 Life is about constant evolution. Always better today than we were yesterday. There are no shortcuts to a successful fitness regimen. Only hard work and consistency. And to navigate through the mountain of fitness advice available, candidates must learn to separate fad from function. I'm Daniel Fletcher. Welcome to the Only Easy Day was Yesterday, the official Navy SEAL podcast. In this extended series, we'll speak with select special warfare performance experts to clarify common training misconceptions and provide insight into areas of focus specifically important to special warfare candidates. Today, we continue our fitness series with a discussion about lower body strength with director of fitness for SEAL and SWCC training, Mike Caviston. Let's get started. We're at Buds today in the barn. You can hear the recruits graduating and playing music off in the distance. And on the other side of us, they're just finishing up their Hell Week class. So we're in a bit of a special place here, right in the heart of it. Speaking with Mike Caviston about strength training and specifically today, the lower body. Obviously, it gets us to where we need to go. It's an important part of the body. There's a lot of running that goes on at Buds. There's a lot of lifting. There's a lot of various movements. Give us your kind of overarching philosophy with strength training the legs and preparation for Buds to start with. Well, in some regards, strength training is strength training, whatever part of the body we're talking about. And of course, we've also got to think about the upper body and the core. And so a lot of the principles apply equally in all areas. And the most common, overlying principle that I could stress is balance. And so when we talk about the lower body, I'll talk about some specific areas that are probably overemphasized and talk about some other areas that are typically under-emphasized. Another thing I might talk about in regards to training the lower body is that a lot of people, in particular those planning to come to Buds that recognize they need to develop their running technique and their ability to run well. I hope everybody that plans to come to Buds is aware of that. They're not, they should be. You gotta be a good runner. And people that are trying to become good runners think, okay, I'm gonna lift my legs so that I'll be stronger and can run better. And there's some logic to that, but I think a lot of people tend to misapply that. And so when I talk about the lower body, especially as it pertains to preparing for Buds, I'm gonna emphasize a lot of the neglected areas that are actually even more important than just developing strength in the big muscles that propel you when you run. You talked about running and people maybe substituting, running for lifting and vice versa or to try to kind of create a bit of a better performing athlete, talk about that a little bit more in terms of how that maybe negatively impacts people's ability to run or. Well, they're both necessary. And especially again, coming to Buds, you need to run, you need to get stronger. And so you need to lift weights as well as run. One doesn't replace the other. They complement each other. They need to be developed consistently and properly in both areas. And so some people that might wanna do, for example, a high-intensity circuit weight training routine and think that that will make them a better runner, I think they're probably fooling themselves a little bit. They need to spend some time running. But they should certainly also spend some time strength training and including the lower body. Is there a bias you think in athletes coming in or I'd say recruits slash athletes coming into Buds where they may be more strength biased or they may be overtraining running? Is it one or the other? Well, probably for what I see, it might be a little bit more of bias towards strength training. And there's a belief that being very big and very strong is beneficial. And being strong is beneficial up to a point. And if you wanna become stronger, I think that there are probably time-efficient ways that you can accomplish that without spending hours in the weight room. So don't wanna discourage anybody from lifting weights at all, but I do wanna encourage them to do it in a streamlined, efficient fashion and to recognize that it shouldn't take away from developing important cardiovascular skills like running and also swimming that are important for success in Buds. Lower body strength training is an area where you often see a lot more machines being used like leg press, et cetera. Why is that in your opinion on the lower body? That might be true in some gym settings. Actually, I'm probably more used to the opposite where people are biased against machines and they think the machines are evil and that they wanna avoid machines at all costs. And I think that some machines are designed poorly and shouldn't be used, but some machines are actually designed pretty well and offer advantages that you don't get with free weights. And so one theme that I develop when I talk about strength training, whether it's the upper body or the lower body is that you wanna select a variety of different resistance modes to train. And so machines are actually appropriate to use occasionally, but not exclusively. And there are a lot of different ways that you can challenge the legs and I would encourage people to utilize a wide variety of exercises. Are there any machines specifically you think maybe that have gotten that unfair treatment in your life? Yeah, well, if you look at the