Free-standing presses for runner and hiker core strength

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the movement, movement. I'm Sebastian Gonzales, show curator and head clinician at Performance Play Sports Care in Southern California. This show's for active people, those who refuse to let pain and injury get in the way of their life and how they want to live it. Trails and trips, fields and courts, whatever moves you. Each episode features rotating host, expert guest, and real clinical conversations that help you move better and trust your body again. Here we go. Now, if you are following the series that we currently have right now, I've been talking about resistance training for more specifically trail athletes.

We have our runners, hikers, backpackers, and so on, which for a lot of people who have been doing this type of activity, they tend to miss some easy wins with resistance training because they think it doesn't necessarily apply. I'm here today to talk about the remaining portion of the lifting program type that we suggest to the people that we help get out of pain with knees and heels and hips and so on. Because inevitably, you got to use your legs with hiking, running, jogging, whether it be on the trail or even on the concrete. So today, if you've been following along, we covered hip-dominant exercises.

We covered knee-dominant exercises. The last time we did pulling exercises or rowing, which is an upper body part. And now we have pressing today. I will cover caries possibly in the next one, which is kind of one of the last of our series here. But the takeaways that we have for the other areas is that the knee, and we're using the knee as like a kind of a case study to demonstrate a purpose, but the knee doesn't work in isolation. The rest of the body does not work in isolation. And treating it as that is a big mistake because everything does work together. Grammar was not wrong. The knee bone's connected to the shoulder bone, and so on.

And so pressing exercises are kind of the cornerstone of getting a very strong core. Now, a lot of the literature about knee conditions and other lower body conditions revolve around having a strong core. There was a physical therapist back, I want to say, kind of had to be back like 20 years ago, who popularized this. His name was Gray Cook. Gray Cook and Mike Boyle wrote a paper together, which is online, and it goes over kind of the training approach that we would take with someone who is having a problem. And so it's called the joint-by-joint approach to training, and it covers how all these different areas of the body have different general principles or biases.

The hip has more of a mobility bias, but also can produce strength and power and so on. The knee has more of a stability bias, but it is mobile because it has to move forward and backwards and side to side, just a little bit. But it moved more forward and backwards, as we can kind of see, because it's a full bend, right? And the same thing goes with the upper body. I tell everybody that I work with for our telehealth sessions and the in-persons that we do. It does not matter about, like, their pain matters, but also, like, what matters more is building resiliency and strength within the appendages.

It helps us get a little bit less nuance with, like, itemizing down our strength training or our exercises. We don't need to do a glute exercise more, like, specifically every time we go to the gym. We don't need to do a bicep one. We don't need to do a calf one. The big movement patterns that we do that I talked about in some of these other podcasts, like, it covers these bases. Like, you can certainly do accessory work on those areas if you want, or that's kind of like the idea of our rehab or priming protocols, is that if someone has a deficiency in, say, like a calf, which is not helping out with their knee, then we would probably prime that calf up with a calf exercise.

But we probably wouldn't have someone who is healthy and recovered do that unless, again, there was a deficiency. So we've covered all those other patterns today, but we're going to cover pressing today. Pressing is one of really the only exercise categories that does more of a core dominance. And what I mean by that is that you cannot effectively press with the majority of the exercises unless you have a core that's functioning well. In this case, there are ways to get around it. Like, there's ways to press without really having to do a lot of core activity. But when you get into the heavier realms of it, like, it's harder to get away from it.

Like, a bench press is an example of an exercise that requires less course ability than a standing, freestanding press. From a lot of our rehab protocols for people with back conditions, hip conditions, or have this whole, like, anterior tilt thing that we've talked about that has a relationship with a poor functioning core, poor functioning hip, and sometimes putting more load and force into the knee over time is, actually, I lost my train of thought there, but the core matters, all right? And so all that stuff usually goes along with a poor functioning core. And if we're trying to spare the knee, we need to get some core activity.

Now, do we need to do core exercises? I mean, they're helpful. Again, if there's a big deficiency, but do we need to stress and do those every day? Probably not. Like, they can be helpful for some people, but ideally, everybody just goes and does a good resistance training program. They do their pushing, pulling, squatting, carries, et cetera, and then they change them for a little bit of variety over time. Now, the exercises that I default people to for presses, at least for some of our trail athletes, are going to be overhead pressing and horizontal pressing with one arm and two arms. That's key.

