Static Holds For Injury Prevention

Injury prevention runs the risk of becoming an industry all by itself, staffed with kindly souls with Swiss balls who advise previously-active and healthy against doing basically anything at all, on the true but overstated grounds that it could prove harmful. That's the case across all aspects of society, from (say) office chairs to child-rearing, but nowhere is the emphasis on injury prevention more noticeable than in sports.

On the other hand, it’s simply true that if you push yourself, whether you’re a great athlete or an average Joe who likes to get better and challenge yourself, you’re running an increased risk of injury.

So what’s a sensible but athletic person to do?

Some people will shy away from more and more exercises and spend more and more time doing ‘corrective’ or ‘prehab’ training – and some will simply say, the heck with it, and go back to benching the world with horrible form until their arms wind up halfway down their chests.

But shouldn’t we be able to figure out a way to build injury prevention into our training? After all, getting fit should get you, well, fit – you should be less injured, less hurt, and more functional, as you train.

Let’s start with something that seems to have gotten lost along the way: Training is itself a form of injury prevention. Athletes, from sprinters to football players, and from weekend basketball players to world class track and field athletes, are using their time in the gym to make themselves more ‘sport-proof,’ and more ‘life-proof’ too.

In order to come up with an injury prevention protocol that does the job, we need to know what the job is. What are the injuries you can reasonably expect to get in training? Well, sometimes, like Mathias Steiner, you drop a 432-pound barbell on the back of your neck, but that’s not the typical training injury, not least because most people couldn’t get a bar that heavy overhead in the first place. Most training injuries are musculoskeletal foulups and the actual injury is usually to connective tissues, especially tendons.

Because tendons don’t have anything like as good a blood supply as muscles, some people find that their muscles get stronger far faster than their tendons and they’re actually able to hurt themselves by pulling on the tendons with more force than the tendons can cope with. I had a training partner who found this happened to him regularly, especially with strong muscles that respond quickly to training, like the biceps. 

The other key causes of injuries in the gym are simply pulling tendons while struggling with a hard movement, or poor alignment leading to injuries to the tendons around a joint. The tendons that we tend to pull in the gym aren’t even the ones attached to the big prime mover muscles – they’re the fragile ones of long tendinous muscles like the supraspinatus and the iliotibial band.

As underdeveloped support musculature like the serratus and the scapula complex muscles fatigue and quit, the strain is thrown onto tendons that were never designed to take it. Often we’re not even aware that we have a tendon injury – we just know it hurts!

Ever since Charles Atlas promised young men they could pack on slabs of muscle by ‘dynamic tension’ (isometrics – working against an immobile object) static holds have received askance glances; tarred with the brush of phony get-fit-quick schemes, they’ve been ignored too long by people who could seriously benefit from them.

And a growing body of research since then shows that for strength and especially for hypertrophy, dynamic resistance work is more effective than static resistance work. I’m not disputing that. What I’m advocating isn’t anything like Atlas’ notoriously false material.

But there were people who used static holds to great effect and were open about their methods, like John Grimek, a major advocate of static holds, which he referred to as ‘supports.’ Gymnasts use difficult static positions like the planche and iron cross to develop physiques that turn heads – and strength that does more.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating: can static holds work for you? It’s extremely easy to find out. I’ve outlined the ways you can use static holds to get more out of your training – without changing the training you do all that much.

Incorporating Static Holds Into Your Training

The easiest way to build static holds into your training is to put them in at the end of an exercise. Let’s say you’re doing overhead presses.

Do one or two one-minute sets (if you can, and after a whole, you'll be able to for sure!).

The effect of this add-on to your regimen is to take the big prime mover muscles out of the exercise – they’re often not really challenged by static holds, since the load is in such a mechanically advantageous position (more on that later!). However the support musculature has to work harder because it is enduring more time under tension, resulting in toughened, injury-proof rotator cuffs, serratus and intercostal muscles and improved tonus and strength in the often-neglected scapular muscles – and both scapular retractors and elevators get some work in an overhead static hold.

Transferring this to the bench press, for instance, will give similar benefits

There’s one benefit to this choice that I haven’t discussed yet – when you hold a position for a long time, your body learns that this position is normal. When you hold a position under a load or some kind of stress, the body learns it that much more quickly, once it finally accepts the necessity and stops trying to cheat by using movements it already knows. As a result of these two facts, static holds might be some of the best technique practice you can do: you’re strengthening the support musculature and learning the position properly at the same time, while simultaneously allowing the muscles to ‘relax’ (tip: don’t actually relax unless you do want to imitate Mathias Steiner!) into the correct shape for the lift.

Your Golgi tendon organs will learn the new ‘right length’ for the muscles they control, and the tendons themselves will be strengthened. That should smooth your progress when you come back to the lift – and creating a situation where the top of the lift feels like a natural, comfortable place to be will do wonders for your confidence! And your athletic performance!

The other method of using static holds for injury prevention consists of using these techniques in mechanically disadvantageous positions, to target specific muscles or to obtain the effect of a ‘loaded stretch.’

An example of this would be to hold the top position of a lateral raise for time: it’s the weakest position your arm can be in, at right angles to your body with the load a long way from your centreline, and a lot of leverage is working against you, which is why you can’t lateral raise anything like what you can press. That leverage is the reason the lift triggers such hypertrophy in the deltoids, but you can use lifts like this or the standing barbell extension – pushing the bar out in front of you at chest height and holding it there – to strengthen your support muscles by challenging them at angles that your big lifts won’t hit them at, all the while allowing the prime movers to get some rest.

Have you tried using static holds in your regular workout regimen and found it worked? Or found it didn't?  Whether you have a query or a tale to tell, drop me a line in the comments section.