functional exercise: side lifts

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Last modification: 30.12.2018
Trivial name: side lifts
Level: A

Classification

classical: inversion pose
psychomental: energizing
physiological: arm and shoulder strengthening

Contraindication

Effects

(632) strengthening deltoids and supraspinatus

Preparation

Follow-up

Derived asanas

Similar asanas

Diagnostics

Variants

Instructions

  1. Sit or stand with your upper body upright.
  2. Grip light dumbbell with both hands in overhand grip, between one and a few kilos depending on your strength and specific application.
  3. Stretch your arms out to the side, keeping the elbow joints constantly bent by a few degrees.
  4. From anatomical standard position, lift the dumbbells laterally slowly and at a constant speed to about 45° above the horizontal line of the arm.
  5. Optionally, you can hold the position briefly. Then lower the dumbbells again at a similarly moderate speed until you reach anatomical zero, i.e. arms bent.
  6. Repeat depending on the specific application or until limiting effects occur, such as fatigue of the grip strength or the finger extensors on the back of the forearm (dorsal side).

Details

  1. The weight acts much more on the long lever arm of the arms than directly on the body. In contrast to the front lift, the moments on both sides neutralise each other so that there are no forces worth mentioning that push the spine in any direction and then have to be compensated for with the strength of the autochthonous back muscles.
  2. The appropriate weight is of course very individual. With very low physical strength, half a kilogramme may be sufficient, but more than 7 to 10 kg is rarely required. Depending on the application, the amount of weight is secondary to the duration of the exercise and thus the TUT, and also the number of repetitions does not play a major role compared to the duration of the exercise.
  3. The dumbbells should be raised and lowered slowly. It is not about speed or acceleration, but mainly about the duration of action on the deltoids. If possible, the dumbbell, which is not currently in motion, is not placed heavily on the leg but held by the arm with a certain amount of force.
  4. The raised arm should be slightly bent. The dumbbell is held with an overhand grip, i.e. the palm of the hand is above the bar connecting the two weights. For special purposes, such as tennis elbow, the dumbbell can also be gripped in the underhand grip, which shifts the rotation of the upper arm further towards exorotation and shifts the load within the agonists more towards the biceps.
  5. The shoulder blades must not be elevated.
  6. For tennis elbow, this exercise cannot usually be performed without pain in the upper grip with adequate weight and is contraindicated with adequate weights because it can contribute to maintaining the irritable condition. The undergrip can provide a remedy, but it is prolematic for golfer’s elbow. In both cases, slow repetitions can be performed with adjusted weight so that the pain sensation does not exceed NRS 3-5, see also insertion tendopathy.

In lateral position

Purpose: Reduces the tone of the supraspinatus and thus helps to relieve its tension.

Instructions

  1. Perform the lateral abduction described above to approx. 70° in the shoulder joints in a lateral position, alternating the dumbbell in front of and behind the body until you reach a clear adduction.

Details

  1. The arm is laterally abducted with the dumbbell up to approx. 70°, beyond which the effect of the exercise decreases significantly because the cosine of the abduction angle in relation to the horizontal approaches zero. The movement therefore oscillates between this lateral abduction and an adduction of the arm, which alternates between behind the body, i.e. in retroversion or in frontal abduction, i.e. in front of the body, as close to the body as possible so that the lever arm remains as large as possible and the retroversion does not cause the dorsal shoulder muscles to cramp. The lateral position can be assumed on the floor; a flat dumbbell bench commonly used in weight training is less suitable here due to its narrow width, as it does not allow the legs to bend any further and therefore often does not provide sufficient stability against the body’s tendency to tilt. In cases where it does prove to be practical, it naturally offers the possibility of significantly further adduction and thus goes into even greater sarcomere lengths of the supraspinatus.
  2. The weight that should be selected for this variation is significantly lower than that of the basic posture described above. This results from the position of the arm and the large gravity effect with large sarcomere lengths of the lateral abductor muscles. While the arm starts the movement from the vertical in the basic posture and thus simultaneously increases the force of the lateral abductors according to force-length function and also the gravity effect, which opposes the movement, thus increasing the torque to be applied according to the sine function of the abduction angle, in this variant, the movement starts against the maximum gravity that is possible in the posture, i.e. against a maximum torque of the dumbbell-arm system, while the lateral abducting muscles are still at a very large sarcomere length and therefore still have little force according to the force-length function. The deltoid in particular only just passes the centre of rotation of the glenohumeral joint with its middle pars acromialis in the connecting line between the origin and insertion at the start of the movement, and other parts cannot even have an abducting effect at all. Therefore, it mainly presses the humeral head into the glenoid, but hardly contributes to lateral abduction.
  3. Depending on the mobility in the shoulder joint in the direction of adduction, the starting position can represent a significant stretching requirement.
  4. At first glance, you might think that this posture corresponds to a version of the basic posture described above from a little before 90° to just before 180° frontal abduction. However, this is only the case geometrically; physiologically, the two options differ fundamentally in the sarcomere length: Lifting from just under 90° to just under 180° while standing allows the lateral abductors to work at less than half their sarcomere length throughout and, when performed frequently, can lead to losses in the mobility of these muscles, whereas lifting in the lateral position starts with approximately maximum sarcomere length and only just reaches medium sarcomere length, which is why an increase rather than a loss of flexibility is to be expected. With reasonably in- and extensive execution, it can even lead to longitudinal muscle adaptation.
  5. Because lifting is performed from large to maximum sarcomere length against large gravity, the relevant muscles only have a fraction of their maximum achievable tendon force available for the initial lift in accordance with the force-length function. Secondly, the lever arm is smaller, i.e. the distance of the muscles or their executing tendons from the centre of rotation of the glenohumeral joint. On the one hand, this leads to a significantly lower maximum weight that can be moved and, on the other hand, to the need for increased caution when choosing the weight and execution. It also requires sufficient warm-up. Furthermore, it is essential to avoid giving in too much to the effect of gravity during the downward movement of the arm after lifting, so that too much acceleration is achieved, which must be stopped with great effort towards the end of the movement. Although some may be inclined to consider this for a particularly intense training success, this is the classic situation in which strains occur: stopping a large load in eccentric contraction quickly, this is easily beyond the muscle performance capacity and the resilience of various structures. Finally, the tendon force possible in eccentricity is significantly greater than that achievable in concentricity, which also means a greater approximation to the load capacity limit of the structures, and not just the Z-discs of the sarcomeres, which suffer small microtears that heal completely in a short time when muscle soreness occurs, but also other structures that take much longer to heal, which more than cancels out the presumed additional training success from a longer training break due to injury. The time it takes to heal a strain is certainly an order of magnitude longer than the recovery phase of the muscle after heavy, sore muscles producing injury-free training. The expected value of this risky training method is therefore extremely poor.
  6. If there is a known tendency to anterior or (very rarely occurring) posterior dislocation of the shoulder joint, the dumbbell should not be adducted too far and should be held as close to the body as possible. To do this, the forearm can be supinated (if behind the body) or pronated (if in front of the body).
  7. The load on the elbow joint only occurs with very wide exorotation of the arm largely free of varus stress. However, this is of secondary importance as the weight is very moderate, even if you consider the lever arm that the forearm represents, i.e. the varus moment.
  8. This variation is very similar to the exercise described in Supraspinatus training, although the lateral abduction remains very limited so that the effect is mainly restricted to the supraspinatus.