Now, I talked about this last time with our pulling exercises. There's different slots, which is like the power slot, which is kind of like your karate, right? Your kya. Like, you push and pull, and that's kind of like a lower elbow angle, which is what most people end up faring better with. Elbows up, as some people say with the dance side to side, like elbows up is a little bit less powerful than elbows down. And then there's also like the vectors, which is going to be forward, forward, overhead, and then there's going to be all the variations in the middle. So, the ones that I tend to start people with are very basic, and you start with what everybody should be able to do is a push-up.

Do your push-ups. If you can't do push-ups from your feet, that should be an overall long-term goal. If you can't do a push-up at all from the feet, you can do it from the knees. If you want to start challenging the push-up position from the feet, then just go into a push-up position plank and stay there. A plank eventually becomes a push-up. Now, once you're able to get that done, we can start migrating into some of the other horizontal presses. That's going to be more of like a dumbbell bench press or a kettlebell bench press. You can also go to a barbell bench press. All those are okay to do.

If you don't have experience in the barbell, please ask for help. Ideally, everybody who's working with a barbell has some instruction because the barbell is the least forgiving of all of the workout implements. It's the most rigid and it will make your body and shoulders do what it wants it to do. Like, it is going to win. So, make sure that you are trained by somebody first and how to use those. The other implements, the hand weights, stuff like that, people can get away with a lot more. Now, we talked about overhead press a little earlier. Overhead press can be done with an annealing position or a seated position.

I know a lot of people will use the chair and then press overhead and twist the dumbbells kind of how they do. Personally, I don't really like the seated version too much. I'd rather have them kneeling. A lot of people do have a range of motion deficit with the shoulders overhead and when you do have that deficit, people tend to arch their back. When they arch their back, sometimes they get that dreaded lumbar spine referral that goes to the hip or the knee or they end up just having lumbar spine aches and pains and then they discontinue their exercises, which we don't want them to do. So, usually splitting the stance, going into a what we call half-kneeling position, which is like kneeling down versus like two knees down.

It's one knee down. Into that position is what we call like a soft lumbar lock. It kind of locks your low back roughly into a non-extended or flexed position. This is kind of in a neutral, so it's pretty forgiving. Now, from there, if the weight gets heavy, you can actually lean on something and press while having some support. As I tell most people who are doing free weights, if they're wiggling around and falling around and stuff like that, like I would prefer that you actually use something to keep your balance. It's not a cop-out. It's not like it's making it a worse of an exercise just because you can't do it freestanding.

It just makes it so you can start focusing more on doing the strength aspect of it versus working on the balance. We don't really need the balance as much in this case. We just want to get some strength, some resistance. So that is a one-arm overhead press version. You can do a double this way too. It's a little bit less forgiving for people to do a double overhead, but you can. You can do a kettlebell double overhead, half kneeling, or standing into a split stance. By the way, you can do single arm and split stance as well. And you can do it with dumbbells, kettlebells, barbell. You can also do a cheater version, as we say, which is kind of like a jerk, which is where you're like cheating with the legs up and dropping under a little bit.

That's okay too. I usually don't have people do Olympic lifting, especially unless they have some good experience with it. It's very technical. I find that people have more trouble implementing that than just doing regular world strength training. And if they're endurance athlete or a trail athlete, like I'd rather them actually just focus on just getting the strength versus actually doing the power aspect for now. We can get part of the power aspect by having them move the weight faster. So usually with the heavier weight, you can't move it quite as fast. But with the lighter weight, you punch, punch.

Like you can do it faster, which is going to get power, which is power is moving a weight faster versus strength is it doesn't matter how fast you move it. It's just, you just have to move it at some point. So now we've covered just as a recap, horizontal press. We've done two arm horizontal press, which is was our pushups or it was going to be our bench supported series. You can also do single arm variety too, which is going to be a single arm dumbbell or kettlebell press from a bench. You can also do it from the floor called a floor press. All those are okay to do. A Turkish getup is also a version of a press as well.

