Balancing Chest to Back - Part1

I thought I'd spend a little time addressing one of the areas that people need to be aware of, which is the ratio of chest to back exercises (or horizontal push to horizontal pull to be more precise). Whilst here at The Hardcore Workout, we're about motivating you to push yourself to your limits, we want to ensure you do it in a way that will create a healthy, injury free and functional body. Your body needs to be able to do whatever tasks are required of it and be pain free, as well as be aesthetically pleasing, but too often people find the aesthetics govern the fitness training. I think this is particularly the case when it comes to upper body exercises.

I think guys might be even more susceptible to this problem, because one of their main aims in weight training is to get a bigger chest (large Pecs) and so they do extra work on the chest exercises at the expense of the opposing exercises for the back. Basically, they can't see their backs in the mirror so easily, and probably don't care as much about what they look like anyway, so don't consider it as important.

Another factor in this imbalance is the ease of doing press ups and chin ups as an equipment free, easy to grasp exercise. Many people are doing bodyweight exercises with no equipment. It's a great way to workout and can produce good effects (check out some of the bodyweight workouts Craig Ballantyne does in Turbulence Training) but I see a lot of press ups in these workouts and not enough back work to balance it.

I've trained in kickboxing since I was a teenager and our instructor has us do a lot of press ups. It's an easy exercise for instructors to throw at you. I then joined the Royal Marines at 19, and we would do hundreds of press ups a day. It was the standard punishment for anything they could think of, and sometimes it even seemed like it was just a way for instructors to pass the time, watching you bang out 50-100 press ups.

I think maybe another factor is that chest pressing just feels more fun to do? I don't know about you, but I find benching is just more enjoyable than doing rows.

However, in my mid twenties I started to get neck pain and really tight shoulders and eventually started to pull muscles underneath my shoulder blades because I was so imbalanced. It wasn't until I got into the fitness industry that I became aware of this concept of balance and recruiting mid back muscles to stabilise the shoulder that I realised just how unbalanced I'd been in my training over the years. I learned that I was suffering from what is termed upper cross syndrome, and needed to address the way I was training.

Upper cross syndrome is a common result of doing weight training in an imbalanced way. It can also come from having poor posture due to desk jobs, working on a computer, driving a lot, or similar activities. If you do both weight training and work at a desk, your chances are even greater. The symptoms are rounded forward shoulders, a forward head position and usually a feeling of tightness and pain in the neck and shoulders. These symptoms are a result of the muscles in the front of the shoulder being too tight and the muscles at the back of the shoulder being weaker and over-stretched.

If you are experiencing these symptoms, then you definitely need to address the balance within your training regime. Even if you're not suffering at the moment, then I would suggest thinking about the future and making this change too.

In the next post I will be talking about how to address the problem in some more detail.

Until next time,

Andrew and Alex