Michael Kamalu has been an avid multi-sport athlete since he was 3 years old, excelling in basketball, football, soccer, volleyball, and track (high jump & hurtles). He was a starter for the basketball and football teams for Davis High School, taking second in state (6A) in both sports his junior year, and continues to play competitive sports to this day. Michael started weightlifting 6 days a week when he was 14 years old. From the very beginning, he was intent on studying exercise-science, including the anatomy and biomechanics behind each lift and the various strategies and nuances in targeting each muscle, in order to optimize his physical fitness and athletic capabilities. Others soon began coming to him for tips and advice, and so he started informal personal training before even entering high school. As Michael’s training and experience continued to grow throughout college and into medical school, he developed the unique ability to take new, academic knowledge of physics, physiology, neuroscience and anatomy, and apply it physical fitness and weightlifting. Combining that with his capacity for innovation, he started creating new and better ways to train, and developed dozens of novel techniques.
Yet, due to his perpetual participation contact sports, Michael was constantly getting injured – many of which became chronic and even required surgery, including a torn labrum in one shoulder and a rotator cuff impingement with biceps tendinitis in the other. Not wanting to undergo months-long recoveries, yet understanding that his normal weightlifting routines would only aggravate his injuries, Michael started developing hundreds of additional techniques, modifications to common exercises, and even completely new lifts that would allow him to continue to train and build muscle, while not only avoiding aggravating existing injuries, but actually rehabbing them and strengthening the joints to prevent any future injury. Then, after becoming frustrated with the lack of high-quality and scientifically accurate content he saw among “fitness influencers,” Michael decided to share what he had with the world. What you can now find and benefit from in the “Dr. Gains” programs is the cumulative result of all of Michael’s unique and extensive experience, personal training, scientific education, and creative ability. Additionally, his experience and success managing people as a business owner gives him the unique ability to understand his clients’ wants and needs, and to convey his knowledge and training material in a way that they can understand and implement in their own lives. Rather than just telling them WHAT to do, he teaches them HOW and WHY they’re doing each exercise, empowering them to customize the content in his programs according to their specific situations and goals. There’s truly nothing else like it in the industry!
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Michael Kamalu about how to exercise correctly using Dr. Gains.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How many fitness influencers who claim to have natural results often use performance enhancing substances or have exceptional genetics, leading to unrealistic body expectations for others.
– Why these unrealistic expectations hinder people from starting their fitness journeys.
– How many fitness practices can lead to problems and injuries.
– Why working muscles the exact same way each time can lead to imbalanced muscle growth.
– How understanding the underlying anatomy of muscles helps analyze and customize exercises.
Connect with Michael:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@michael_kamalu
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/michael-kamalu-57bb2013b
Links Mentioned:
dr-gains.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
What would you do if you were watching a bunch of fitness influencers and people telling you how to work out, how to get in shape, how to look better, et cetera, better performance and you knew that what they were saying was just complete crap? What would you do? Well, we’re going to talk to someone who went through that little moral dilemma on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first. Those things are your foundation, although we might talk about other body parts first.
But here on this podcast we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the flat-out lies that you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or CrossFit or whatever it is you like to do and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I mention enjoyably? That’s a trick question, of course I did. Because look, if you’re not having a good time, you’re not going to keep doing whatever it is you were doing, so find a way to have some fun.
I’m Steven Sashen, CEO and co-founder of Xero Shoes, and we call this The MOVEMENT Movement podcast because we’re creating a movement, we’ll talk about that, we’re part of that, about natural movement, helping people understand that your body works great if you let it do what it’s meant to do. Now, the movement part that involves you, like the spreading the word, is really simple. Go over to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no secret handshake or money involved. You can just find previous episodes of the podcast, all the ways you can find us on social media. And of course, if you’re not hearing this podcast from some place that you like, you’ll find other places you can get the podcast.
Oh, and look, spreading the word is the key thing, so give us a review and a thumbs up and hit the bell icon on YouTube and subscribe and all those things, you know what to do. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So let us get started. Michael, pleasure having you here. Do me a favor, tell people who you are and why in God’s name you’re here.
Michael Kamalu:
Well, thank you, Steve. I mean, first I’m a little disappointed there’s not a secret handshake.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a secret handshake for people on the podcast. You didn’t get the email about that?
Michael Kamalu:
No, I missed that one.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, all right. Well, check your spam folder. We’ll figure that one out.
Michael Kamalu:
All right. Well, my name is Michael Kamalu. I am the founder of the Dr. Gains health and fitness brand. I’m here because I have somewhat of a unique take on fitness, specifically resistance training, but general fitness and health as well. I started the brand after becoming frustrated from what I saw with various fitness influencers online, what I felt was often just straight made up, things that sound good but are not correct and other things that lead to significant injury. So that’s it.
Steven Sashen:
Well, hold on, you left out the best part of this story. The best part of the story is this was starting when you were in med school and your wife basically told you, “Put up or shut up.”
