👋 Hey.
Welcome to issue #28 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (3.5 min read):
🩻 Slouch remedy
A few weeks back I talked about the trap bar smash.
It can help relieve commonly tight upper trapezius muscles (between shoulders and neck).
But the trap bar smash is a band-aid.
Because the underlying problem is stress and overuse of the muscle.
See, the latissimus dorsi (lats) are our biggest upper body muscles.
They're the wing-like muscles that connect our arms to our lower spine👇
And according to Andy Galpin, it’s extremely common if you can’t activate them.
Which can lead to:
- 🦴 Poor posture (slouching)
- 💥 Tension, pain and injuries (overusing other muscles like our upper traps and arms)
- ⚖️ Instability, pain and injuries (the lats stabilise our spine and shoulders)
- 🏆 Sub-maximal physical performance (the biggest upper body muscle sitting on the sideline)
Here’s the test:
If you can contract your lats sitting here reading this, you can probably contract them when you need to. Lifting. Swimming. Rowing. Goanna wrestling.
And if not, you can probably assume the same.
How to fix it:
If you haven’t been using your lats for a couple decades or more, it won’t happen overnight.
It’ll take persistent, focused effort.
A light band will be your best mate here.
- Hook it behind a closed door (so it’s coming from above you)
- Grab it facing the door
- Step back and pop your arm out at a 90º angle in front of you
- Pull it down beside your body
- Go slow, focus on activating the lat the whole time
- Put your non-working hand on your working lat for feedback
- Do 3 sets of 10 reps (each side) as often as you can
Visual with a bloke using 2 bands 👇
I struggle to activate my left lat.
You can tell because my left trap is bigger than my right. I overcompensate.
But just being aware of it helps.
Then I can remember to switch it on when doing the exercise above, swimming, lifting and whenever else I need to.
Hopefully it can help you too.
💬 Quote: hard work
“Hard work is so often the answer. The question is so often irrelevant.”
– Ross Edgley (Extreme adventurer, ultra-marathon sea swimmer and author)
Hard work is a pretty general term. Comes in all shapes and sizes.
Usually some combination of consistency, persistence and effort.
But when learning from the world's best performers, it's a common theme.
- 🧗 Ross Edgley: 1,000+ rope climbs, 7 days a week for 10 weeks (in prep to rope climb the height of Mt Everest in 24 hours)
- 🎻 The Beatles: 5 hours on stage, 6 nights a week in a seedy strip joint in Hamburg (their "apprenticeship" where they got good before they got famous)
- 🏋 Arnold Schwarzenegger: 5 hours a day in the gym (when he was competing)
Yes, some of these stories are extreme. The everyday athlete needs more balance in life. So it's about figuring out the shape and size for you.
Look out for a deeper dive into grit soon.
😀 The science of a smile
‘Cheerfulness in the face of adversity.’
A science-backed tool the Royal Marines use to improve their performance.
See researchers from the UK’s Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance ran an experiment.
They had cyclists ride to exhaustion.
Some were shown subliminal cues of happy faces. Some sad.
Those shown happy faces rode further. And with less perceived effort (it felt easier).
They reckon it works in 2 ways:
1. 🗺 Adaptive coping strategies
A positive frame of mind means we can better adapt to hard and changing conditions. Shown to improve performance. (More on this soon)
2. 😃 Happy hormones
A positive frame of mind pumps us up with chemicals like serotonin. It helps rein in the pain. And we can push on.
Me telling you to be positive isn’t real helpful though.
But the cool thing is:
We’ve got our own cheerfulness switch.
See our brains don’t know the difference between a real smile and a fake one.
And research from the University of South Australia found:
Smiling (real or fake) lights up the amygdala. Which:
"Releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.”
So whether you’re pushing it up in an endurance event or managing your team through a draining, long-term project… High spirits in low times are gonna help our performance.
Harness the science of a smile.
When it gets tough, get grinning.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
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