¶ Introducing Structural Balance Concept
Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beerty. I'm here with my co host Rob Mauseri. We're going to talk about something called structural balance this week. Um basically uh again we're just going to treat this in a very uh kind of relaxed and casual way. I'm not going to talk about a lot of physiology and biomechanics before we jump in.
I'm just going to uh kind of do this quick intro and then hand over to Rob to ask him to tell us a little bit about what he's been seeing in this topic. 'Cause essentially it is just us reacting a little bit to uh what we've been seeing or what Rob has been seeing, um, in terms of what people are saying about this idea of structural balance, which is essentially ratios
um of uh strength in different exercises. So without further ado, Rob, can you tell us a little bit about what you've been seeing and what this topic of structural balance is actually all about?
Yeah, so um basically it's the idea that when you're training uh especially athletes that you need to look at kinda like the main um barbell exercises. programming decisions and and where you take the athlete's training around what lifts are stronger and weaker. And typically you would be using like a shoulder width bench press as like say the 100% value for the upper body lifts. Um, and then basing where like dips, chin ups, pull ups, overhead press.
some isolated external rotation work and things like that should be um relative to that. And then for the lower body, using the like a high bar back squat as kind of the hundred percent value. And then basing uh deadlift. front squat, um various clean um variations and some like step ups and things like that around that squat value. And then you kind of use those numbers. to pick like what you should train or where an athlete might be weak and in need of more um more work in that area. So
¶ The Appeal of Strength Ratios
Okay, understood. So um I think I can see why people find that idea attractive, um, because it takes a lot of the thinking out of a uh training program design. You basically test the athlete for these uh different uh exercise strength tests. And then you write the numbers down and you can say, Okay, uh here are the areas where the athlete uh is a long way away from the averages or the norms or the
standards that we're aiming for and here are where they are kind of better. And we're going to focus the training programme on those areas and we're going to aim for this kind of holy grail kind of set of ratios which are suddenly gonna make the athlete better at the sport that they're participating in. So essentially it means that all of the stuff that we talk about is largely unnecessary
Because you don't actually need to go, uh, what does the athlete need in order to be better at their sport? You don't need to do any analysis of their uh kind of sport or the movement patterns in their sport. You don't need to do any designing of the training program to enhance the qualities that make them better at those particular movements. Uh it's all just by basically creating this uh list
of exercise uh strength ratios and targeting um development in that direction, which, as I say, makes things very, very easy, which I uh can see why it is very attractive to people to use that particular type of program. Okay, cool. So, um
¶ Debunking Stabilizer Muscle Myths
When you've been analysing this, when you've been looking at this, what are your initial reactions? What what are your what are your kind of um thoughts about this?
So I mean I I learned it years and years ago and initially, you know, like you said, I I found it to be a a cool idea and a bunch of big big time coaches and that have been talking about it. And so I you know, rolled with it for a little bit. did not see any real significant benefits, you know, especially for like training um combat athletes, for my myself in particular, anything like that. So, you know, moved moved away from it obviously.
And uh I I always see the idea even now that if you're somehow imbalanced, particularly in our like the the little muscles and movement. with the external rotation work and things like that, that like, you know, those little things, uh quote unquote stabilizer muscles and things like that are gonna be limiting your performance, obviously in a bench press, but also in throwing, in punching. In uh athletic things where you need to be fast and powerful. Um
Okay, well let's let's talk about that. Let's talk about that'cause um that's a really interesting kind of idea and I think a lot of people
hear that and initially kind of go, Oh yeah, maybe I was neglecting that thing and therefore if I include that thing it'll help me achieve the goal that I'm trying to achieve. So It's kind of like a a hijacking of the logic process where the the the idea arrives and you go, Oh, I hadn't thought of that and you initially just kind of grab hold of it and you run with it and you see if it actually makes a difference.
