Nevermind Your Six-pack, Can You Use Your Obliques?

Can you use your obliques?  Happy Gilmore was right, it’s all in the hips. 

Something that we often hear in athletics, especially in baseball, is: “you gotta get more hips to shoulder separation if you want to throw harder”. But it is true for pretty much any sports, such as tennis, javelin, boxing, etc. In golf, the concept is common knowledge and there is much research on the topic linking it to power production and performance. That hip to shoulder separation is referred to as the X-factor.

However, although the idea that more separation leads to more power often appears to be true, it is not the be all end all. We often talk about pulling the rubber band – ie. getting more separation –  but I feel like we don’t talk enough about letting go of it. In fact, all that matters is letting go of it. It’s pretty much useless to pull the rubber band if you’re not going to let it recoil. 

Just like knowledge without action, 

potential energy without transfer to kinetic energy is just a waste

Let’s look at how failure to use the X-factor optimally can restrict performance, considering that the latter is not only about getting MORE stretch.  We’ll also see how optimal movement holds an element of prevention, which in itself is also performance.

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ROTATION IS EVERYWHERE

If you don’t work with rotational athletes and you think that this stuff is not for you, think again. Rotation is everywhere in our activities of daily living and is a strong component in GAIT. We see running as linear, but it’s only externally linear. Internally, it’s very much rotational.  The obliques are positioned in a manner to propel us forward and they allow for very efficient motion, which means more output for less input. This is quite economical, and, thus, optimal. So, while having a six-pack is nice and all, we can’t deny or overlook the importance of the obliques.

In many rotational sports, the ability to rotate the pelvis independently from the trunk is going to be very important for the efficiency of movement. Getting hips to shoulder separation is not only about rotating the shoulders around the pelvis, but mainly from the relative rotation between the hips and the shoulders. 

We can create stretch at the obliques by rotating the shoulder away (X-factor) or we can keep our shoulders a little more square and use a relative pullback from the hips to increase the amount of stretch to store potential energy (X-factor stretch).

We can clearly see this with long drive champion Jason Zubak’s incredible pelvic control and, thus, power!  The same principle applies to Roger Federer in tennis, where we can see the scissor move, illustrating the contraction of the obliques (click on the image to see it play).

THE RUBBER BAND

So, how do we pull back and let go of the rubber band? It’s multifactorial, as there are many parts involved in creating rotational movement. But it essentially all comes down to the internal and external obliques, which we’ll refer to simply as the obliques since they work together! 

The external oblique fibers run diagonal downward from ribs 5 to 12 to attach onto the iliac crest, inguinal line and linea alba. The deeper internal obliques originate at the iliac crest and inguinal line to insert at the 8th to 10th ribs and linea alba in an upward diagonal direction.

As you can see, their opposite lines of pull make them work as a team: the external oblique together with the contralateral internal oblique contract to create movement in an X pattern, explaining the origin of the X-factor term in golf.

Now, if we want to rotate better to throw harder or hit the ball further, what are we going to need from the obliques is the ability to relax one side and contract the other; one side creates distance between the hip and its contralateral shoulder, whereas the other side brings them closer one to another.

You can see that the obliques have a great moment to affect not only the shoulders, via the ribcage, but also the pelvis. As one hip rotates further away from the opposite shoulder, the stretch becomes greater, and it is now going to take great strength and neuromuscular control to pull the ribcage towards that stabilized hip.

SCREENING FOR CAPACITY

Of course, accomplishing this is no simple feat.

There are always fundamental prerequisites to movement, and failure to meet those are going to affect preferred movement patterns and change behavior. That behavior becomes based on compensations that trigger a snowball effect for health and performance.

Poor movement performance doesn’t only come from limitations in tissue extensibility, or the capacity to stretch. Failure to get into (and out of) positions can be about poor neuromuscular control or coordination. As we know, mobility is a combination of range of motion, motor control and strength.

The PELVIC TWIST and the UPPERCUT TEST are two screens that allow you to see whether an athlete has the fundamental movement requirements. They give you information about an individual’s capacity for controlled rotation.

