![]() The CoachMePlus Heatmap Chart visualizes the management of strength training for every athlete’s entire program. The center of mass was certainly more favorable with this bar, but the load was still higher up and further away from the body than our normal set up with dumbbells which made stabilization a major limiting factor to the lift. Lo and behold, the SSB worked pretty well with my RFE training. (I also played around with the Pit Shark and an RFE set up–that was interesting!) I began to play around with the SSB, experimenting on myself. As luck would have it, our Olympic Sports facility had recently purchased a few, specifically for our baseball players. Cue the Safety Squat BarĪdmittedly, and somewhat embarrassingly, I’d never used a safety squat bar (SSB). Naysayers focused on these limitations, along with stability demands, to minimize the RFE’s effectiveness. The undertaking of putting on five 20lbs vests, or one of our big 80lbs monsters, along with picking up and positioning 135lbs dumbbells became so cumbersome that it took away from the effectiveness of the lift and the flow of the training session. Grip strength also started to become an issue. It had become unwieldy, however, to combine enough vests with heavy dumbbells. Performing the exercise with 300+lbs was now somewhat routine with our higher training age hockey players. Logistical concerns, not the athletes’ physical abilities, were constraining progress in the lift. They also provided an easy “out” if the athlete lost balance by simply dumping the dumbbells.įast-forward eight to nine years. Heavy dumbbells allowed us to adequately load the exercise while keeping the weight much closer to the body. It’s a recipe for disaster.Īt the time of the near catastrophe, we were able to continue progressing load with other tools in a much safer manner. Even if the athlete can get their back leg quickly onto the ground, momentum takes them in the other direction. It’s particularly dangerous with high loads, especially if the loss of balance loss occurs toward the side of the lead leg. This means that any slight lateral deviation of the bar becomes almost impossible to correct, and a complete loss of balance may ensue. The nature of the lift when performed with a traditional barbell puts the load very far away from the center of mass. I vowed never to use a barbell with this lift again. We did this as a safety measure early in my career, I had a near catastrophic incident with an athlete under my direction who was performing the lift in the classic barbell back squat position. Until the past year, we almost exclusively used a combination of dumbbells and weight vests to acquire load in the RFE. ![]() ![]() ![]() Evolving Past Dumbbells for Single Leg Training Along with a few colleagues, I’ve probably been more aggressive than most when programming absolute loads with this movement–it’s our chief maximal strength tool for the lower body. I’ve used the Rear Foot Elevated (RFE) split squat as our primary lower body push exercise for about a decade because I see tremendous benefit to unilateral strength development. I’ve recently added the HSRFE as a staple for my collegiate ice hockey team. Upon reading a recent SimpliFaster article about the hand supported split squat and its cousin, the hand supported rear foot elevated (HSRFE) split squat, I was excited that others were finding outcomes similar to mine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |