoming gravity online part basically having basically working through a lot of the straight arm ranges of motion especially starting at the beginning we're going to help with strength in the long run and you can do both bent arm and straight arm strengthening and we'll go into that into a bit more detail in some of the subsequent videos as well so that's all I got for you guys in this one and be sure to tune in for the next episode
