Watch Your Back!

by Jarrod Fobes

Amber Glasgow, of the Ledaig Heavy Athletics Club, performs a Turkish Get Up with 35 pounds. The Turkish Get Up is a great exercise to strengthen muscle imbalances in the back.

Injuries have shaped a lot of my training, and there is nothing that will get you thinking more about how you train than an injured back. Bum knee? Work your upper body for a while. Injured shoulder? Train around it. Hurt your back? You won’t be in the gym for at least a few weeks. After my last back injury I got busy researching back health and learning what I could do to prevent any future relapses. From what I’ve learned, spinal “prehab” can be distilled down to two major factors. Here’s what they are and what you can do about them.

Muscle Imbalances

Muscle imbalance refers to any break in the symmetry of the muscular system. You don’t want your right side stronger than your left, or your front stronger than your back. Most of you have heard that to protect your back, you should strengthen your abdominals. Strong abdominals are important to provide a counter to the powerful muscles of the lower back, but they are only part of the equation. Is your left hip flexor stronger than the right? Then your hip may be pulled down on the left side, and your back will struggle to compensate for it. Are your hamstrings disproportionately stronger than your quads? That may have an effect on the stability of your knee. If your knee goes out, your hips may start compensating for your injured knee. From there the chain of compensation can easily reach your back.

Fortunately there are two exercises that are terrific for correcting major muscle imbalances. One is the Turkish Get-up, already and official USAWA lift. The other is the One Legged, One Armed Deadlift.

If you are balancing on your right leg, you will grab the weight with your left hand. Put a slight bend in the knee of your support leg. As you lean forward to grasp the weight, your non-support leg should rise up, keeping in as straight a line as possible with your back. Maintain that alignment as you stand up with the weight. As with any deadlift, don’t let your head droop forward.

Both lifts should be trained heavy, but not to failure. Within a month or two diligently giving each side of your body equal work with these lifts, you should have corrected the major imbalances in your body. But stay on guard against overworking one side or the other in day-to-day life too: if you ride a bike, don’t always push off with your dominate leg. If you carry a kid around, make sure you use both sides of your body for roughly equal time. You get the idea.

Muscle Endurance

Muscle endurance is the ability of a muscle to work for a prolonged period of time. It is related to, but separate from muscle strength, which most of us focus on in the gym. Many of us have strong backs, but inexplicably still have back problems. That’s because while we may be able to lift enormous loads with our backs, we haven’t conditioned them to handling sustained, symmetrical loads. Just as being able to do 100 push-ups may not translate into a huge bench press, heavy deadlifts do little to condition our backs to prolonged work. That is why kettlebell swings are so important.

Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. You should have about a 90-degree bend in your knees, as well as at your waist. Do not let your back round, and keep your head up. The kettlebell (or whatever implement you decide to you use) will be in both hands tucked under your behind. Your wrists should rest on your inner thighs.

From this position, explode forward with your hips, extending the legs and back. The weight should stop at 12-o’clock, directly over head with your arms straight. A common mistake is to initiate the movement with the arms. The explosive hip extension should provide the momentum to get the weight moving. Guide the weight back down to the starting position, and repeat.

Since we’re focusing on muscle endurance, execute a high number of reps, at least 75. Focus on maintaining a high rep speed, too. This will mean starting with a lighter weight than most of us like to be seen with in the gym, but do it anyway. If 75 is too daunting, start with 3×25, and “steal” reps from the last set and give them to the first in following workouts. So following rep schemes might look like 35x25x15, 50×25, etc until you reach 75 reps. Once you can handle 75 you have the option of increasing weight or increasing reps. Besides muscle endurance, my posture has improved greatly since adding kettlebell swings to my routine. I recommend them to anyone whose shoulders roll forward. Another benefit of this exercise is the tremendous cardiovascular work it provides. If done with speed, explosiveness, and adequate weight, your heart will really be pumping by the end!

Black Swamp Meet

by Al Myers

MEET ANNOUNCEMENT

ATOMIC ATHLETIC GREAT BLACK SWAMP OLDE TIME STRONGMAN PICNIC AND ALL-ROUND MEET

Roger LaPointe, of Atomic Athletic, is hosting an All-Round Weightlifting Meet on May 14th.  Roger is not new to the USAWA as a meet director, as he has hosted a couple of competitions in the past – but it has been a few years.  I am REALLY GLAD to see him get back into the USAWA fold by promoting this meet!  Roger owns a very unique equipment company, Atomic Athletic,  that caters to lifters wanting to buy unique equipment that we as All-Rounders would appreciate.  He also sells about anything else that a lifter would need.  Take a little time and check out his website for his business.

