Friday Fix: Mini Band Lateral Walks

Today’s Friday Fix is a quick one (my future MIL is in town, one of my HS athletes has senior night, it’s Nick’s last spring training game before the season starts).

The mini band lateral walk. 

I love to include it to help reinforce strong glutes, to teach people to move through their hips and not their knees, and to combat knee valgus (I love throwing this in with deadlifts or barbell hip thrusts or as a finisher). 

But, people often do a few things wrong: 

• They rock their upper body side to side in an effort to move that way, rather than through their hips.
• They let their knees drop in and reach with everything below their knees rather than use their hips (check out the video on the right below). I’m SUPER exaggerating it so it may not always be that obvious. 

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I PREFER to coach this with clients/athletes in an “athletic position” (a quarter squat basically….imagine if you’re covering/guarding someone or receiving a tennis serve or whatever their sport’s equivalent is), rather than a straight standing position (I see that as a different exercise). 

Start with the feet under or slightly wider than hip width apart, and take TINY steps (maybe 1-2 inches) to really reinforce that they are moving from their hips (and not encouraging them to try to sneak distance by reaching under the band or going overly wide). I like starting people with the band above the knees because it provides feedback on knee valgus (without them thinking about it, because really, who is actively thinking “watch the knee valgus!” when they’re doing this?).

Which is Better: Progressive Overload, or Muscle Confusion

If you’ve watched any infomercials in the last few years, I guarantee you’ve heard about “muscle confusion” and how “it’s the best way to get results.”

And, if you’ve ever read anything about lifting weights, you MAY have heard about progressive overload (maybe, depends on who you’re reading).

Well, what are they and what’s better, right?

They’re actually two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we can look at “muscle confusion” as variability in a workout. Variability means that you’re providing a new stimulus to the muscles in a pattern it isn’t quite used to and therefore, it needs to learn how to adapt.

It means instead of just doing all conventional deadlifts, perhaps we include some squats, or cycle through with a month of sumo deadlifts, or do just pulls from a rack for a bit.

It means doing different movements in different planes (sagittal, frontal, transverse). In other words, it means moving sideways, not just forwards; backwards, not just straight up and down. It means staying athletic. You need variability to build a strong (and broad) foundation of movements, which is key.

Great! Sign me up! That’s exactly what I want, athleticism. Right?

Well, here’s where we need some progressive overload, which we can think of as consistency.

Progressive overload is a principle first written about by Dr. Thomas Delorme back in the 1940s, when he was working on rehabbing soldiers from World War II. It basically states that gradually increasing a stress on a body will adapt it to be stronger (similar to Wolff’s Law, which states adding stress to a bone will cause the body to lay more of it down, thereby strengthening the bone).

This principle is what we use for anyone who wants to get stronger/fitter (which, whether your goal is to “tone up” or get bigger biceps or squat the house or be a better athlete—or on the endurance side of things, run farther—this is what trainers and coaches use when picking your training loads and developing your workouts).

You need this if you want to get better at anything. You need to consistently practice something to get better at it.

For instance, you’ve never been able to do a pushup off the floor and want to. One week, we start off with three sets of eight pushups off of pins. Next week, maybe we do four sets of eight. You’re doing more volume than the week before, but you can still only do eight at a time. Next week we drop the pin down and go back to three sets of eight. It’s harder now because we’re closer to the floor.

We progress until you can do them off the floor.

For athletes who want to get stronger and faster, and for clients who want to get stronger and fitter, we use progressive overload. Walking an extra ten minutes, doing an extra rep, going up in weight—these are all examples of progressive overload.

Okay, so which one is better for results.

Both. You can’t get better at a movement if you don’t practice that movement; but if you practice it all the time and only practice that movement, you’re missing out on all the OTHER movements. You could get hurt from doing a movement too much, and you can get hurt from doing a movement too infrequently.

It’s about balance.