Um, but we were just kind of chatting a little bit about this before we jumped on the podcast today and I was like, Well If we analyze this idea as as as like um in the context of somebody who's been doing um say powerlifting for a year or two, they've already got a relatively solid bench press or squat or deadlift or whatever, and somebody comes to them and says, Oh let's do a analysis of your kind of various different exercises and let's
see whether you have a high level of external uh rotation strength or whatever, or let's, you know, look at some of these stabiliser muscle exercises and and see whether you have low levels of those relative to your main lifts. And, you know, let's say they identify that those uh exercises
you know, do show a a lower level than than the standards show, which I would probably expect that they would do, to be honest. And that therein lies part of the attraction of this kind of testing in reality,'cause if you can find something that's missing you can then you know, start to present a solution.
But um I think it's interesting just to say, well, okay, but if I'm doing a bench press, let's imagine that I'm in a in a powerlifting program and I'm kind of been working on my bench press for, you know, a year or two, um and I've probably got to a point where the sort of um muscular development of my prime movers is relatively high.
So, um, I've probably got to a point where my s when when we talk about plateaus in in strength training, um, we basically kind of identify them as either stimulus plateaus or um fatigue plateaus. Now fatigue plateau is obviously poor programming, but a stimulus plateau is like a a challenge that you have to try and overcome because it it's kind of telling you that you're bumping up against your maximum muscular development in a particular muscle area. You're gonna have to get get creative about
how you solve that problem. Um and, you know, we've talked about sticking regions and kind of uh accessory exercises in the context of powerlifting and how neuromechanical m matching works in that.
uh kind of context. So if if this is what I'm about to say is unfamiliar to you, then please go back and and listen to that episode'cause it's uh you know, basically answer the question um that we're talking about right now, which is that ultimately if you're trying to make progress and you've got kind of you're bumping up against your maximum muscle size with one of your major muscle groups, then what you've really got to do is try and find a way to
get the bench press to rely more on the others instead,'cause you've kind of maxed out. So in in my particular case I would probably find very quickly that I maxed out what my triceps were capable of doing and I'd have to try and reorganize my bench press to rely on the other muscles instead. So It's kind of an accessory exercise process that you would go through to try and make that happen. But the reality is that that plateau is happening because the main muscles
are bumping up against their maximum muscle sizes, uh and you can't really make much more development uh in those particular areas. The reality is though, that if my stabilizer muscles are being used in that exercise
um, because they're needed, um, then they will be used up to the point that they're needed and they will actually grow alongside my prime mover muscles. And because they're stabilizers, they're not actually prime movers, they're l much lower levels of motoric agreement, um, ultimately
they'll have lots of capacity to to grow as I get stronger with my prime mover muscles and I start to uh sort of just push my bench a little bit higher, my stabilizer stabilizer muscles will activate a little bit higher and immediately because they've got so much capacity to grow, they'll just immediately grow the amount that they need to grow. I mean, like, they're just literally waiting for me to push a little bit harder in the kind of prime mover areas.
And immediately they will just kind of notch up a level of activation and instantaneously those fibers that haven't been particularly worked previously'cause the recruitment levels have been too low will immediately become activated and loaded and grow and everybody's happy. I mean ultimately Growing stabilizer muscles is
I mean...
easiest thing in the world because they're literally just sitting there waiting for you to just tick up a level of motion accrument and immediately they'll grow because they just haven't grown prior to that point. It's like being a beginner, really. It's like
You can kind of think about it as saying, well, the stabilizer muscles are at the beginner level of kind of um hypertrophy in that context, whereas your other muscles are kind of at the advanced level. This is one of the reasons I really don't like uh kind of
saying that people have a particular training status. I think muscles have training status. People don't have training status. You know, I've said that before. I think it makes no sense. It's just but y this kind of idea that sort of uh stabilized muscles or synergistic muscles are somehow going to be Limiting us is actually impossible because as soon as you actually need them, activate hypertrophy, everybody's happy. I just don't get why people don't see that. It's so strange.