leg press, it's hard to describe vocally and point out some of the different design flaws of different leg press machines. So they're not all created equal. And so I just keep it pretty simple and say, don't overemphasize leg press, but they're okay. One machine or one piece of equipment that I think is underutilized that I wanna encourage people to incorporate regularly as the leg girl and working on the hamstrings. When I talk about poor balance, a textbook example is that people will have very overdeveloped quads and very weak hamstrings. And so you need to isolate the hamstrings and you need to target them. And so find a good leg curl machine to do regularly. Some people are opposed to leg extension. And I think people can abuse the leg extension, usually try to do too much weight and place too much stress on the front of the knee. That's not good, but using a moderate amount of weight and going through proper range of motion to target some of the muscles that control the way the patella crosses over the knee joint is actually pretty beneficial. So I would include some isolated leg extension as part of the strength training routine for lower body. You mentioned the hamstring there. And do you think that part of the lower body is akin to the area of the shoulder that you mentioned in terms of upper body neglect? In terms of strength. So upper body is another example where we see imbalances and I referred previously to people doing lots of pushups but ignoring growing motions. And so they become overdeveloped on the front or the anterior part of the chest and shoulders. And in the lower body, the same concept applies. People spend a lot of time doing leg press or squats. People are actually pretty big on squats and they do lunges because they know in buds they're probably gonna have to do a lot of lunges. And so they isolate that. And those exercises are fine in and of themselves but they're very quad dominant. And if that's all people do, those muscles are gonna become overdeveloped and corresponding opposing muscles are not gonna get challenged. And so you need to actively seek out ways to challenge the hamstrings and the glute muscles more effectively than most people do. Other than the leg curl, what other movements or exercises or apparatus do you recommend for that back of the leg development? That's a challenge because without a specific machine it can be hard to target. There are some ways and I'll just take a minute here to plug some of our resources that are available on the website Sealswik.com and our training information. And so there are some video clips of different exercises that would give you an idea. So something called the Nordic hamstring curl which often requires a partner but you can do it by yourself if you set up the right parameters to target the hamstrings and things like elastic bands if you need to. There are different ways that you can do it and you do need to be creative but it is something that's important enough that I recommend people look into how they can target the hamstrings. Yeah, I'll second that. I mean just in my own personal training I definitely recognize that as a weakness and I think it makes sense if you think about how comfortable it is to be on your stomach on a leg curl machine versus the opposite with a leg extension. It doesn't feel good to be on your stomach, uncomfortable, you're smooshed in there, your legs aren't in the right position, you have to adjust it but push through it. I often see in gyms where there are available leg curl machines that they go unused for just exactly what you described and they're not fun. Yeah, it's not fun, it's not comfortable, it's tough to adjust but yeah, do it. Do it. Yeah, definitely do it. There's the potential for more weight and more loading in the lower body versus the upper body in general. And because of that I think there's a certain amount of programming that goes in line with people either maybe avoiding it because it's scary or it's heavy or it's uncomfortable and along with that people sometimes use weight belts or specific shoes and all this stuff. What are your kind of core principles for avoiding injury when you're moving bigger weights or should that be even done in the training for Bud? Well in my opinion and really admit that there are other opinions out there and people can solicit them if they want but in my opinion try to keep it pretty simple and not use so much weight that you require a special apparatus to do it and so special shoes or weight belts or things like that or it's not something that I would actively encourage people to do. There are as I mentioned a number of different exercises that people can do and for the lower body, gold standard for many people is the squat. I don't tell people not to squat but I try to encourage them not to emphasize it as much as they do and look for a variety of other things that will be of value in terms of providing the overall condition to the legs that they need. That to me is a big area that I've heard you emphasize in our other discussions and I'm hearing again now so I think it's worth reiterating pushing for strength numbers that are stronger than a friend of yours that might be competing in it or even pushing yourself to incorporate your one rep max strength numbers to putting yourself in the strongest you've been heading into Buds is something to almost outright avoid what I'm hearing from you. Yeah it's important to recognize that I encourage people to be somewhat competitive and to push themselves you gotta know how to push the envelope go to the limit but