Michael Kamalu:
That’s true. I was in my first year of medical school at the Mayo Clinic, and my wife was pretty into the fitness influencer scene on Instagram and YouTube. I’d catch her watching things and I’d tell her, “That’s wrong. Don’t listen to that. That’ll get you injured. Never watch that guy again.” After complaining about how bad everything she was watching was, she said, “You know what? Why don’t you go ahead and do something about it and tell everyone… ” Decided, “All right, I’ll start a fitness brand.”
Steven Sashen:
How long ago was that?
Michael Kamalu:
That was almost four years ago now.
Steven Sashen:
Not that long ago. Well, and I’m going to say something about you that’s semi personal just so people have a context for this. When you check out Michael’s site… And we may as well drop the hit now, Dr. Gains. Give them the URL or tell them where to find you on social media. Usually we do this at the end, but this is important for now, so go for it.
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, dr-gains.com, that’s the website, the YouTube channel’s Dr. Gains, and then I’m Michael Kamala on all the other socials.
Steven Sashen:
And we’ll have all this spelled out for you and it’ll be in the show notes. So one of the things that’s very interesting about Michael as a fitness expert/influencer, for lack of a better term, is when you start out and you’re wearing your doctor’s lab coat and you’re looking like a normal human being, you don’t look like your average fitness YouTuber, for example, or a fitness Instagrammer because you don’t look huge. And then you do something crazy like take off the majority of your clothing, and everyone goes, “Oh, shit, okay, I was greatly mistaken.”
What’s interesting to me about that is your body type, and of course a lot of this is just genetics 101, but your body type is way, way closer to what normal humans, if I could use that term, have the ability to become than what you see with these guys who are claiming that they are natural and often aren’t or just have mind-blowing genetics and you will never look like that no matter how much you lift, diet, take whatever drugs you can think of, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is going to be a weird question following that weird intro, which is, how do you feel about that?
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, that’s a great point. People have a skewed perspective of what big is and what is realistic, because 99% of the people you look at online on YouTube and they’re just huge. They’re not natural. The ones who say they’re natural, they’re lying, or they think because they’re not taking this specific subset of steroids they can say they’re natural when they’re taking all sorts of other anabolics, hormone supplements, et cetera. So yeah, what somebody can naturally achieve, and of course there is some variability with genetics, but you can tell, you can really tell. It’s unfortunate because that unrealistic perspective also, I think it prevents many, many people from even starting. They go to the gym a week, two weeks, et cetera, and they get this idea, “Oh, I’m never going to look like that guy, so why try?”
When I get people saying, “Oh, you should be bigger, et cetera,” I’m just as big as I want to be. I don’t want to be any bigger. Any bigger and you start losing functionality, you start losing flexibility. It’s no longer beneficial, really, from any health standpoint at that point.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a guy, I’m not going to mention him by name, but he’s got a very successful YouTube channel and he’s a science-based fitness guy, but he’s also 100% admitting, “Yeah, I’m taking a bunch of drugs to do what I’m doing.” He did a really, really interesting interview about the up and downsides of being that big, and there were way more downsides. He was really, really just wonderfully honest about that. There’s no question, it didn’t make anyone go, “Well, I don’t want to do it,” even though it undeniably should have. Because he was saying things like, when you break a sweat, I mean like a full body sweat while sitting down, that’s a problem when you’re that big. When you can’t get into a car, that’s a problem. He wasn’t trying to sugarcoat it, but people, really, they leave that out. I was really impressed that he was willing to fess up.
Conversely, I got an acquaintance who is a former world champion bodybuilder back in the ’80s, who to this day will not admit that he took any performance enhancing supplemental things, which is hysterical because all of his peers, if they’re still alive, they’re all getting online talking about exactly what they did. So it’s fascinating just what people will or won’t say. But it’s really wonderful that I think you are not someone who’s presenting something that is so unrealistic that it either turns people on for reasons that are inappropriate or turns people off for the opposite reason, because they think that that’s just not even attainable. So you’re in a whole different world.
Anyway, be that as it may. So backing up then to what you were bitching and moaning about and then that led you to starting your actual business as a fitness person, let’s talk about some of those because these are things that people are often doing on a regular basis or think they should be doing on a regular basis and that could be causing problems. So what’s your Mount Rushmore top four things that you see that makes you want to scream and run into the gym and throw weights out of people’s hands? Are you going to limit it to four?
Michael Kamalu:
First several that come to mind then. One is no days off. It’s a rally cry in the industry just to show how mentally tough you are. No days off is a great way to not achieve any gains because, for one, you don’t build muscle while you’re lifting. You build muscle during the recovery phase. If there is no recovery phase, you’re not building muscle. And then two, it will inevitably lead to over-training injuries, which will then prevent you from being able to lift. There’s a point where more is less, I guess is what I’m saying here, so there should absolutely be days off and there’s a lot of different strategies you can use, which I won’t dive into now. But just from a general perspective, yes, you should take days off. And generally, a lot of people work each muscle too often. Now we’re talking specifically for resistance training here, not cardio. You don’t need to work a muscle as often as people think that you do.
