bmx Archives - Strength Cycle

Over the years as a bmx rider I have had my fair share of injuries. From shoulder injuries, to numerous lower back injuries to tendon tears, knee injuries and various bumps, bruises, knockouts and much more. My passion for weight training, muscularity and strength helped prevent many injuries but once I had an injury the secret to fixing it was mostly my determination to go to the gym.

A lot of people look down on people who are just determined to go the gym regardless of injury. They just don’t understand that Friday is arm day and injury or not, it’s still arm day so fuck it, lets go! On the face of it this may seem like a stupid, egotistical thing to do but in my personal experience this mindset has been the key to rehabbing my numerous injuries in a very short span of time.

Every time I had a shoulder injury I would still be determined to go to the gym on chest or shoulder day. Many times this meant using very light weights that I wouldn’t ordinarily use or doing certain exercises that I would never do otherwise. The point was to begin working my shoulder thru the greatest range of motion while under load that I could. Sometimes this meant bench pressing with just the bar, or having to only to side lateral raises with 10 pound dumbells. Each week I would try to work thru that range of motion with greater and greater weight. Sometimes this process took two weeks, sometimes it took 2 months, but every single time I would get back to my previous level of strength or surpass it and it would be without any lingering pain. Now I know this is anecdotal and not a controlled experiment but I’ve done it enough times that I firmly believe that weight training is one of the major keys to rehabbing and preventing injury.

Another example was an injury I received when I was 18 in which I crashed on a tailwhip and trapped my foot under the pedal and it got pulled into an extremely extended position and it pulled the tendon on the front of my ankle off of the bone and pulled a chunk of bone off of it. Within a minute it swelled up to the size of a tennis ball. Within a few days my whole lower leg was swelled up and crazy looking. The orthopedic surgeon told me that this could take up to a year to heal properly. I spent 2 weeks in a moon boot cast thing but I still went to work and moved around on it. As soon as the boot came off I was back in the gym. I didn’t have the range of motion to do a real squat so I would use the leg extension machine to get some use in my leg. then I would slowly progress to very light weight on the leg press machine, and slowly and slowly I worked back to doing squats and deadlifts. Within 8 weeks I was back to riding again and squatting again at about 90 percent of my previous strength and intensity. If I had listened to the orthopedic surgeon I would still have 10 more months left before it was healed. Oddly enough last year at the age of 30 I had the exact same thing happen and I was back to 100 percent in half of the time. The key was getting the inured area back into activity as soon as possible but without overdoing it and re injuring it.

I’ve had a similar problem with my back over the years. Numerous times I have injured my lower back while riding and the key to fixing it was pretty similar. Now the low back is a weird thing and sometimes certain exercises i did that did help me can actually aggravate it more, one of them being back extensions. I felt those helped me in my early injuries but many people have reported that they made their pain much worse. That is not a topic I am qualified enough to go into. What I can talk about though is that the more deadlifting I did and the stronger I got, the less I got injured and the quicker I was able to recover.

I basically used the deadlift and back extension to rehab my back injuries in the same way I rehabbed my shoulder and ankle, by gradually working the injured area thru a greater and greater range of motion with heavier and heavier weights. At one point in my life I had been neglecting deadlifts for a while, I was injury free but every time I would deadlift my back would feel extremely fatigued, and tired and sore and would stay sore for a few days. It was extremely uncomfortable, but not what I would call painful. At the time I decided to enter a push/pull powerlifting contest at my local gym. I had only 6 weeks to prepare and decided to try a radical experiment, I was going to deadlift and bench press every day or 5 days a week until contest time. The whole process is going to be part of another article but the strangest thing happened, my back pain went away. With each workout I got more and more comfortable. My warmup sets got more and more comfortable and it took less and less of them to get up to being comfortable at heavier weights. I became less sore after the workouts and over the 6 weeks I added 20 pounds to my deadlift. Basically getting stronger thru the range of motion is what contributed to the decrease in pain and discomfort. Strength was the key component in the reduction of my pain.

At the end of the day I feel like it isn’t the big lifts that create pain or discomfort and injuries, its not doing those exercises that contributes to pain and a greater risk of injury. So when you get hurt, get back to some kind of training as soon as possible. Start super light and just get some movement in and gradually increase from there. Leave your ego at home to avoid re injuring it but get back on it as soon as possible.

Building Big Shoulders for Sports

Everybody wants to have big shoulders. For aesthetic purposes they are one of the muscles most responsible for the fabled “v-taper” that so many people are after. They are vital to a strong bench press or overhead press but they also have another function, one that I came to realize and appreciate very well, they help protect the shoulder joint from injury and they help heal an injury to this joint much more rapidly then someone with weaker, less developed shoulders. The same can probably be said for many other muscle groups as well but in particular I personally benefited a lot from having strong shoulders.

Growing up the two sports I was most into were wrestling, and BMX riding. A common injury in both of those sports is an injury to the rotator cuff. A common denominator with everyone I saw who had shoulder problems in either sport was that they had no interest or saw no value in weight training. That is not to say that people who weight train never injure their shoulders or that no one ever got hurt weight training on it’s own but in general I believe that having big strong shoulders helps prevent damage to the rotator cuff and in general almost acts like shoulder pads as far as reducing impact related injuries.

I was always a dramatic risk taker in BMX and consequently I had some very hard crashes more then a few times, often times much harder then some of my more skilled, or more reserved peers. The few shoulder injuries I had were quickly healed up not by staying off the weights, but by embracing them and using them to speed my recovery. My shoulders are stronger, bigger and healthier then they have ever been and the following program was what I used for 10 years to build them.

