Range Training - Is it the missing link?

Here we go ATG fam. ATG principle number one athletic range, is it the missing link? This is for you to decide. I’m gonna share my understanding of where I’m at with this I would love to hear from you about how you're understanding this, where this overlaps with the way you've already been thinking about strength, and which other coaches are already thinking along these lines?

This has been the biggest breakthrough of my strength coach career to understand this concept. I hope by the end of today you will also understand it and be able to use it and get better results. I believe that we are entering into a new era of strength and these two movements kind of tell the story. The movement on the left, they go with the funny face, is working on the short-range strength. As the shins become closer, and move close to the face, we're getting a shorter and shorter position for the hip flexors and the abs. They're working as much as they can towards their shortened position and then you see the lengthened position on the right with Ben Patrick. When you get to this deep position you're going to be using a lot of connective tissue and the muscle is fully under stretch. We're going to break down the concept of short-range versus long range.

My understanding is that we are just entering into a new level of technology and your era of strength and your depth of understanding that is based around athletic strength and human engineering rather than strength sports. There's nothing wrong with Nokia's they just got replaced by better technology and I believe that that is what we're doing at the moment.

We're moving into a new era of strength training technology and it needs to happen because there are far too many orthopedic injuries going on, there are too many people that are breaking tendons and ligaments, snapping muscles, missing out on their athletic dreams and also elderly people, joint replacements are increasing at an exponential rate and it's not a good thing. We need to do something different and better and that is what I am dedicating my life to contributing towards.

Modern physical education it lacks the accountability of engineering. If you listen to engineers discuss how they see nutrition science, they'll often be highly critical of the scientific method and the way it's employed. I think the same can be said for exercise science, not that anyone's bad people, it's just very difficult to do studies on humans and get the quality of training that people want, the time period, the seriousness, and supervision. It is a very difficult area to do research in and I think because of that we really haven't taken on the level of seriousness. Something like engineering, if the bridge falls down then people are held accountable, the whole world knows and it's very very serious. In Roman times when they unveiled the new aqueducts, the builders of the aqueduct would stand under it. If it was going to collapse then they were going to know about it. Everything that they did along the journey to building their result was extremely accountable and I don't think we have that in sports science and exercise science. I think we have a bigger responsibility than building bridges with human bodies and we need to take that to another level with our knowledge and understanding. I’ve been working on finding solutions and finding better ways. Today I will share what I believe is the most important of them that I’ve discovered so far. There's another problem with modern strength training is based on circus and strength competitions that are really where the history of strength training comes from and that is actually not what we need in terms of rebalancing the human body and getting the best out of the body. Some of the research that was going on post-war in rehabilitation also arrived at very similar conclusions to ATG. It's not necessarily new, I think you'll find that understanding today just helps you to have more dexterity and really truly see what the impact of different movements are going to be and how to put them together inside of a program. The outliers in terms of performance and durability are using different methods to the majority and I think you're also going to see where that shows up with these movements people doing strange movements and getting strange results.

The nature of these things is that as a new idea comes out and someone gets very excited about it then they tell someone and then they tell other people and these things don't tend to go backward. Initially, there was a lot of resistance to new technology, things like Uber, things like computers, and things like smartphones, they were all rejected and thought of as “why would anyone want that?” Bitcoin is another great example but today those technologies have all become much more accepted and mainstream and I think that's what we're going to see with the ATG method. Yes, we live in a special time where there is the possibility for rapid change and disruption and I think we are very well due for that in the field of strength training.

I can't deliver this presentation without talking about Charles Poliquin. Some of the biggest arms a strength coach has ever had and a massive contributor in so many ways to ATG. He was revolutionary in lots of ways and he stood apart from the crowd and he was highly criticized for that but he continued anyway and he made a massive contribution and left a huge legacy to the world. This concept was there within Charles's programs, especially his arms training programs but it wasn't taken to the length and extreme. Those of you who are serious students of Charles will see some of the concepts.

How they showed up in Charles's programs but there is a significant change and difference because you won't see any of these positions in Charles's programs. This is why it's a new era of strength. Taking range further brings about new opportunities and new adaptations in the tissues. You'll see in these positions, there is massive connective tissue length so the passive structures are all under tension, and then the muscle contracts and that's going to create extra tension that cannot be created when the passive structures are not already under match maximal tension.