And then probably the next one would be lack of variety. People have this core set of lifts that they do and they just stick to that. What they don’t realize, people don’t appreciate how complex the human body is, the musculoskeletal system in particular. You hear people saying, “A contraction is a contraction. It doesn’t matter how it happens. Just working a muscle with one exercise is the same as working it with a different exercise.” That couldn’t be farther from the truth. There’s a principle called region specific hypertrophy or non-homogenous hypertrophy in activation where muscles, they are not activated equally across the muscle length. It can be broken down into even… Sarcomere is the functional unit. I don’t know, don’t want to get too technical here. But-
Steven Sashen:
Well, you can get technical, and then if I feel the urge, I will ask you to dumb it down for people who are not that technical. Dumb it down is a horrible way of putting it, make it more understandable for people who don’t have the knowledge of biomechanical lingo.
Michael Kamalu:
Thank you. All right, so-
Steven Sashen:
Yes, so please explain a sarcomere for instance.
Michael Kamalu:
Different sarcomeres can be activated to different degrees, and they are activated to different degrees based on a variety of factors. There’s the range of motion of muscle being used. There is the angle of resistance. There is whether it’s an eccentric or eccentric depending on how you pronounce it, or concentric or isometric contraction. Those all work different regions of the muscle in different degrees. And then there’s whether it’s a compound lift or an isolation lift or as in is it moving two joints to hit that muscle or just one joint. There’s a whole slew of other factors that all influence which region of the muscle is being used the most. If you only work each muscle the exact same way each time, for one, that’s how people get lumpy. They’re big, but they don’t really look good, they just look lumpy, because they’re using the same exercise every single time. And so they’re not getting even balanced muscle growth.
And then it also leads to injuries because if you’re only strengthening a muscle along, let’s say, one line of resistance, in life, you don’t live life along one angle of resistance, right? Life is dynamic, you’re twisting, you’re turning. And once that muscle gets placed in a point of stress at an angle that you haven’t strengthened, that’s when things tear, that’s when you get injured. So variety is absolutely essential with resistance training and think it can be applied to pretty much any type of exercise as well. Too much of one thing is generally detrimental. Yeah, does that make sense?
Steven Sashen:
It does. Let me ask you two questions about that last point. One is, given that… Well, let’s start with this one. Let’s use an example, so let’s talk biceps for the fun of it. Talk about different exercises you could do for biceps. I will add a little caveat or maybe a little teaser that I’ve noticed at least in the videos that YouTube is recommending that I watch. There’s always in the fitness world, there’s things that catch on for a little while and maybe they stick around, maybe they don’t, and lately I’ve just been getting a whole bunch of videos from a whole bunch of fitness guys who are talking about doing pull-ups in a particular way or chin-ups in a particular way rather than doing bicep curls for a number of reasons. But that’s a bit of a lead into let’s talk about a few different ideas of what you would do for biceps that are different exercises that have a different effect on that particular muscle group.
Michael Kamalu:
That’s a great one. I’ll put a caveat here that scientific research is really just getting to the point where we can prove that there’s differences in regional activation within the same muscles. So some of what I will say is more based off of how I’ve applied the principles and been able to see the results myself, but they haven’t been actually proven in scientific research yet. I’ll start with something that has. The biceps perform supination. So rotating your thumb externally, rotating your forearms so that your palm is up, your bicep does that. If you grab your upper arm and then go like this, you will feel your bicep contracting underneath.
Steven Sashen:
So again, for people who are listening, I’ll use my left hand. Using my left hand, I’m grabbing my right bicep, I’m turning my forearm and hand palm up, but not just at the exclusion of the rest of my forearm and definitely feel a contraction in the bicep.
Michael Kamalu:
Awesome. So bicep is the primary supinator of the forearm. But there are two different heads of the biceps, the long head and the short head. Each head performs different ranges of supination. So if you start with your palm facing down, going from there till your palm is almost completely face up, that is done by the short head of the bicep much more than the long head. Then from almost fully supinated to past the supinated position, so rotating your thumb out even more so that your hand is facing out to the side, that is done by the long head of the biceps. So that’s an example, but that’s talking about different heads of a muscle.
There’s also different regions within the same head. Another thing that has been proven is, let’s say, you’re doing bicep curls while standing up, and if you’re using a straight bar or a preacher bar doing curls in that position, that is going to mostly work the upper or superior region of the biceps. Now, the whole thing will be activated, it’s not exclusive, but it will work the upper portion more than the lower. It’s because you’re making it so that the 90 degree point of maximum resistance, so the point where the muscle is feeling the most load, is when it is more contracted than not. It’s towards the top of the range of motion. Now let’s say if you were to… I’m trying to visualize this. If you were to have a flat bench in front of you and then you were to lay your arm, so the back of your upper arm is on that bench, and then you put a dumbbell in your hand and your forearm and elbow are hanging off the edge of the bench, in that position, maximum resistance is when the bicep is fully extended. It’s when your elbow is straight. In that position, you are working the lower region of the biceps more than the upper. There’s various different positions you can use to work the biceps at its point of maximum extension, but that’s an example of a differentiator.