This meet will feature two popular all-round lifts – the One Hand Deadlift and the Clean and Push Press.  This day will be more than just a meet.  Roger has planned a picnic and other Strongman Shows to compliment the meet.  It sounds like a great day of fun!!

Great Black Swamp Olde-Time Strongman Picnic Promotional Poster.

For an entry form, click here –  Black Swamp Meet Entry Form

The things I hate about the sport I love – part 2

by Larry Traub

Part two – I’m OK, You’re OK, We’re all champions

Larry Traub performing a deadlift in a powerlifting competition.

At the time I started my teaching career in 1976, a book that had been on the best seller list a few years earlier seemed to be having a huge impact on our interaction with the students we taught. The book was called “I’m OK, You’re Ok.” Let me give you my perception of how things started to changed in the 70’s due to the concepts expressed in this book. The basic concept, as I see it, is that our students should constantly be praised for what they do. The effort involved, or the excellence of the accomplishment should not be a factor in whom we seek to reward. If everyone is praised and rewarded for everything they do then they will develop high self-esteem which is the key to them becoming wonderful, fully functional adults. This may be an exaggeration of the concepts expressed in this book but I feel that there is quite a bit of truth in my analysis.

The big example that clearly shows that this trend has survived and is thriving is in youth sports. My niece and nephew are in soccer leagues where no teams are recognized as being better than the other, but every kid who shows up for the last game is awarded a trophy for this amazing accomplishment. Hollywood has definitely taken notice of this development in kid’s sports. For all you “Every One Loves Raymond” fans there are several episodes that poke fun at this trend, but one of my favorite lines occurs when the basketball coach of Raymond’s two young twin boys helps Raymond understand this concept. He explains to Raymond that, “A ball that misses the basket is just as valid as one that goes through the basket.”

I think I can concede the need for sports at a very young age to be more recreational than competitive, but I have to question whether it is wrong to start teaching and rewarding excellence at an early age. And the bigger question in my mind is: At what point should you really have to achieve excellence before you are recognized as a champion?

This trend of making sure that everyone feels like a champion goes well beyond youth sports and I suspect that the motivation has more to do with money than self esteem. I did some research to make my point relevant to the sport of powerlifting. I started looking through issues of Powerlifting USA and I discovered that for the year 2007 I could find 11 of the 12 issues. So the following research is based on carefully combing through every 2007 issue of Powerlifting USA except February. I found that the following totals were good enough to make someone a “National Champion” in 2007. These all came from the open men’s competition, not the master’s or teenage. This was compiled from whatever organization that claimed to have a “National Championship”. These totals are all in pounds and they are all totals from a combined squat, bench and deadlift where the competitor had successfully completed at least one attempt in all three lifts. (No bomb outs.) Some of the meets were raw and some of them were drug tested, but I didn’t bother to distinguish between the different rules governing the meet.

Here are your 2007 National Championship Totals. The names have been withheld to protect the unworthy.

Weight Class Total Weight Class Total
123 688 220 959
132 881 242 1229
148 986 275 1550
165 1046 308 1197
181 804 Hwt 1758
198 837    

I found a national championship where only 2 weight classes had entries in the open division, which meant that anyone who showed up for this one could have won a national championship unopposed, provided they weren’t in the 181 or 220 lb division. I also found a National championship (and this is my favorite) where there were so many different divisions that 70 different national championship awards were given out. (Many lifters were multiple national champions.) In this same meet 5 people received second place awards. No thirds. No fourths. There were only 5 people on the whole meet who got beat by somebody. I am, of course, concerned about the deflated self esteem of these 5 individuals, and suspect they will require therapy to get over the humiliation of being a national runner-up.

Part of the reason that I have chosen the USAPowerlifting (USAPL) as my venue for competition is that they seem to attract the best competitors. (At least among those who would submit to drug testing.) I believe a big reason for this is their affiliation with the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF) which gives lifters an opportunity to compete in true international competition. I really think that the IPF is doing the best job of holding the line on creating meaningful championships. Their championships include subjuniors, juniors, open, 40-49, 50-59, and 60+. Compare this to the usual laundry list of, youth, 14-15, 16-17, 18-19, juniors, collegiate, open, military, sub masters, masters, 40-44, 45-49, with continued 5 year increments through infinity. I understand every organization wants to succeed, and giving people what they want is paramount to the success of that organization, but surely we can see that this is killing the legitimacy of our sport.