recognize when you're gonna go over the edge and don't go too far and so a lot of the problems that I've seen over the years that are centered around weightlifting that two major things are either people try too hard to lift too much weight for no other reason than to just be able to brag that they lifted more weight than somebody else or as a result of focusing on a couple of things the glory exercises, the vanity exercises or whatever it might be as a result of spending all the time doing those exercises they ignore other important exercises that affect their performance so you know with any aspect of training any part of the body you wanna try to avoid isolating any one area so much that you exclude other areas. We talked previously about some of the kind of accessory movements that people can do to strengthen the lower extremity of the foot and ankle. I think that should be incorporated in our discussion here of lower body strength. Maybe you can kind of touch on that because that's something that I think is really, really not uncommon but almost invisible to people that are training for their legs you know. When I set up training for the lower extremities try to make people recognize anatomically we've got the hip joint, we've got the knee joint we've got the ankle joint and then think about what movements can we perform at those joints so at the hips we've got flexion and extension but we've also got lateral movement so what's called abduction and adduction so moving out to the side and so people are likely to incorporate flexion and extension if you do a squat or if you do any sort of pushing motion with your leg you're gonna activate your extensors to somewhat if you do things like sit ups you're probably gonna activate your flexors to a degree but a lot of people ignore the side to side motion and that's actually very critical for supporting yourself at any point but especially in a lot of the environments and buds where the surfaces are unstable, they're in soft sand they're on uneven ground or they're carrying weight on their body that might not even be distributed evenly so it creates a lot of off-center stresses and so to be able to keep the leg in proper alignment and in order to keep pressure off the knee people need to be able to stabilize their hip and if the lateral muscles, the hip abductors are weak they're not able to stabilize their hip so it's a long-winded way of saying make sure you're working on the hip abductors as part of the overall training and then we just think about that going all the way down the leg so we got the hip, we've got flexion extension and lateral motion at the knee we've got extension and as I mentioned flexion that's what leg curls do, they flex the knee so we wanna make sure that we're doing that regularly the knee's not supposed to go side to side so don't plan to incorporate that into your training but then down at the foot and ankle there's lots of different things people are pretty good at developing their calves they do toe raises, they really want to get the calves to look big and strong if they overdevelop the calves at the expense of other muscles that might be a problem so in addition to doing heel raises that's what we call planter flexion make sure to do dorsiflexion which is the muscles that actually lift the toes up off the ground and then think about side to side motion think about doing what's called abduction and abduction for the foot or what's called inverting and eversion and so strengthening those muscles can make people less likely to experience ankle sprains for example and distribute the forces better so that they're more likely to avoid shin splints which are a common complaint among people that go through buds as all my shins are hurting, why is that? Well, there's a number of different reasons but a contributing factor is an imbalance where the calves are very strong and the opposite dorsiflexor muscles are weak that's a huge area I think that maybe even is, I guess in general going from the hips all the way down the lateral movement of the legs something that's really ignored I think you mentioned using elastic bands earlier it seems like that would be a really good place to start for people with a lot of this kind of stuff that's non squat or non kick doing something called the monster walk is a basic exercise that's very easy to do and very effective to do so just put an elastic band around your thighs just above your knee and just sort of shuffle side to side or front to back a little bit to get those side muscles working more Yeah, I think that especially paying attention to the ankle strength or lower leg strength is an area where I'd imagine people are definitely not putting any amount of time that you would recommend maybe if you could go over a couple of movements or key coaching words that you could provide to them in terms of frequency or methods, exercises or how to know if they're doing enough kind of stuff like that because I think that's an important area it's overlooked Well, the most important thing is to come up with a plan or a template to follow that alerts you to targeting these different areas and some of them that they maybe have never done before and so the basic format as I said incorporates eight different motions and so just come up with exercises that will target those different motions as I've been stressing there are lots of different exercises that may accomplish that so for a simple knee extension there are all sorts of different things that it might be a lunge, it might be a squat it might be a leg press it might be