Steven Sashen:
That’s an interesting one since another thing that’s been popping up a lot lately is inspired by some research that came out about birds building muscle from just having basically a weight on their wing just at a stretch point and just that stretch initiating a hypertrophic response. What’s, of course, been interesting is that that seems to be true for many muscle groups but not all muscle groups. But to that point, just being in that stretch position, which is what you just described for that second bicep exercise, it would make sense that would act differently than when you’re stretching essentially around the elbow joint versus stretching around the shoulder joint, the other end of the bicep. But what’s interesting is even when people who recommend those different exercises, they aren’t recommending them with the kind of, for lack of a better term, understanding that you just laid it out with, about why these things are doing what they’re doing and what the effect could be, which would give people an ability to think through what they’re trying to accomplish.
And of course there is going to be some genetic variation about if you’re doing something in a stretch position like that example for the bicep whether that is going to demonstrate or dramatically change the shape of your bicep because there’s just going to be different things that might come into play, but it leads me to the second question I wanted to ask. Given that human beings really like cookie cutter, paint by number, just tell me what to do and then I’ll just do it more than they like to try to figure it out on their own, how do you manage that as you’re getting people to think about these different exercises to do for different reasons and different regions, if you will, of a muscle group?
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, I always emphasize the importance of understanding the why and the how and not just the what. That is probably one of my Mount Rushmore top four things that I emphasize because once you understand the fundamentals, then you don’t have to just trust what some influencer says is true. You can actually analyze exactly what they’re saying, what are the principles behind it, does this make sense or does it not. So yes, I mean there’s a lot of people who just want to go straight to the what, but if you don’t understand the why and the how, you’re not going to be able to perform the what as effectively as you can, and you’re definitely not going to be able to personalize it because, like you said, there’s so much variability and cookie cutter workouts. They are far from optimal. You have to be able to adjust and customize based off of your own body, what you’re feeling, what your actual needs are you. That’s impossible unless you really understand the fundamentals behind it, so exactly what the muscle is doing, okay, what’s its origin and assertion, what movements can it perform, what range of the movement is being worked here.
You can go far, far deeper than that obviously, but understanding just those few basic principles of the underlying anatomy, the movements that it performs, then even with just that you can analyze any exercise and really get a good feel for exactly what it’s going to work and why. Let’s take a deadlift for example. Deadlift is a very complex exercise. It involves virtually the entire body. But if you just say, “Okay, I’m going to go do a deadlift because somebody said it’s going to work this, this, and this,” you’re missing out on so much because there’s so many different variations of the deadlift. Or I can do it with my knees a little stiffer rather than bending down all the way. Or I can do it with my feet spread a little wider. If you understand the underlying anatomy behind the movement, you know exactly what each of these variations will do to the various muscles being worked.
So let’s say, I mean, you have a hamstringing strain. You want to be able to do a deadlift still, you say, “Okay, I’m going to choose a deadlift variation that takes load off the hamstrings and emphasizes other areas of the muscle.” So yeah, absolutely essential to understand the underlying why behind the exercise.
Steven Sashen:
It is interesting. I think that there may be one other benefit to that, it just occurred to me, that if you have this understanding, and it may sound complex, but it’s not. Like the example you gave on the bicep of just what you experience with supination, once you just get that, it’s not rocket science. And so, one of the things I appreciate… pardon me, hiccups… I appreciate about what you’re doing is sharing the information this way where it’s just screamingly obvious or simple to understand without having to have a master’s degree in anatomy for example.
So it raises a question or something that I’d love you to talk about, which is a term that people use and rarely define it, which is the mind-muscle connection. They want you to have a good mind-muscle connection when you’re lifting. It occurs to me that if you don’t have some of this information that you just described, it’s hard to have that. So let’s start with your definition of that and how that applies once you have some understanding of the different ways you can impact a muscle with different exercises, different angles, et cetera.
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, that’s an extremely powerful concept. I was actually a neuroscience major, that was my undergrad degree, and so I’m fascinated by how the brain interacts with the muscles and how you can influence various outcomes by it. I guess my definition of a mind-muscle connection, mind-body connection would be just instead of going through the motion rotely, being able to very intently focus on a specific outcome of that exercise, so why am I doing this? Okay, I want to actually improve this specific region of a muscle or whatever the outcome is.
A really good example of this is studies have shown that if you touch a muscle region during an exercise, you can actually increase the relative amount of engagement of that specific region. So let’s say you’re doing a chest fly and you want to try and emphasize the inner region of the fibers, if I’m doing the fly with my right hand on a cable machine or something, I can take my left hand and actually touch the region of the muscle that I want to emphasize and it will increase the amount of relative engagement in that area. Sounds crazy. It’s been proven. The power of the mind is really unbelievable, and science is really just breaking the surface of what this can achieve.
