Last Sunday, I trained with my mum for the first time in three years or so.
She has been training The Phil Tyreman Way since the spring of 2017, initially under my supervision but it wasn’t long before I left her to her own devices.
Anyway, she asked me to take a look at her squat form because she’s been struggling with it a bit lately.
I could see why immediately. The poor woman was folding over when she hit depth and also had an unhealthy degree of anterior pelvic tilt (the infamous “butt wink”). A couple of choice cues improved her form immensely, but didn’t eliminate the problem (unusual, because those tweaks usually do).
Next was overhead press. Again, her upper back was folding over, partly because she’d gotten into the habit of bringing the bar down to her sternum instead of returning to a proper front rack position, but it persisted even when this was rectified.
So I probed a little deeper by asking about what her routine looked like.
Short answer long, she’d decided to stop doing deadlifts and rows altogether in favour of doing a lot more bench and overhead pressing, for reasons I am sure made sense to her at the time, nevertheless it was a downright dumb decision.
Why?
Do a lot of pressing and little (or no) pulling, and you will very quickly (potentially in as little as a few weeks) develop nasty imbalances.
These imbalances not only result in an unsightly forward rounding of the shoulders (creating the hunched, “knuckle-dragger” look so often sported by bench press addicted broccoli heads) but it also nukes your ability to maintain good posture under challenging loads – hence the “folding over” my mother was experiencing.
Persist in this unbalanced fashion of training for long enough, and at best you will struggle along spinning your wheels no matter how hard you work, and at worst you’ll get a training-terminating injury and a date with a surgeon’s scalpel. (The latter being far and away more likely in this instance).
The solution is to follow a programme of training that carefully balances all six primary movement patterns, such as the (in my biased opinion) near perfect example that I break down, choice by choice, exercise by exercise in the August issue of The Phil Tyreman Letter.
To get it (and all of the other benefits subscribers enjoy) you must join us by 23:59 on the 31st of July.
So, if you are interested, make haste to the below-linked page:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman