Hello and welcome to the Healthy Bit podcast where we talk about stacking healthy habits,
whether that's food or exercise, into our daily lives so that we can make better choices
and hopefully thank our future selves. And in today's episode, we are going to be talking about
different forms of exercise and deadlifting and what we should be doing in terms of is it
Is it correct to do weightlifting?
And are there any problems with doing so?
So let's dive straight into it.
Before we do, I'm Hayley Jarville,
and I'd like to introduce my co-host, Henry Herbert.
Hello. Hello, Hayley. How are you doing?
Quick shameless plug from me.
If you enjoy listening to The Healthy Bit,
please do give us a comment or a like
or share it with one of your friends or family.
Everything helps to get our little fledgling project off the ground.
It might seem small, but every comment and like really does help.
We've also started working with Fountain, where we launched the podcast on.
But you can stream it directly through them.
They're really great, great, great application.
But you can also listen to it on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and all the other usual ones.
Anyway, on with the show.
So we've already had a couple of listeners ask us questions on techniques and whether
deadlifting's safe and whether we should be doing it.
And that's a really interesting topic because we often get asked this in clinic and especially at the moment when everyone's trying to take up maybe new forms of exercise.
And I think people are starting to shift their mindset into what type of exercise they should focus on.
Whether you're young, you know, old, middle age, whatever.
I think most people are aware that they should be doing some form of resistance training or strength training, especially for bones.
And as you know, Henry, bone health is one of my specialist interest areas.
Yeah.
And it's really essential that we do do weight training.
But we often see, again, people who are successful in doing weight training and they go on to lifting heavier and they have successful rehab programs and they achieve great things and they're strong and they're muscular.
And then we see the opposite of that in clinic, which my kind of passion is to try and help people to stop falling into those kind of pitfalls where they often end up injured and regret doing what they've done and sometimes have caused themselves quite severe or serious spinal injuries, which means that they're no longer able to continue with that.
so we're going to start by just talking a bit about what you should really think about before
you start lifting heavy weights because people often go well surely I just think about what
weight I want to do and actually you need to look at your position to squat down into the
onto the floor without any weight and to see what your spinal position is like because some people
will start to bend and say this is the spine henry here for those of you listening i'm just showing
a picture of um my hand just representing a spine uh but in sort of like a 45 degree angle and when
some people bend down they will tend to like stick the bottom out so they'll curve almost upwards
their bum will go towards the ceiling and they'll dip their lower back and that will happen at a
certain point of their knee bend or their squat position. And that's what we tend to look for
as physios if they're shifting that into that position. Or they might do the opposite where
they really tuck their bum under and they tend to kind of spinely flex. So they might bend a little
bit more from either the middle point of the back or from the lower bottom part. Or even they might
try and compensate for any stiffness in the lower back by bending forward from their neck and the
upper back so we're looking at kind of three points of curvature on the back and what you're
aiming for is to try and keep almost like um a ski slope type position when you bend and that's
the best thing i like that analogy i've always used that analogy like could i ski off your back
is it kind of like locked in or is it is it you're engaging your core you should absolutely
be engaging your core. So you should be engaging your core. So that's as if you're imagining you're
in tighter trousers. So a lot of people just belly suck. They kind of suck their tummy muscles in
and they go, oh, I'm engaging my core. And you can see that they're physically pulled all the
muscle and skin inwards, but they're bracing. So that's like an imprinting bracing type position.
what you want to do is just gently imagine your waistband as a circle you want to just draw in as
if you're shrinking your waistband by sort of 10-15% something like that so just gently drawing in all
the way around as if someone's giving you like a corset or imagine a dancer would kind of hold
themselves and they kind of hold themselves into that position so you want to maintain that
and breathe because a lot of people forget to breathe.
And if you hold your breath, you're going to raise your blood pressure,
but it also increases your intra-abdominal pressure.
So you would put more pressure on your discs in your back.
And we don't want that because we know that if we're the ages of 35 to 55,
that we could end up causing ourselves or putting ourselves at risk of a disc prolapse
or as what people used to call a slip disc.
So you need to be careful with your breathing and you should always breathe out as you go into a lift.
So you're not holding that pressure in your body.
And looking at other areas within your body.
So how stable and strong are my ankles?
Because people overlook that.
And if you're wobbling around on your ankles and you're kind of rolling in,
or you just don't look very strong in your calf muscles or in your quad muscles,
or you've got a stiff knee.
So say, for example, one knee is actually quite flexible and there's a meniscal injury and another, or you play a lot of sport and you dominate on one leg.
It's all going to contribute to the weight shift through your body.
So are you leaning more, even if it's minuscule, are you leaning more to the left?
Are you leaning more to the right as you go down into that squat position?
So you're looking for that key center point position as best you can.
And then again, looking at forward and back motion, is someone sitting back through their
heels adequately, or are they going through their toes and pushing through their toes and
not distributing the load through the feet and the base of support.
And again you should always think about not only your core muscle contraction but even your pelvic floor So people probably don think about this I think ladies are starting to think more about it But as you lift anything and it
should be if you're lifting a baby at home out of a cot for, you know, young parents, or if you're
lifting something in an awkward position out of your car boot, say, for example, it's something
heavy, or you're carrying weights, just functionally, like shopping bags, things like that doesn't
always have to be a heavy heavy gym weight that you kind of look at and you think well I need to
be careful because that says 15 kilograms on it some things don't come labeled so you just need
to be cautious then you should really be engaging both your core muscles and your pelvic floor
muscles because they all act as a hammock to hold up your internal organs and if you don't then you
put yourself at risk of more internal kind of issues or injuries so they're the areas that you
need to particularly think about and people leave out their upper limb so if you have a weaker
shoulder stiffer shoulder you know you sit desk based all day and you become very stiff in your
upper back you're not going to be a great person to kind of drop the shoulder make sure all the
energy is going to your core muscles and your legs you might be trying to lift with your hips or with
your back and we want everything to work together and then you sometimes see that even if someone
can keep a really good position through their lower back so they've got that ski slope position
with their back they might bend their head forward or have their neck extended so it's about keeping
the back of the head in line with your back too so that your chin back in a little bit so that your
spine is kept as sort of elongated and as straight as possible even though you're in that tipping
forward position so there's quite a lot to think about before you even do you realize there was so
much to it henry weightlifting is not really something i've haven't really done like i don't
have weights at home and i don't go to the gym so i so i i mentioned before i go to an exercise class
which is it's probably mostly cardio so it's a lot of burpees and jumps and jumping around and
running and whatnot and then probably a couple of times a month we do have weights and we'll be
doing um reps but probably the heaviest weight is probably 10 kilo dumbbells so we're doing you
know kind of lunches and all sorts of stuff with weights so we're not doing kind of deadlifts when
like when i think of a deadlift i guess i've seen the jacked men on instagram that you know like you
could do this and all that kind of stuff i haven't um fallen prey to their uh their advertising just
yeah but is it literally just lifting as heavy a weight as possible from the ground up and up to a
kind of up to your waist then dropping down again is that like now obviously i realize that's the
kind of like the bravado of like that you can flex how many how heavy you can lift compared to your
your friend or your work colleague brother or whatever it is um but is it is it like a good
exercise like what's the benefit of lifting a really heavy weight like um or is it just a kind
of have a show off and sound good no they're not showing off if there is evidence behind um lifting
lifting weights our muscles need load to adapt and to to create change and and as the way i kind
of describe it to patients is that we almost need to and when i talk about just the muscles in
isolation now so this isn't other body parts but we need to almost create a little bit of
micro trauma in the muscles we need to kind of tear a few of those little muscle fibers as we
lift weight and that's what happens when we gradually and incrementally and safely increase
weight and and you should do that slowly and that's because then the muscle will mold and develop and
remodel and change and you get that adaptation and you create tensile strength so the the fibers in
the muscle line up nicely if you apply load to them as opposed to if you keep loading and you
don't stretch for instance the the fibers all cross over and they look like a load of spaghetti
on a plate all kind of jumbled up and people go well I lift weight and I increment my weight but
I don't stretch and I'm like well that's that you need to because if you increment your weight you
need to stretch out those muscle fibers so that they keep realigning and then the straighter they
are the more adaptable they are and the more able they are to tolerate load so it's you'll actually
achieve higher better performance if you do stretch alongside your weight training so people
and and you do see that you see that a lot you see people going well I've kind of done a very
and if they've done a brilliant program of like incrementing the weight very gradually they don't
always apply the stretch and with muscles and tendons we have to be a little bit careful with
those as we get older if there's different hormonal changes especially for ladies but also men because
we do see these changes in tendons regardless of age and you know as you get older they do need a
little bit longer to turn over and so there's some evidence to say that 48 to 72 hours you need to
allow your muscle and tendon cells to remodel because if you overload them too quickly they
they lay down larger proteins within the muscle or tendon and then they just kind of get a little
bit more hydrophilic so they absorb and contract or attract water into them and they swell and then
they don't actually remodel very well because they think they're in a hurry because they think
right you're going to put more load under us again in another day and another day and another day
so they don't have time to organize and lay out all the tendon cells you can imagine under a
microscope can't you how neat they would probably look if you apply a bit of weight keep the cells
healthy and they line up all nicely and nice and straight and if you're stretching and you're
helping that process then you're going to get a better quality muscle tendon rather than something
that's quite grumbly and where it looks chronic and we can actually you can actually see that you
can scan them and you can you can see that you get infiltration into muscle and it gets a bit
fatty and it gets a bit not very nice if you don't kind of take care of both your diet your
hydration and your training schedule so there's quite a lot to yeah yeah a lot of a lot to think
about and so with and with so with a deadlift obviously i guess because you're coming from a
bending down position does that mean you're you're you're using your legs your core and your arms so
is it almost like a kind of full body workout or what like because i guess when i think of weights
i guess i just think about doing bicep shells i'm probably just a bit basic so you've got your kind
of squat from the ground so you could just do your kind of squat positions and and that's where you
try and keep your back sort of into that ski slope position you've also then got your kind of dead
lifting where people tend to hint they look like they hinging more from the hip they kind of standing you shouldn really ever completely lock out your knees They should be slightly soft so that you engaging the muscles
but not stressing at the back of the leg.
And then you would hold, so you need good grip strength.
So if you know your grip strength is not very strong,
then you need to be careful with that.
And you would hold onto the bar and you would come up lifting the weight
and you would pop it back down.
Some people start too heavy and too low,
So they would have the weight down on the ground, but there's nothing wrong with having the weight up onto like a step or a block of something and trying to, as long as it's stable.
So when you're putting your weight, it doesn't roll onto your foot.
But you could, if you're not using too heavier weights and you're really mindful of that, you can actually pop it up a bit higher and then standing up with that.
Now, that technique particularly uses your hamstring muscles quite a lot.
So if someone's very tight or weak in their hamstrings or predisposed to back pain or any disc pain, I would err on the side of caution with advising that I would want to see some better squat positions first.
And it would be really important that you don't just do that in isolation.
You would need to be doing other forms of exercise, whether that's swimming, walking, cycling, pilates, stretching.
So if I'm not currently doing any kind of heavy weights like deadlifts, etc., and I don't particularly want to join a gym, I'm not quite ready to make that.
So do I need to go on Facebook Marketplace and find myself some old school rusty weights that I can store in the back of the kitchen and then do some deadlifts?
Or is there other exercises that I can kind of recreate without having to buy all the kit?
or do you just kind of need a metal bar and some heavy weights
so you can build up on?
Often, yeah.
So you can do exercise with very little equipment.
You could just have – so I always say to people,
what do you have already at home?
So do you already have a set of, like, dumbbells or weights at home?
Yeah, we do, but they probably only go up to, like, 10 kilos each.
So, yeah, so 20 kilos.
20 kilos, that's quite a lot.
And often we will look at somebody's technique with the weight that they say they're doing in the gym.
And we'll often, most times, probably I'd say 90% of the time, we would probably knock down their weight because they think they're lifting that weight well.
But actually they're compensating.
So you're better to do a smaller weight and do it well and get the technique and the quality better than not doing that.
But if you've got like 20 kilograms, you've got 10 kg of weights either side, you could start with, there's lots of things you can do.
You can do things like a golfer's lift type position where you can actually keep your back straight and you counterbalance.
So you stand, I'll try and do a little demo.
So you kind of stand one leg in front of the other and then you hold your weight in front.
