Question: I have been working out with weights and riding the stationary bike two to three times a week for about six months. I was wondering if I should add stretching to my workout routine. Since I have never stretched before would it be beneficial for me to join a stretching class such as yoga and what do I look for in an instructor?

My answer really depends upon what your goal is for introducing stretching exercises into your workout. If you have a balanced strength training routine that works the muscles properly on each side of every joint, then you may never HAVE to stretch at all. Your joints are already getting the health benefits that many experts usually attribute to stretching, such as the prevention of joint stiffness and degeneration associated with aging.

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Here are some myths, as well as some facts, about the bench press.

The bench press is the best chest exercise, right?
The chest muscle or pectoralis major is involved in the bench press, but it is far from the best chest exercise. Due to the fixed grip width on the bar (predetermined before you start to move), the desired shoulder motion is limited therefore the amount of contraction is limited.

Furthermore, the fixed hand width also creates a mechanical system in which the triceps are called into play as much as, if not more than, the chest. There’s nothing wrong with triceps involvement, but what’s your goal? Exercises like the dumbbell press that allow the hands to change width as you move use much less triceps, thereby allowing you to emphasize the chest if that is truly your goal.

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Myth: On calf exercises, turning your toes in will work your outer calf and turning your toes out will work your inner calf.

The truth is that turning your “toes” is really a matter of altering the position of hip rotation. You turn your whole leg inward or outward. The hinge joint we know as the ankle is not affected by this change. Additionally, both heads of your gastrocnemius attach to a common tendon running to your foot and again are unaffected by this attempt at “variation.” MRI and EMG studies both show greater activity of the medial head regardless of the “variation”. The ankle joint dictates that the feet be aligned parallel to one another for optimal performance on most calf machines.

One considerable factor during calf training is that of maintaining alignment of the foot joint that is just below the ankle. This is the joint that allows the side to side motions of the foot. Often the ankles are allowed to roll outward as the heels near the top of the motion during a calf exercise. This demonstrates a lack of use of the peroneals, a muscle group that lies on the outer most aspect of the lower leg. By maintaining the alignment and ensuring that the heel moves straight up, and not out, these muscles are utilized and developed. Due to their position on the leg, they will add to the size and appearance of the “outside” of the calf.

Important factors to keep in mind when lifting weights include:

* Get a feel for, and practice, proper posture in standing position. Try “lifting your chest slightly” and “comfortably tightening your abs.”
* Begin the lowering phase by slowly bending your knees and simultaneously “sticking your butt out” (bending at the hips). This is key!
* As your butt moves backward your torso should begin to move from vertical to diagonal, relative to the world around you. If you must actually go to the floor with your hands, your torso may be near horizontal at the lowest point, but your spinal posture or alignment should still be maintained.
* Keep your chest “out”. As you lower at the hips and knees, the natural tendency will be to let your chest “cave in” as a result of your spine rounding. Again, this is often due to an attempt to reach down with our hands rather than lowering yourself down and allowing those hips to move backward as you go.
* Placing the feet wider than shoulder width will help you get lower without unwanted spinal motion. Also, moving your hips backward will keep your heels down on the ground where you want them.
* Finally, you might want to concentrate on keeping those shoulder blades from spreading apart and rolling forward. This protraction, as it is termed, is often the first sign that you are not keeping your postural muscles tight and the spinal muscles are likely to soon follow.

Many fitness trainers suggest that you keep your head and “eyes up” as you lower your body. I have found it more helpful to emphasize the “chest out/shoulders back” cue instead, as this directly relates to the thoracolumbar position. The head and neck do not directly alter the thoracolumbar position, and therefore create a very indirectly associated cue. In fact, extreme cervical hyperextension can be associated with misuse of this cue during some lifts due to “looking up” while your torso is required to move near horizontal during the lower forms of lifting.

In the gym…
There are two situations that are common to lifting in the gym (occurring about every minute) that are not found quite as frequently, or as heavily loaded, elsewhere.

#1 “Stooping” (to the weight rack)
Lifting dumbbells from the top layer of a rack typically doesn’t concern many people because….well, it’s not that far to bend. Treat this like any other lift, using the same exact movement and stabilization concerns, just through a shorter range. Keep your chest out, stick your hips out, and bend your knees as required.

#2 Seated lifting
I’m not referring to seated lifts like curls or overhead presses, but these are what usually precipitate the need to lift from the ground while seated to get the weights into starting position. You’re getting ready to do a set of seated dumbbell curls or your on the bench preparing for a set of dumbbell flys. What do you do next? You leave your butt on the bench and fully flex your spine to retrieve the dumbbells from the floor. And when your set is over, you do the same thing to return them to the floor. That’s right…you’re asking for it, and as I shamefully mentioned, I know from personal experience!

