DO the oblique muscles need to be tightened, in order to help hip hieght in sprinting?
If an exercise shortens a muscle, does it strengthen the muscle?
I have read that muscles can become shortened and weakened with imbalaned posture. But I have also read muscles can become lengthened and weakened.
I’ve got the oblique handles, but my obliques are not very tone compared to some athletes obliques.
How would I go about toning up my obliques?
Side bridges don’t seem to do it for me.
Are you referring to the muscles themselves, or the fat on top of them? These are two different issues. Getting rid of the fat has nothing to do with oblique training.
I was not talking about the fat on top of the obliques.
I was talking about the muscle. I want to tone up my oblique muscles.
I dont have much fat on top of my abs and obliqes. I work out, and I dont eat pizza.
Fat has never been an issue for me. I could shed any fat in less than a fortnight if I wanted to.
It’s the muscle that I am interested in. Muscle, strength and performance.
I’m still not sure what you mean by toning the obliques. What kind of training have you been doing (not just abs)? In what way are they deficient? Is it a cosmetic or performance issue?
It’s obviously a performance issue. If it was a cosmetics issue, I would have visited bodybuilding.com and would have recieved a much quicker answer.
It’s a performance issue.
Here was my very first sentance in the thread;
‘DO the oblique muscles need to be tightened, in order to help hip hieght in sprinting?’…
Does that not suggest that I am interested in performance?
And from ny last post;
‘…It’s the muscle that I am interested in. Muscle, strength and performance.’
The only time I mentioned fat was after you brought the subject of fat, in to this thread.
By toning, I mean making them more hard and dense. i,e ‘stronger and harder.’ I,e; ‘toning’ them up.
For Christs sake, you are extreemly knowladge able and one of the most frequent and experianced members of the board. How the hell could you not understand what I mean when I type words such as;
‘Performance’
‘Strenth’
‘Balance’
in-balance
posture
‘Hip - hieght’ and ‘Sprinting.’
For the third time, this is not a fat or cosmetics issue.
It is a performance issue - as I have mentioned in every one of my posts.
You know what? Forget it. I am loosing the will now.
Sprinting by itself provides the stimulus for your body to make all the necessary structural and central adaptations . No need to worry.
Goose232, chill out! 
acidhell, would you say that this applies to (a) all performance levels and (b) all events? What makes you believe this notion? Thanks!
Well, its pretty obvious isn’t it? Your body adapts and makes the necessary adaptations to the demands that are placed upon it, so as to to become more efficient in subsequent exposures to the same stimulus.
So sprinting is a tremendously powerful activity, in which you basically fight gravity. So you get stronger in it. (Specifically some very prominent Structural adaptations are upper hamstring hypertrophy in the glute-ham tie ins, glute hypertrophy, adductor magnus hypertrophy since its a strong hip extensor as well as provide an anti-gravitational aid in the first stage of the support phase, along with core strengthening). So there you have it.
Every high intensity stimulus provokes a central adaptation in the nervous system (generalised effect, spill-over effect to other activies) and topical/structural as well.
Optimally,you just need to spread your CNS resources preferably to one more High intensity stimulus ( plyos, weights or throws), in order not to limit your rate of progress down the road , to manage your neural resources in a safe way (and sort of “expand your CNS capacity”) without excessively increasing sprint volumes (increased risk of injury) thus making VERY good tapers , which is essential to peak performance, and also provide short term potentiation in the activities to follow in the following days.
And yes it applies to ALL EVENTS and to all levels!
I believe the higher the level, the more attention should be paid to deloading from additional high intensity stimuli, to exploit any intensification in the desired event, only after your CNS resources have been expanded as much as possible.
Hope my message is comprehensible, ( i am greek)
I think it was Charles Poliquin who wrote about this. Basically, he said the obliques have very little trainability and that work you get from lifting, sprinting, and basic abdominal work will cover it. I tend to agree as if I am sprinting 2-4x a week, doing medicine ball circuits, lifting without a belt, and abdominal work, I don’t see where extra oblique work fits in or contributes to my program (assuming there are no specific issues present).
It was the reference to “tightening” the obliques that was throwing me. That’s usually a cosmetic term.
