TWO KEY EXERCISES THAT SHOULD BE IN YOUR STRENGTH PROGRAM
As an athlete the more you can understand about the methodologies and exercises that we are looking to train and why we are using them, the more you can then manipulate and improve your own training.
This awareness will give you the power to work on your identified weaknesses and imbalances, select relevant exercises and target key muscle groups to achieve the desired results.
When looking at lower body strength exercises in particular, two main muscle groups we are looking to develop strength in are the glutes and the hamstrings and we can target these by either choosing hip dominant or knee dominant exercises.
For a lot of endurance athletes, many problems come from a lack of posterior chain strength i.e. weak glutes. However when we are considering the knee joint and the strength of its surrounding musculature, a weakness in the quads is just as important to address if we want to find strength and stability in this area.
So how do we identify whether an exercise is hip dominant or knee dominant?
Hip Dominant Exercises
Hip dominant exercises will primarily train your hip extension, essentially targeting your glutes and hips as well as smaller surrounding muscles. When you thrust or extend your hips, you are contracting your posterior chain muscles such as your hamstrings and glutes and opening up your hips. In a real world example, this can be seen as you extend each leg behind you when running.
With hip dominant exercises, the goal is often to maximize the range of motion around the hip, whilst limiting it at the knee. We talk about the hip hinge pattern, where you're going to have slightly soft knees and you’re pushing your hips back or breaking at the hip. As soon as we do this, we’re going to put load into our glutes and hamstrings.
A key thing to remember as you push your hips back is that we want to hold good shape through our upper and lower back as our chest and head fall forward. When we start to add weight to this movement pattern, dumbbells, barbell, or even just a broomstick (see the broomstick drill below), you’re going to really notice what loading your posterior chain feels like.
When we use heavier loads, one of the biggest differences is that you can often find that you are able to lift heavier loads with hip dominant exercises compared to the knee dominant alternatives. It's amazing how powerful your hips are. If you think about it, your hips are designed to drive you forward, to carry your body weight across short distances very quickly or long distances consistently. Many issues arise because people will have incredibly weak and fragile hamstrings, glutes, core and weak hip extension.
“People blame a lot of their pain on having hip flexor issues but actually it's because of a very weak posterior chain.”
Examples of Hip Dominant Exercises:
Knee Dominant Exercises
Knee dominant is very much a quadricep heavy movement pattern, developing the structures in and around the knee and quads and are generally classified as movements in which the knee is the primary lever during the exercise, with flexion / extension occurring. These exercises target the anterior (front side) of your upper leg being primarily the quadricep muscle group.
Across a progressive strength program you should see your knee dominant movements progress from bilateral (double leg) where both feet are in contact with the ground, to unilateral (single leg), where one foot is in contact with the ground.
When performing knee dominant exercises such as a single leg squat, a key focus is to watch how you stabilise under load i.e. how your knee “tracks”. What we are trying to avoid is your knee collapsing inwards, a good way to monitor this is performing the exercise in front of a mirror.
Examples of Knee Dominant Exercises:
Integrating Both Into Your Program
Due to the nature of our biomechanics many exercises train and have aspects of both a hip and knee dominant focus, but often we want to bully one more than the other. We can actually manipulate different exercises to make them more or less hip or knee dominant by changing how you execute them.
For example, with a lot of ultra distance athletes and trail runners who are doing a large amount of ascending and descending, we love to turn squats into even more knee dominant based exercises by elevating their heels, narrowing their stance, or squatting/stepping down off boxes. What this does is puts more emphasis through the quadriceps and into the patella tendon. More load is put through the front of your knee, creating an overload effect in your quads, which if you've ever done some serious descending after a long distance is a great way to prepare your legs and knees for the demanding descents.
Likewise, we hear a lot about people being very quad dominant, especially in running, so we want to put more emphasis in your back end, in your posterior chain. We can manipulate this by essentially getting us focusing more on hip dominant movement patterns, adjusting your positions, getting you focusing on not flexing in the knee much, but getting more work going through that hip hinge position.
“Like any strength work we are essentially looking to simulate the types of stresses we’d come across in our sports, so your body's more acclimatised to it when you're actually out in the elements. “
When people get fatigued or they haven't worked on these movement patterns for a long time, they’ll move dysfunctionally. We often see people who have knee issues, who cannot help but overload their knees. They can't help but just keep putting work into their knees and they're not able to put the work into their hips and into their glutes, and we need to do this - to find balance.
It's ludicrous if you're not working on these hip dominant, knee dominant exercises on a weekly basis, because you’re asking so much of these muscle groups on a daily basis. Some of you who are running five to six days a week, where are you expecting that extra work to come from? Just from doing more volume?
No. You've got to be asking your body to develop more muscle tissue, to then be able to leverage that muscle tissue and get more out of it. This is why it's so important to understand this work and really go to town on it, and by that we mean progressively working towards lifting loads equal to your body weight.
This is going to help you leverage your own training, not only are you going to have a greater platform to build more speed and more endurance from but you're going to have less likelihood of injury.
Understanding how to individualise and manipulate your programming will make sure you're covering all areas and essentially making them your strengths.