Today’s podcast features movement focused strength and performance coach Julien Pineau.  Julien is the founder of Strongfit, which started as a gym, and is now a full educational program for coaches and fitness/movement enthusiasts.  Sports have been a part of Julien’s life since he was young, and he has athletic backgrounds in a variety of areas from competitive swimming, to mixed martial arts, strongman, and more.

In 1993, Julien began his coaching career as a conditioning and grappling coach for the MMA gym where he trained and in 2008, he opened his own gym that focuses on strongman training. Julien has a fascinating ability to visualize and correct proper human movement patterns, and has worked with athletes from a wide variety of disciplines.  He is a man on a journey inward as much as he is outward.

The current world of training seems to exist on a level of “exercise proliferation” much more than it does digging into the main principles of human performance and adaptation.  Coaches often times have their own favorite exercises and drills, and have athletes perform them to “technical perfection”, citing the ability to hit particular positions as a marker for program success.

On today’s podcast, Julien Pineau goes into the fallacy of training athletes based on one’s preferred exercise selection, or technical positions, while rather viewing training on the level of the “human first”.  Julien views training on the level of the entire athlete, and has exercise principles starting with the “inner most” human mechanisms.  He gets into his ideas on internal and external torque chains extensively through this show, and describes how to fit muscle tensioning patterns to the needs of athletes in the realms of speed, strength and injury prevention.

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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points:
3:14 – Women’s work capacity and ability to adapt to chronic stress, relative to men, with the crossfit games competitors as an example

6:36 – How strength training setups may be modulated for females versus males in terms of extending work out over a longer period of time, versus more dense packets of work

9:16 – How one’s perception and attitude in a training session is a critical aspect of adaptation

11:27 – The importance of tension over position in strength and athletic movement

17:20 – The pros and cons of social media in athletic development

21:18 – The innate movement pattern element of sandbag training and its role in facilitating hamstring activation

23:17 – The origins of Julien’s thoughts on internal and external torque chains

33:51 – Squatting patterns in light of internal and external torques, and how sandbag lifting fits into the squat and hinge pattern and muscle activation

46:34 – Links between internal torque/external torque and sprinting, and practices in the gym that can lead to issues over a long period of time

54:19 – Olympic lifting and external torque, as it relates to block starts or sprinting

1:05:32 – Types of athletes who may be external torque chain dominant

1:07:56 – How the external torque chain fits with more sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system elements, while the internal torque chain fits with more parasympathetic elements

1:23:43 – How various body types will impact one’s squatting technique, with relation to internal and external torque

1:27:08 – Upper extremity sport (such as swimming) concepts in relation to internal and external torque production

1:32:06 – How to determine how an athlete’s body wants to squat, and how to tap into an individual’s squat technique

Julien Pineau Quotes: