Today’s podcast features movement focused strength and performance coach Julien Pineau. Julien is the founder of Strongfit, which started as a gym, and is now a full educational program for coaches and fitness/movement enthusiasts. Sports have been a part of Julien’s life since he was young, and he has athletic backgrounds in a variety of areas from competitive swimming, to mixed martial arts, strongman, and more.
In 1993, Julien began his coaching career as a conditioning and grappling coach for the MMA gym where he trained and in 2008, he opened his own gym that focuses on strongman training. Julien has a fascinating ability to visualize and correct proper human movement patterns, and has worked with athletes from a wide variety of disciplines. He is a man on a journey inward as much as he is outward.
The current world of training seems to exist on a level of “exercise proliferation” much more than it does digging into the main principles of human performance and adaptation. Coaches often times have their own favorite exercises and drills, and have athletes perform them to “technical perfection”, citing the ability to hit particular positions as a marker for program success.
On today’s podcast, Julien Pineau goes into the fallacy of training athletes based on one’s preferred exercise selection, or technical positions, while rather viewing training on the level of the “human first”. Julien views training on the level of the entire athlete, and has exercise principles starting with the “inner most” human mechanisms. He gets into his ideas on internal and external torque chains extensively through this show, and describes how to fit muscle tensioning patterns to the needs of athletes in the realms of speed, strength and injury prevention.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
3:14 – Women’s work capacity and ability to adapt to chronic stress, relative to men, with the crossfit games competitors as an example 6:36 – How strength training setups may be modulated for females versus males in terms of extending work out over a longer period of time, versus more dense packets of work 9:16 – How one’s perception and attitude in a training session is a critical aspect of adaptation 11:27 – The importance of tension over position in strength and athletic movement 17:20 – The pros and cons of social media in athletic development 21:18 – The innate movement pattern element of sandbag training and its role in facilitating hamstring activation 23:17 – The origins of Julien’s thoughts on internal and external torque chains 33:51 – Squatting patterns in light of internal and external torques, and how sandbag lifting fits into the squat and hinge pattern and muscle activation 46:34 – Links between internal torque/external torque and sprinting, and practices in the gym that can lead to issues over a long period of time 54:19 – Olympic lifting and external torque, as it relates to block starts or sprinting 1:05:32 – Types of athletes who may be external torque chain dominant 1:07:56 – How the external torque chain fits with more sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system elements, while the internal torque chain fits with more parasympathetic elements 1:23:43 – How various body types will impact one’s squatting technique, with relation to internal and external torque 1:27:08 – Upper extremity sport (such as swimming) concepts in relation to internal and external torque production 1:32:06 – How to determine how an athlete’s body wants to squat, and how to tap into an individual’s squat techniqueJulien Pineau Quotes:
“We always knew women needed more volume than the men, but the question was, how far are we pushing this?”
“Men are very good at acute responses; in terms of constant stress women can take almost anything”
“Winning matters… if every time you went into a workout you felt like you lost, forget the hormonal levels, you are not going to be successful in the long run”
“Go to the world championship and you will not see two people squatting the same way, but they are squatting world records. The tension is the same, the position is not”
“(As a coach) the less I gotta talk, the better we are doing”
“Are you making them squat a barbell because it makes you look good, or because it’s necessary for the athlete?”
“The position that comes to them is their position, not mine”
“So you are supposed to create strength externally rotating to the outside, but how about rotating to the inside? Have you ever seen someone punching throwing his fist out (externally rotating)?”
“It seems to me that either you go towards that (hara/center) point, or away from it, there seems to be two torque chains, one that goes towards the center, and one that goes away from it, that is the first principle I look at, when I look at movement”
“If you train the adductors and inside fibers of the hammy, it will allow you to create more internal torque on the way down, which means you can load the squat better on the way down, in order to load the spring and release to lift more weight on the way up”
“We do things the right way differently, but the wrong way the same”
“Carrying a sandbag is all hammies and glutes, it’s not quads”
“You shift to the right with the squat with a barbell. I’m going to have you squat with a sandbag, bearhug it and squat it. I don’t see the shift anymore. You don’t have a squat problem, you have a barbell problem”
“You make yourself look good (in your sprinting/sport still); all I can give you that muscle capacity and tension”
“There are two ways to lose mobility, you can lose range of motion, or lose tension. When you stop training the internal torque chain, you start to lose tension and you shorten your (sprinting) stride”
“Her power-cleans (all external torque) were doing zero for sprinting, because it was not developing the internal torque chain… they were helping her out of the blocks”
“At a full catch clean, you will produce internal torque at the bottom”
“A standing box jump is fully external torque”
“You need a massive amount of output in external torque… look at Klovov (more intense) lifting vs. a sprinter (more relaxed)”
“Before an Olympic lifter start the lift, they are very relaxed, but as soon as they start, there is a lot of tension in the face (associated with external torque)”
“So the better fight is when you are in flow, where the sympathetic and parasympathetic work together to create a high intensity under control”
“When someone is in full sympathetic, they swing (punch) wildly in external torque, when someone who is using their parasympathetic, they will stay more centered in their punches”
“Honestly, I think the more emotional the athlete is, the shorter the distance they are good at”
“If you are going to attempt a max box jump, there is no way they can go about it chill”
“If you lose your cool in a snatch, you might hit the pull, but you are not going to catch the bar”
“To me the mind and body is the same… there is no such thing as movement, it is the person squatting; that is why it is tension over position”
“Is that the 11th commandment, you should squat with your knees out? Says who?”
“If you have very open hips, squatting with your feet straight is actually pigeon toed”
“The most efficient squat is the best squat; if you have 6 different movements in a squat, that is a problem”
“What I want is the tension of the sandbag on the hips to feel the same as the barbell back squat”
Show Notes
Torque Chains Visual
Sandbag Carry Instruction
About Julien Pineau
Julien Pineau is the founder of Strongfit, and a movement focused human performance coach. Sports have been a part of Julien’s life since he was young, and he has athletic backgrounds in a variety of areas from competitive swimming, to mixed martial arts, strongman, and more.
In 1993, Julien began his coaching career as a conditioning and grappling coach for the MMA gym where he trained and in 2008, he opened his own gym that focuses on strongman training. StrongFit was born and has evolved from a single gym to a full education program.
Julien is trained to visualize and correct proper human movement patterns. He has a fascinating ability to diagnose imbalances, find the root of problems, and provide knowledge to build a stronger, more fit, and a more resilient human. He is a man on a journey inward as much as he is outward.
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