So say you've got your left leg standing in front of you, right leg back.
You've got your right arm to counterbalance.
And you would lean forward with that weight, keeping the back straight.
And you could bend the leg so that you're training with the weight and the load.
And then obviously switch over.
So you could do things like that.
It's very simple, very functional.
And it's an exercise that's overlooked, in my opinion.
Because it's very hard.
And that builds up the gluteal muscles.
It builds up the legs and the ankles and the core stability.
And you can increment the weight.
And it's a very easy thing to see whether or not you're doing it right or wrong.
Because if you do it wrong, you're going to topple over.
And it's a clear instruction to keep your hips square and to keep them level as you go into that golfer's position.
So, and that's how you can counter do it.
Some people call it arabesques.
They're called arabesques in ballerite, like into kind of dance and things like that too.
And how, like, without, you know, turning into a gym buddy and going, you know, every day, how much time should I spend doing some weights a week?
So, yeah, so the recommendation is sort of two to three sessions a week of sort of 20 to 25 minutes of strength training.
Or some people just globally say like a couple of strength training sessions a week, say depending on how much time you've got.
So we should be focusing on some strength.
And then alongside that, you've got your 150 minutes of aerobic activities.
It's quite a lot, isn't it, to fit in?
And then you've got to try and do core work.
I think I'm doing enough on the cardio, I think,
because I'm doing two sessions and then live a fairly active life anyway.
But I think, yeah, probably the weight is something that I don't do enough of.
And I think it's because I don't have them at home and I don't go to a gym.
So it's like, you're not kind of around it.
But it is something that, you know, you're kind of seeing more and more,
and particularly, you know, when you start reading about as you get older,
like keeping muscle on.
Like I've probably seen kind of elder people in my family, you know,
and as they get older, they do lose that muscle.
And then, you know, if they fall or they hurt themselves,
they lose that stability and these things actually.
so it's something that I'm more conscious of that I don't want to you know waste this waste waste my
prime years and not not build that muscle yeah they don't wait but muscles are quite forgiving
so you can keep muscles the the kind of myth is that you can't make your muscle stronger when
you're older you can you just have to work harder at them because you just lose more muscle mass as
you get older and that's why it's so important to do that but I get you know my osteoporotic
osteopenic patients in clinic i encourage them to work so i will look at their technique with bending
and then i will get them doing some kind of like little modified squats and and like those little
arabesque and arabesque or golfers type positions and and they're hard but actually you can get
good at them very quickly which is quite satisfying yeah but things like wall sits with
holding weights and just going against the walls that do your core work as long as well as your
leg strength you're going to also get some loading as well with that so and that's a good
place to start if you are not confident with squatting and you're not sure if you or if you
suffer with back pain and you think right well I get back pain every time I squat and it's just
because someone's core strength isn't keeping up with the weight they're trying to lift so you do
have to think okay what am I doing core wise and I know when we did the Tim Bresnan episode we
um we talked to him about it didn't we and I don't know if you remember but he enjoyed doing the kind
of plank type rollouts with jimbals and um that's that's an exercise we've always liked in physio so
you can go in different directions to kind of build up your core strength and your and it a great one because you not going to upset your back yeah and and I that an important point to remember What you do now and I love this saying and I think it gets you thinking
what you do now, will your 80-year-old self thank you for it?
And it could be that you're not doing enough,
in which case your 80-year-old self will think,
what have you done?
You've not done enough to me.
We're now suffering.
The bones are suffering.
The muscles are suffering.
and the metabolic systems are not functioning as well.
Exercise has so many benefits.
But also, are you choosing the wrong exercise in this decade of your life
that not only leaves you prone to injury in the next decade,
but when you're 80, are you going to be able to do that?