Let's look at the two extremes short range is when the muscle is doing all the work and the connective tissue is playing very little part in that. This ratcheting here on the right, this is really the mechanism that needs to be fired, it's fired by the nervous system and the muscle shortens and locks that's really what it lengthens slowly under control. In the short-range position we're relying much more heavily or almost purely on this mechanism. The tendon if it was represented by the elastic band, it's passive initially, and then as load is added, if we're in this shortened position, the tendon, it has very little tension on it, you can wiggle the tendon around. Then as load is added then it will come under tension but it's not already under tension as you'll see with the long-range positions. We’ll go into detail about how this is going to change the adaptations that come from strength training. In this example, it would be the man also in the bottom left, the man is doing the work. This is in short-range movement and it depends purely on the nervous system. It's depending on the nervous system, the brain, to create the energy for the work to be done.

With these exercises, it's really the electrical energy. This is a great example of a short-range exercise. If you're looking to burn something into your mind about what a short-range exercise might be. You'll see that the elbow is getting fully extended. We're not talking about the old concept of the full range of motion which doesn't actually really mean anything in practice. Full range of motion I believe should be replaced by the concept of athletic range and short and long range. What matters is the position where the movement is difficult. We want to look at the strength curve and the force curve of the exercise. Where the muscle is going to be challenged most? Where the actual strength of the muscle lies? That's what we really need to be considering. In this exercise, the bottom part of the movement is very easy. Even though it's going to straight elbow position, there's nowhere near as much challenge as if we were using for example, like a preacher curl, where you feel a lot more pressure on the biceps in the bottom position. These things are best experienced. It's best to go through this face-to-face or practice these movements and you will understand much better what I am talking about. When you do this movement, you'll get like a crampy feeling in the biceps. You could even try and put the bar back above the head or behind the head and get the bicep in the most shortened position and that will become crampy. When you're using these kinds of movements, the connective tissue contributes a lot less.

This is the magic of the ATG system. The magic of the ATG system is you can get your strength training done without challenging the connective tissues. There are times where you want to be able to train strength without challenging the connective tissues. Yes, you can manipulate load but manipulating athletic range is a key tool and it's an important tool. It's different to just manipulating load because some of these movements under any load will aggravate tendons and you won't be able to do them. This gives people an on-ramp back from injury, back from surgery. These short-range positions. You'll see on the left, the hamstring working towards an inner range shortened position much different to the Jefferson curl, the RDL, where we've got the trunk basically vertical. Rather than having the trunk flexed which would put a lot more stretch on the hamstring and then we've got the knee flexed here rather than having the knee extended when we're first starting to produce force. This image on the left, it's quite similar to the one that we just saw for the bicep. You will get that crampy feeling and it's really the muscle doing the work, the connective tissue is not doing any of the work for you. Where it's hardest, it's all about the muscle and the passive structures are not contributing to the movement. When you go for your l-sit or your v-sit, the abs are in a shortened position, the hip flexors are short, and the cords are also short, so you got the knee extended and the hip flexed. These crampy positions don't rely on connective tissue very much at all and therefore they will create relative connective tissue weakness. They will set us up for tendon injuries if we overuse them and exclusively use them or don't understand how to load the tendons and the connective structures. It doesn't make them bad. As we go through this series, we're going to go through what, how, and why. We need to use each of these. The step-up variations are also a good example of the inner range, and short-range strength.

Short range for the knee. In this example, you can see that for the ankle it's actually a long-range movement, right there.

The ankle is being loaded fairly heavily in a dorsiflexed position.

Then these movements we can call rewiring movements.

Short range is good for rewiring, so their mind-muscle connection and bodybuilders will understand that they'll know that the spider curl type variations, the frontline curl that we looked at is an exercise that you would use to connect the mind to the muscle.

This is often what we need to do after an injury or if there's pain, we find a movement that causes no pain and these movements are less likely to cause pain because of the decrease in connective tissue tension.

We will be able to get work done and connect the mind to the muscle and rewire and get rid of that pain memory in the muscle and restart doing what we want to do.

These movements will cause much less inflammation because they cause less structural damage because there's not as much tug of war going on.

You're actually pushing the two points together in the tug of war.

