Chris Graham: Strength Coach

Learning how to hip hinge is a huge valuable skill for all athletes, and learning how to for youth athletes in particular is usually a very difficult task.

Here’s a few videos of a progression I’ve been going through with one of my athletes. We’ve been slowly working on developing body and postural awareness with bodyweight hinges, then including some different progressions with the PVC pipe, and then slowly adding in some weight with the dumbbells.

As you can see that his form consistently improves as we go through this and the goal for it all is just to continue to refine that technique as well as increasing load to continue developing both strength and power within this movement, that will then transfer over to his sport.

It’s amazing what a few focused sessions and lots of effort will do for you!
I’ve been working with my athlete here for only a handful of sessions and he’s shown tons of progress improving his form on exercises and building up strength by adding more load to his lifts.
Not to mention having your dad lifting with you is an extra motivator to push even harder! 💪🏽

I’ve been trying to find a good way of isolating the quads in my garage gym. I’ve been able to set up the bar and bench in ways for good isometric sets but haven’t been able to get something with a smooth range of motion.

Because of my bench height and the adjusters under it, I couldn’t get a seated leg extension to work well and kept catching the cable on different parts that it never felt smooth until I got the idea for this prone variation.

Aside from the awkward setup, this one definitely hit the mark and was a nice way to isolate the quads. And with the hips in extension during this one, I was able to feel the re**us femoris light up (which crosses the hip and knee).

I’ll probably continue to experiment with this and play with the angle of pull as well as body position for more or less hip extension and how to progress it.

Any questions on this set up?

Your training doesn’t need to be “functional” to be effective.

For over a decade there’s been a large push that exercise and training should be “functional” or mimic what you want to do, or some other weird branding like that to push a training methodology (I’m looking at you CrossFit).

But what the hell even is that? Sure there’s some categories that were created by the people pushing this idea (like no machines or isolation movements), but these are just arbitrary ideas with no research or evidence behind them, they just kind of made it up and ran with it cause it sounded good.

If you asked ten different coaches what it is, you’d probably get eleven different answers, and that’s coming from someone who spent my first few years coaching learning and mentoring at “functional” training facilities and prominent coaches in the space.

In reality, strength and the ability to produce more force is “functional”, even if it’s a machine based isolation exercise with extra external support.
Does that mean you stop doing single leg work or more open-chain exercises, of course not.

What you want when you say functional training, is more capability to do the things you want, like being better at your sport, playing with your kids, or just able to do general daily activities of living without extra help.

The good news, that’s pretty easy and strength and conditioning coaches have been programming training like that for decades. There’s no fancy marketing or agenda pushing, just sound evidence based training where you run, jump, lift, brace and move through different planes of motion. That’s not “functional”, it’s the basics of training theory and proper planning to include all aspects of fitness.

For most people to get fitter and more capable, you should focus on multi-joint exercises for the bulk of your training, fill in with isolated exercises to build up weak points, and be sure to mix in runs, jumps, and different intensities of cardio work.

What’s your take? Do you agree or feel a different type of way?