Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [70]
Once you know what an extended low back feels like, you can get yourself into a good position at the bar in steps. Take your correct starting stance, set your back, and lower yourself into position a little at a time by shoving your butt back, your knees out a little, and your shoulders forward, going down until you feel your lower back break out of extension. Then come back up as high as necessary to set it in extension again, and then try to get a little lower than the last time. In this incremental way, you can eventually get into a reasonably good starting position at the bar.
Back injuries are fairly common in the weight room, and unfortunately this is a part of training with heavy weights. Both squats and deadlifts, as well as cleans and all other pulling exercises, can produce these painful, inconvenient, and time-consuming problems. But knowing what actually causes them can lend a whole new perspective on how necessary it is to prevent position errors that result in these injuries.
If you go to the doctor when you have a back injury, nine times out of ten she will tell you that “You just tore a back muscle. Take these drugs and quit lifting so much weight.” This diagnosis and recommendation reflect a lack of personal experience with these types of injuries and a lack of understanding regarding how and when muscles actually get torn and how they heal.
Torn muscle bellies bleed. They are vascular tissues, and a tear of any significance disrupts the connective-tissue components of the muscle belly to the extent that the contractile and vascular components burst; blood then begins to accumulate in the area of the tear, producing a hematoma. This looks like a large bruise and goes through the same processes that bruises do as they reabsorb and heal. Bad tears will leave a visible gap in the muscle belly. Minor tears hurt like hell, too, but they don’t bleed enough to make a noticeable bruise. Little ones heal quickly, while a major tear can take several weeks.
The majority of muscle tears occur in the thighs and legs, with bench pressing accounting for quite a few torn pecs. These muscles are attached to long bones that either move heavy weights over a long range of motion or accelerate the bones themselves very quickly over a long range of motion. In tears that occur during the bench press or the squat, the weight itself provides more resistance than the muscle can temporarily overcome and the rupture strength of the contractile tissue is exceeded. These tears can occur at any velocity of movement, even after sufficient warm-up. More commonly, running injuries occur in which the contractile strength of either the agonist or the antagonist muscle exceeds the rupture strength of the opposing component. Hamstrings, quads, and calves are torn with unfortunate frequency, and this becomes more common as athletes age and lose both muscle and connective tissue elasticity.
The common feature of muscles that are the most subject to belly rupture is the job they do: they accelerate long bones around an angle. To do this, they produce long ranges of motion and relatively high angular velocities. Contrast this to the job of the spinal muscles: they produce and hold an isometric contraction. They are postural muscles, and their primary function is to hold a column of small bones in a constant position relative to each other. Their morphology reflects this task: the spinal muscles are long muscles, true, but they all have multiple origin and insertion points on a closely spaced, segmented, bony structure that is designed to be held in place while the appendicular