Steven Sashen:
That’s an interesting one. So just getting that proprioceptive feedback, or it’s actually more than proprioceptive feedback, that kinesthetic feedback is intriguing to me for two reasons. One, I see that with runners where they don’t have that kinesthetic awareness, their proprioceptive awareness. They don’t know where their body is in space. It’s trickier to put your hand on the appropriate part of your body if you’re running. But one of the things that we’re trying to do with people, in fact one of the things that we’re doing with our product, is giving people more sensory input, more feedback, which can change motor patterns pretty effortlessly as a result of that.
But I’m also thinking of the number of people who just, they don’t know what their body is doing or they can’t feel what their body is doing because they haven’t used certain parts in so long, their brain has sort of shut down. So it’s an interesting thing just pondering ways that we could improve learning new movements just by adding that kinesthetic feedback.
The second thing that made me think of, so I had shoulder surgery let’s call it eight weeks ago, something like that, and bicep surgery as well thanks to being an older, former gymnast, like way older, way former. But regardless, it’s interesting, so when I’m lifting to get that bicep working again with my left arm, what I’ve been paying attention to is paying attention to the muscle, paying attention to the bicep and contracting the muscle as a way of initiating the movement instead of just doing the movement. And that’s another component in my mind for mind-muscle connection, is that kind of attentiveness. Now, some people, again, may not be able to feel that and would need to get that extra kinesthetic feedback, just feeling something to see if it’s working.
In fact, this just made me think of this one, Dr. Irene Davis, when people come into her lab with some sort of running injury, one of the first things she does for almost everybody is she takes her finger and pokes their gluteus maximus, pokes them in the butt. I had to say gluteus max first, otherwise poking in the butt sounds like it could be a very different thing than what she does. And basically says, “Squeeze your butt so you can feel that you’re getting resistance to my pushing into that muscle.” And many people can’t do it, or more accurately, they can’t do it if they’re asked to just flex their butt independently. Then she pokes them and says, “Now try.” And even then, many people are able to do better, but they still don’t know how to activate that muscle yet. They’re getting more feedback, eventually they figure it out, and then it has to become internalized. It’s just a fascinating thing about, to your point, how our brain either can help with making these movements and be beneficial or just is tuned out and you got to wake it up somehow.
Michael Kamalu:
The brain is very plastic, is what it’s called, meaning it can adapt and change very quickly, very easily, far more so than any other organ in the body. Its ability to hone in on specific muscles and even specific regions of the muscle is incredible, but not necessarily naturally, like you said, especially if it hasn’t been trained, hasn’t been very intentionally grown. It doesn’t take a whole lot to get there, though. Again, once you understand what muscles are involved and how, like for example if I’m doing a front raise where… I mean should I explain what a front raise is?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, why not. Sure, have some fun, see how well you can do on this one.
Michael Kamalu:
Okay. All right. So let’s say you’re doing it with the cable machine, you have the cable set fairly low and it’s just one arm. You have the arm neutral, so hanging down by your side with the elbow straight, holding the cable, handle in your hand. And then you slowly flex your shoulder forward. People will say, extend your shoulder, but that’s actually the opposite of shoulder flexion.
Steven Sashen:
Oh yeah, right.
Michael Kamalu:
Anyway, moving the shoulder forward and up and then back down. There are three different primary muscles that perform that movement. There’s the anterior deltoid, or front delt, there is pectoralis major, the chest, and there’s also the biceps. The biceps cross the front of the shoulder, so they’re performing that movement as well. When I’m doing it, I can focus in on one of those three more than the other just by using that mind-muscle connection. I want to work my front delt with this exercise and my front delt will be worked far more than the other two muscles. Yet if I wanted to work my biceps with that exercise, I could do that as well. So yeah, there’s really limitless potential to how you could leverage mind-body connection.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, the focus thing is fascinating. Again, since I’m recovering from surgery, when I’m doing things like a front raise or lateral raises or scaption raises, whatever, as a former gymnast, when I was doing those, I was focusing entirely on all those muscles in the front because that’s a really important motion for gymnastics. Now I’m thinking about all the muscles on the back because I’ve got to get my shoulder back in the right place and staying there. It’s so fascinating for me, literally 50 years after the first time I did one of these exercises, to be paying attention to the “wrong side of my body” to initiate that movement. It took me a while to even realize that’s what I wanted to do because I had so much in my brain of doing it the way I had done it for well over a decade. It’s a riot that you can initiate and perform the same movement and have the impact be completely different muscles. It makes your brain hurt if you think about it too hard.
Michael Kamalu:
It does. You touched on one of the things that I also hit on a lot, is the shoulder imbalances that are so frequent with resistance training because the vast majority of people’s focus is all in and forward. It’s the chest, it’s the biceps, it’s the front delt, everything that pulls your shoulders in, it pulls them forward and rotates them in. And then what happens eventually? Well, that closes off what’s called the subacromial space, and that’s where your rotator cuff tendons pass through. And so it ends up grinding your rotator cuff against the bone, and then you get the impingements, the tears, the labral tears, the bicep tendon tears, all of that.
