Understanding Load

Loading a person or athlete is something that we have done for years with relatively good results.  There are seemingly endless methods and implements for applying load, including barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, sandbags, sleds, medicine balls, tires, plates, clubs, and the list goes on…

As a strength coach, I firmly believe in applying an external load to my athletes.  In most of today’s sports, speed and power reign supreme and athletes won’t be either fast or powerful if they aren’t strong.  Thus, we need some sort of progressive overload to improve strength.  Most of the time, that is most efficiently accomplished by applying a load to the person or athlete.  Now, we can have a huge discussion about what kind of load should be applied at what time during a training cycle, but that’s a discussion for another time.  For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll accept that when it comes to strength and performance training, using some sort of a load to improve strength and power is important.  That is, assuming that they move well without a load.

So that brings me to movement.  How does load affect movement quality?  Does it help or hurt?  Can it be used to evaluate movement?  Or, does it cover up poor movement patterns?

The answer is…YES!  Load can and does all of these things.

Lets start with a very important concept with regards to movement quality and load…

LOAD CEMENTS MOVEMENT

What does that mean?  It means that load will almost always lock in a movement pattern.  This can be good or bad, depending upon how we use it.  Let’s start with the good.

Load can improve movement by helping you to cement good movement patterns.  When you are performing a corrective strategy with a client or athlete and they start to do things correctly and you are wondering how you can help maintain that correction until you see them next, load the movement.  That means that when I am working hard with one of my athletes to correct a squat (or other basic movement for that matter), and by the end of the session they demonstrate something that looks good and I want to hold on to it, I finish by loading that pattern.  It doesn’t have to be a big load (remember that by now they are likely pretty toasted neurologically anyway), but some sort of a load to help their nervous system to lock in the pattern and maintain it until next time.

On the negative side, load cements all kinds of movements.  So, if you have a really crappy squat (for example) and you load it, you just cemented that really crappy squat and have made it that much harder to fix.  Also keep in mind that the human body will always sacrifice quality of motion for quantity of motion (Gray Cook).  In many cases, the body will view load as an increase in quantity.  Thus, the quality will likely be sacrificed.

We see this a lot at the college level.  There are thousands of well meaning high school coaches out there who are trying their best to help their athletes and teams get better, but they are just uneducated.  They see things on TV, read magazines, and go to clinics to learn that latest things that SEC Football strength coaches are doing.  The next thing you know, they have 14 year old kids doing things under a bar that they have no business doing.  And, some of them think they’re really making things better by adding chains and bands to a load that is already too high.  College sport coaches end up recruiting them and hand them over to their college Strength and Conditioning coaches and Athletic Trainers.  Then we get to spend the next 4 years trying to undo the previous 4 years because they cemented the poor movement over and over and over.  They would be much better off learning to handle their bodyweight and focusing on mobility and stability in high school.  Then at the collegiate level, we can cement the movement patterns that are appropriate.

Load also plays a significant role in hiding or covering up poor movement patterns.  This may be a bit confusing, given that we just talked about how the body will always sacrifice quality for quantity.  The best example that we can use to demonstrate this is again the squat.  How many times do we see athletes who’s squat looks pretty good under a load, but when you ask them to perform a bodyweight squat, they look awful?  Load can do a few things in this scenario.

• The load can literally shove their body through their restrictions or dysfunction and into the squat.  Then, once the load is taken away, their restrictions or dysfunction become apparent.  The problem with this is that most athletes don’t compete with a bar on their back.  So, all of that dysfunction will be an issue when they compete.
• The load may be moving their center of mass enough to allow them to get around their restrictions or dysfunction.  Once again, they look good with their offset load, but their dysfunction all becomes apparent when the load is removed.  That is the pattern they will almost always revert to.  I need to know what they will do under pressure, not what they can do when they’re coached.

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