If I use this chord as an example. Rather than pushing these points together and then it's up to the muscle to adapt and to then be able to create tension rather than if I’m pulling them apart as hard as possible and then I have to contract from that position, you can see it's going to cause a lot more structural damage.

These neurological movements, they're going to help develop neural drive and nerve density into the muscle.

They work very well with high repetitions and more repetitions equal more practice. You really grease the groove and connect the mind to the muscle and they don't cause a lot of muscle soreness so less time is required between sessions.

For example, the reverse out knee pain protocol is short range. The knee is bending very little and then straightening.

It's concentric only even within that short range because there is no eccentric there's even less structural damage and we can create massive circulation with almost no structural damage and that is the best way to be able to repeat efforts over and over again.

Exclusive use will cause a decreased length in the fascia, the muscle won't be happy to go into the lengthened positions and it will make us actually very prone to injury but you can see from previous reasons we still want to use them, we just have to understand how it fits together.

Without this dexterity of understanding, we can be creating injuries and building the foundation for an injury.

For example, with like concentric only trapped by deadlifts, that would be an example of a short-range movement or mid-range but if we're doing concentric only then we're going to get very little structural damage so it's going to be very poor at developing athletes who are not already great athletes.

The trap by deadlift is a very poor development exercise and it will create a decreased length in the muscles.

If it's a main strength exercise and we're not getting the rebalancing of other strength exercises then we're in for a lot of trouble.

This is what we're seeing at the moment because that is such a popular exercise and trap bar concentric on their trap bar jumps very very popular.

We're powering up the mind-muscle connection and short range and then we're not developing the connective tissues, we're not developing the decelerative capacities to anywhere near the same extent and so we experience much higher injury rates than we should.

These exercises by their nature are concentric dominant because they're not leaning on the connective tissue structures which eccentric dominant exercises do.

The limitation is often the opposing connective tissue.

If I’m trying to hit my best v-sit, I’m going to do slant Jefferson curls before I do this movement and that's going to open up the range.

You're going to see that movement in a second.

Remodeling. Remodeling movements, this is our long-range strength.

In long-range strength, we're going to be doing a lot more muscle damage and we're going to create hypertrophy.

In this example that band would be already under tension when the muscle contracts and we want to think of the stick here in the bottom left, it's the stick, the connective tissue is already going to be under tension when the muscle contracts.

We're going to create a very different stimulus.

You see here with the shoulder extended the bottom position you might not get this from watching but most people are absolutely screaming and can't handle anywhere near the kind of weight they can handle in a standing curl in this movement and it's because the connective tissues are not well developed because the nerves are too short and relative, children are able to do this movement with no issue.

Adults who've trained a lot and done a lot of bicep curls will have a lot of trouble with this movement. We've lost what was natural movement and that leaves us prone to a bicep tear, to a pec tear, to all sorts of shoulder issues and injuries because we don't understand how to restore the movement that we have as children. This movement is very connective tissue dominant.

You'll see people will want to go slow in this movement. It's not a crampy movement. It's a teary movement.

If the short range is is crampy, the long-range feels like it's tearing, it feels like pain and we need to work into these gradually because that is what's happening.

We are doing more damage. We're tearing more and that makes these movements extremely anabolic.

If you watch Arnold Schwarzenegger doing his pec flyers, he's getting into these extreme positions. If you see Tom Platts he used these extreme positions.

This would really be extreme long range.

You've got the platform Zurcher Jefferson there, so at body weight that's putting extreme tension on the lower back.

I’m not gonna lie, the fascia in my lower back, and the connective tissues in my lower back took some time to recover from this movement.

I was having fun with it that day and it's my job to test things out and to feel it because if I go and prescribe that to somebody if I go and give this to Sonny Bill Williams at our camp, I need to know what his back is likely to feel like after that.

It actually is really easy to make the lift because the passive structures are doing a lot of the lifting.

The hamstrings are under so much tension. The lower back is under so much tension. I can't get to this position without the weight. The weight is taking me there. The load on those structures is playing a huge role and I did get sore from this movement.

That's what strength training does. It's progressive overload and we want to understand where our limits are.

I was actually bouncing in the bottom of this, so you can see it on my Instagram if you want to actually watch the video.