So it’s absolutely essential for people to work just as much the external rotators and the retractors of the shoulder, but most people don’t do any external rotation specific exercises. So that’s something I hit on a lot.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there were two thoughts that I had about that. One just fell out of my brain entirely, so I’ll go on to the second one. As I’ve been doing especially all this shoulder stuff, it occurs to me that a lot of sports that we encourage our children to get into, and as a child I was into, we’re not… Oh, I know what it was… so anyway, we’re not at that time even strong enough to be doing any of those things properly. When I was a 12-year-old gymnast, I literally didn’t have the kind of strength in my back, those external rotators and retractors to keep my shoulders in the right place while I was doing all those other things. I mean, it was just not even possible. It wasn’t until well past my career that my body was in a place where I could actually develop that kind of strength.
And so I’ve just been pondering lately how often we get kids involved in sports that they’re just physically not ready for unless they have perfect technique, which is really, really rare because that requires perfect coaching as well. The other thought that went along with that before I lose it for the third time, is one of the reasons we’re so focused on all those things in the front, and I wish I could remember the name of the guy who did it, he’s a psychologist who’s written a bunch of books about how the literal construction of our perceptual mechanism impacts things we do. In other words, we have eyes in the front of our head, so we’re very attentive to the things that we can see in a mirror or you can see when we look down. We don’t have eyes in the back of our head, so we don’t pay attention to that.
And it’s a similar thing with running. People don’t understand that if you don’t overstride, that doesn’t mean your gait is somehow magically shorter. It just means that you’re putting your foot down in front of you and your gait is extending behind you, your leg is extending behind you differently than having your leg extending in front of you, and then it just barely doesn’t go behind you. But because we can’t see those things, it’s really hard for most people to then make these changes that they, again, just simply can’t see without eyes behind them.
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah. That’s a prevalent concept in weightlifting as well. I mean, you perform a deadlift, for example. You think you’re doing everything perfect, but you don’t see yourself from the side or from the back. And so that is one of those areas where having a coach, someone who knows what they’re doing and can walk you through those things you can’t see can be really important.
Steven Sashen:
It was a moment of great pleasure for me when I was working with a sprinting coach who was talking about, and this is remotely, he was in the UK, and he was talking about how for the exercise we’re going to do the importance of being able to hip hinge, being able to bend the hips the right way, keeping your back flat, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not going to get into what a hip hinge is. He spent an hour talking to me about this, and said, “So send me some videos of you hip hinging.” So I sent him the videos, and he just called me back and went, “All right, well, you don’t need any hope for that.”
I was very happy about that one because it’s one of those things where you can’t see it at all. It has to be either you’re looking on video or you’re feeling it, because even if you have a mirror to the side, just looking to the side is going to mess up what you’re doing for most people. So it’s a fascinating one. We did our Mountain Rushmore, but maybe there’s a couple other things that popped into your brain of, “If I could make people stop doing this forever, that would make me happy.”
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, there was a few that I thought of as we were talking. A couple of them already went out the other side, but one is people are way too focused on how much weight they are lifting. Honestly, I haven’t tracked what my one rep max is or anything of the sort for a very, very long time. I don’t really care how much weight I can bench. Again, it hearkens back to that mind-muscle connection. I know when I’m lifting a weight if it is enough to trigger the various type of benefits that I want. If it’s not, I just make adjustments. But if you’re too focused on the amount of weight, then form inevitably suffers. It can be very, very small differences in form that can have just drastic impacts.
With a bench press, for example, if what you are focused on is getting the right contraction in the right areas, then you’ll use perfect form throughout. If you are focused on just moving a specific amount of weight, then instead of keeping your shoulders retracted, you’ll push them forward, instead of moving both sides evenly, you’ll start rocking your shoulders side to side, trying to get a little leverage here, leverage there to get that weight up there. And that is so dangerous and inevitably will lead to injuries, imbalances, first of all, because one of the reasons you have to rock side to side is because one of your sides is stronger than the other. And so when you do that rocking motion, you’re not balancing out the strength, and so you’re just worsening that discrepancy, and all sorts of different injuries and imbalances will occur. Unless you are a professional or a competitive powerlifter, where that is your focus, don’t be too concerned about how much weight you’re using. Be more concerned about whether you’re getting the contraction done the right way.
Steven Sashen:
It’s an interesting thing to get over the self-consciousness of using lightweights. Admittedly, I mean let’s not be coy about this, if you’re in a gym and you’re doing whatever exercise with something… Basically, if you are taking the weights that some woman who’s half your size is using and removing some plates, that’s a hard thing to do, even if it’s the right thing to do. I mean, I will say it was fun for me when I was pretty much at my strongest when I was in my mid-40s as a sprinter and I was doing a lot of deadlifting and I got really good at it. I’d go into some gyms and there’d be some really big guy who had 350 on the bar, and then he’d see that I was going to get on the platform and lift next to him, and he starts to try and reach for the plates. I went, “No, no, I’ll be adding some.”
