When you lift with a belt you don’t move more weight because you got synthetic abs. You move more weight because you use your abs Better.
If you want to get Better and Stronger at lifting, you want to move your light weights the same way you’d move heavy weights. You need good bracing to move big weights, a belt helps with this. Develop your lifts by using a belt plus proper abs/brace with light weights!
You’ll get stronger quicker, you’ll move heavier average weights in training, you’ll recover faster between workouts. You’ll develop better technique. You’ll have less chance of injury.
Plus training with a belt gives you the option of training “Beltless.” If you never wear a belt, that’s just how you lift. It’s not “special.”
This was exactly my thinking until recently, when I messed up my back/hips deadlifting. I’ve ordered a belt and will be learning to use it properly as soon as it arrives.
Anyway, thanks for asking these questions. And thanks to @FlatsFarmer and @TrainForPain for weighing in.
Is that you saying use a belt for your top weight/set, take it off for the back off work or use it with light weights also to develop your brace? Sorry I think I’m just misreading it.
I think it was Jordan Shallow that said you should never allow your beltless best work to be below 75% of your belted work on the squat.
Not to put words in his mouth, but my thought here is you wear the belt even on some of your lighter sets to learn to use it/ develop your brace. You can carry that skill to your heavier loading.
That’s fair, but I don’t think a reason to avoid a belt. I honestly can’t imagine this not taking care of itself, anyway. How much is someone getting out of a belt?
Keep the belt on during the back off sets to keep them more like the heavy work. Especially if you continue on with Hatfield stuff. You might get into CAT training, where you try to move the bar really fast on back-off sets. Tightness and positioning are really important for that stuff.
And once you’re good at using the belt, and your technique is (theoretically) a little “tighter” you have the option of taking off the belt and really challenging your (theoretically) new and better positioning.
That’s not 25+% in either case, though (and he said “squats”!!!) was my point.
I didn’t watch the video, so I am completely missing context, but I just feel like you’d have to be doing something nuts to not bring your beltless squat along with you.
With total respect;
The flip side of what Dr. Shallow is saying is that if you have butt wink and a sore back, and you don’t use a belt, it might be because you’re not using your external obliques properly.
And then when you put a belt on, you feel that it’s “loose” over your obliques, so you adjust how you take in your air until you “feel” your obliques come on and push against the belt.
Suddenly your brain is more aware of what your body is doing because it can “feel” your mid section better,
I’ve had some interrogations myself about this because sometimes my belt moves a bit and I have some butt wink on squats.
Yet my obliques is probably my muscle that gets the most sore from heavy squats. They are almost cramping on max effort lifts. I’ve been bracing correctly for so long though.
So I don’t know. Perhaps my tiny waist combined to lack of abs training (and I literally trained my obliques directly once in ten years) is the culprit there
I also feel some of these “how you should move” arguments go down silly routes. For instance, there used to be a bunch of stuff about the prisoner squat and sitting in it and now that’s how we should squat with a barbell and APT shows what a immobile lump you are.
I’m not saying we should tolerate dysfunction, but there simply is a difference in squatting with a bar on your back and sitting down on your heels. It’s not a normal human function to squat a 500 lbs. barbell to a depth arbitrarily decided by what’s easy to judge in competition. I have to do that differently than how I move in life (which isn’t going to require some major abdominal bracing, as it turns out).
I guess all that to say, I think a belt is there for the purpose of lifting. If you can’t get out of bed or off the floor without one, you have some work to do. I do think it’s greatest strength is in its cueing - it doesn’t suddenly run steel rods parallel to my spinal column or anything.
Did you guys see when Thibadeau was logging his training and doing a bunch of golf moves? A few times he said his obliques got painful because he lacked internal hip rotation on the one side, and he strained the oblique compensating.
I hip shift to the right when I squat and it always blasts my ride side. Like hip/ribs/back where my oblique would be. I know therapists types are always talking about hip/knee issue being caused by lack of internal hip rotation.
Do you get any pinchy hip pain with the sore obliques?
I do think my hips are a lot of why my right knee hurts worse than my left. The band mobilization thing seems to help a little. I don’t really notice anything weird in my obliques though.
Had to go back and quote this as felt it was too good to be left where it was, and I feel it got swallowed up in a discussion about belts. Lets hope you are not arrested for carrying concealed weapons of mass destruction.
Had a buddy in town. We just did the fun stuff in the gym. We did a lot of yoke walks and farmer carries. He was good at these and I was awful! It definitely pointed out that I don’t hold a brace well enough at all. They also made my upper back sore, so I’d like to incorporate these more. I’m not sure how - I know I need to give up some lifting volume - but these are definitely way more fun than calf raises and shrugs.
My buddy is a powerlifter, so obviously stronger than me. Today he spent a lot of time helping me better get set under the bar and hold a brace when I squat. I think that’s going to pay off. He then had some crazy BFR cuffs we used and did some curls and triceps, which was fun enough. It’s been cool just doing different things; I kinda didn’t realize how much fun I wasn’t having