I was bouncing in the bottom there so when we go to the lecture on tension understand that it's not the weight that's important, it's the tension that's important.

If I’m dropping and catching this weight in the bottom position, that's going to cause a lot more tissue remodeling than if I’m very slow and gentle with the weight.

Though that weight will generally encourage you to be slow in these end positions.

You'll see Ben getting into and out of this natural knee extension faster and faster. Why? Because he's more and more comfortable with it.

What's going on in these images?

What we can see here is maximum tension from both ends.

You've got the hip under tension and you've got the knee under tension.

In this, you've got full hamstring tension and you've got full lower back tension.

We can even take it slightly further with more than one joint.

I can go on a slant board with this and then I’ve got full tension in the foot and the plantar fascia, the calf, the hamstring, the hip, the glutes potentially.

Generally, they don't feel the stretch in this as much.

Then the lower back, I can then tuck the head as well and have basically the whole posterior chain under tension.

I understand that these types of movements are going to have a very different effects on the body.

For example, the v-sit is a great contrast to this because this is basically a v-sit right except in this one I’m using gravity to help me get my head on my shins, the body folded together.

Where in the other example it's the muscles that have to do the work and they're fighting against the tension in the opposite side of the body.

These are also long-range movements but they're not extreme long-range because it's not both joints.

There's not more than one joint that's under maximum flex.

You see here in the split squat, yes, the knee is closed and we're getting contact between the calf and the upper leg and we can take this even further by elevating the heel a bit more but because the trunk is flexed rather than being extended it's not as much tension.

There's going to be more tension in this one because we've got the glutes on the heels but we've also opened the trunk as well and you'll notice when you do these movements that it feels very different.

With the dip, yes, we're getting maximum range at the shoulder but because the arm isn't straight we're not actually taking maximum tension into this whole chain and it does feel very different when you go into something like the lying bicep curls, the Smith curls variation or the back lever, supinated back levers you're getting tension from at maximum tension at the pec and the shoulder as well as at the elbow.

This distinction between long range and extreme long range is actually really important.

The same distinction can be made with short range but I don't want to overcomplicate today.

With long-range it is important to understand, is there a tug of war going on from both joints? both of the key ends where strength is being produced.

When Ben comes out of this position, there's already full tension from both sides.

When I come out of this position there's already full tension, maximum connective tissue tension.

With these movements, long-range strength is going to cause massive amounts of inflammation.

There's going to be internal bleeding or the tendons, ligaments, etc. are going to get potentially sore if you load them too hard.

These movements can cause a lot of damage.

They cause bleeding, and restructuring, that's what makes them anabolic.

New muscle is created to replace the damaged cells, these muscles, these movements, you have to be more careful with and we want to progress load and speed gradually. Generally, we use lower repetitions on these because they're really the higher tension movements.

There's a lot more tension in the system, in these movements by their nature.

They're going to cause a lot of connective tissue remodeling and the recovery cycle for these movements is going to be much longer.

You are going to need rest to rebuild after these movements but that rest can be just long-range rest.

Now that you understand short range, you can actually use short-range movements to regenerate and people have been doing this for a long time.

You might say, “well, that's not a novel idea, the idea of using sleds for recovery” but did you understand the exact mechanisms for that?

You say, “yeah, well it's concentric only.”

Yes, it's concentric only but it's also short range.

We can use concentric only long-range movements as well and that's getting into the dexterity and the finer details of this.

Anyone can put together a bunch of exercises just like anyone can make a cake but there are very few Michelin three-star chefs, they're very few people who have the dexterity to manipulate the program and manipulate the adaptation stress in the way that you will have as you understand and apply these concepts across the whole body in every training session.

These movements are eccentric dominant which means we often do slow eccentrics but being able to progress speed on eccentrics also signals increasing tension tolerance.

If you can go fast but smooth on the way down on the 200-kilo, 300-kilo deadlift, then you're stronger than if you can lower it very very slowly to the floor.

I’m not talking about just letting it go, but if you can go smoothly down and stop just towards the bottom, the faster you can do that, the stronger you are eccentrically and the more tolerant to tension you are.

The load is supported by the connective tissue in these movements.

That is something that we have to understand, the load is being supported by the connective tissue and therefore the end positions are often really easy to get out of like someone who's really tight, the bench press, getting off the chest is usually easy and then it gets harder after that because the connective tissues are taking a lot of the tension at the bottom.

