Staying Injury-Free with Barbell Weightlifting

While weightlifting is incredibly beneficial, using improper form or lifting with poor mobility could lead to injury. Professional athletes, casual gym-goers, and Crossfitters all have felt discomfort at some point while using a barbell. Here are some tips to stay injury free so that you can stay strong, healthy, and perform at your best in the weight room.

Warmup

In our last blog, I talked a lot about the benefits of breathing properly. You can brace your core with intra-abdominal pressure, meaning that as you breathe in, you are pushing air in a full cylinder around your torso. To practice this, you can put an exercise band around your waist and push your belly, sides, and back into the band. This will elongate and provide support to your spine, create a stable base during your lifts, and create better mobility in your shoulders, hips, and knees.

Spinal mobility is our next focus. We can use dynamic stretching to encourage proper movement. Here are some options:

• Cat-Cow: While on all fours, arch your whole back into the air. Now drop your stomach as far towards the ground as you can. Repeat.

• Thread the Needle: Still, on all fours, take one arm and reach underneath the other, pushing your arm as far across your body as you can! repeat on the other side.

• Thoracic Can-Openers: Lay on your side, with your knees together. Have your arms out in front of you with your hands together. While keeping your bottom hand and your knees on the ground, open your top hand all the way to the other side of your body. Repeat.

If you're doing upper-body, shoulder mobility is especially important. Here are some good movements to warm up those shoulders:

• Kettlebell Halos: Hold the sides of the handle of a light kettlebell with the bell facing up. Keeping your head still, rotate the kettlebell around your head. Go both directions, and be careful! Kettlebells aren't soft.

• Banded External Rotation: Gripping a cable or band, hold your elbow out to the side, and keep your upper arm steady. Now rotate your hand back.

• PVC Range of Motion: Hold a PVC pipe at each end, placing it in front of you. Rotate the PVC over your head and behind you. Keep moving your hands a little closer together each time.

Hip mobility is crucial to any movement involving the lower body. This means squats, deadlifts, cleans, and the majority of full-body barbell movements. Start here before these lifts:

• Kettlebell Hip Openers: Kneel on one knee, with the other foot flat on the ground and your hip opened to 90 degrees. Keep your chest up and square, with a kettlebell held loosely with relaxed arms. Now, Shift your weight into the leg with your foot flat on the ground. Hold for 5 seconds, and repeat.

• Hold a Low Squat Position: Squat as deep as you can, and hold that position. Now, do some circles with your hips as you sit in the squat, rotating through as much range of motion as possible. Play with different lengths of time!

Barbell Squat

Earn the right to put weight on your back. Make sure that you have good technique with a goblet squat or a bodyweight squat before you put weight on a barbell. We want to start by ensuring you have your chest up with a stable core. We don't want to see your low back arch or your butt dip back or forward. To make sure this is the case, we check ankle mobility at Function First to make sure that your knees are able to go above your toes, which helps keep your back at the same angle as your lower legs. If you can't keep a neutral spine, it might help to put 5 lb plates under your heels to allow the knees to come further forward.

In the office, we check to see if you have retroverted or anteverted hips. This is the angle that your hips developed at, which dictates how wide your squat stance should be.

Barefoot shoes can be an awesome tool for distributing your weight correctly through every lift. With your toes splayed wide, you can distribute weight through your heels, the balls of your feet, and the arch of your foot. This stabilization allows for the knees and hips to move properly without compensation.

Barbell Benchpress

Barbell benching with proper form is crucial. If you go into almost any gym in America, you'll find a lot of people around the bench with shoulder pain. These tips should limit the amount of strain placed on important shoulder anatomy. To preface the form, make sure that you're not ego-lifting. Work with a weight that you can maintain good form with, and don't push past that limit.

1. Brace with intra-abdominal pressure! Push the air into your abdomen.

2. Pinch your shoulder blades together and drop them down. This will put more weight on your chest muscles.

3. Use your legs! Without over-arching your back, push your feet into the ground and squeeze your glutes.

4. Keep your arms at a 45-degree angle to your body. We don't want to see your arms flaring out to 90 degrees, as it will put pressure on the front of the shoulder.

5. Make sure that your forearms are parallel to the bar while your arms maintain the 45 degrees.

6. Keep your wrists in line with your forearm. Make sure you aren't bending your wrist!

When your shoulder blades aren't stabilized, you don't use your legs, and you flare your arms to 90 degrees, the rate of injury increases. Risk of bicipital tendonitis, AC joint sprain, pec minor and rotator cuff strain, and anterior deltoid hypertonicity all increase.

Overhead Barbell Press

The path of the barbell is important, making sure the bar rises in front of your face, and then straight above your head. To make sure this is the case, you need proper shoulder mobility. In addition, we want to make sure your core is stable so that your low back isn't arching too much. To accomplish both mobile shoulders and core stability, we're going back to intra-abdominal pressure. Push out in a full cylinder all the way around your core with your breath in.

As a bonus, let's talk about Kettlebell shoulder press since it's common to see poor form with the motion, which can lead to SLAP tears in your labrum.

1. Start with your elbow tucked into your body.

2. Keep your wrist stiff so that it doesn't bend.

3. Maintain a strong core and press up.

Barbell Deadlift

When deadlifting, keeping a neutral spine is crucial to prevent injury. If there is movement in your spine through the lift, it can lead to disc herniation. To make sure that you're safe through the lift (you guessed it), maintain quality intra-abdominal pressure through your core. A lot of people will use a weightlifting belt to stabilize their back but use it incorrectly. Rather than keeping it as tight as possible, keep it comfortable. Now, push your belly, sides, and back outward into the belt to brace during the lift. This has huge benefits. In addition to stabilizing the spine, it also elongates the discs between your vertebrae. This helps counteract the disc compression that takes place during the lift.

Rather than bending over the bar, be sure to start in a hip-hinge. Lock your shoulder blades down and back, and pull up.

Finally, chiropractic care, soft tissue work, and rehab can ensure that you are moving at your best during your lifts. Come into Function First Sports Chiropractic today!