Do I have the solution to the problem? I think I have some ideas that could minimize this trend that, in my mind, is killing our sport. As mentioned in a previous article I recently competed in the USAPL raw Nationals. I found the experience enjoyable but there were many unopposed national champions which is not typical of the USAPL. I hated to see the all the meaningless national championships in a contest that was overall very competitive. I understand that it is all part of the growing pains of starting something new, but I think there are creative alternatives that would allow you to recognize outstanding individuals in other divisions (masters, teenage, etc) without creating meaningless awards. The raw nationals had no qualifying total which means that it could attract lifters from 14 yrs old to 100. This is my recommendation for USAPL Raw Nationals. First, let everyone enter in their appropriate weight class and compete against whoever is there, no matter if they are open, teens, masters, etc. I think that a 17 year old who can finish in the top 6 or 7 of this type of contest would have more pride in his accomplishment that being an unopposed national champion. Second, Have an All American team consisting of the top ten lifters on formula including the use of age coefficients. The 17 year old, who finished 6th in his weight class could conceivably, using this formula, become one of the top 5 lifters in the whole contest and his All American status would be an appropriate recognition of his accomplishments.

This format would also make this contest more conducive to a true team championship. With this scenario, a gym or club would make an effort to get the best person they could into every weight class regardless of the age of the individual, and there would be far less choosing of team members simply because there is little or no competition.

This would be my recommendation for the raw nationals, but the same or a similar format would be applicable to a lot of other competitions. There could even be a female coefficient that could allow you to group males and females together for outstanding lifter awards or all state/American awards.

If athletes really want meaningless championships then I suppose there will always be promoters that will provide them, especially if there is a buck to be made doing so. I’m not so sure that this is always the case. I think that a lot of lifters and promoters are seeing problems with the sport of powerlifting and are starting their own organizations so they can create their own solutions to this problem. In my opinion, time would be better spent trying to bring reform to the organizations we have. For instance instead of starting a raw powerlifing organization, help the USAPL develop their raw nationals into a true championship for all lifters who want to lift unequipped and without performance enhancing drugs. This could lead to a true raw world championship, and who knows, with less fragmentation of the sport, maybe we could be taken seriously enough to someday become an Olympic sport.

One of the most enjoyable contests that I can remember competing in was at a local prison some 25 years ago. There were 15-20 lifters involved and for most of them it was a home meet, if you get my drift. The competition really wasn’t that good but there was another local lifter who, like myself, got to leave when it was over, and was considered to be quite good. He was a 148 lber and I was at 220 and the whole contest was based on formula which made it quite interesting. I did come out on top, which may be why I recall it fondly, but either way the use of the formula as opposed to weight classes made it a real competition. I would hope that we, as powerlifters, are seeking out real competition and not just looking to gain some meaningless status.

The things I hate about the sport I love – Part 1

by Larry Traub

Part one – Artificial Strength

Larry Traub performing a squat in a powerlifting competition.

Without a doubt, the thing that troubles me the most about the direction our sport has taken is the amazing lifts that are being posted that are not representative of the athlete’s natural ability or hard work. There are two separate issues here that result in what I would call artificial strength. The first one is the use of strength inducing drugs and the second is the use of equipment that spring loads the body.

The pharmaceutical end of this has been around for a long time and that’s a tough nut to crack. My association with The USAPL/IPF leads me to believe that they are being as diligent as possible in keeping drugs out of their organization. As a lifetime drug free lifter I fully appreciate the fact that they are creating a situation where I can minimize the possibility of having to compete against someone who is using drugs to enhance their lifting. There is always the old argument that since drug testing is imperfect that the only fair way to run a contest is to have no drug testing. There may be some truth to this, but if I choose not to use drugs, I would rather lift in an organization which encourages drug free lifting and discourages and penalizes the use of performance enhancing drugs. Ideally, I feel that there should be two organizations. There should be one that has no drug testing and one that employs the best testing methods available. The need for the other 10-15 organizations that we have is very questionable but that is a subject for another article.