Same in the bottom of the dip and generally we fail up quite high because out of the bottom the connective tissue are taking a lot of the weight.

These are the exercises that make athletes great.

There's your one take-home from today.

There's probably a bunch and hopefully, you've taken notes, if not, go back and take notes.

This has taken me 20 years of research and wanting to understand what is actually going on with strength training.

How can we do it better?

These are the exercises that make athletes great.

There's no excuse now with poor quality athletes and low genetic potential.

At the moment there's a huge competitive advantage to be had and by getting this right you can transform athletic careers.

Charles Poliquin was the greatest strength coach in history in terms of people coached to Olympic medals because he understood how to put muscle onto people, and how to gain strength quickly.

There's a lot of strength training going on at the moment that's short-range and that's neurological-focused.

If you increase the strength of the athlete, strength is the mother quality.

Hardware dominant athletes, the athletes with the best hardware, whether that be tendons or muscles, we can choose to push our training adaptations more towards tendons or we can make it more towards muscle based on how we use these exercises but by optimizing the hardware and by building the tissues we can transform terrible athletes into great athletes.

This is our role. This is the ATG difference. This is the Poliquin difference.

I want you to have the same ability.

The most dangerous scenarios then are when the muscle is stronger than the tendon.

If the muscle is stronger than the tendon then that's the danger zone.

This guy in the red is in danger.

He's doing his best but that is the scenario that we're setting up with modern strength training where the muscle is very strong but the tendon is just battling to keep up.

The other dangerous scenario here is when one end, the connection is very strong and then the other end it's weak.

Wherever we have that weakness in the connective tissues then we're in for trouble.

We'll go into more detail about what's going to add more proximal mass and more distal mass for connective tissues and for muscles but we want to understand that we need to be able to strengthen these attachment points.

We've gone too far with strengthening the muscle and not understanding where the tendon fits into the equation and we can't actually get maximum muscle hypertrophy even for those of you who aren't as interested in athletic development.

It's actually bodybuilders who generally, apply this principle better than strength coaches because they want the size.

Let's put it to the test.

Is this a short-range or a long-range movement?

Because the body is protecting against full muscle rupture and tendon rupture, this would be long-range strength.

Is the muscle crampy, yeah, not so much.

Now we look at these two movements.

The movement on the left people, get upset when I put stuff like this on Instagram. Some people are saying, “oh yeah that's just a split squat.” but look at gravity.

It's obviously very different from a split squat but I am basically in a split position as far as the hips go but gravity is actually helping me to get more load into that hip flexor.

Often when I do split squats I feel like I can't really get the load to the hip flexor, sometimes it's a bit locked if I’ve been sitting around a lot.

This movement hits my hip flexor better than anything.

I just playing with the light dumbbells as a way to load the movement and a way to hang out there.

It is useful to hold these positions for a period of time I really like to move another part of the body while I’m holding these.

In this example like curling and pressing the weights and you feel like a difference in the amount of load as you move the weights around as well.

That creates a little bit more tensioning in the hip flexor.

A little bit of my thought process behind that movement which I actually really like.

The weights in the hand are just kind of playing around but they do actually really open up the pecs and the biceps as well.

That kind of weight is actually still significant for the pecs and the biceps despite how much weight can be lifted in the short position.

I don't have tons of strength out in that lengthened position and most guys will find that they're kind of the same.

Tolerance to strength just like with the Jeffersons, we probably can tolerate a lot of weight in these positions, if we train for it but initially not so much.

The movement on the right here. The glutes are shortened so the hip is extended, and the trunk is extended.

This is a good short-range movement for the glutes, also for the lower back.

This was when I was doing a muscle-building muscle club program and that was probably the best physical shape I’ve been in my life so far.

This was last year.

Inner range for the relatively, for the posterior delts, and such as well.

This movement will be a bit more crampy, people don't tend to cramp so much in the glutes.

You could take it further towards the inner range but it does illustrate the point.

Length movements versus muscle movements.

Is the body protecting against a full muscle tendon rupture?

On the left, is the french press. Yes, that's going to pull the tendons.

A lot of people say french presses hurt my elbows. Of course, they do.