So and then it's a huge focus and then it's you wind up using tons of training time trying to ad uh you know, adjust these things. And you know, if you spend
ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, whatever it is, doing a bunch of very isolated exercises. When if you just did your benching, your rows and your pull downs, chin ups, whatever it may be, you know, things like that. Like Those muscles of the cuff and that, they're gonna get trained well enough anyway, certainly like you said, to the level that you need them to be to be executing the lift.
And it just doesn't yeah, it doesn't to me, obviously anymore make sense to be trying to target them. And I mean if for some reason you wanted, you know, some some giant lower traps or some
really, really big muscles around the cuff. I don't know, you know. For some reason that's a goal, I'll have at it. But if you think that it's gonna give you fifty pounds or something like that on your bench, or if you do like a weird goofy step up variation, it's gonna help drive your squat up, um, things like that, which is what I'll see, or it'll drive your, you know, your jump performance and stuff like that.
You know, you're not you're not really getting anything out of it. I'll see people do like a step up and they're they're a person who can squat, you know, in the four hundreds, five hundred pound range. They'll do some isolated partial range step up where they have something like a you know, fifteen, thirty-pound dumbbell. And they're just doing kind of like a top range for higher up.
we'll say it's improving, you know, knee stability and this and that or, you know, targeting the VMO which doesn't work is impossible and that and you know, y you see I see it all the time and Yeah, maybe on paper it it sounds cool and you'd think maybe it could work and it just does not work.
At all.
¶ Structural Balance and Prime Movers
Yeah, the logic isn't there, is it? I mean, I just want to clarify for people that we are talk we' we we're we're describing very much the stabilizer kind of um muscles here, the kind of the external rotation, you know, kind of stuff that y you started off talking about.
Um
Which is different from accessory exercises that we were talking about previously. So uh an accessory exercise is trying to provide um prime uh mover muscle uh growth in a way that we're not getting it in the main lift because the main lift is you know, kind of pushing activation to a another prime mover and it's not allowing us to max out the uh the kind of the other one that we're interested in. So um
You know, I've I've seen some really great uh kind of accessory exercise analysis along those lines. Uh we did our own kind of version in the podcast previously, but I've seen other people doing other great ones as well and they've come up with some really creative ideas. Um this is not that. We're not talking about that. That's cool. That's prime mover stuff. This is about exercise uh exercises training muscles that are not
um kind of um prime moves. Okay. With that being said then, um, what else are you seeing in this in this kind of context? You're seeing um You know, you described to us how uh you know, your your initial impressions of it. What else are you seeing in this particular area?
So, I mean, I definitely see I mean I like I said, I see it programmed all the time. I do obviously see cases where it appears to work. So I figured, you know, you can address, you know, cases where on on paper think, Oh, this is actually working because it's improving structural balance, yada yada. But, you know, if you look at it, say someone's bench is lagging, um, and they happen to do a phase where they add in, you know, more more dip work. More overhead press work, something like that.
Those would those would be prime movers wouldn't they? This is what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. So this is the
Спасибо за просмотр!
Yeah, exactly. This is the kind of the diversion. It's like um are are those but that's still within the context of um of the I see what you're saying now. Okay, I just took me a moment to catch up with you. Yes.
It'll look like it's working because you've improved these ratios when in reality you
Clean doing. Yeah.
You've gotten like more recruitment in the prime movers. You've gotten, you know, very likely more size in the prime movers you might not have been getting. So it's not approved you because the ratio is important.
Yeah, okay. So for example then if some Right, okay. So for example then, to keeping keeping the bench press example with with me as the as kind of the uh individual doing the benching, obviously I'm gonna be very tricep dominant. And I also am gonna have a monster dip compared to pretty much any of my other pressing exercises. So the person is gonna look at my structural balance in inverted commas and go, Your dip is way too high relative to everything else. You need to do a lot of kind of
work on your chest and uh delts and then you'll find that your other your exercises will go up. And the irony is that they will. because what's happening in the bench press is that my triceps are gonna do all of the work and I'm gonna be limited by the fact that my triceps are maxing out and I've got nowhere else to go and I'm not training my delts and my pecs enough to really make progress.