Because what we don't often talk about, but we see it,
is that as you get older, you can have something called spinal stenosis
and narrowing in the spinal canal.
and these conditions can often be a result of people who have done lots of heavy physical
I'm not saying everyone that does any heavy lifting will get it but you know think if you've
maltreated your back doing the wrong techniques wrong type of sport your work has great as you
know back in the day when nurses perhaps used to have to lift because there wasn't lifting equipment
and all the manual handling regulations in place things like that that could particularly contribute
you over time and it's not just a few one-offs it would this would have to be done a lot badly
for a long period of time but there's no sort of like well that caused that it's very difficult
patients will go well did that cause that and I'm like well not really it's more of a what's
happened collectively over time and some people are predisposed to things like this but generally
if we can keep our core muscles really good and we can exercise and think about joint positions
when we exercise and not just looking at the area itself. So not just seeing it as a squat or a
deadlift, but okay, how good are my hamstrings? Are they as strong as they need to be? How good
are my quad muscles and my thigh muscles? How good are my ankles? Do I do any jumping and plyometric
work, especially if I want to be a hockey player or a basketball player? Can I jump? Can I jump
high and can I land and can I land without rolling my ankle and am I very fast with my kind of sprint
and running around and do I practice that do I practice change of direction and do I sort of do
proprioceptive work where you get to really challenge your body in space in terms of do I
know where my body is in space if I close my eyes and can I catch a ball on a single leg because you
know someone's throwing me a heavy weighted ball or something that's going to require me to have to
think and are my legs going to be prepared for that so doing things like that and then also
looking at upper limb because that gets overlooked as well so trying to be strong lower limb how good
are you upper limb how flexible are you do you think about your neck strength you know some people
if they working at a desk all day they become very weak around their scapular muscles so their
shoulder blades and they get very weak around their neck and they get weak and stiff in their thoracic
spine they might not do rotational exercise but maybe you know some cable work where you're doing
some resistance work through a range especially if you're a golfer you know we get people doing it
in the opposite direction to the direction that they have to like swing the golf yeah yeah because
they're both the other not the other gotcha yeah and then doing things like okay how can you make
that more challenging because balance is so important in whether you're young or old balance
is really good for sport. So can you do any of these exercises on a single leg? Because it makes
it much more challenging. Can you change and play around with the base of support? And that's when
we get people on those kind of like BOSI balls. You know, you see those in the gym, but you don't
have to go to a gym to use one of those. You know, that is something that's simple. We've talked,
I think, before about using the wobble boards and using those to break up your sitting position at
at work and things like that but you can use them to quite high functional levels in your sport and
in exercise so there's lots you can do with those as well so trying to get that combination of
everything together yeah definitely yeah that's super interesting and also um all the things you'll
say i'm like yep that's me yep that's me sitting at a desk all day weak neck yes that's me um
So it's good to be reminded that we need to keep pushing ourselves and keep trying.
But also, you were saying right at the beginning about how important it is to have the correct posture
and that actually if you go too fast, you can end up causing yourself more issues
that then non-term can become problematic.
And that's not what we want, is it?
So it's going to start.
And we spend...
That's it.
We spend a lot of time with the surgeons and the consultants and we read all the stuff that they send us in terms of patient letters and things and what they recommend or what they can or can't do for someone.
And it's really heartbreaking for people if they've tried or they've gone through numerous surgeries and they're not feeling as good.
And I have patients who say, gosh, I wish I knew this when I was younger.
And I always say to them, I wish you could talk to my younger populations and tell them this is what can happen.
So it's really important that we look after ourselves.
And a lot of the time, I don't know where the errors can sometimes come when people have a misconception about what they should be doing.
Sometimes there's this sadness, in my opinion, that people feel they've got to keep up with their person they go to the gym with.
and there's this well you live you live 25 and i lift 15 so you must be better than me yeah
it's sometimes you know not everyone does that but it's it's important not to compare yourself
to others any exercise is good and um yeah just trying to be sensible and thinking if your body's
not up for it or if you're getting symptoms 24 to 40 hours after doing it which isn't just the
delayed onset of muscle soreness where you feel a bit achy after doing something if you're getting
sharp pains pins and needles tingling numbness yeah you're doing something wrong and you should
stop and seek some some support yeah brilliant oh well thank you that's yeah that's that's some
great info there and always a pleasure to chat with you Hayley and really what makes it better
is when we get good engagement from our listeners so if you enjoy it please do share with your
friends and family, like us, send us a comment.
It all helps in boosting us up the ranks
and getting more ears and eyeballs on the healthy bit.
Anyway, big chat.
And until next time, Hayley.
Thanks very much, Henry.
Thank you very much.
See you next time.