You haven't understood how to prepare for those movements by using short-range like the movement on the right.

First, I like bilateral variations of kind of tricep kickback.

They're great. We just have to understand where they fit into the picture.

They will be a poor exercise for muscle development as they're often criticized for but that's not the role, that's not what this tool is for, it's a short-range movement.

It's a movement for circulation and building the mind-muscle connection and so it definitely does have its place and doing barbell variations of these works extremely well, it's great.

I did want to add one of the controversies in Charles's career was he's kind of criticism of glute bridges and Bret Contreras's kind of saga.

Anyway, that exercise, if you look at glute bridges, it's a really kind of popularized, Bret Contreras has really popularized the glute bridge.

Understand that it's an inner range movement. The hardest part of that movement is going to be when the muscles in its most shortened position and therefore it's going to be not very anabolic.

It's going to be a good muscle to create a mind-muscle connection but then Charles was always a much bigger fan of the lunge.

The lunge is then an extreme outer range exercise for the glutes and you will get sore glutes off lunges more often than you'll get it off in a range.

At some point, the tension becomes significant, and inner range movements are really useful, especially for lazy muscles that we have trouble establishing mind-muscle connection.

That's one way to look at that whole scenario and that's probably the platform that Charles was coming from with saying we don't need glute bridges.

He did recommend this exercise, the 45-degree back extension.

The benefit you'll see here and you'll hear Ben talk about as well is that you're actually bringing in the hamstring and the lower back all in balance together.

You just get more bang for your buck as an inner range exercise and you'll often see Ben using these as a unilateral exercise so they're much more specific to running ability.

Frans Bosch also is a huge fan of this inner range short position strength work.

I’m 99% sure he doesn't think of it from this perspective of the impact that he's having on the connective tissue with those movements but I'd love to understand that.

If you're a big fan of his work and you understand more about that please drop a comment or get in touch and we can chat more about it.

How do we use this stuff?

This is really the key. Ultimately, Charles is looking down on us and he's thinking about, “are we actually doing the right stuff with his work?”.

We want to put this to work.

“Exercise selection isn't only about gaining strength in the range it's trained” which is a quote that's often attributed to Charles.

It goes beyond that, we have to look at the adaptations that are created there and I think Charles actually knew this and I think he just chose not to articulate this concept.

There were quite a few concepts that he didn't really articulate that often publicly and those who know his work very deeply, I would love to hear more from you about, if he ever shared these kinds of concepts, if they're written in some of his work that I haven't seen, etc. I would love to know about that and but I never came across it in lots and lots of research and reading pretty much everything I could find from his very first writings to later on.

Exercise selection determines the type of adaptations.

We want to be looking at what are the connective tissue adaptations that are going to come from this and what are the muscle motor unit adaptations that are kind of going to come from a certain movement.

Will there be a lot of connective tissue damage?

Will there be a lot of muscular damage?

Will the athlete become tight as a result of doing a lot of this movement?

Will systemic inflammation increase?

These are really really really important questions for us to know the answer to for every exercise that we prescribe.

Unfortunately, I didn't really understand this concept and I didn't apply it.

I was able to coach athletes to win world championships before I understood this.

That doesn't mean that I can't get better.

Don't take this as criticism of you.

I also didn't know how to use this and I didn't understand this concept.

Even Ben has sort of said that 100% the ATG Knee System is built on this technology.

Like if you reverse engineer it, you can see that this is exactly there and that's why in 2018 when I saw Ben I knew that he'd solved something very very important but when I talked to him about this he's just starting to think about it more as we discuss this concept more.

We're all learning in this journey and I think that's the cool thing.

It may sound like I’m presenting all the answers but I’m presenting the answers as I have them right now and this is really working for me and it's really working for many thousands of people who are on the ATG system for knee ability.

How far can we take this?

How much better can we make strength training?

how can we influence the way machines are built, the way gyms are set up, the way personal trainers are delivering what they deliver?

The way strength coaches are getting results.

That's really the question and what comes next.

You now have an upgraded criteria for exercise selection.

Exercise selection is king.

There's been so much talk about programming and periodization.

Exercise selection is king.

Better understanding the implications of these selections changes everything.

