Pairing Strength Training With “Fillers”

Pairing Strength training with “Fillers” People waste way too much time in the gym. A 5-minute rest interval between your sets of bench press that includes checking your emails on your phone, sending a text message, going to the water fountain and gazing up at the ESPN highlights on the T.V. is negatively affecting your ability to get work done. Ironically, this is usually the same person that complains that they “don’t have time to train”. Now, if you are between sets of a max effort bench press that is 1.5-2 times your body weight and training for absolute strength than I can justify something longer than a 2 minute rest period. Everyone else should be spending that time on another set, a different exercise (as part of a circuit, or superset) or something called a “filler”. Fillers are mobility drills that can be added between lifts as part of an active rest that directly affect a particular limitation in the succeeding lift being performed. Fillers ensure that you don’t waste time standing around between sets. Pairing the right lifts with the right mobilizations can have a dramatic effect on improving strength. An example would be spending a minute on some hip flexor mobilizations if you are having trouble getting your glutes to fire during a deadlift. Tight hip flexors will limit glute recruitment. Mobility/Stability and Strength are directly related. This is why I spend so much of my time explaining and implementing the importance of dynamic warm ups, soft tissue work, activation drills and corrective exercises. However, no one looks forward to spending 20 minutes on their weakness or something they suck at, plus it’s boring. While I am all for corrective exercise, and feel like it should be a staple of any properly designed program, it does tend to get overemphasized at times. Corrective exercise should be a component of a program, not the program. Just rolling around on the carpet trying to connect a dozen corrective exercises before a work out with no rhyme or reason is not going to benefit us. This is why fillers are so great. We can spend several minutes before and after our main lifts of the day attacking areas of positioning in which we are lacking range of motion and motor control and still kick ass at the same time. Remember, while a dynamic warm up and any mobility/activation work done before a training session is more general, a filler exercise should directly focus on a the weakest link or biggest limitation in the succeeding lift. Here are three examples of some great filler exercises for the squat, bench and deadlift. The filler exercises is marked with an * A1) Bench Press A2) Band Pull Aparts [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Dm-j5wYIc] B1) Barbell Back Squat B2) Chin ups B3) Ankle dorsiflexion mobilization [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4iVv_z_Zao&feature=player_embedded]C1) Dead lift C2) Single Arm Dumbbell Row C3) Half kneeling hip flexor stretch [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcNuKsRIVc&feature=player_embedded ]