Open Joint vs Closed Joint Lifting – Part 3

In part 1, I talked about the concept of the open joint lift and how it can be used to move big weights. Part 2 was about taking that concept and using it to prevent injuries to the knees. This post will further that concept and explain how to apply it to prevent and manage back injuries. If you haven’t read the previous 2 posts, please do so. It’ll make this post a lot easier to read.

The back is one of the most commonly injured areas, whether a person lifts or not. A back injury is also a lot more debilitating than most other kind of injuries – everything you do in life uses your back. Unfortunately, because we live in a sitting society, back problems are all too common these days.

Let me introduce you to the lower back first. The primary region we are concerned about, for this discussion, is the lumbar area (lower back). The spine connects to the hips and as such any movement in the hips will involve a loading of the spine. The spine is also strongest when it is straight or “arched”. Any issue in the spine is usually magnified when the spine is rounded. Therefore, we will remain in an arched position for all the lifts mentioned here. Because when arched, the spine is now a rigid structure that is more or less one big joint, the hips are where the movement occurs. Strong and mobile hips = strong spine = less chance of injuring the back. Usually the reason that people experience so much back pain is because the hips are so locked up and immobile that now movement has to take place through the spine.

Taking the ‘open vs closed joint angle’ from before, the most obvious solution to work around back pain is to use a more open joint angle at the hips. Why? When the hips are closed, the back is close to parallel to the floor. This puts the lower back under a whole lot of shear stress. However, when the hips are open, the back is more perpendicular to the floor, which results in more compressive than shear forces on the spine. As we have already seen, our joints can handle compressive forces a lot better than shear forces. So how do we use this information to train around back pain?

1) Strengthen the abs. This may seem counter-intuitive but it’s very rare that the lower back is actually weak enough to be the problem. Usually the problem is that a person’s abs are too weak to take the stress off the spine. Training the abs through stabilization (planks, ab wheel rollouts) is the best way to solve this issue.

2) Use the open hip angle to your advantage. Front squatting, the high bar back squat, clean deadlifts and trap bar deadlifts are great for people with lower back problems because they force you to remain more straight up than leaning forward.

Trap bar deadlift

3) Get off the leg press machines. These machines do not let the hips travel and more often than not a person will curl up the lower back when using these machines. Stay on your feet when lifting and you will reap the benefits.

4) Use single leg work for your posterior chain needs. The great thing about single leg work is that you cannot lift as much weight as with two legs. This greatly reduces the stress on the spine, while still giving your muscles a training effect because you can use a closed hip angle now. Single leg deadlifts, long step reverse lunges and long step Bulgarian split squats are great in this regard. You’ll probably feel soreness you’ve never felt before too.

Single leg deadlift

5) Train stabilization of the hips. If the hips are not properly strengthened, the onus falls on the lower back and various other muscles to keep the hips in check. Great way to train stabilization while still lifting heavy weights is to add farmer walks and its variations to your program. Grab a heavy weight and go for long walks with them. Michael Boyle has stated that the strongest hips he ever tested were strongman competitors  - where farmer walks is a big competition. Because you will be in a standing (ie open) hip position, the stress on the lower back is very low.

6) Use Olympic lifting variations of pulling. The snatch deadlift and the clean deadlift force you to sink your hips lower which would keep your torso more upright. It will still tax your muscles, but the pressure on the spine will be less. If the convention deadlift with its closed hips kills your lower back, try snatch deadlifting. You’ll probably find that it’s way easier on the spine, and you can still lift very heavy weights and get stronger.

Clean Deadlift

You’ll find that this list is directly opposite to the list in part 2. The less the knees travel, the more stress that’s put on the back. And the more the knees travel, the less stress is put on the back. Pick your poison and get to lifting.

Open joint vs closed joint lifting – Part 2

In part 1, I talked about the concept of the open joint lift and how it can be used to move big weights. This post will be about taking that concept and using it to manage and prevent injuries at the knees.

When talking about loads on the body, there are two kinds that we will worry about: compressive forces and shear forces. Compressive forces can be described as putting a load on your back, such as a squat. The weight pushes you down into the ground. Shear forces are a bit more confusing. The easiest way to think about shear forces is to imagine a joint moving further away from the mid-line of the body. An example would the leg extension machine. The knee and ankles are far away from the mid-line of the body, and this would put a lot of shear stress on the knees. Our body can handle a lot more compressive force than shear force. As proven by Stuart Mcgill, “the spine doesn't buckle until 12,000-15,000N of pressure are applied in compression, but as little as 1,800-2,8000N in shear will get the job done” (Cressey). This same idea applies to the knees. It’s very rare to see somebody who has knee pain when squatting get the same knee pain when standing up with the weight. It goes to follow that the more open the knee angle is, the less shear stress on the knees. This is why a deadlift will almost never hurt an injured knee, while a full squat will kill a person’s already injured knees. (Note: I am not bashing on the full squat, some people find that it helps their knees, some find that it kills their knees. More often than not, I find that it kills a person's knees. Your results may vary.)

Andy Bolton with 1000+lbs, spine not collapsing yet

Another way to determine if a leg exercise will create a lot of shear force is to determine shin angle, or knee travel. In a full squat, the shin angle will be as acute as it can possibly be, while in something like a box squat the shin angle will be more perpendicular. The more acute this shin angle, relative to the feet, the more shear stress will be placed on the knees. The above principle still applies - the knee is far away from the midline of the body. This is also a reason why people with long femurs will find squatting painful, their knee has to travel a lot further than a person with short femurs.

So how do we use this information to keep our knees healthy and pain-free? Here are some guidelines:

1) The obvious solution: strengthen the back of the body. The reason knee pain is so prevalent in today’s society is that people are just plain weak through the posterior chain – the lower back, glutes and hamstrings. These muscles are very important when it comes to preventing back and knee injuries. The quads pull on the patella and if the hamstrings and hips are not strong enough to offset that pull, there will be problems. Ok now that we’ve got that out of the way…

2) Use the open knee angle to work around the knee problem. The conventional deadlift is a great way to strengthen the back of the body and stay pain free through the knees. Other exercises that work great in this regard are the box squat and Romanian Deadlift. They both (done right) involve very minimal knee travel and so place very little shear stress on the knees. Great for rehab and for getting stronger with bad knees. 

Notice the shin angle

3) Give up squatting for deadlifting variations. Hear me out before you form a pitchfork mob. Squatting will always entail a more vertical spine than a deadlift. This automatically makes the knees travel. Deadlifting during a bad knee period will provide the same training stimulus on the legs, and make sure you remain strong during the injury. Chances are you will come back from the injury with a stronger posterior chain and climb to a higher squat.

4) Front squat or low bar squat in the presence of knee pain. They both have been shown to reduce shear stress on the knee, and will give you a squatting stimulus.

5) Stay off the leg machines. The leg muscles are never meant to activate in isolation, and forcing them to do so will lead to problems down the line. Using these machines once in a way, or in addition to compound movements on the feet like the squat and the deadlift is fine. Exclusively using them is not.

6) Deadlift. Seriously.

Less shear stress than the back squat

The next part will be about the spine and how to use the open concept angle to prevent and manage back injuries.

Open joint vs closed joint lifting – Part 1

I was watching a video of Tony Kono where he was explaining why squatting into the deadlift is wrong. The reasoning behind this struck me as extremely simple but powerful. He explained that the more open a joint angle is when lifting a weight, the more force can be exerted. In the case of the deadlift, the optimal alignment for open joint angles are hips inbetween the shoulders and knees, while the shoulders should get on top of the bar. 

Notice the relationship between the hips, shoulders and knees.

Based on a person’s anthropometry this could change where the hips would be closer to the knees in case of a long torso, or the hips would be closer to the shoulders in case of a short torso. But this doesn’t change the fact that a person should strive to create that perfect relationship between all the joint angles where they can remain as open as possible, to ensure maximal force production. After all, everybody can stand up with more weight than they can lift off the floor. This is the reason why a person can lift the most weight in the deadlift – it’s a lift where joint angles can be kept as shallow as possible. 

Powerlifters, whose very sport depends on maximal force production, are masters of the open joint angle. Look at a powerlifting squat vs an Olympic lifting squat – the knee angle of a powerlifter is kept as open as possible while the Olympic lifter flexes the knee as much as possible.

Shallow knee angles let you move massive weights.

Or the powerlifting bench. To keep shoulder flexion down, the bar is brought as low as humanly possible. If your intent is to move massive weights, you must master the shallow joint angle concept.

Stay tuned for part 2, which will be about injury management and prevention using the concept of open and closed joint angles.

Deadlifting cues for the long limbed lifter

A very popular cue for deadlifting is “hold on to the bar and push the earth away”. While this is a great cue for people who are natural squatters (usually below 6 feet with short femurs and a long torso), it often doesn’t work for people who aren't natural squatters (usually above 6 feet with long femurs and short torso).  I had a 6 ‘7 basketball player at my gym come up to me and tell me his deadlift is terrible because  “I don’t understand what it means to push the earth away”. When I checked on his form, he was literally treating his deadlift like a squat, the bar got too far away from him, he got his hips almost down to knee level, and it was a squat. The quickest way to muck a deadlift up is to treat it like a squat.