You need some (planned) variability to stay athletic/keep a strong foundation of movement. You need some progressive, planned overload to get stronger/faster/fitter/better at anything.

If you train by the month (a mesocycle, fancy term!), perhaps you change out different versions of your movements each month. Instead of doing a chin up (or lat pulldown) every month, perhaps you change it out for a different pulling movement, like a row (variability). Instead of doing all goblet squats, perhaps you do an eccentric or a pause squat (progressive overload), or swap it out for a single leg movement like a split squat (variability).

You can then spend a month working on getting stronger in these movements (overload) by adding weight or reps (depending on your goals) before moving on to your next mesocycle.

Don’t get caught up in which is better. As is often the case with fitness, it’s not about dogmatically choosing ONE THING that will “be the magic fix to all my fitness pursuits.” You need both.

Friday Fix: The Bird Dog

Fun fact: I never questioned why this exercise was CALLED a bird dog until about 7+ years into teaching it…at which point I almost slapped myself on the forehead for not knowing it was called such because bird hunting dogs point. 

Still trying to figure out why a “deer in headlights” exercise is called that, but that’s a post for another day.

Anyways, a bird dog exercise is one that I frequently use with clients and love throwing into my own workouts because it’s that good. It reinforces a neutral spine position, in actively centrating your shoulders and hips in their sockets without hanging on them passively, and it involves some serious core stiffness to do correctly. (It’s an anti extension AND anti rotation exercise! Bang for your buck).

I also love it because it can reinforce extension at the hips rather than movement through the low spine, if done correctly.
That being said, this is one of those exercises I often see butchered, largely because people don’t take the time to do it correctly (they think just going through the motions is enough to get the benefit, but you’re missing the point if you don’t build tension!)

Here’s a good example of one of the things I see people do incorrectly:

Turkey and Vegetable Meatballs

I have gotten insanely lazy about food prep the last few months, mainly because my fiancé has been home to make dinner every night (and he’s a phenomenal chef, so who am I to say no to that?!)

That’s changed, now that spring training is underway and baseball season is around the corner.

Sundays are always my day to go to the farmer’s market anyways, so I decided to spend a few extra hours coming up with some recipes and actually preparing food for the next week.

One of the recipes I wanted to try? A turkey meatball. I looked around and found one I could play with and dress up how I liked, and came up with this one. It made about 30 meatballs, which, with veggies and rice, is a good four or five meals for me.

Turkey and Vegetable Meatballs
Prep Time: 25 minutes*   | Cook Time: 15 minutes
(*This took me so much longer because I don’t have a food processor to chop things up, so I did it all by hand. Worth it, and very therapeutic somehow). 

Ingredients:
1 small yellow onion
80z mushrooms (I used baby bellas because I had some left over)
1/2 cup carrots
1 celery stalk
4 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup freshly chopped parsley
1/2 cup spinach
2 tbsp Italian seasoning (I mixed my own because I didn’t have any but I had all the parts to it)
salt and pepper to taste
1 pound of lean ground turkey meat
olive oil

Directions:

1. Finely chop mushrooms, onion, celery and garlic in a food processor, or by hand, if you’re like me and just don’t have one. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the vegetables and cook, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has evaporated, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl and let cool for 10 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 450°F. Line a tray with tinfoil and coat it with cooking spray.
3. Add the spices, parsley, and spinach to the veggie mix, then add in the turkey. Fold everything together but don’t over mix it.
4. Form this into little meatballs! I used a spoon to scoop some out and make them. You can certainly go ham and make massive meatballs, just keep in mind the cook time will be wildly different.
5. Bake these bad boys for about 15 minutes, give or take.
6. If you want to freeze some for the future, let them cool, seal them in an airtight container, and you can keep them for up to three months (though I kinda doubt they’ll last that long here).
7. ENJOY. No but seriously, enjoy these bad boys. They’re good AND healthy.

You can certainly add zucchini or any other vegetables to this as well. I’m a huge fan of hiding veggies in my meals JUST to get a few extra.