If you know how to do that, that is fine too. And then we've covered some of our overhead options. There's one arm, two arm, half kneeling, split stance or chair supported if you really want to go that route, but I don't strongly suggest it. Now, some other variants that I really like as well are going to be incline press. You can do this with all the implements, barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell. And this is a really nice way to start implementing overhead if you really have a problem with going arm overhead. Some people really do, like their shoulder blades don't take it, their shoulder doesn't take it due to a past shoulder injury or they haven't really done much of it at all in the past anyways or they end up having some neck pain associated to it.

So the goal is not to make you feel crummier after doing the resistance training. The goal is to make you stronger. So there's many ways to skin this and we don't have to necessarily use the lifts that you don't really feel good with. But generally, an inclined version of a press, like using some inclined bench, usually is pretty good to do so. If you don't have an inclined bench, you can use like a bench or like a ball or something like that, like a Swiss ball and kind of roll down it and press. I've seen people do this with kettlebells and dumbbells, not with barbells. But it's not bad, but it's really hard.

It's a balance thing again. So you're sacrificing some of the balance for the strength in this case. So I don't really suggest it unless you're going into higher rep ranges. Now for a quick pause before we keep going. Hey everybody, it's Sebastian. If what we've been describing in the show so far sounds very familiar, and you've been dealing with some ache, pain, or stiffness that keeps coming back no matter what you do and no matter what you try, we're offering a free discovery call today where we brainstorm with you what has been working for you, what hasn't been working, and we also try to unravel what is a critical part of the puzzle that you've actually been missing that's keeping you from full recovery and getting back to full activity.

The link's in the description. It only takes a few minutes to fill out the form. Okay, back to the show. And the last ones that I really like are going to be cable presses. So this is where you kind of see all the guys on the side of the gym and they're all like hanging around these cable machines and like, you know, doing weird stuff with them. Maybe don't do the stuff that they're doing, but if you turn away from the machine, you can do with one or two arms. Depends how many cables you have. and you just lean away and press. This is a really good machine to use because this is the one where you're really going to start to understand how the core is related to pressing in a real-life scenario.

All the other bench-supported ones, floor-supported ones, like it's a little hard to link them up. It's hard to kind of get that feeling. It is working, but this is the one where people start to say, oh my gosh, this is like a core one. Yeah, it's a core one. Now, I know I didn't cover too much of the anatomy on this in the beginning part. I will right now. I'll just skim through it, but I think if you think in context of like what the old podcast on pulling was about the posterior sling is going to be with the lat and the glute, this is going to be the same thing but from the front. So it's an anterior oblique sling.

So it is in the front anterior. It's oblique, meaning it's kind of making an X and it's on both sides and so it goes from right shoulder to left hip, left hip to, sorry, left shoulder to right hip, et cetera. So this is where all that musculature works together and I'm pretty sure I said it in the old podcast but all of these muscles work together. They fire together. Working with only single joint exercises independently is, I mean, it's not bad to do but it's a little incomplete. So if you can start to incorporate all the musculature together, you will have better linkage into real life activities like running, jogging, et cetera.

Now, if you've listened to some of our podcasts in the past, we've talked about injuries like sports hernias or athletic peabal, adductor strains and stuff like that. Like, this is the anterior oblique sling. This is where people end up having an injury associated to it usually because it's overworked. A lot of the exercises that we have discussed, like different versions of planks and pressing and things like that, we end up using at some point with these people. And so, although they seem like exercises that may have very little relevance associated to a knee injury with hiking or running, it actually is very important.

So, when you really dig into the weeds with things, it looks like it's not related, but when you zoom out, again, the body works all together. A good rehab program is really just a good strengthening program where you're strengthening in the presence of having some type of pain or discomfort. If anything in today's episode resonated with you, visit the link in your podcast player. There you'll find any free resource that we mentioned in the show, any guest links, and a link for a free discovery call with us. We're licensed to work with our outdoor active people via telehealth across many states in the U.S.

at this point. In fact, we cover almost half of the population in the U.S. and we add more states every year. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show and we'll see you in the next one.