Proportions matter

As a 6 ‘4 lifter with extremely long femurs, I never understood the ‘push the earth away’ cue either. Reason being that squatting is a very foreign concept to a long-femured individual. Ask a tall person to squat and it usually looks like a giraffe trying the limbo. If this is you, and you just can’t seem to get the ‘push the earth away’ cue right, try the opposite. Treat the lift as a pull. Imagine yourself as a human crane and you’re lifting the weight up to put it somewhere else. I’ve found that this typically resolves a lot of issues with longer limbed lifters. When a long-torso person deadlifts, the hips will typically be lower - almost like a squat - because the shoulders have to be over the bar. However, a long-femured person would have higher hips because it doesn’t take much to get the shoulders over the bar. As soon as I told the basketball player to stop pretending it was a squat, and just pull the bar up, his lift looked picture perfect. Long limbed individuals are natural pullers off the floor. Stop pretending it’s a squat and think of yourself as a human crane. Try it out and see if it works for you.

Be like the crane

Tools for perfecting your squat: The squat-to-stand

The overhead squat is the most difficult version of the squat because of the mobility required through the joints to produce the full squat movement along with the overhead movement. It demands complete mobility through the ankles, hips and the thoracic spine. Mastering the overhead squat will make the basic squat movement a breeze.

Enter the squat-to-stand. Introduced by Gray Cook, the squat-to-stand is probably the best way to teach the overhead squat. Cook prefers to teach the movement from the ground up, referring back to when we were babies and learned to stand up from a squat. The squat-to-stand consists of 4 steps:

1) With a shoulder-wide width, or slightly wider stance, bend down to grab the toes. If your flexibility doesn’t allow you to do so with straight legs, bend the knees as necessary. Don’t worry, your flexibility will catch up soon enough.

2) While holding on to the toes, pull yourself down into a squat stance while keeping the elbows inbetween the knees and shoving the knees out. Really focus on getting the chest up and staying relatively straight through the spine. Do not over extend the neck either, look at a spot around 6 feet in front of you.

3) While remaining in this squat position, extend your arms over your head and try and reach for the ceiling. Focus on keeping the arms in a slight Y shape, not necessarily straight over your head. You may not be able to get into this position, and that’s a sign of restricted thoracic spine mobility.

4) Keeping the weight on the heels, stand up.

Here’s a video that explains the above 4 steps. 

If you have very restricted mobility (and a lot of people will fall into this category), focus on only the first two steps for now. When the first two steps have become easy, add the last two.

Adding the squat-to-stand as a warmup movement before some heavy squatting is a great idea. An even better idea would be to perform 3 sets of 8 of the squat-to-stand every day to remain mobile and keep the hips healthy. Try it out, stay consistent with it, and your squat form will feel amazing

Using straps on the front squat to fix your form

Using straps to hold on to the bar for front squats is recommended for people who lack the flexibility for a rack position, or for people who have elbow problems. However, there is another use for straps – perfecting your front squat form. The front squat is superior to the back squat because of one reason – it is very hard to cheat. With the back squat a person can lean excessively forward and use the lower back to get the weight up. If you try that with a front squat, you will dump the bar in front of you. However, most people figure out that if they hold on to the bar with their hands, they can lean forward just that tiny bit and overuse the lower back. This is where the straps come into play. By using straps to hold on to the bar, you have no way to ‘hold’ the bar in place, and any leaning forward will cause the bar to fall forward, thus ensuring perfect form with the chest up and the lower back arched. Try it and perfect your front squat form.

Watch Rob Adell of Average Broz Gymnasium perform a 227.5kg / 501lb front squat using straps

Tension and the Deadlift

The deadlift is a unique lift compared to every single other lift in the weight room. It’s unique in that you lift the weight off the ground from a dead stop, without any eccentric component. There’s no way to get a “feel” of the weight you are lifting before you actually lift it, and this is why the deadlift is so ridiculously hard and is not very often performed in the weight room.

Tension is the key to deadlifting big weights. Pavel has written a great amount about the importance of tension in his book “Power to the People”. He also mentions that when deadlifting legend Lamar Gant used to get down to the bar, he would go down so slowly it looked like he was squatting a maximal weight. This is accumulating tension - a big reason why Gant was such an accomplished deadlifter.