The other aspect of artificial strength that has infected our sport is the use of suits, shirts and wraps to produce results that are not at all representative of the strength of the individual. In contrast to the drug problem this is not a tough nut to crack. Here’s my solution to the problem.

“This is ridiculous. Let’s not do it.”

In 1979 my wife and I drove to Dayton, Ohio to see the World Powerlifting Championships. I was a veteran of exactly one powerlifting contest, but I knew I was going to pursue the sport and I wanted to see the best lifters in the world at this point in time. And I did. Inaba, Gant, Bridges, Thomas, Anello, Pacifico, Kuc, Wrenn. All of these men are legends in my mind, but my most profound memory of the meet is the bench pressing of Bill Kazmaier. Kaz was the largest muscular and athletic looking individual that I had ever seen in my life. He was already the world record holder in the bench, but he bumped his 615 lb world record up into the 660 lb range. Kaz became a multiple world powerlifting champion and went on to win the World’s strongest man title three times.

The current world record, according to my research, is 1050 lbs posted by Ryan Kenelly. Kenelly out benched Kaz by almost 400 lbs. It turns out that the world record of Bill Kazmaier was really pretty unimpressive. Actually, most everyone associated with powerlifting already knows that we are comparing apples and oranges. Kaz didn’t know it at the time but he was performing a raw bench as opposed to an assisted bench. Is the difference significant? Apparently so.

I confess to having spent a lot of my money on this equipment and spending a lot of time and effort squeezing myself and others into this equipment. I plead guilty to telling people about my double body weight bench press when I was 49 years old without explaining that about 10-15% of that was accomplished by spring loading my body with a shirt that took 3 people to get on. And in retrospect I would have to say it was all ridiculous. I rationalize it by saying that everyone else was doing it so I had to do it in order to be competitive, and of course a little voice is asking me: “if everyone else jumped off a bridge would you jump too?” Since the last time I used one of these shirts (8 years ago) the technology has advanced to where people are claiming 25-30% gains out of the single plys and God knows how much out of the multi layer, off the shoulder, open back shirts that are legal in other organizations. In a PL USA interview of a prominent bench presser the lifter had recorded competition lifts of 600 lbs raw and 835 shirted. This works out to a 39% increase in his performance due to the mechanical advantage of wearing the shirt. I couldn’t find the article but I recall a 1000 lb plus bencher saying that his raw bench was around 700 lbs. This would make his increase in the 43% range. The use of suits and wraps to enhance the squat and deadlift may not be as dramatic but the concept is just as absurd. The real question is; does the first lifter claim to have a 600 lb bench or an 835 lb bench? I don’t like to brag but, I’m old enough to get the senior citizen’s discount at Shoney’s, and I was still able to lift up the entire side of my minivan the other day. Oh, did I mention I used a hydraulic jack?

History tells us that anything associated with technology will continue to improve and as this happens the lifts associated with this equipment will become less and less representative of the actual strength of the lifter. So we can absolutely expect the ridiculous situation described to get worse.

Besides the basic dishonesty involved with this situation, I think there is a serious safety issue to consider. It is widely known that steroid users are much more prone to injury than natural lifters. With drug free training, muscles get stronger and there is a corresponding strengthening of tendons, ligaments and tendons. I recently had minor shoulder surgery to clean up an arthritic condition that had developed. The surgeon was using the dermis from a cadaver to form artificial cartilage in the joint. His plan was to attach the dermis with screws by drilling into the bone and using expanding anchors similar to what you would use when attaching something to drywall. He told my wife the surgery would last about an hour but it went beyond two hours which prompted my wife to call the life insurance company to see how much she could cash in on, if I didn’t make it. The problem turned out not to be life threatening, but in order for the anchors to expand he had to drill through the hard part of the bone and into softer bone tissue. It took him forever to get through the hard part of the bone because my body had adapted from years of lifting and had made this hardened layer much thicker than normal. This is part of the natural adaptive process that the body has that allows it to withstand the stress that you are going to put on it when you utilize your additional strength.

When using anabolic drugs the muscles adapt quickly but the tendons, ligaments and bones lag behind and the risk of injury to the connective tissues increases dramatically. With a bench shirt, in a matter of minutes, your “strength” may be increased by 40%. The bench shirt may provide some protection for the supportive tissue around the pecs, delts and triceps, but the elbows and wrists are not provided that protection and the chance of injury seems to be multiplied.

