Ever since I did the post about legs – chest – back, I focused more on these muscle groups. For the last two weeks I’ve been heading to the gym 3 times a week to train the largest muscle groups. In the beginning my muscles used to be soar after a training session, but like the muscles always do. They get used to the intensive training and reduce the pain in the muscles.
The 3 largest muscle groups are you legs, chest and back. With the “squat” you will train your legs and that’s exactly what I want. Anyone familiar with squats will know that the shaft can hurt like hell if you don’t put it on your shoulder blades. Moving the shaft up a centimeter or two will make a huge difference and that’s the difference between a little pain and a lot of pain.
For anyone that don’t know what squats are just take a look at the picture. You’ll see the man in a position where he put the shaft in his neck and he bents his knees. This is the easy part, the hard part is to get back up again and repeat the same motion. Another part which annoys me is the part where you put your hands. As you can see in the picture you have to stretch your arms and bend them over the shaft, which will make the exercise less comfortable.
Anyway, as you can see the shaft is leaning on the neck and when you’ve got, in my case 80 kg, leaning on your neck, you will notice it’s uncomfortable. There is a simple way to reduce the shaft from leaning on your neck and that’s a protective covering. There are a couple types of protective covering ranging from cheap ones, that don’t protect you from anything, to protections that absorb almost all the pressure, so that you can focus on your exercise and not the pain.
The last 2 sessions I did, I decided to use a protective covering. Usually I didn’t do this because I thought I was too cool to use it. But how foolish I was. Thanks to the protection I could focus on the exercise and not the pain and because of that, I lifted an extra 30 kilograms without having any pain in my neck or shoulder blades.
To keep the story short. If you are doing squats already and you get the same pain in the neck and shoulder area like I did, I recommend you using a protective covering. If you are planning to do squats in the near future, keep in mind that there is protective covering you could use. If the gym you’re going to doesn’t have one, you could ask them to purchase it. If they refuse you could always buy 1 for yourself. They should only cost like $20-$30 so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Sun, Jun 1, 2008
Sport