Regardless of the amount of weight you use on these exercises, you’d do well to make it a habit of getting your bottom up off the bench, lifting the dumbbells as described above, and then sitting down with them. I’m not saying you have to stand up all the way, just to the “squatting” position associated with the lower part of the proper lifting technique described. Then keep your posture as you return to the seated, more vertical torso position, on the bench. Some would describe this as though you had steel rods through your spine preventing any bending.

Everybody knows that the way you perform an exercise will determine the benefit and risk of that exercise. Just keep in mind that the way you lift the weight before and after your set is equally, if not more, important!

What’s the most important lift? Ask this question of any number of folks in the gym and you’ll get a variety of answers typically based upon their individual bias, background, or interest. “The power clean,” will be one of the most popular answers from athletes and ex-athletes. A hardy “bench press” or “squat” will be the answer from many of the traditionally-minded, and arguably mistaken, “mass before isolation” guys. You may even have a few spot-reduction myth addicts who claim that the “crunch” or “walking lunges” are key.

Everyone of the exercises mentioned above may be valuable to you at some point in your training. Whether or not they become appropriate for you as an individual will of course depend upon your goal and ability level. But there is one exercise, or as I stated before, one lift that could be labeled as a priority above all of those mentioned above. For all of pressing, pulling, rowing, and curling that occurs every day in every gym, and in some homes, around the country, we typically never think about how we actually lift the weights off the rack or off the floor…and of equal importance, the manner in which we return those weights to the rack or the floor! Furthermore, this is the only “lift,” the only “technique” in the gym that consistently becomes part of our everyday lives. We put so much effort and concern into the correct method for performing a dumbbell press or a leg press, but we pay no attention to how we got those dumbbells into position or how the plates got on or off of the leg press machine.

One of the few acute injuries I ever received in a gym was a back injury. What was I doing? I had finished a set of seated dumbbell curls with 60 pounders and I just bent right over to get those things out of my hands. In my haste, and out of poor habit, I left my butt on the bench as my back fully flexed forward and slightly to the side as I released the right, and then the left. Zing!…Sharp pain!… Grrreat set!… Nearly intoxicating biceps pump!…. Couldn’t straighten up!…Felt stupid!!!

As a physical therapist didn’t I know better than to do such a mindless thing? Of course, but it seems that we, as humans, must make a considerable, significant, and often painful, mistake in order to truly learn a lesson.

Now, everybody thinks they know how to lift things correctly….even if they don’t regularly, or actually never, do so. What we are talking about could be called “basic lifting technique,” “body mechanics,” “lifting mechanics,” or as it is often referred to, “functional lifting.” And there have been just as many ways of teaching this skill. I refer to it as a skill because it is in fact a relatively complicated activity that requires considerable practice. Nobody “just does it” right! Actually, there are two major instructional cliches that are, at best, misleading as cues for correct lifting:

Cliché 1 “Lift with your legs!”
I treated thousands of back injuries in my physical therapy practice. Each of the individuals who claimed that his or her injury was a direct result of lifting also stated something to the effect of, “I dunno know why I got hurt. I lift with m’legs just like your s’pose to.” The problem is that this cliché over simplifies the goal. Lift with your legs does not mean “…while ignoring the position of your spine.” In fact, you should be more conscious of your spinal position or posture than anything else.

The natural tendency is, of course, to simply bend over in an attempt to reach an object. The concept behind “lift with your legs” was to learn to lower yourself to the object rather than bending over at the waist. The problem is that most people still bend at the waist and flex the spine, even as they use their legs. In fact, most books and safety posters I’ve seen on the subject illustrate the “correct” version or technique INCORRECTLY! They show the legs bent, but also typically show the spine rounded. In reality, we must learn to maintain the spinal alignment or posture even as we incorporate the legs into the lift.

Cliché 2 “Keep your back straight.”
This is somewhat misleading. First of all we don’t want a straight spine. We want the natural curves to be maintained in what is commonly called a neutral position, which is to say, not gravitating toward either extreme of flexion or extension. So if those ideal curves are what you mean by “straight” then you may be okay. Another huge misinterpretation of the word “straight” is to think that it refers to vertical. There is no way to even begin to lift something from the floor, much less something heavy, while trying to maintain the spine vertical to the world. For this reason, some authors refer to the spine’s position in space as being diagonal e.g., the diagonal lift.