Episode 1783 - Lats: the glutes of the upper body

Dr. Zach Long // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete lead faculty Zach Long discusses the importance of the need for simultaneously strong & flexible lats to optimize performance & reduce injury risk in CrossFit and other functional fitness athletes.

Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

ZACH LONGIt is August 2nd, 2024. I am your host today, Dr. Zach Long, lead faculty inside of our fitness athlete division, teaching our live course and our level two course that we just, uh, just changed the name of that. So excited to talk to you today about the lats specifically in the CrossFit athlete, why this is such an important muscle group for us to appreciate and why I call it the glutes of the upper body because it's just that important of a muscle. We focus so much in the lower body on glute development for athletes, for health, for performance. The lats are the key when it comes to the CrossFit athlete. Why is it key? Two big reasons. Number one, lat inflexibility will drastically impact many skills the CrossFit athlete is trying to develop. But what I want to focus on a little bit more today is lat strength. So let's get rid of the flexibility issue first. So if your lats are tight, what we're going to so commonly see is all overhead lifts affected. But we're really going to see athletes struggle with things like the overhead squat, whereas they're going down into that squat and their hips being flexed, that lat inflexibility is going to really wreck havoc on somebody's overhead squat. And then when we look at so many gymnastic skills as well, If you can't fully open that shoulder up into in-range flexion, you'll struggle with your kipping mechanics. Things like handstand walking will also be drastically impacted if you don't have great lat flexibility. But again, our focus today is going to be a little bit more on the strength of the lats and why that's so important. So obviously we all know that the lats create shoulder extension. So they're going to take our arm from being overhead down towards our side and behind our body. That is a movement pattern that shows up so much in CrossFit, probably more than any other recreational fitness activity. So if the lats aren't strong, movements like your kipping pull-ups, your muscle-ups, your toes-to-bars, are going to be impacted. Even your deadlifts, your cleans, your snatches, the lats are so important in those movements to keep that barbell close to your body and become more mechanically efficient in those movement patterns. So we've got to have really strong lats. I think one great example that I love to do when we're teaching a live course to help people really feel and understand how important the lats are in just barbell-based movements i