I in bench exercise'cause I'm just continuing to send all the activation to the triceps. This is what we talked about in the accessory uh kind of uh conversation in the powerlifting uh episode that we did. Um so yeah, absolutely, it will actually work. But it's not working because of structural balance. because I'm training the muscles uh that I need to train in order to make progress in the menstrual press because my triceps are com are currently dominating.
And if pe people go, well, no, that is structural balance, then then what you're saying is that structural balance is uh literally just following neuromechanical matching.
Yeah, I mean it would come right back. And you know, a lot of people too when they're doing accessory work, a lot of times they'll do you know, if they're doing things like tricep extensions, direct shoulder work, stuff like that, a lot of times they're not doing it with uh with enough
intensity, they're not doing they're maybe doing some fluff work, you know, high reps, far from failure, not really getting anything out of it. So then they g they go and do something like a dip or an overhead press that involves those prime movers more. They use a heavy load. You know, good rep range, a little bit of shot failure. And then all of a sudden they get these increases in recruitment. They get these increases.
in, you know, hypergrophy that they're not getting from just kind of doing some half assed work at the end of a session on those muscles. And then yeah, it gives this great appearance that, well, this, you know, worked so well because you improved the balance. But It just comes down to all the things we generally talk about.
¶ Limitations: Leverages and Torques
Exactly. Uh and I guess really, um, you know, one of the things that we we've kind of skated over but is worth emphasizing is that um it may not be possible and probably isn't possible for many people to actually achieve, um, you know, these kind of strength ratios if their leverages are you know, kind of away from the norm. So if somebody like me who's got really extreme triceps leverage and not not great leverage for very much else
then uh ultimately it's gonna be extremely strange. Uh why, it's just actually impossible. Once I got my sort of dip strength to the level I got it to it was just gonna be absolutely physically impossible for me to get um my bench or any of my other pressing exercises to those ratios. It would have just never happened, no matter what I did. Um
So ultimately I think some people are just gonna have leverages. And th you know, you see people with amazing deadlifts and you look at them like you know, if you wanted to get their structural balance equations correct or ratios correct, then their squat would have to be, you know, this level and you look at them and go, That's just not gonna happen.
Never gonna happen. And then the reverse you get someone with incredibly short arms and legs, great bench and squat.
Exactly.
We'll have just a deadlop that's never gonna be never gonna catch up. And if if it's an athlete, there's not a there's not a need for it to catch up. You know, you have someone whose deadlift is lacking. So you say, Oh, I need to bring up the deadlift to improve, you know, posterior chain, hamstring strength, whatever it may be.
Well, there's way better exercises for that. You just do hip thrust and direct handstring work and you're gonna get way more out of that than improving a deadlift. The deadlift is gonna improve it.
I think it's um so one of the one of the one of the kind of um points that I make um repeatedly, but probably not repeatedly enough. is that adaptions are the thing that matters, not outcomes. So we're talking about strength or speed or power or whatever. My first question is well what is what is the adaption that you're triggering that's gonna uh actu or stimulating that's gonna
you know, kind of benefit you in that outcome, that strength or that speed or whatever. Um and I think really we've got, you know, something um kind of similar here because if somebody thinks about strength in a deadlift, they're thinking strength, weight lifted, and they're like focused on that number, that load that they're lifting. But the reality is it um the torque that they're producing at the joints in order to lift that weight um is being generated by a muscle force and a leverage
And then the required torque is being generated by the body position and segment length such that you've got a certain external moment arm lengths required to lift the barbell. If I've got if I'm lifting a barbell from the floor And the external moment arm length is a horizontal distance of the line of gravity going through the barbell to my hip joint. If I change that distance, if I make that distance shorter, then I basically can lift a heavier load
Um, and I'm gonna look like I'm stronger. I'm I'm actually creating I'm displaying more strength, which which is true from a load point of view, because I've made the exercise easier. So you can see some of the really kind of old um kind of time lifters, they would have these crazy body positions where they would try and bring the kind of bring the barbell line of action really close to the hit joy. It was just absolutely nuts from our perspective today.