Recently a college football player was seriously hurt when he dropped approximately 300 lbs on his neck while benching. I strongly suspect that some very bad form and some inadequate spotting was involved but what if you added 40% more weight to the bar, and then added the difficulty of controlling the bar while adapting to a shirt. The whole scenario is a disaster waiting to happen.

My work as a powerlifting coach for high school athletes At St Xavier High School in Louisville Kentucky has given me a unique perspective on the situation. I was fortunate enough to have a tremendous facility, the support of the school, and a large pool of athletes with a tremendous work ethic. These factors and what I hope was adequate coaching helped us win 5 successive USAPL National Teenage Championships from 2003 -2007. Several years we had close to 100 athletes involved in a program that cumulated with a raw meet in early May. From there we attempted to determine who was capable of meeting the qualifying totals for Teen Nationals and who had the desire to go. At the national meet most everyone would be using the latest supportive equipment, so in order to be competitive we felt we had to do the same. With our new group of athletes we started the process of getting them adjusted to equipment in a short period of time so that they would be ready for a qualifying meet in a matter of several weeks. As a coach this was the time that I considered sheer hell. There were bloody knuckles from pulling on the shirts. First time lifters would swear that they would never get in there equipment and when they did, they found the pain prevented them from getting the bar to their chest or getting parallel in the squat, but we kept working and eventually we would made it work.

The whole process was not fun but the next part was even worse. Eventually the kids started thinking that this equipment was the coolest thing ever. We had spent months emphasizing the importance of completing a workout designed to make them stronger and more athletic. Now a great deal of time was spent getting in and out of equipment and much of the workout was ignored. It didn’t bother the kids much because, in their eyes, the “benefit” they were getting from the equipment far outweighed the actual strength training they were involved in before. It was also not surprising that this is where coaches from other sports began to question the benefits of powerlifting for their athletes.

I had been selling my program as a way of motivating athletes to lift with intensity and good form and promised that they would benefit greatly as athletes. I feel very strongly that in general I delivered on my promise, but I do feel that the athletic benefits of the program were compromised in the 5-6 week period that we were in equipment.

Dealing with parents became a challenge also. I told them not to show their mother’s the marks that the equipment left on their bodies because I was afraid that they would forbid their sons from participating. The kids would create their own stories when explaining the benefits of the equipment to their families or friends. One boy told his mother that when we started going heavy in the squat that the knee wraps kept his knees from exploding.

I feel powerlifting has the potential to appeal not only to those who want to test the limits of strength, but also those who want to become more athletic and build a better physique. High intensity exercise in the low to mid rep range is the most efficient way to build type IIB fast twitch muscle fibers and these fibers have the greatest potential for growth.

If my first experience with powerlifting involved seeing men and women who could barely walk because of the knee wraps, or torsos that were disfigured because of the shirts that their three buddies stuffed them into, then I would have a hard time making the connection between powerlifting and its ability to produce muscular and athletic individuals.

As intelligent individuals capable of making good decisions I would encourage you to ignore the babblings of those who tell us that this equipment is here to stay so we might as well get used to it. Let common sense overrule our egos. I returned to competition last year after a 5 year sabbatical when I entered the USAPL Raw Nationals. I didn’t have the opportunity to compete against the best lifters of my age as I did in the USAPL Master’s Nationals and the IPF Master’s Worlds. I missed that aspect of the competition, but I’m hoping that time and common sense will lead to a change in our system that will bring the greatest lifters on board with true unassisted powerlifting at the national and world championship level. In the raw meet I posted some numbers that weren’t overly impressive for a number of reasons but I absolutely found the experience much more enjoyable than previous meets and I can also tell someone what I lifted without adding a lengthy explanation about supportive equipment or feeling guilty about being dishonest to them or to myself.

Introducing Larry Traub

(WEBMASTER’S NOTE:  Larry Traub will be hosting his first USAWA competition on April 30th in his hometown of Georgetown, Indiana .   This competition will introduce the USAWA to several new lifters.  The following story is an introduction to Larry and his past involvement in powerlifting and weightlifting.  Larry is a great addition to the USAWA!)

by Larry Traub

Larry Traub (on left), of the Ledaig Heavy Athletics, receiving his award from the 2010 Dino Gym Grip Challenge Meet Director Ben Edwards (on right).

