Today’s show brings on Angus Bradley. Angus is a strength coach and podcast host from Sydney, Australia. He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar. After focusing primarily on weightlifting for the first half of his career Angus finds himself spending as much time “outside of his lane” as possible trying to identify the principles that transcend all human movement. Like many guests on this show, Angus has been well-educated in the compression/expansion training ideals proliferated by Bill Hartman that are pushing our industry forward. Angus is frequently sharing next level knowledge from his social media platform and podcast, and he works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between.
I’ve always been trying to “figure out” weightlifting in context of athletic performance. There are coaches with a lot of different opinions on which lifts athletes should do, and some elite sports performance professionals have athletes do little to even no traditional barbell work. In my own journey, I found myself a much more powerful, but slightly less elastic athlete in my mid-20s after 12 years of loading my body through squats, Olympic lifts and the like. On the flip-side, I’ve had athletes who I honestly believe would struggle to achieve their highest peak without some solid help from barbell work. Rather than only assigning more, or less lifting to a particular athlete, I enjoy knowing the binding principles of barbell work and different body types.
In my search for answers, Angus Bradley is a huge wealth of knowledge. He is highly experienced in weightlifting methods and has a deep understanding of the principles of compression and expansion in a variety of exercises, and in determining strategies based on body type. On the show today, Angus talks about squatting and hinging from ribcage and pelvic floor perspectives, the importance and impact of pressure management in how “strong” athletes are at various lifts, and how to train and manage various body types in light of preventing un-wanted compensations and shape changes in the body. This is a podcast I wish I had listened to myself, 15 years ago.
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Timestamps and Main Points
6:30 Breaking existing paradigms in the performance training industry, and how Angus thinks of the “necessary patterns” of squat, hinge, push, pull for training athletes 12:45 How a squat differs from a hinge from a pelvic floor pressure management perspective 17:00 A re-hash of “expanded” vs. “compressed” types of athletes, as well as a chat on compressive strategies in the big lifts 28:15 The compressive strategies by which athletes actually lift increasing weights in training vs. an increased activation of relative motor units and other factors that tie more readily into athletic performance 44:05 How to look at an athlete who wants to increase vertical jump in light of an athlete’s pressure management strategy 52:30 Some rules of thumb in navigating the day by day process of adding weight in strength training without piling on compressive compensations in athletes 59:15 The errors we have made in posterior chain training, and how to address the posterior chain in context of compression and expansion strategies 1:05.45 How an athlete becomes “quad dominant” and how to work with that in light of pressure systems“The S&C world has always looked to powerlifting, and said, “well you are the squat guys, can you tell us how to squat?”
“But there is a certain kind of quality that we are trying to capture when we prescribe a squat or a hinge…. it’s no longer about where the bar is on your body, but what is the muscular strategy at the thorax and the pelvis”
“The two different opposing strategies as I see them when it comes to the thorax and the pelvis, it doesn’t squat, it doesn’t hinge, it just compresses and expands”
“What we look as a squat is pure vertical translation of a pelvis… and then hinge is pushing the pelvis back, horizontally in a straight line”
“When you reach parallel, the femurs are about as IR’ed as they are going to get in that squat”
“The squat is an expansion dominant strategy…. the hinge is just the opposite”
“The deadlift is a pure compression movement”
“If you have a narrow ISA you have a “blown up soccer ball” in your ribs””
“Supination is the inflated ball, pronation is that ball as its mushing into the ground”
“As you are descending (in a squat) inhaling can really facilitate those hip flexion mechanics by expanding the pelvis”
“People who can’t throw their guts back up (at the bottom of a squat) will lean forward… you don’t want to do that in a squatty context because we are not practicing falling forward there”
“The laying down of more muscle tissue over time is more compressive in nature”
“(Referring to my subpar deep squat history) You are a good squatter the way I define a squat, which is your ability to yield… your ability to yield is your strength as an athlete”
“There is so much pressure in there (in the thorax and pelvis)”
“There is such a reciprocal relationship between the pelvic floor and the thoracic diaphgram that you can make a lot of good assumptions about what is going on at the pelvic floor (and the foot) based on what is going on at the ribcage”
“For most people, you want to find, not what they have tried to turn themselves into, but what they have tried to be from the get-go”
“When I put load on you (a narrow infra-sternal angle individual), there are going to be parts of your body that are going to over-compress”
“For an expansion person, try to drive as much expansion as possible; you can build a lot of strength with those expansion strategies… acknowledge what they are, what direction they are heading in, and then act accordingly based off that”
“You can chase heavy weights to an extent while driving a yielding strategy, you just have to stack the deck more, you can elevate the heels”
“With your muscle driven athletes, you can keep compressing them (with lifting), given they aren’t losing their movement options”
“The hedge (if you are unsure what to do) is throw a little weight on someone and drive an expansion strategy (via heels elevated vertical squatting)”
“That the narrative I was born into, (back training) was seen as this ultimate hedge… you can’t go wrong, strong back! But then you get all these people where the lats have squeezed all of the air out of the back of your ribcage and then they have absolutely no ability to rotate”
“The bones are the constraints for the pressure system to flow through”
“Due to limitations in proximal structures, some people are unable to truly train their hamstrings”
“The idea of a compensation is that there is a reward for the thing you exchange for it, so it is just making sure you are getting a good deal for your compensations”
“If you are an expanded axial skeleton, then that biases you into ER, and then you like to be on the balls of your feet, which is like concentric ER… that’s how some people find a sneaky compensation strategy over that overall inhaled skeleton”
“It’s a lot of coordination to keep that pelvis over the pelvic diaphragm and drive those guts down into it to expand the pelvis”
“Your body just wants to stop you from falling over and peeing your pants”
About Angus Bradley
Angus Bradley is a strength coach and podcast host from Sydney, Australia. He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar.
After focusing primarily on weightlifting for the first half of his career Angus finds himself spending as much time ‘outside of his lane’ as possible trying to identify the principles that transcend all human movement. He works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between.
Angus has been mentored by Jamie Smith from Melbourne Strength Culture, and formerly dropped out of his major in journalism to tour Australia with his band.
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