Training in Lengthened Positions

one of the things that i like to use um that i've been talking about for over half a decade that is now coming out in the research is that people don't train positions in the length and state enough and that's causing a lot of issues where things get tight and they destabilize and then other muscles have to take over and it's subjective too right like just because you think a muscle's length and doesn't mean it is right so like any lat as an example if your serratus isn't actively actively contracting you're not lengthening your lat so there needs to be uh some awareness of what that actually is and i think people just go it feels length and that's enough but it goes deeper than that right it goes a lot deeper that if you're doing say like let's say we're doing a pullover and you're lying your ribs to flare you can't keep them down or you can't like you said they can't get the serratus to to create that coupling between the ribs and the scapula. And if you don't, if you don't keep that stuff locked in, then you're getting fake length on the lat. The lat's not actually lengthening out. You're going to have to figure something else out or you need to kind of regress back and start working on those smaller muscles around the ribs and scapula that people don't take care of, especially bodybuilders. Like most of my body they're doing shit tons of serratus work. We're doing a lot of stretching. I know stretching, everyone hates stretching but if it works it fucking works and so we're doing a lot of stuff for either soft tissue on the uh the subscap and the teres minor or teres major uh in concert with trying to strengthen the serratus anterior and get all that stuff pulled back into place so they eliminate shoulder pain yeah i think people don't acknowledge what length and muscle is like even at a pec like just because you're at the bottom of a fly doesn't mean you have a lengthen pec like you're not externally rotated the shoulder you're not actually lengthening your pec and when i started incorporating that stuff you know years ago pain just went away man i was like man my you know and the way i equate it in my brain is the greater the distance the more the body is dependent on on kind of proximal stability or generating proximal stability right so um if i if the weight's close to me the body is kind of less dependent or requiring less proximal stability of the joint so as i get it further away from me and i get that muscle fully lengthened it's almost requiring this 360 degrees of stability right so rather than it's like balancing joint forces so rather than one thing is going to have be hypertonic and trying to compensate for something else in the back that's not working by taking it to that almost like vulnerable length of that muscle of the agonist muscle now requiring the antagonist to activate and turn on and create more tension as a state as a means of stabilizing in order to generate torque in the opposite direction as soon as i started doing that i was just like man i feel like i feel like a newborn baby with my joints. Yeah. And a lot of this stuff, we were teaching at a very low level, some of this stuff in the PICP program that Charles event, like doing things like working the lower traps, working trap three and four, working on your rhomboids, working on the serratus and in diagnosing what needs to happen. So I think people don't put enough emphasis in that. So when I give bodybuilders lower trap raises or serratus wall slides or wall angels, they think it's stupid because like, oh, I look ridiculous. I'm like, yeah, but look, you're shaking and you can't even get in the right position. So this is exactly what you need if you want to get out of pain and get the right muscles growing. Because if this stuff is not in balance, you're not actually working the muscle like you're supposed to be working it. And this is why your upper chest looks like shit. yep dude so much so much wisdom there so coming back to you know that that kind of went down this path of um you know what training might look like for people in the beginning i guess to summarize for the listener it's it's like you know making sure you're getting full range challenge ultimately like training training the length and range making sure you're doing your basic compounds making sure you can ultimately access full range of motion and then stabilize full range of motion seems like you know you and i are talking the same language as far as what the prerequisites are for hypertrophy in the gym.