I will admit, I really enjoyed that, and the fact that now I’ve got compromised spine, not from that reason, that, A, I can’t really deadlift or it’s not smart for me. I can do single-legged stuff, so I’m using even less weight, and then using even less weight and really focusing on whether it’s working, it has taken me years to be okay with that when I’m in a public gym. More accurately, to be okay with the fact that I wish I was lifting some huge amount of weight instead. That’s just the thought in my head, and then I just keep doing what I’m doing and going, “Yep, that’ll be really fun, but that’ll be really stupid too.”
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, yeah, you’re right. You got to put away the ego and-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, you’re never going to put it away. You just have to pat it on the head and say, “I-
Michael Kamalu:
Hide it for a while.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I completely agree with you, we’re just not there. It’s like when I got back into sprinting, it took me two years to learn that when my brain says, “Let’s just do one more,” that was the time to stop, because for the first two years that let’s do one more as what got me injured. It’s a similar thing to what we’re talking about here. Because again, we like to have that cookie-cutter thing, the weight is a definitive thing. It’s measurable. It’s incontrovertible. It’s other words that I can’t think of that you wouldn’t find on the SATs that were simpler words that just weren’t coming into my head. But you know how much weight it is, how much you’re feeling. Getting used to doing things by feeling is such a radical idea, especially when we’re such a goal-oriented group of human beings over here that it makes sense that we’d be obsessed with the number instead of the effect and the feeling and the way you’re doing it.
Michael Kamalu:
Well, there is a technique you can use that can mollify the ego and still prevent injury, and that is to use the eccentric again, some people say eccentric, I think that just reminds me too much of eccentric people, so eccentric phases of the exercise. For one, eccentric contractions are better for you. Actually, they trigger strength and hypertrophic gains more at a greater and faster rate than concentric. Now, I guess I should explain eccentric is the negative phase. So if we’re talking about a bench press, concentric is pushing it up, eccentric is it coming back down, so it pushing you basically. Most people are really only focused on the pushing out phase, that’s what they’re trying to do. But the eccentric, the negative, is actually far better for you, and you’re stronger in an eccentric contraction. You can lift more weight that way, you can put out more power, and it is much less likely to result in injury.
One reason just is how the muscles themselves are put together. But the other is, again, using the bench press as an example, the concentric phase, you’re really focused on getting that up, that’s the goal. I got to push this thing up, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get there. I’m going to arch my back, et cetera, whatever it is. Whereas on the way back down, you’re not trying to move it somewhere, it’s moving you. You’re just kind of resisting it as it comes back down. And so if you were to load up a ton of weight on a bench press and do only the eccentric phase, you know you’re not going to be pushing that back up, so you’re not going to arch your back, you’re not going to twist your shoulders, you’re just kind of resisting it as much as you can as it comes down. And so you’ll maintain proper form. That is a way you can put a lot more weight on whatever exercise you’re doing and not sacrifice form and not risk injury and again better results just focusing on the eccentric contractions.
Steven Sashen:
I want to ask you a question about that, something I’ve been thinking about lately. For most people, they think of eccentric as literally just, let’s call it, in the bench press the lowering phase. And eccentric is about just slowing down the lowering, whereas the real value for the eccentric, like you described, is that you can handle more weight. Let’s say you can push, I’m making up a number, you can push 150 pounds, but if someone put, and I’m totally making up numbers, they suddenly put 300 pounds on the bar, you can resist that coming down before it crushes you. You could resist it pretty significantly. I have the idea, and again, I’m dying to hear what you think, that the way most people think of the eccentric, again, just the slower lowering, is really just increasing time under tension because it’s not really taking advantage of the overload phenomenon or the overload possibility in eccentric.
But of course, to do just the overload part, there’s certain exercise where that’s really easy, pull up, dip, et cetera, where you could for a pull up step on a bench to get to the point where you’ve got your chin over the bar and slowly lower yourself, dip, same thing, you step on a bench till you’re fully extended and then slowly lower yourself. Not so easy especially on your own for other exercises unless you have some electric motor equipment like a tonal gym or whatever where you can program it for that. So what’s your take on an overloaded eccentric, like a legit eccentric where you’re doing everything you can to resist that motion versus just slower/time under tension?
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, so it depends on if you have a partner or not, but let’s say you don’t have a partner, the key is unilateral exercises, or one side at a time. Let’s take the bench press. In this case, you’ll do a dumbbell press then. Let’s say in a dumbbell press the most you could press would be 80 pound dumbbells. Well, then I’m going to get a 100 pound dumbbell and I’m going to start with it on my chest with both hands on the handle. I’m going to press up with both hands, and then I’m going to let go with one and just resist it coming back down with the other.
And then again, I push up with both hands, and then you have to shift it to one side before you let it drop down. But I do this frequently on my own. You can do this with virtually any exercise, any muscle group, even if you’re on your own. You just have to do it one side at a time. So bicep curl, same thing. If the most you could do in a curl is 40 pounds, then take a 50 pound dumbbell, use both hands to curl it up, let go with one, resist it as much as you can on the way down.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, let’s be clear, especially on the bench press example, when you use both hands to push it up, make sure you only let go of one hand and not two, because that would turn into a whole different thing that we are not responsible for.
