The Critical Role of Lats in CrossFit Performance

Dr. Zach Long // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete lead faculty Zach Long discusses the importance of the need for simultaneously strong & flexible lats to optimize performance & reduce injury risk in CrossFit and other functional fitness athletes.

Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

ZACH LONGIt is August 2nd, 2024. I am your host today, Dr. Zach Long, lead faculty inside of our fitness athlete division, teaching our live course and our level two course that we just, uh, just changed the name of that. So excited to talk to you today about the lats specifically in the CrossFit athlete, why this is such an important muscle group for us to appreciate and why I call it the glutes of the upper body because it's just that important of a muscle. We focus so much in the lower body on glute development for athletes, for health, for performance. The lats are the key when it comes to the CrossFit athlete. Why is it key? Two big reasons. Number one, lat inflexibility will drastically impact many skills the CrossFit athlete is trying to develop. But what I want to focus on a little bit more today is lat strength. So let's get rid of the flexibility issue first. So if your lats are tight, what we're going to so commonly see is all overhead lifts affected. But we're really going to see athletes struggle with things like the overhead squat, whereas they're going down into that squat and their hips being flexed, that lat inflexibility is going to really wreck havoc on somebody's overhead squat. And then when we look at so many gymnastic skills as well, If you can't fully open that shoulder up into in-range flexion, you'll struggle with your kipping mechanics. Things like handstand walking will also be drastically impacted if you don't have great lat flexibility. But again, our focus today is going to be a little bit more on the strength of the lats and why that's so important. So obviously we all know that the lats create shoulder extension. So they're going to take our arm from being overhead down towards our side and behind our body. That is a movement pattern that shows up so much in CrossFit, probably more than any other recreational fitness activity. So if the lats aren't strong, movements like your kipping pull-ups, your muscle-ups, your toes-to-bars, are going to be impacted. Even your deadlifts, your cleans, your snatches, the lats are so important in those movements to keep that barbell close to your body and become more mechanically efficient in those movement patterns. So we've got to have really strong lats. I think one great example that I love to do when we're teaching a live course to help people really feel and understand how important the lats are in just barbell-based movements is to have somebody do a hip hinge holding an empty barbell. You slide that barbell down your thigh as you hinge over, and then you stop with that barbell sitting right at the patella. And then you take a second and you let that barbell drift three or four inches out in front of your knees, and then you pull it back to where it's touching your knees. You can do that a few times. And what you'll notice really quickly when you do that is as soon as that bar starts to drift away from your body, you'll feel your back tension really increase as your lumbar paraspinals have to work a lot harder when that barbell gets away from the body. I often explain this to my patients as carrying your groceries into the house. You don't carry your groceries into your house with your arms at 90 degrees of flexion in front of your body. That would not be an efficient position to carry that load. That's what the lats do in your deadlifts, cleans and snatches. So, how do we determine if someone's lats might be weak? That's tough to do. So I have a couple different things that I look at that kind of hones me in on thinking that this might be the case. Number one, does somebody just not have strict pull-up capacity? If somebody can't do that first strict pull-up, then I know that we need to build overall lat strength, then just overall vertical pulling strength. But once somebody has that, then there are a couple other things that I like to look at as well. Number one being, in their strict pull-up, where do I see those elbows at? So where I ideally want to see is when they're pulling themselves up, I want to see that humerus is pretty much staying kind of in the plane of the scapula, about 30-ish degrees forward from being in pure abduction. What I'll really commonly see is individuals that as they do their pull-up, those elbows come really far out in front of their body, almost in like straight flexion or 90 degrees of adduction. And what that usually indicates to me is somebody that's relatively stronger in their arms compared to their lats. So if you jumped on a pull-up bar today and you did a wider elbow angle pull-up and a really narrow angle pull-up, what you'll notice immediately is that as soon as you go more narrow, you will feel your arms working drastically more. So those individuals that go forward elbow position in their strict pull-ups are often weak in their lats. And then there's another great test that I like that's really specific to the CrossFit athlete. We show this in the live course, so this might be a little bit difficult to visualize on the podcast, but I get a very light box or bucket on the floor directly in front of a pull-up bar, three or four inches in front of a pull-up bar on the ground, athletes hanging from the pull-up bar, and I have them go into a hollow body position as if they were doing a kip, but we're doing it really slow. And what I'll usually see is that athletes with strong lats and great kipping form, great hollow body positioning, as they go into that hollow body position, you'll see their toes slide nice and smoothly up and down the box. For individuals that are weaker in their lats and they leverage and utilize their hips too much in their kip, they'll flex their hip, they'll go into a piped position, and you'll see that box actually get pushed forward as they do that motion. So there's three different things that I kinda look at that cue me in to somebody needing lat strength. Now, obviously, that is important for both, for performance, strong lats are gonna make you better at the movements that we see in CrossFit, but I also think that this is really important for us to appreciate as rehab providers, because when somebody has weak lats, we often see their rotator cuff and elbows get beat up as a result of that. So imagine somebody's putting in a high volume of kipping movements, toes to bars, pull-ups, et cetera, on a pull-up rig, but their lats aren't super strong. They're relying a lot on that momentum generated by the kip to get themselves over the bar, but they don't have the lat strength to