an isolated leg extension there are different ways that you can challenge that but find something and over time choose different things so that you're not always doing the same thing every time and then for the exercises that you do just do them in proportion, in balance so for example, most people that focus on the quads they do multiple sets of squats multiple sets of lunges all sorts of things that target the quads and over develop the quads and because they're spending so much time doing that they're not doing the other things that we've been talking about so just make sure your routine includes a balanced attention to all the different areas that need to be developed specifically in terms of the ankle and the ankle or foot stability what recommended ways other than some of the more I guess careful manipulation of whether it's I think you spoke before about doing kind of like a towel crunch with your foot is swimming with fins beneficial for this, running in sand I know that this kind of a careful area you do to prescribe movements for but maybe you could touch on some of that well it's actually a good question I do want to be careful about how I frame the answer but swimming with fins and running in soft sand are common activities that give people problems that they don't actively prepare for them and so one of the ways that you can make sure that you're ready to swim with fins is do some of the ankle conditioning exercise that we're talking about and the same thing for running in soft sand it requires a little bit more stability and so doing some of the specific strength training exercises for the lower body that we're talking about will help prepare them and then recognize at the same time that doing those things if you spend a lot of time running in sand or if you spend a lot of time swimming with fins that's going to cause stress on some of these muscles and so one of the general pieces of advice I'll tend to give people is that yeah you're going to need to run in sand but don't go out on the first day and run 10 miles in soft sand build up to it gradually yeah you're going to need to swim with fins at some point but don't go out in your first swim and do two miles with big stiff fins because it's going to create some stress and problems that you're going to pay for later so recognize that those activities swimming with fins and running in soft sand challenge the muscles and it works both ways so your overall training you've got to be careful not to overdo it either in the weight room or in the water or while running a good way to help prepare for running and for swimming is to incorporate some of these basic exercises into your routine yeah I think just the awareness of this area in your training and I think a lot of people are more focused on joint pain or specific lactic acid build up in major muscle groups as opposed to that kind of maybe intricate soreness in some of these stability areas kind of at least maybe mix it into your training and pay specific attention to the soreness level and be a little bit more careful with that area it's kind of interesting with all things I mean pay attention to soreness pay attention to overdoing it and you want to feel like you've gotten a good workout and so there's going to be a certain amount of discomfort but it's a sort of discomfort that should fade relatively quickly and so if it's something that's lingering hours or days later then you know you've done something wrong and you want to try to avoid that but you know if your ankles are constantly sore day after day then you've got to figure that you're doing too much of what are probably good things but just not in that quantity so you've got to figure out how to dial it back a little bit are there areas in the lower body or the legs that have specific mobility limitations in general from the athletes that you see come into Bud's? So in terms of mobility in the lower body some of the issues that we see if they're not caused specifically by an injury or maybe some sort of anatomical abnormality You mean like someone being let's say a shorter person versus a taller person or maybe the one leg shorter or whatever Just one leg shorter or just the way some of the joints are formed where the bones come together it creates more limited motion in some people than in others so that's not something you can necessarily directly address but for most people if there's a mobility problem it's probably going to be due to a combination of tightness in some muscles and weakness in other muscles and so keep up the balance that I've been talking about in terms of trying to make sure the weaker muscles are being addressed and then the strong muscles that tend to get tight as a result of being worked so often make sure you're stretching them out to be able to allow the joints to keep their normal range of motion In terms of strength and conditioning in the legs how do plyometrics play into this for you in your opinion? Yeah I think that plyometrics are something that should be incorporated as part of the overall training so strength training for most exercises I'll encourage people to be kind of slow and deliberate and make sure they're going through the full range of motion making sure that they're emphasizing what we call the negative or the eccentric portion of the lift and that's true for the lower body but strength training can include and should include some plyometric activities and for the lower extremity that means simply jumping doing vertical jumping or leaping and bounding Maybe if I can just interject real quick if you could