So how do we use tension? Perhaps you have heard the anecdote about the two suitcases. If I tell you one suitcase weighs 200lbs, but in reality it only weighs 10lbs, the suitcase would fly when you tried to lift it. Conversely, if I told you a suitcase weighed 10lbs but in reality weighed 200lbs, you would probably hurt yourself when trying to lift it because you would not be tensing the body and protecting the spine. My take on this is a bit different. Imagine that I gave you a suitcase to lift, but all I told you was that it’s extremely heavy, probably the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted. You do not know the exact weight. How would you lift it? Would you take a chance that the suitcase is light and yank it off the floor? Or would you accumulate as much tension as you can before gingerly squeezing it off the floor? Obviously, the latter. Once you’ve got an idea of what the weight is, you would accelerate the suitcase to a standing position. Go ahead, pretend you're lifting something up off the floor and it's the heaviest thing in the world. Really focus on how much you tense your body before the act of lifting the imaginary object. That's the amount of tension you need to accumulate before the lift. The more tension you can accumulate, the more force your body will produce.

This is the key to building that big deadlift. Too many people yank the bar off the floor in the hopes that if they create acceleration at the bottom, it will carry over to the top. Think about throwing a medicine ball straight up from a full squatting position. You would gradually accelerate from the bottom to the top and peak at the jumping position to throw the ball up. You wouldn’t put as much acceleration as you could into the bottom position. This applies to deadlifting as well. You squeeze the bar off the floor, and then gradually accelerate to a strong lockout.

Try the suitcase analogy the next time you deadlift heavy. Pretend you don't know what the weight is, but that it's just really heavy. Another way around this is to pretend the bar is 200lbs heavier than it actually is. If it's a 400lb deadlift PR you're going for, fool yourself into think it's 600lbs. You'd be surprised at how easily the weights come off the ground

Counter intuitive lifting tricks and cues - Correcting the 'falling forward' on the deadlift

The Problem:

We've all seen it. A person sets up for a deadlift in the right position, everything looks good and BAM at the point of lifting the hips rise forward and upwards and the lower back and quads are used primarily to lift the weight up.  Being used to a world in which we predominantly sit, the hips have become dumb, and the ability to shift our weight posteriorly (get the hips behind the heel) has diminished. Now this may be the case of a posterior pelvic tilt (tight hamstrings, weak lower back), but if a person can get into a perfect starting position, it's more likely just a case of bad habits. In the video below, it's not an extreme case of hips coming forward, but this person would be lifting a lot more if he fixed his hips.

Why This Happens:

Assuming the weight is not something that's too heavy for the person, this mostly happens because we live in a quadriceps friendly world. We like to shoot our weight forward, and this is why you see so much more back and knee pain in today's world. With the deadlift, we do not know how to load our hamstrings and glutes, and the body lets itself pitch forward to put more stress on the quads. In the bottom of the deadlift, the pelvis is as anteriorly tilted as it can get which means that the hamstrings are the prime movers. If you lose this position and take the stretch out of the hamstrings, you will bring in the wrong muscles. It's usually the case with beginners and people with extremely strong backs. Or just people who have been improperly training and have been feeding their dysfunctions.

The Counter Intuitive Solution:

1) Firstly make sure the bar is only an inch or two away from you. No amount of cues and fixes will fix your deadlift is your starting position isn't perfect.
2) Lift the bar very slowly from the ground to the kneecap. It should take you at least three seconds to get to kneecap height.
3) From kneecap up, lift normally.

Why This Works:

1) The problem is magnified when going slow. A person can use momentum to drive a light weight through bad form, but when going slow the weight will keep a person honest. The person will be forced to pull back and load the posterior chain, because the falling forward will be made that much more obvious.

2) The going slow will force the abs and lower back to contract harder. Most people forget how to contract their torso to stabilize the spine. Going slow forces this change to happen, which makes for a better lift.

3) The person can't jerk the weight around when going slow. Jerking the weight, usually off the floor, results in losing the tight lower back arch. Tension is key to lifting big weights, and this solution helps solidify that key point.

When And How To Use IT:

Firstly, this should not be done with heavy weights. Think of this fix as practice. You want to practice consistently and perfectly. If this is a chronic problem, you want to practice this every day or every alternate day. Maybe even between sets of your bench, you can practice a set of slow deadlifts. If this isn't a chronic problem for you, but you still would like to practice perfect form, I would suggest once a week or so as a warm-up. It works great as a warm-up, but make sure you also get used to pulling fast and perfectly when it comes to heavy weights. Be aware that this will also cause some very sore hamstrings the first few times.

Note:  I do not advocate pulling slowly all the time. This is only for people who need technique work and who pitch forward. Practice safe lifting