This can be used as a shoulder specialization plan or as part of a traditional 4 day training split. This sort of plan will also fit well with a Wendler 531 plan as well. Basically the plan is this, this was a Thursday workout which at the time was shoulders and arms and it went as follows:

1: seated dumbell shoulder press-3 sets of 6, pyramid up in weight

2: seated side laterals: 3 sets of 8-12

3: seated rear laterals: 3 sets of 12-15

1: seated barbell military press: 3 sets of 6

2: seated dumbell press: 3 sets of 8

3: seated side laterals: 3 sets of 8-12

4: seated rear laterals: 3 sets of 12-15

Off and on I would alternate between these two workouts. What gym I was working out at and what training partners were with me influenced which routine I used but as you can see they aren’t much different. The overhead presses were the main meat of the program and here is where I tried the hardest to constantly add weight.

That was basically all there was to it. Now this seems like a very cookie cutter program and is less then perfect but this is exactly what I did for a very long time to build healthy shoulders. While I personally didn’t use a very scientific loading scheme at the time I did always strive to add weight to the primary exercises which were the barbell military press or the dumbell press. On barbell days I would focus on adding weight to the barbell, and on dumbell days I would focus on adding weight to the dumbells. The weight used for the other exercises wasn’t nearly as important. While I always attempted to add weight or reps when I could it wasn’t always linear, as new weight on the primary movements sometimes made me too drained to increase the weight more on the auxiliary movements.

Here is what my whole program looked like so you can see it in context to the other training days as well.

Monday: Legs

squats: 3 sets of 6

leg presses: 3 sets of 8

front squats: 3 sets of 10+

leg extensions: 3 sets of 12

leg curls: 3 sets of 10

Tuesday: Chest

incline barbell or dumbell bench: 3 sets of 6 pyramid

flat dumbell bench: 3 sets of 6

barbell bench: 3 sets of 6

Thursday: Back

deadlifts: 3 sets of 6

bent over rows: 3 sets of 6

weighted pull ups: 3 sets of 6

hyperextenions: 3 sets of 10

Friday: Shoulders and Arms

dumbell shoulder press: 3 sets of 6

side laterals: 3 sets of 8-12

rear laterals: 3 sets of 12-15

Triceps:

close grip bench press or weighted dips: 3 sets of 6

seated french presses: 3 sets of 8 to 10

cable push downs: 3 sets of 12-15

Biceps:

standing barbell curls: 3 sets of 5

seated or incline barbell curl: 3 sets of 8

cable curls: 3 sets of 12-15

*often times i would superset the bicep and tricep work as they are very easy to do that with.

* all workouts take less then an hour. Try to add weight as often as possible on the big core lifts.

Now this is what worked for me, it is not exactly the optimum way to train for obvious reasons. Dumbells have a lot of limitations as far as adding weight in a linear fashion and there are better exercises for accomplishing more then one goal at once.

As you can see it sounds like a very typical bodybuilder style plan. While I would definitely do things different now, the fundamentals were there and it was a very balanced plan that was easy to fit into college life. The key to the shoulder health for me was always the heavy overhead presses of one kind or another. These are vital to building shoulder strength and protecting the rotator cuff. Additionally, using this format for a long time left my bench press slightly less then I would have liked but it kept me from having any shoulder related problems that can come from too much bench pressing and it let me build a good foundation of muscle and strength so that when I finally did a bench specialization plan a few years later I was able to add 55 pounds to my max in a fairly short amount of time.

Now like I said, knowing what I know today I would pick a slightly different plan than would allow me to incrementally add weight more often but that would also allow me to train with more frequency throughout the week which I personally like. The problem with a 4 day split like this is that for beginners it places a whole week before you hit that muscle group again and you can make gains faster then that.The good thing about using the big basics as I have always done is that all great plans are made up of them; a little bit of reordering and all these excercises can fit into most popular and effective plans. The smaller excercises can be dropped altogether and the bigger ones can be focused on in a way that guarantees progress. From there frequency and volume can also be manipulated to achieve different goals.

Now if you are intent on using this exact shoulder plan your self here are the changes that I will recommend:

Just do one workout, there’s no need to alternate workouts.
That workout is this:

A: Standing or seated barbell overhead press (standing is better overall in my opinion) 3 sets of 6: use the same weight for all 6 sets

B: Dumbell shoulder press: 3 sets of 6 to 8. same weight for all sets

C: Side Laterals: 3 sets of 12 increase the weight when you can

D: Rear Laterals: 3 sets of 12-15 increase the weight when you can

For the barbell press, add 2.5 pounds each week. For the dumbell shoulder press once you can do all sets with the same weight and not miss a rep then move up to the next weight of dumbells and repeat until you can do all 8 reps for all three sets then go up in weight again.

An alternate plan that I would recommend that can fit into many of the 5×5 style plans looks like this (I’m leaving out all the rest and just showing you the shoulder stuff since shoulders overall is the point in this article)-

Monday:

Standing overhead press: 5 sets of 5, add 2.5 pounds each week.

Seated dumbell press: 3 sets of 8, once you can complete all 8 reps for all sets go up to the next heaviest set of dumbells.

Friday:

Standing overhead press: work up to a max set of 5 reps, add 2.5 pounds each week.

Heavy Shrugs: 5 sets of 3, add 5 or 10 pounds each week.

There you have it, a few proven methods to add some strength and muscle to the shoulder area to help prevent injuries while in sports and to fill out a t-shirt. Big basic heavy overhead work was the key to my shoulder health and size and I feel like you can use these plans and have a lot of success.

Mark Rippetoe teaches the power shrug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0t_hCzUgvM

Strength Cycle

Tag Archives: bmx

Fixing Injuries With Barbell Training

How-To Build Big Shoulders