Michael Kamalu:
That is key, yes.
Steven Sashen:
I’ve seen some crazy things in the gym, and I can imagine someone exercise. So that’s a clever way of doing the bilateral on the way up and the unilateral on the way down, which will seem, again, awfully weird to most human beings, but if you try, it’s fascinating. I think the first time someone does a real negative where they’re just seeing how much weight they can load up to then just slow down how much it’s going down, they’re stunned at the difference between how much they can push versus how much they can resist. To be fair, if you really do any centric workout, you’ll be, I think the technical term, please correct me, I’m not a medical professional, is sore as shit. Did I get that right?
Michael Kamalu:
You got that perfect. But again, it comes back to variety and how so many factors determine how a muscle is worked. So if you haven’t focused on eccentric workouts, then yeah, the first time you do that, you are going to be insanely sore. I said earlier eccentrics are better for you in general. You can lift more and they trigger size and strength gains better, and they prevent injury better. But even then, you don’t want to do eccentrics exclusively. Variety is key, so you still want to be working in concentric contractions, isometric. Isometric is when you’re pushing or pulling but there’s no movement, it stays in the same spot.
Steven Sashen:
To give people an example for an eccentric that they may not even have thought of, if you’ve done any hiking where you’re going uphill in a big way, you can get to the top of the hill or the mountain, wherever you happen to be, and you feel like you’ve worked out, you feel pretty good, but then that coming back down is where you end up your quads are on fire for the next day. And that is the eccentric. You’re just trying to slow down as you’re bending your legs. Slow down how you’re going down is a better way of putting it. It’s a good one.
Anything we missed from things that we wish people would never do again? FYI, I got to tell you, there’s a time where I was sitting on the path at the Boulder Creek with Danny Dreyer from Chi Running. Danny is a great running coach, and we were just watching people running by and simultaneously just going, “Oh God,” just seeing so many things that people are doing that they’d be having much more fun, let alone being more effective and efficient if they weren’t having those form problems that we were seeing them having.
But we elected not to run up and tackle people and try and tell them what to do instead. But anyway, in the time we have left, any last, here’s one that really gets your goat.
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, I mean most of the rest would be in movement specific. With specific lifts, specific movements there’s always things that people do wrong or little tweaks they can make to emphasize different areas. I think probably the last thing that I can think of right now that is a big pet peeve and also a significant detriment, people’s success is swinging weights using momentum. This comes back to the ego. People want to look like they’re using more weight, so let’s say with the bicep curl, they’ll get a big dumbbell and then rock their back, swing the weight as they bring it up, and then they got this kind of back and forth swinging motion going on. That’s doing nothing for your biceps.
I guess I should say there are areas at an advanced level where you actually do want to use momentum, very controlled, very specific ways, but that’s pretty advanced. A general rule of thumb is don’t use momentum, don’t swing weights. Use slow, controlled contractions. Focus on that mind-body connection, exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve with that specific exercise, and it’ll be far more beneficial for you even though you’ll be using less weight than you otherwise would.
Steven Sashen:
That is a good one. Well, on that note, first of all, thanks, let’s wrap this up. Do me a favor, once again, let people know how they can track you down and find out more about what you’re doing so they can do more things for themself that will be beneficial as they’re continuing to live a human life.
Michael Kamalu:
Yeah, so dr-gains.com, that’s with an S, not a Z, G-A-I-N-S. I have a weekly newsletter that I send out, it’s called Fitness Tip Friday, just a brief email where I send out the tip of the week, something that is immediately applicable for your life, something that has to do with health or fitness, and you can find that on my website. And then the YouTube channel is Dr. Gains and on all other socials, Michael Kamalu, K-A-M-A-L-U.
Steven Sashen:
Perfect. Well, Michael, A, absolute pleasure, B, really looking forward to what’s next. I’m looking forward to hearing what people experience when they track you down and find some of the things you’re doing and get involved with your work, which again, I’m just really impressed by because there are so few people in almost any physical activity who take the time and effort or have the inclination to really listen and look at what people have been saying and doing that’s just been passed down and passed down and go, “Yeah, hold on for one sec. There might be another angle to this,” pun intended, “or a different way of thinking of this. Or maybe you’re just flat-out wrong.” But it’s just the way people have been doing it so I appreciate what you’ve been doing.
Anyway, for everybody else, thank you for being here. Go check out Michael at dr-gains.com and Dr. Gains, et cetera, et cetera. He gave you all that stuff, I don’t need to tell you again. On our end, don’t forget, go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find previous episodes, find all the ways you’re can engage with us on social media, et cetera. And as always, if you have a request or suggestion, someone you think should be on the show, ideally, it would be great if I could finally get someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome and we can duke it out and see what happens when I just ask questions like, “Really, where’s your proof?” But either way, you can drop me an email at move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. Until then, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.