Um, and so basically what they're trying to do is just kind of increase the efficiency of the lift. And so you kinda look at it and go, Oh, they're they're they're s they're really strong in that scenario. But in terms of talks
And in terms of muscle forces, it's a different story. But the same thing happens internally. So like in muscle force and the leverage, if you've got an amazing leverage on a muscle, you know Then ultimately, it's going to be able to produce a really high joint torque, even though it's not producing really high muscle force.
And so um ultimately we've got these disconnects between what we see as the load being lifted and the muscle force being generated. And people are just going, load lifted muscle force like, hang on a minute. You've got an external moment arm length to worry about and that could be varied depending on the segment lengths and the the coordination and the way that the person is performing the lift and you know, all that kind of thing.
And then secondly, when you're talking about the actual torque at the joint, again, you've got a muscle force, but then you've got this internal moment arm length. And when you external moment arm length can move around because of your segment lengths or your way of performing the exercise, and your internal moment lengths are who knows what.
and could be massively varied between people. It's literally impossible to go Oh no, this person's strength, as in muscle force producing capacity, is not sufficient because I can see them lifting this load instead of that load. It's like It's nonsense because you've got two leverages in the middle of that chain of events that people are just ignoring. And I think that's the problem. It's that people don't understand how talk works.
Um and we've got these two different moment arms that are uh basically breaking the connection between muscle force and um and the actual load being lifted. So This is ultimately why, you know, fundamentally a strength ratio just isn't gonna make sense because you could get one athlete's muscle force d to just be at, you know, the maximum possible level. The biggest muscle force you could possibly get, the muscle is absolutely fully developed, you know.
You can't physically shoehorn any more myofibrillar protein into that muscle. It's like absolutely done. And they still can't lift the kind of load that you're asking them to lift. And there's some other guy who just walks in and he's just like got these ridiculous moment arms and a kind of peculiar way of lifting the weight. And he's just kind of
moving the weight with no difficulty whatsoever. You know, and that is just gonna happen because th of the of inter individual variety or variability rather. Um, you know, and so I think um Just the fundamental approach to saying, Well, you know, these ratios need to be kind of in these um these numbers, I think is is just never gonna work for for m most people most of the time.
Yeah. And then other ones, like other ratios I've seen used are attempting to determine if someone is like powerful enough, explosive enough, so they'll use ratios between the squat and like some of the Olympic lifting variants, especially some of the power variations. So like not the full lifts, but power snatch, power clean, things like that. And like, you know, we've talked obviously about speed and power. those things, yeah, well they may have like a decently high power output.
where they sit does not really matter and training them directly to improve them is gonna improve those, not your actual
Yeah. And I would be cautious about comparing movement patterns that are different like that. So much easier just to measure vertical jump height and then um add a little bit of load and do a load of vertical jump height and compare those two numbers. I mean that's gonna give you perfect comparability more or less.
Uh and you can even do like a force uh velocity profile and use a you know, a quick calculation to see what that tells you and you can get kind of some sort of line on a chart that will give you some information. Um but I would keep the same movement patterns if you're gonna compare those. I mean the thing is that is already out there. People can already use that. It's available. There's apps for it and, you know, it's not it's not difficult. So
I wouldn't want to rein yeah, I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel if we've already got the ability to do that in a in a much more valid way with with two different you know, two different loads for the same exercise. No.