You know which exercises are more anabolic and have longer connective tissue recovery times and will stimulate bigger tendons and probably bigger ligaments and more cartilage as well but you also know which movements rely much more on the neural drive and will require some muscular recovery but not so much connective tissue recovery.

Hopefully, we've got the cogs turning and you're going to be looking at your programs, you're going to be looking at what else is out there and you're going to be thinking either you're thinking “this is junk, I don't need this, I’m doing just fine with what I’m doing” or you're going to rethink the way that you train people in strength and you're never going to look at strength training the same again.

When I came across this concept, it took me a while for it to settle in my mind and I asked myself the question “do I really need to go to this level of detail?”

People have been spot benching and deadlifting and getting strong for a long time.

Does this even matter and it doesn't matter until it does?

Once there has been an injury then we have to know this.

Once there's a plateau, once there's a specific weakness that can't be overcome.

Strength training is going to cause imbalance, that is understood.

If you're re-engineering the body, you're changing it from its natural balance or the balance of your lifestyle.

Strength training plays with that balance very significantly.

What we need to do is understand how to manipulate that change to make it as much in harmony with what God gave us in terms of physical ability, and nature's way.

There's no choice, we have to strength train.

The strength-trained athletes are going to win but we've created this double-edged sword where traditional strength training causes a lot of discomfort injury, and often loss of athletic ability by putting muscle mass in the wrong places, by putting too much muscle relative to tendon gains and now we can understand how to use this double-edged sword to really fully truly benefit people.

I’m just excited for the impact that we're gonna have with this.

Next time you're writing a strength training program, you're gonna be able to celebrate a little bit more success and I hope that you have that feeling of like a breakthrough by the end of this video because it's really has changed my perspective, my life and I’m super grateful for ATG and Knee Ability.

It changed the way I look at strength training.

It changed the way I look at what athletic development should look like and as a result, I’ve gone all in and become the ATG mentor to help other coaches to understand this.

I want every coach in the world to understand the concept of long and short-range strength.

This is athletic range, is the concept and we need to understand athletic range.

Now you have this dexterity of how, when, what to use, whenever.

I encourage you to think about progressive connective tissue loading and progressive muscular loading.

This picture on the right is John Grimek, it's attributed to him at least I can't tell if it's him or not, to be honest.

I was questioning whether it is actually him but he's got some big arms there.

Is this position dangerous?

A lot of people would say, “this is ridiculous” but it's just a reverse Jefferson curl.

I think they call it archer press.

Should you be able to get into this position or not?

What makes it a bad position?

What makes it a bad position is the tissues and the structures aren't able to handle the loads in this position.

What can we do about that?

We can change it.

We can train to gradually be able to get back to these positions.

I believe that if we know that we can get to whatever position that we want, we have a lot more possibility and dexterity as coaches.

We can program to get the exact adaptations that we want.

You might decide, “I don't need the archer press”.

That's fine, that's a decision that you can make but if you know how to get there, then you're ahead of the game.

You'll see this nordic variation. On the left my nordic’s taken some time to develop, I went too hard in terms of tension.

We're going to go deeper into understanding tension further on in this series.

It's another one of the principles but regressing into this position, you'll see I’m already starting to get under tension here and this is relatively a much more inner range focused movement.

I’m starting to get tension quite early and the muscles are doing the work.

If I’m working in these positions then it's not going to load the tendons quite as hard.

I did have a tendon flare-up because I was explosively throwing out of the bottom of my nordic curls.

Just understanding which movements to use when to use them, and how to use them, is what this is all about.

Thank you so much.

If you made it through to this point, I would love to hear your comments and thoughts.

What have I missed?

What do I need to understand that I haven't understood yet?

What other resources, or things, do you find that overlap with this perspective?

Please drop some comments and I look forward to exploring this with you further.

Next up we're going to go deeper into short range.

I did explain it in some detail today but we can understand it more deeply and if you're like me, you will need a significant amount of repetition for this stuff to become second nature where you just instantly recognize what's going on and you can really identify straight away what someone's doing with their programming, where their strengths and weaknesses might be.

We're going to be going into more detail about these short-range strength exercises and how, when, and why they're actually really really important despite the fact that they will lead to muscle tears in athletes if we overly focus on them and we don't understand long range.

That was episode one, ATG principle number one, athletic range.

Is it the missing link?

You tell me.