control that eccentric motion. So they're going to come down a little faster. They're going to be a little less controlled. And when they hit that in range flexion down at the bottom, you're just going to see a little bit more force get thrown at the shoulder than if they had more lat control in those movements. And so very frequently, what you're going to see is those individuals with a little bit of lat weakness are the ones that are showing up to the clinic with rotator cuff tinnitopathy of the shoulder. And they're going to show up with shoulder instability issues. because that shoulder's just getting taxed more because of those weak lats. So, so frequently when I'm treating somebody with gymnastics-based rotator cuff tendinopathy or shoulder instability in the cross-fit population, I'm giving them rotator cuff strength work in an EMOM combined with some lat strength work. And we'll talk about a few drills for that in just a minute. One other thing that you'll very often see, especially in those forward elbow pullers, is that you'll find that they very commonly are those individuals that show up to the clinic with medial elbow pain. They're going to show up with golfer's elbow, medial epicondylogel. that medial elbow is getting overloaded because so much of what we do in CrossFit is already grip intensive. They're dead lifting, they're cleaning, they're snatching, now they're jumping up on the rig. But their rig work is also done in a way that puts a little bit more stress and emphasis on the elbow. And a lot of times that elbow just can't keep up with the load that's being placed on it. So obviously, again, you're loading up the elbow and trying to make those tendons a little bit more robust. but a huge component in those individuals also has to be strengthening those lats so that the elbow's just not getting constantly beat up in those CrossFit workouts. So it is super common for you to see my rotator cuff and elbow rehab programs in the CrossFit population having lat accessory work in it as well. So now I want to talk through my four favorite lat accessory works, excuse me, five. 1. Pull Up Variations Pull up variations are number one. Number two, I really love banded front levers. So especially for athletes trying to learn some higher level gymnastic skills, the toes to bars, the bar muscle up, etc. A banded front lever is a killer exercise to isolate the lats. That one does take a decent amount of strength to do. Number three, racked shins. Man, if you haven't played with racked shins in your own personal fitness journey, I really wanna encourage you to play with this one because it is a killer lat exercise. I mean, the first time you do it, you're gonna spend the next four days unable to raise your hands over your head. So what you do here is you set a barbell up on J-cups to where it's at about chest height, and then in front of you, you either get a tall box or maybe an incline bench, and you place your feet up on the box or incline bench. So your hips are flexed. while your shoulders fully overhead. So it just puts a massive stretch on the lats and then you do essentially a pull up with those feet a little bit elevated. Look up a video of this if it doesn't make sense, but that big lat stretch down the bottom really crushes the lats. And again, you're gonna be sore for days if you do that one. Number four, straight arm pulldowns. So I prefer this with a cable column, but a lot of CrossFit gyms aren't going to have a cable column, so then we just do bands. We get a band attached to the top of the pull-up bar, hold it with both arms, arms straight, and then we keep our arms straight as we go from shoulder flexion down into extension. So what that's going to do is it's going to completely take the arms out of the equation here, and really focus on isolating the lats to extend the shoulder. So this is another one that I really like for that individual that has that really forward elbow pull. I'm just gonna completely take their arms out of it. I might have them a couple days a week doing straight arm pull downs, a couple days a week doing toe assisted pull downs to build up their lat strength. And then number five, the RNT row. So I get a band position tied to like a upright of a squat rack at about knee to hip height. I'm holding the band at the same time that I'm holding a dumbbell or kettlebell. Now I'm doing a rowing motion where the band is resisting shoulder extension and my emphasis here isn't on pulling the weight to my chest. My emphasis is on trying to pull my elbow back towards my hip. When you focus on pulling the elbow back to the hip with that band resisting shoulder extension, you're going to find that the lats just get really, really isolated. For individuals that when they're doing pull ups or we're doing some of the other exercises that we've already talked about, tell me that they just don't feel their lats working as they do that. That's my favorite exercise to just build a little bit of awareness of the lats. It's great for strength. The negative is that we're only training from about 90 degrees of flexion down to zero, so it's a little less specific. But when I need to create that mind-muscle connection to get them to feel and engage their lats, I absolutely love that drill. So there's five different exercises and a couple different ways to test out the lats. SUMMARY So I really hope that you come away from this really appreciating how important that muscle group is for the CrossFit athlete. If you want to dive deeper in this stuff, we focus on lat strength a ton in our Fitness Athlete Live course, again, just because it's so stinking important. And so we've got a number of different live courses coming up that you can check out all across the country. In September, we've got three courses. We're going to be in Austin, Texas, Longmont, Colorado, and Spring, Texas. And then through the rest of the year and early into 2025, we're going to be in New Orleans, Orlando, Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, and Salt Lake City. So you've got a lot of different options across the country to catch fitness athlete live. And I also want to mention that Our Level 2 course, if you've already taken Level 1 online, Level 2 starts up in September as well. And that course always sells out. We have a few more seats available. We're about a month out from the start of that course, but it will sell out in the next two weeks. So if you've taken Level 1, and you wanna move on to Level 2, and you wanna move on to getting your ICE Fitness Athlete Certification, then you need to go sign up for that Level 2 course as soon as possible, because it's gonna sell out really soon. Hope today's episode gave you a few clinical tips and look forward to seeing you next time and at live courses. Have a great one, everybody.

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