Ivan Abadjiev, the great Bulgarian weightlifting coach made the world take notice when his team started dominating Olympic contests and international meets during the prime of his coaching career. What was the secret to his success? Increasing the annual training volume of the contest lifts with his athletes in training. The Bulgarian training regime for weightlifters is legendary. Multiple sessions per day, six days per week with athletes working up to daily maxes in all their big lifts. The relatively small country of Bulgaria was outpacing the Soviet Union, which had a much larger population and the most advanced training based science on the planet at that time. Abadjiev demonstrated with clarity and certainty that attacking specificity with a volume based approach was the most dominant methodology for developing weightlifters.

There are many potential downsides to increasing volume, particularly when specificity is the only training means utilized. Many people will experience overuse injuries, become burned out psychologically, and demonstrate the classical signs and symptoms of overtraining syndrome. For the past few summer Olympic years, collegiate athletic training rooms were inundated with swimmers coming in with overuse shoulder injuries. Why? Because Michael Phelps' training regime would always be publicized, and collegiate swimmers would attempt to replicate the swimming volume that Phelps would accumulate in his training phases. Michael Phelps is able to handle the Michael Phelps training plan because he is Michael Phelps. He is anatomically well suited for swimming, his biomechanics are as on point as possible, and genetically he had a situation where he was able to buffer hydrogen with his energy systems better than almost any other human being on the planet. The greatest in the world are outliers, and the rest of us probably shouldn't attempt to try to copy everything that they do. The great ones won the genetic lottery. Their bony attachments are ideal for their sporting choice, and generally speaking their technical mastery is sounder than everyone else's.

So should we all give up hope and jump in the excuse heap? Absolutely not. If your sport biomechanics are really clean, you can handle larger training volumes compared with athletes who demonstrate suboptimal movement strategies. When speaking of overhead lifts, we as coaches and athletes need to analyze the anatomical considerations that are involved with the movement and maximize the strategies that will provide the most optimal biomechanics possible. Saying that any one particular bony region is the most critical segment of the body for an action is impossible.

(Editor's note – The following section is very heavy in anatomy out of necessity. There is a series of videos demonstrating the techniques discussed below at the end of the post)

The positioning of one bony landmark is highly dependent upon its relative orientation to adjacent and even far off segments. That being said, scapular positioning and stability is of critical importance when discussing overhead lifts. In the competitive lifting and performance coaching communities, it is fairly well accepted that maximizing stability of the scapula is of critical importance. We focus on the local stabilizer muscles of the scapula, such as the lower trapezius and serratus anterior. We study the kinesiology text books that discuss the exact joint motions associated with what happens when either the insertion or the origin of one of these muscles fires. We then perform many repetitions of corrective exercises, such as wall slides and push-up plus to pick up the performance of these muscles. The problem with simply attacking these muscles with many of the exercise choices is that we fail to consider that air pressure driving out into the scapula from the regions of the lung that are adjacent to the posterior ribs that border the scapula is the mechanism of creating reflexive firing of the local stabilizing muscles. To see the way that traditional interventions have failed strength and power athletes, and approaches aimed at treating more proximal matters involving respiration and authentic stabilization mechanisms, here's a great example.

Let me try to explain the way in which air pressure stabilizes the scapula first, and then I'll get into the critical zone of the lungs that must experience filling in order to pull off reflexive scapular stabilization. Many of us have seen someone squat who demonstrate knee valgus during the execution of the movement. What do we do to correct this? Put a band around their knees. The band would create a pull force that would be trying to cave the athlete's knees into the valgus position. When the band tries to force the athlete into valgus, the athlete reflexively pushes the knees out by recruiting the femoral abductor muscles. This strategy was developed by Gray Cook and is part of something that he calls, Reflexive Neuromuscular Training (RNT). If you push someone in a direction, they reflexively push back on you. The phenomenon that I am describing here is an RNT-style concept. The only difference is that in the case of stabilizing the scapula with air pressure, we are doing it from the inside out. The scapula sits on the posterior rib cage. If the posterior rib