Yes, it's a lot of it I think just looks like like you said at the beginning, it looks you know, good on paper in theory, gives someone the ability to kind of take A lot of the the guesswork out of writing, some what a programming adjusting it long term and it's just not not really necessary. And no, it's also a lot of it relies on
overly depending on like periodizing programs and using different things as you go through a program and stuff like that. And obviously we've said a ton of times now if you think something's important. Keep it in the program. Don't change the program. We do it all the time. And you you know, if your exercises are good and someone's making progress, also don't change the program. And don't change it because, you know, X, Y, and Z are supposedly imbalanced.
¶ Structural Balance and Injury
And yeah. Also, you know, the idea around limiting limiting injury and stuff like that. I know you and I talked before the podcast a little bit, but there's not really good uh good data there.
Have we done an episode on injury at all? Have we done anything on injuries yet? I don't think we
We probably should at some point.
Okay. Because I know that we've I mean this is um obviously to us having a conversation in the middle of a an episode, but we we won't do this for very long. Um we were thinking about doing something on um running economy because a lot of people have been asking us about
doing some more on the aerobic exercise stuff. And I'm not prepared to build a cardiovascular uh adaptions model. That's not gonna happen. I'm too old. It's gonna take it would take me ten years. I'm just not gonna do it. So um you'll have to find somebody else to do that for you. Um, but the best I can do is um I can do running economy and and we can, you know, segregate a little bit into things like cycling economy as well for the same reasons, but
Uh that'll basically give us a strength training for uh endurance running, strength training for uh endurance cycling, that kind of thing. We can do that. Um and we can also do something on injury uh prevention, I guess. We could do something on muscle strain. injury, we could do a little bit on maybe tendon damage, um, but probably not much more than that because there isn't any data. And that's kind of the point I was gonna make when
We just kinda went off piece there a little bit, which is that um a lot of people ask for, you know, oh, how do I kind of um target injury prevention with strength training? I'm like, well You know, there's almost no data. There's just there isn't really any data out there. Um and certainly there isn't any data that says if you do if you build your strength ratios to these levels then you'll reduce the risk of injury. I mean that that data doesn't exist.
It does not exist.
But there's the voice there's the voice of somebody sp spent time looking for it this week. I laughed so much when he sent me that message.
And I was digging and digging and digging to try to find things in favor,'cause I do try
Thank you.
In favor of anything I'm gonna chat about. And I was just like, I can't and I know I texted you and I'm like, I can't do it. Do you have anything? You're like, it's not there.
It's just not there. I uh you could have asked me, I'd have told you. Um no, there's just nothing there. So yeah, I mean, to be fair, it's because it's actually really, really difficult to um collect that kind of information.
Yeah, you know.
Um and the reality is that most of the time if you are going to collect that kind of information you need to be part of a really big or tapped into a really big organization that is collecting that data for you. For the simple reason that injuries aren't actually that common.
So you need to be actually kind of monitoring an enormous number of person hours in the gym, uh or person hours in a sporting context, in order to be able to collect enough uh kind of data to be able to say, well, you know, this is kind of potentially what might be associated with an injury uh risk. And not only do you have to have those person hours um collected and the injuries that happen in those person hours, you also need to know what those people were doing outside of the gym.
Yeah, there's so much that goes into it.
And honestly, it just, it's one of the, people think it's really easy. Oh yeah, we can easily find out what kind of is a risk factor for an injury. I'm like, no, you can't. No, you can't. This the sheer amount of s sort of um data collection that would have to go into those kind of processes is just absolutely crazy. So um yeah, so there isn't anything really that and and this isn't
And to be, you know, kind of like you're saying, trying to be a little bit objective. This isn't saying that, um, you know, you can rule out the possibility of these things playing a role. Uh it's just that there isn't any supporting data, not only for that, but for anything else either. I mean, literally the best we've got is a little bit on strain injury, you know, maybe a little bit on the on the tendon damage side.