The ReMoND Machine – Release Movement Neuromuscular Developer

My name is Larry Traub. I am 57 years old. I have just completed 24 years of teaching at St. Xavier High School in Louisville Kentucky and 28 years of teaching all together. I am a math teacher (Primarily Geometry) but I have also taught an elective P.E. class called Strength and Fitness during most of my tenure at St. Xavier. I have been involved in the weightroom almost all of my years at St. X and have served in various roles including, strength coach, powerlifting coach, and weight room coordinator. I retired as the powerlifting coach in 2007 after winning 5 successive National Championships at the USAPL (drug tested) teenage championships.

I was also a gym owner in the early 80’s and built most all my own equipment. I did a little competitive bodybuilding. My last contest was in1982 in which I won the Mr. Kentucky title. I have been an active powerlifter since the mid 70’s and have won 9 master’s National Titles in the USAPL and a gold and a silver in the IPF world championships. I have held American Records in the squat (635 @ 198 in the 40-44 group, deadlift (700 @ 198 in the 40-44 group) and 1630 total in the 50 plus age group which was also a world record total @ 198.

I have a son and daughter who both earned college athletic scholarships. My daughter in basketball and my son in track. They both were national teenage powerlifting champions and American record holders. My daughter did a 400 lb deadlift @ 165 as a teenager and my son was a world champion and a world record holder in the subjunior division (He did a 690 deadlift as an 18 year old in the 242 lb class). He presently holds the school record for shotput at Indiana State University.

I tell you this, not to blow my own horn (well maybe a little bit), but to give you an idea of the depth of my involvement in weightlifting and sports over the course of four decades and hopefully give myself enough credibility to allow you to carefully consider my invention.

I have always been fascinated with the correlation between strength and athletic ability. In my 35+ years of involvement in weightlifting I have seen a tremendous shift in attitudes regarding the benefits of lifting for almost every athlete. My personal experience with an increase in jumping ability shortly after I first started squatting convinced me of the athletic benefits of lifting. After a year or so of high intensity squatting for powerlifting I was delighted to find I could grab the rim on a basketball court. A year or so later after my max squat had improved considerably I was expecting a corresponding increase in jumping ability but discovered no significant difference. I later discovered that the reason for my plateau in vertical jump was my brains inability to send a strong enough signal to fully utilize the fast twitch muscles I had developed. My limitations were not muscular they were neuromuscular.

Over the years I have read about and tried all sorts of programs that were supposed to increase the bodies neuromuscular capabilities. I set up extensive plyometric programs but saw no real effect other than joint pain due to the stress that the exercises put on the body.

I used light weights with maximum speed, but received no noticeable benefit. I discovered that the use of high speed reps with lighter weights had huge limitations because your body knows that at the end of the motion it must stop or the weight will leave your body and come back and cause injury. The use of bands and chains was supposed to be the solution of slowing the movement at the top, but if that were to work effectively then the resulting slowing of the motion would be counterproductive to the goal of developing maximum speed. I have seen athletes perform jump squats with a barbell and I thought immediately that the fear of the bar coming down on them and causing pain would prohibit them from putting maximum effort into the exercise which in turn would minimize the results. My son, while in college, was instructed to jump with sand bags on his shoulders. This seemed a lot more reasonable but there was still no way to see a measurable progression. (Was he jumping higher than he did last week?) There was also the considerable stress on the body of landing with the combined weight of his bodyweight and the sandbags.

The latest trend I see is the use of the Olympic lifts and various exotic versions of them as being the “do all, end all” for athletes in the weightroom. They do require explosive movement but the actual number of muscles that are involved in the explosive part of the lift are very limited and once again there is a great deal of stress put on the joints of the body. I also feel that way too often the athletes are doing the Olympic lifts whose primary benefits are neuromuscular and ignoring the continued development of fast twitch muscle throughout all the major muscle groups.

Ideally, athletes should continue to develop fast twitch muscle fiber through conventional means but have a way to improve their neuromuscular efficiency so they can fully utilize those muscle fibers, and do it all with minimum stress on the joints of the body. The solution, as I see it, is a release movement machine that allows you to accelerate a bar using various exercises that stimulate all major muscle groups. You must be able to release the bar without fear of injury so the bar must stay at the peak of movement and be safely lowered to the athlete for the next repetition. The exercise must also be measurable. (A certain amount of weight is moved through a certain range of motion and progress occurs when you either move the same weight through a greater range of motion or move more weight through the same range of motion.)

This is what my machine is designed to do and I would appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate.

Sincerely,

Larry Traub

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