Eye Path and Strength Training

[Scott Malin]

My head strength coach had a guy (friend of Pavel, didn't catch the name) come in today to teach some kettle bell usage. It was mostly basic stuff, however at one point he went into the topic of the role of eyesight in the proprioceptive system. He then did some manual exercises on us demonstrating how the path the eye follows while performing an exercise directly affects its quality and amount of resistance able to be used. To maximize strength, the head would always stay in a neutral position, while the eyes would path upwards for exercises involving extension, downwards for flexion, and mixed/diagonally for swings. The difference in weight using this method was immediately noticeable for myself, the other assistant, and the head coach. This guy is pretty into Z-health and Dragondoor so curious if anyone else knew or had read about this since we have some long-time DD followers here.

[John Sapinoso]

Sounds pretty interesting to me. What's his name? Does he have any literature on this?

[Scott Malin]

More info/lit is what I'm hoping to find.

[Nic Branson]

The basic premise behind this is that the body essentially follows the head. Keeping your head in the proper position improves your mechanics during the movement.

Off the top of my head I'm not sure of a good reference, would have to dig around some. You could try researching head position during resistance training or some biomechanics. Google Scholar might pull up a research piece for you.

[Joshua Naterman]

The eyes move in the same direction as the body's center of gravity through space relative to the loaded muscles, it seems to me when I do things.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but when you do certain things, like bench press, pull ups, planche, curls, deadlifts, etc, your eyes seem to want to move a certain way and focus on certain things, and it's unique to each exercise. Pay attention and you can start teaching yourself this stuff.

I've done this with a few exercises, like curls and deadlifts, but I've never really thought about it as being special. I thought most people did this. I'm going to do some research and see if I can find out more details about this.

[Scott Malin]

I can tell you for sure that most of my athletes do not do anything like this intuitively with their eyes. Some track athletes and that's about it that I've seen since I found out about this quirk. I taught it to a couple guys in football today and their form had an immediate improvement...see it being especially useful to the lineman out on the field.

[Joshua Naterman]

Interesting. I honestly thought more people did things like that. I never thought about it actually being a system, I just figured it was something people did. I like how the guy you talked to broke it apart neatly, that's really interesting. Now what would be REALLY cool would be EMG tests utilizing the technique as an independant variable!

Edit: Awesome post, by the way! That's great info for everyone here.

[griffdrc]

i had been taught to look up when learning squats and deadlifts by our trainer... they said it could account for a 3-5% increase in strength depending on the athlete... not sure of their sources :/

[heinrich]

Pavel quotes "Dr. Eric Cobb" from Z-Health in his book Return of the Kettlebell.

It was the section on overhead-pressing. Like coreathlete already said:

To maximize strength, the head would always stay in a neutral position, while the eyes would path upwards for exercises involving extension

But he doesn't go into detail about that because - as you might already know - "The Party is always right"!

...and if you want to know why, buy those damn books :wink:

[Joshua Naterman]

Griff: I started that way but have noticed that I actually squat and deadlift better when I point my face straight forward and look up with my eyes. I've been doing that for about two and a half years now, and it makes a good 10 lb difference at least, for reps.

Thanks for the reference Heinrich! I'm going to go read that and see what it says.

[heinrich]

Here you'll find plenty to read about Z-Health (it came today with Pavel's newsletter):

http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode ... override=1

http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode ... override=1

http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode ... override=1

http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode ... override=1

It is Kettlebell related but might also help strength training in general. I must admit I didn't read all of those articles. But I will as soon as I have enough time.

[Tarun Suri]

I learnt that from Z Health.

They take the example of the fetal position and the flinch reaction response. When you're in danger, you want to flex which includes bringing your sight down/inwards.

They have seem performance increase with eyesight pointed upwards for extension related movements.

[Joshua Naterman]

This was my first introduction to z-health, it sounds interesting. I'll have to learn more.

[Tarun Suri]

There are things I appreciate about it and things I don't. Especially when compared to the Esgoscue method which you introduced me to (thankfully). I look forward to your opinions on Z Health.

[Guest viking]

I was also thaught to look up while doing squats by a national coach in weight lifting ( the nation being norway). I guess I missed the part about keeping your head in a neutral position, cause I never did that. Maybe that is the reason I always found it more straining to fix my stare upwards compared to just looking straight ahead.

I want to respond to something slizzardman wrote. He said something to the effect that your stare is striving towards a specific fixture while doing different exercises.

I would like to add to that. I will not argue that your eyes seems inclined to look a certain way while doing some exercises. In my experience though, following this inclination isn't always optimal for performance.

Specifically, when doing pull ups / chin ups, I always have a strong natural tendency to look up at the bar I'm pulling myself towards. But I've found however that looking straight ahead makes the movement significantly easier.

As a comment to what I just wrote, I would like to say that looking up when doing pull/ chin ups, has, in my case, also involved tilting the head out of it's natural position. So I can not say if it's fixing my eyes up high, or tilting my head that makes the movment harder.