Um, more than that, you're not gonna find anything. And people go, Oh, well if I if I do this, then I'm gonna be less likely to get injured in my squat deadlift uh, you know, kind of bench press scenario. I'm like, mm Unless you're talking about unless you're talking about not taking anabolics. I mean that's a pretty pretty effective way of avoiding certain injuries.
Honestly that's uh I would say that's probably one that makes it really hard to determine what's going on in athletes too,'cause A lot of top athletes are lying about being natty. I hate to break it to most people, but you know, everyone thinks your top athletes are clean. And
That's that's a really big risk factor, especially for things like uh tendon ruptures. Um and you know, so ultimately if I i you know, that's probably one of the only things that you could point out and say, you know, uh, is is is that likely to be a factor, but
Yeah.
¶ Final Reflections on Effectiveness
You know, that's um a separate issue. So yeah, okay, cool. So um That was actually really interesting for me to go through that process um with you because I didn't I hadn't really made the connection between um people following a structural balance kind of training programme and um somebody probably making progress in a uh say maybe a powerlifting kind of uh context because
it was inadvertently identifying the prime movers that they were actually uh kind of not using so much. Um, ultimately, as I say, if I was uh benching I will be using my triceps and therefore my main progress will actually occur by using my delts and my pecs. um that would actually register on a structural balance test. It would display the fact that I am a triceps dominant bench. Inadvertently it would tell me that my dip was too high and and my other pressing exercises were too low.
And it would tell me to go away and do some more of the exercises that would actually help me. So this is really interesting because there's actually that element of effectiveness baked into that program for that reason. um, in that context it will actually have a positive effect. But the reason that it's having that effect is because of the way neuromechanical matching works. Um essentially
Allowing us to use the muscles that we are we have best leverage for and pushing activation in those directions instead of other directions. Um so yeah, really cool. I didn't realise that before I worked through that.
Yeah, it's it is cool to think about, but it's definitely not because your uh your low traps are
Not because Well the the the stabilizer stuff is silly because as I pointed out, those muscles can always just grow. As soon as you activate them, they'll grow like a weed because they've literally just been sitting there, you know, kind of with all these uh muscle fibers that aren't anywhere remotely fully developed and as soon as you uh reach into that activation territory, they'll just grow.
So it's the easiest thing in the world to kind of move that forward. But in terms of the prime mover stuff with the differences between, say, a wide brick bench and a narrow bench or a dip or what have you, wherever they're pressing, that would actually reveal
um the kind of the the the especially with reference to the bench press, if you're referencing everything off a standard competition bench press, and it would actually reveal that as an interesting area of uh kind of um development. So I mean I yeah, and I guess we already do use that when we say to people one of the ways that you can
see whether somebody is kind of triceps dominant or, you know, kind of uh double dominant or peck dominant in a bench pressing situation is just look at the ratios of those lists. I mean we already were saying that I guess, but um they've kind of codified it into a into a whole kind of system. Cool. Um, is there anything else that you want to say about structural balance or have we covered everything?
I think that's pretty much everything. Just if anyone's telling you to use it for uh you know, magically preventing injuries, just just know that data doesn't exist and
Well did anybody say you to do anything for magically preventing injuries apart from stop stop taking anabolics?
Yeah, there you go. That's your big one.
That that'll work. That'll work for helping prevent injuries. Um but yeah, uh pretty much nothing else has got any any data behind it. And that as I say, just to repeat myself, that doesn't mean that stuff doesn't work. It means that the data is really hard to collect.
And the people who've done like tons of work on it, like with the Nordic curl stuff for hamstring strain injury, they've done insane amounts of work to get to the point where they can say, We think this is helpful Uh trying trying to get um, you know, kind of
the data to be collected to support those things is just a monstrous effort. So that's why it's really hard to say whether anything is helpful. It's not because nothing is helpful. It's because that we just really haven't got the data to back anything up. Cool. Well let's stop there and um we will be back with another topic next week.