give the listeners a quick definition of what you mean and what your training goal is with incorporating plyometrics Well so besides just doing slow and controlled movements sometimes we have to do fast explosive movements and so plyometric is just a very fast explosive movement and so a burst of strength is applied as quickly as possible and so for the upper body you can actually sometimes do plyometric exercises toss and medicine ball for example try to explosively toss it as far as you can so it's appropriate for the upper body as well but it's probably more commonly used for the lower body and the simple way to do it would be instead of doing a slow controlled squat which is how I would want to do it a lot of the times you can also do an explosive jump try to get up off the ground as high as you can and then you have to also catch yourself when you come back down to the ground or people do box jumps so you jump onto the box and then control yourself when you land when you jump off of the box some other things that could help the lower extremity training would be simple short sprints and incorporating what I I didn't coin the phrase but the frame change of direction so stopping and starting and turning and pivoting and doing again short high bursts of speed that will challenge the different stabilizing muscles either in the ankle or also in the hip and knee when you change directions is a good part of training to incorporate occasionally yeah it's impressive to throw around big weights but sometimes running through tires or you know stepping through the rope ladder is not as impressive thing to do in gym but arguably probably more helpful well things that challenge agility are good so agility drills some people call them that those are those are good things and plyometrics and agility and sprints they're not the basis for doing the entire program but definitely something to incorporate into the overall program and we talked about this a little bit in terms of balance with the upper body balancing strength movements and training with also more of an emphasis on range of motion and balance and maybe not such large reps is that something you think is mirrored in the bottom half of the body in terms of plyometrics versus weight training is probably a little bit more focus on weights than it should be as opposed to that type of explosive movement oh I think I see a wide variety of approaches and a number of different people do different things so I don't think I see any one particular trend when we talk about plyometrics as with any other aspect of training though I would incorporate or encourage people that haven't used it to introduce it gradually and some coaches will count contacts with the ground if you're doing jumps or different forms of exercise that involve landing with force then that's a stress and you don't want to overstress or do too many reps too soon so moderate the amount that you do and gradually build up as you get in better shape but... Be aware of it and how it can fit into your programming and don't avoid it Don't avoid it, don't overemphasize it If you could just walk us through then from top to bottom some of the areas you think that are important to highlight in terms of a summary of lower body strength training for buds Well, lower body strength training for buds or for other activities is pretty straightforward and so a good way to do it is just visualize start at your hips and work your way down and think of what exercises or movements you're incorporating that will challenge flexion and extension at the hip Underdeveloped area are the glute muscles and for many people that don't challenge them regularly they need to think of exercises that will target them sufficiently and then the lateral hip is critical because most people don't target it at all or if they do, not sufficiently so make sure that you're doing things that challenge the abductors at the hip and then the knee, it's very common to work on the quads which are the extensors of the knee so straightening the knee out that's an important movement you definitely wanna incorporate that into your training but make sure that you're also specifically targeting the hamstrings and trying to keep the hamstrings in close proportion to the quads in terms of strength They won't be equal but they should be pretty close and then going down towards the foot just think of the different muscles and movements that involve standing on your toes lifting your toes off the ground allowing you to balance say on one foot feel the different muscles that are challenged as you're trying to maintain stability and the muscles that you would use if you were to change directions going from right to left or left to right or front to back or stopping suddenly and making sure that you're incorporating that into your training Well great Mike, if someone would like to find out more where can they get some more information about some of this training? We have plenty of information and everything I've talked about and more is available at Sealswik.com We've got a training forum that talks specifically about fitness topics including strength training We've got a document called the physical training guide or PTG that outlines a complete comprehensive program including running and swimming and lifting and we've also got some video clips that will visually demonstrate some of the different exercises and some others that we've been talking about today Awesome, thanks so much for your information My pleasure Find out more at Sealswik.com and join us again for the next NSW podcast