by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS

Load is great, but you better fully understand it before you use it!

Loading a person or athlete is something that we have done for years with relatively good results for sports performance, rehab and fitness. There are seemingly endless methods and implements for applying load, including barbells, bands, 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 and ultimately performance.

As a rehab coordinator, load is equally as important for improving function and returning to activity. If someone doesn’t have the strength or power to control a limb or body part, they will never be stable and will get injured or re-injured.  Building strength through load is an important part of the rehab process.

Most of the time, strength 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 building strength strength for rehab or 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 explore the good and the not so good.

• 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 pattern. 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.
• Not so good:  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. The athlete 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.

THE COVER UP

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? A Lot!

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.  This occurs a lot with athletes who have a mobility restriction.  The problem with this is that most athletes don’t compete with a bar on their back. So, all of that dysfunction will become 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.
• In the squat (and other movements as well, but we’ll stick with this example) requires a lot of stability throughout the chain.  That is part of the reason that we love it so much.  Whenever you put a bar on your back (or front or overhead for that matter), we must stabilize.  So, if you have someone who has a poor squat because of a lack of core or trunk stability (usually because of a timing issue – and this happens to a ton of people), once you place a load on them, their core has to kick on to stabilize the pelvis and spine.  This is a good thing, right?  In the moment, yes.  But, the problem is that you are teaching the core to only kick on under a high threshold recruitment strategy.  Most of the movements that we all perform every day don’t occur under a similar strategy.  So, using load for improve movement in this scenario is actually feeding poor stability patterning under normal and sporting activities.

EVALUATION

Lastly, load can be used as an evaluation tool. I will say that I don’t use this often for a number of reasons that we have already discussed. And, when I do, it is often not intentional. The other day, one of my basketball players was working out and she was squatting more weight than she had ever squatted before. We are progressing through our training cycle and we have progressed to a high percentage of her 1 rep max. This athlete is about 18 months removed from an ACL reconstruction. She has passed every test that we have put in front of her and even completed a full season of NCAA Division I basketball with no problems. But, what I found was that when she was placed under a load that she hadn’t handled before, she began to shift away from her surgically repaired knee. In this case, what we learned is that that under extreme loads, she reverts to a faulty movement pattern. It is now my job to find the cause and correct this faulty pattern, because you can bet that the forces she is feeling during a back squat in the weight room are less than she will experience on the basketball floor as she runs, jumps, cuts and decelerates.

At other times, I intentionally use load as an evaluation tool.  Once I am happy with how they move without a load, I do need to understand how they will move with a load if I am going to improve their performance.  Things usually change with load, whether it is grandma with a gallon of milk or a powerlifter deadlifting.  patterns change with load and I need to understand how if I am going to understand my patients or athletes.

Overall, load is a good thing when used appropriately. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of cut and dry scenarios that make it easy to tell you when to do what. It comes down to the art of coaching. Learn to recognize what quality movement patterns look like, what you need to do to correct faulty patterns, and constantly evaluate. Until then, even small loads can become a dangerous tool.

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