What’s Your Pattern? Loading
By Coach Hannah
Welcome back to What’s Your Pattern? Where you learn about movement and how to make your body work for you. Today’s topic: loading. Anytime you move your body, you are loading a set of muscles to help you activate that motion. If you curl your palm toward your face, you are loading your bicep to help you complete that movement. Your loading pattern, which muscles are loaded in which order and when, is extremely important to perfecting your motion and preventing injury. Today we are going to talk about your loading pattern when you bend your legs. Bending your legs seems easy enough, we do it every time we sit, walk, go up stairs, pick something up, jump… you get the idea. We use our legs a lot, and whether or not our legs function well has a huge affect on our overall wellness. Learning to load your legs in the correct sequence, and repeating that correct sequence every time you move will make you stronger and guard you from potential injury.
Do you consistently have knee or ankle pain, knee soreness, or lower back pain and stiffness after you lift? What about after you come to the gym in general? The way you are loading your bent-leg movements may have a lot to do with that. There are two ways you can load your legs when you move into a bent-leg position: quad-loading and glute/ham (or hip) loading. We can try a little experiment to check your pattern: stand up from your desk, then sit back down in slow motion.
You might be quad-dominant if you: feel the weight in your toes or balls of your feet, float your heels off the floor, drive your knees forward of your toes, collapse in the last few inches before you reach your chair, or end up sitting with your sits bones tucked under your butt.
You might be glute/ham dominant if you: feel the weight in your heels, keep your feet planted, drive your knees toward your outside pinky toe, control your descent completely, end up sitting directly on your sits bones.
If you are glute/ham dominant, congratulations! You are doing it right! If not (most of you, don’t lie to me), you have some work to do. Let’s start by taking a look at some of the consequences of being quad dominant in your movement.
First, let’s look at that sitting down motion you just practice. In the picture on the left, I am initiating a squat by driving my knees forward first, and loading my quads to support my body weight. Here, you can see that my knee ends up forward of my toes. When this happens, my knee becomes the fulcrum of my leg lever, and the majority of my effort is loaded into the knee and quads. As
you can imagine, this is not nearly as advantageous as using your hips to support your weight. You can also see that on the left, my hamstrings are not turned on at all, they are just hanging out and flapping in the wind. By contrast, you can clearly see my hamstrings engaging in the picture on the right. In this image, I initiated my squat by pressing my glutes and hamstrings back, and driving my knees out. Here, my entire posterior chain is engaged and participating in the movement.
Many of you are already professional squatters. Hips back, chest up, knees out are cues you have heard a thousand times before when you are squatting. However, our squat loading pattern is not isolated to just barbell squats. Indeed, the way you load your jumping and driving movements are just as important. Consider jumping. In the picture on the right, you can see the difference between loading your quads first when you jump, and loading your posterior chain. In the quad-loaded image, my knee is once again forward of my toe, acting as the fulcrum. Additionally, the direction of my motion is actually slightly angled instead of straight up and down. My heels are floating and I can only apply pressure through the ball of my foot and toes, rather than the whole foot. If I am trying to activate my body for a box jump, there are two outcomes. If I load my quads and jump, my knees are going to come together and forward, I will push through the base of my quads, generate some pretty uncomfortable tension in my achilles, jump forward at the box and land with my knees forward or maybe even completely stiff legs with my weight too far into my toes. If I load my posterior chain, my knees will stay tracking into the squat position, I will generate power through my butt and hammies, drive aggressively upward and land in the same position I started in, loading my posterior chain and flat footed.
You might be starting to believe me that your loading pattern makes the difference in everything you do, but let’s look at one more example, the dip and drive. We use this position when we complete a push press, jerk, power clean, power snatch, etc. A good dip and drive can make all the difference in whether you actually make a lift. Here, you can see that when I load my quads first to dip down, my knees are once again forward of my toes, and my pelvis shoots forward and ends up over the middle of my foot. That means, when I go to drive, I am going to start the drive from the middle of my foot and finish on the front. If you pop up on to your toes when you do an empty bar push press, then you should pay attention right about now. Additionally, you can see the blue line, which represents the bar path. In the quad loaded version, the bar is placed over my heels, while my pelvis is actually slightly forward of the bar. That means, when I drive the bar up, I have to compensate by leaning back slightly, pushing even further into my knees and toes and driving the bar forward and around my face.
Now, let’s turn the image and look at the difference in knee drive. In the image on the left, I am loading into my quads and knees, and driving my knees straight forward. Here, my knees are tracking forward over my toes, but the line of action from my foot through my leg is straight through my knee. Even if I were sitting back into my hamstrings here, the line of action from my foot would be straight through my knee – once again putting pressure on the knee and taking my glutes out of the equation. On the right, I am driving my knees out as I send my hips back, which engages my glutes and changes the line of action from my foot through my leg and hip. This is going to produce a more powerful and efficient movement while simultaneously protecting your knees.
It may not seem like a big deal to move fix this patterning, but if you imagine the consequences of constantly loading your squat and jumping pattern wrong you may feel differently. Imaging that the workout of the day is:
5-5-5-5-5 Back Squat
then, 5 rounds for time:
10 power cleans
10 push press
30 double unders
That is 125 reps under weighted load, and 150 reps under bodyweight load. If you complete 275 reps by loading in your quads and driving forward with your toes, your knees are definitely going to be sore, and your quads are going to be tight. Maybe you buy a pair of knee sleeves, roll out your quads and hope for the best, but 4 days per week with this pattern ends up being thousands of reps per month. THOUSANDS of reps using your knee as the primary load-bearing joint. Soreness turns to pain, turns to injury. Fix your pattern now, and help yourself avoid the long-term consequences of poor movement.
Let’s try the initial experiment again. Stand up for your desk. Now without bending your legs, press your glutes and hamstrings back, hinging slightly at the hip. Place weight in your heels. Place your hands on the side of your butt and drive your knees out until you feel your glutes engage where your hands are. Slowly sit straight down toward your chair while maintaining knee drive and keeping your hips back and heels down. If you land directly on your sit bones, you completed the movement correctly.
The first step to actually fixing this pattern is to gain awareness about how you move. Take video and pictures, ask your coach to watch you move, and pay attention to how you move in your day-to-day. If you are still having trouble getting into the correct position, it is time to address some deficits in your mobility. Movement boils down to just a few simple patterns, and if you can learn to replicate them correctly across the board, you will find that you can better prevent injury and get stronger faster.
Next time on What’s Your Pattern: what the heck are your shoulders doing?