The PELVIC TWIST helps you see whether an individual can dissociate the pelvis from the torso, much like what is discussed in a previous blog article, but specific to rotation. It is a pretty simple screen. The individual forward flexes the torso to 45° and is asked to rotate his hips around his spine without moving the torso.

An athlete is either capable of dissociation or not. It’s pass or fail, there is no in between. The usual mistakes we see are hiking of the hips or moving the torso and the hips together.

Sometimes, you can easily observe an inability to dissociate the two.  Failing this screen is going to be a major issue. If an athlete is unable to control their pelvis in a controlled setting, how can we expect them to control it in a chaotic environment like sports? 

The UPPERCUT TEST lets us see if the individual has both the ability to rotate the torso on a stable pelvis, and second, the ability to do it by contracting the external obliques. While it looks pretty simple, many athletes rotate every day without the ability to actually engage those powerful muscles. When we move, we don’t tend to do what is right, we tend to do what is familiar.  If athletes are not familiar with their obliques, that’s going to be a major problem. 

WATCH THE MAIN VIDEO OF THIS ARTICLE TO SEE HOW THIS TEST IS DONE

PERFORMANCE AND PREVENTION

Let’s go back to what we stated earlier as the forgotten component: letting go of the rubber band. 

There is an optimal length-tension relationship to optimize power and, concurrently, performance. As mentioned previously, it might not be the best thing to try to get more and more stretch of the obliques by rotating the trunk back. This doesn’t mean that individuals don’t need great mobility, but they also have to have a tremendous amount of strength and control within their range of motion.

The best thing to avoid working beyond accessible end ranges of motion, aside from having sufficient mobility, is to have a tremendous amount of strength and control to prevent momentum from taking the individual beyond their end range.

If an athlete can’t contract their obliques on purpose, they’re not likely to contract them properly during their sport.  While high level athletic movements take place in automaticity (unconscious competence), 

mastery comes from the ability to do things slow and under control

Controlling the movement, not letting it control you.

Another issue with failure to contract the obliques is that it calls for sub optimal rotation. In this case, the body finds ways to get the job done, especially with athletes who are the all-stars of compensation to solve motor problems. For example, many people will rotate primarily with their contralateral latissimus dorsi or will side bend instead of rotating. In both cases, that’s no bueno. 

Failing both the pelvic twist and the uppercut test is a strong predictor that athletes will come to us with low back issues.  Low back pain is multifactorial (lack of hip or thoracic spine mobility, improper technique, etc.) but we can’t deny the importance of core control and core strength/endurance in preventing such problems since it’s what stops the momentum from taking us beyond our end range of motion.

MORE THAN A SIX-PACK

Sports are about power. Either you’ll want to generate more maximal power, or you’ll want to generate the most amount of power with the smallest amount of force input, saving you energy in the long run and allowing optimal sharing of forces across multiple joints. 

When talking about the strength of the trunk and the power of rotation, the hero is not the much sought-after six-pack.  Strong and powerful obliques are key, as is the neuromuscular control to activate them at the right time.  Without that, athletes are definitely not tapping into their full potential. 

REFERENCES

1. Lindsay DM, Vandervoort AA. Golf-Related Low Back Pain: A Review of Causative Factors and Prevention Strategies. Asian J Sports Med. 2014;5(4). doi:10.5812/asjsm.24289
2. Abdominal muscle activation of elite male golfers with chron… : Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Accessed April 3, 2021. https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2001/10000/Abdominal_muscle_activation_of_elite_male_golfers.6.aspx

Marc-Antoine Bérubé

in collaboration with Mai-Linh Dovan M.SC., CAT(C)

Marc-Antoine has been involved in baseball for many years. He played within Baseball Québec’s structure, at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2015, he was selected in the MLB Draft by the Oakland Athletics.  Since retiring, Marc-Antoine has be­en transmitting his passion to young prospects as the pitching coach for the Académie Baseball Canada.