The obliques play an important roll in leg lift by projecting the hip forward, thereby reducing the amount of work performed by the hip flexors. This explosive quality of the obliques will obviously be developed by sprinting itself along with supplemental high intensity work such as med ball throws and weightlifting. Most direct work for the abdominal muscles will be more directed toward low intensity strength endurance. Trying to add high intensity specialized work for the obliques on top of the other high intensity elements will probably just overtrain the muscles.
Is there a specific aspect of your performance or running technique that you think indicates a deficiency in oblique strength or endurance? In your original post you said your obliques are not as “tone” as other athletes and that side bridges are not doing the trick, but again that really sounds like a cosmetic issue. The side bridge is a terrific exercise for developing strength endurance in the obliques. If you can perform a substantial volume of side bridges and other ab work, I’d say the obliques are pretty fit. In that case, I would look elsewhere for other performance limiting factors.
You say:
And then:
Therefore, sprinting on its own can’t “provide the stimulus for ALL the necessary structural and central adaptations”? Why would you need one more high intensity stimulus to achieve the goals you describe, keeping in mind that these probably won’t be achieved by “excessively increasing sprint volumes” anyway? And which of these activities would you go with? Also, why sprinting alone would “limit your rate of progress down the road”?
I would like to hear your experiences in other events, if that’s OK with you, as I haven’t got any! Unless this is only a notion/theory at the moment, you tend to believe in, with which I am fine!
Good stuff!
PS apologies to Goose232 for interfering with his thread!
I read that the obiliques are the prime movers of the abdominal group, don’t know if that is right or not.
That being said I train the obiliques in all my athletes - sprinters and throwers but I train them differently in respect that throwers need obiliques as a mover where as I think sprinters don’t. I would train them similar to normal ab movements at low intensity.
Sorry for slightly hijacking this thread but I can’t create a new topic within the Strength subforum, so could someone delete this post and repost it as a new topic?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcvxNXbAn7s&feature=related
Watch this video you won’t believe it!How did this guy get so ridiculously strong? I can’t find any info on him and his website is in French. www.dominiclacasse.com
sorry again! it is vaguely relevant though!
Actally, I’m delighted some of the big guns, and anyone else for that mater, have decided to step in to the thread.
Thank you.
What role do the obliques play in sprinting? To me it would appear that they limit torso rotation with some pelvic tilt control thrown in.
I agree with acidhell in part that sprinting provides the primary stimulus needed, however I disagree that it is all that is needed. If it were you would not be running tempo, lifting weights or doing plyo’s. We use these as tools that exaggerate the requirements of sprinting and just as the methods listed exaggerate the power and aerobic requirements, a few Russian twists, side med ball throws or bridges wouldn’t hurt in training the obliques to limit torsion - after all you’re going to be doing some abs anyway, why not spread it around?
Good questions, nikoluski.
An additional high intensity stimulus is desirable for many reasons as i said before.
Look, i FIRMLY believe in Charlie’s CNS concept
. A little abstract ideas, but he was definately ahead of his time, great intuition… I think the concept of the CNS pictured as a cup, is an extremely valid one. On high intensity days, you want to fill the cup, but you don’t want to it to overflow ( if you chronically overflow the cup, you will create big performances drop, and the whole supercompensation thing will get a little screwed, and besides sprinting when that neurally fatigued is detrimental. The mechanics can can change dramatically).
So with THAT in mind, you instantly become more flexible in your training applications. By the way, the content of the cup is obviously the neural stress induced by the various high intensity stimuli.
Neural stress is influenced by such things as (number of motor units exposed to stress, the intensity of the stimulus, the volume of the stimulus, and the actual force output in an absolute sense).
So, i think as you get more advanced, you cant just keep sprinting and sprinting and sprinting and fill the cup with just sprinting as the high intensity stimulus (though it CAN be done, but its not that safe and optimal). You may have to increase volume too much for it to happen, and you may injure yourself down the road…
And besides , if you keep hammering one high intesnity stimulus over and over with absolutely no variety, your CNS just LOVES to inhibit itself to protect you (but still in the general picture it can be avoided if you manage the cns resources properly, i believe).
So spreading high intensity work over another stimulus, is optimal.
You manage your cns resources (which is imperative if you want to make continual advancements) and create short term potentiantion for subsequent stimuli (especially if they differ in the force time characteristics, imo). Thats why you must supplement your training with weights for example, with what remaining CNS juice is left on high int. days.
ps. i am trying to improve my english, i know:o