THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO STRUCTURAL BALANCE TRAINING

Today we’re going to go deep on the idea of ‘structural balance’ in fitness and performance training. To do that, let’s first take a trip back in time to around 2008.

Back then, I was a budding strength and conditioning coach in Toronto. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to get paid to help people (I still am!) and I was having good success with many clients. Even so, I knew I had major holes in my coaching game that needed to be fixed if I wanted to build a reputation I could be proud of. So, I attended a lot of courses over the coming years, including some by famed strength coach Charles Poliquin.

Many topics were covered, but one of the cornerstones of Poliquin’s training method was called “structural balance.” He said that he’d worked with NHL player Jim McKenzie in 1999 and improved his bench press from 280lbs to 380lbs in roughly four months using this technique. [You can see the case study in this article.] That’s an outrageous increase! Could I also get such unheard of results using this method?

Now, with over ten years of implementation, I’ve come to realize the strengths and limitations of this concept and how it can be applied in the real world, including seven major recommendations which are listed at the end of the article. Let’s get into it.

WHAT IS STRUCTURAL BALANCE?

Structural balance is a term coined by Poliquin back in the 90s. He looked at ratios of different exercises to assess the balance of various muscles groups. Could your quads be too strong compared to your hamstrings? Could the stabilizing muscles around your shoulder be too weak? How would you know? He proposed an answer by establishing specific targets for key exercises.

For example, how much can you squat vs deadlift? What is your chin-up to closed grip bench press ratio? The theory was this: when the strength of the major muscles groups are within a certain ratio, performance goes up and injury rates go down. The body comes into a state of harmony.

USING BASIC RATIOS

While Poliquin popularized this concept, he wasn't the first to have the idea. There’s a long history of strength coaches who have been comparing performance of different lifts to gather clues about athletic performance. For example, olympic weightlifting coaches often use tables that compare performance of key lifts. Here’s one example (although there are many different variations that exist… just google and you’ll find several):

Clean and Jerk: 100
Snatch: 78-82
Power Clean: 88-92
Jerks from Rack: 103-105
Clean Pull: 115-120
Front Squat: 115-120
Back Squat: 128-132
Deadlift: 138-145
Standing Press: 48-52

Many factors influence these charts, and not every athlete fits the ratios perfectly due to variations in limb length, mobility, positioning, how explosive a certain athlete is, etc.

For that reason, most coaches use ratios like this as a rough guide for selecting priorities in their program design for clients. Here's one simple way to interpret them.

Let’s say you can back squat 175kg but you can only clean and jerk 100kg. Based on your big back squat, you ‘should’ be able to jerk more. It’s incumbent on the coach and athlete to determine why the jerk is relatively low (could be a technique breakdown, poor upper body strength or a mobility issue) and to prioritize it in training. The ratios give us a clue to shape your training plan: you’d better spend more time working on your jerk and less time focusing on squatting strength to improve overall results for Olympic weightlifting.

On the other hand, if you can snatch and clean and jerk at the high end of your target ratio compared to what you can squat, chances are your technique and speed are solid. The ratios suggest that you need to work hard on getting stronger in order to get better. Spend more training time on improving your squat and general strength and less rigorously drilling technique.

It’s a pretty intuitive idea and it makes total sense.

POLIQUIN’S TWIST ON THE IDEA of Structural balance

What Poliquin did was expand on the use of ratios and emphasize that athletes need balance across their entire bodies. When muscles groups get out of balance, we're more prone to injury and - importantly - we leave easy performance improvements on the table.

To go back to the example of Jim McKenzie’s miraculous bench press improvement, you’ll read in the article I linked that he did no bench press training to get there. How can that be? Poliquin found that McKenzie had extremely weak external rotators of the shoulder. These muscles are key stabilizers of the shoulder joint. By correcting McKenzie’s terrible shoulder stability he fixed the weak link in the chain. At that point, he could actually express his true potential for strength and saw a massive increase in his bench press.

Today, I wonder if this story has been subject to a tiny bit of creative licence. Perhaps the numbers were inflated for effect. Or maybe McKenzie was the perfect candidate for structural balance. Having worked with hundreds of clients on improving structural balance, I can attest to the very real performance increases and a general feeling of ‘being more solid’ that clients express. At the same time, McKenzie's results are by far the most dramatic improvement in the bench press that I’ve ever heard of. So don’t expect to be adding 100lbs to your clients’ bench presses (especially if they’re already benching around 300lbs) in one offseason without a bit of fairy dust and a magic wand.

POLIQUIN’S structural balance RATIOS

In case you’re wondering at this point, here are Poliquin's structural balance ratios, most of which are available online.

UPPER BODY RATIOS
Close Grip Bench Press: 100%
Incline Bench Press: 91%
Parallel Bar Dip: 117% (bodyweight plus addition weight)
6RM 1-Arm Dumbbell Press: 30% per arm
Lying Triceps Extension: 40%
Supinated Chin-ups: 87%
Scott Barbell Curls: 46%
Standing Reverse Curls: 40%
8RM Flat Powel Raise: 10.6%
8RM Bent-over Dumbbell Trap-3 Raise: 10.6%
8RM Seated Dumbbell External Rotation: 9.8%

LOWER BODY RATIOS
High Bar Back Squat: 100%
Front Squat: 85%
Deadlift: 1.25%
Power Clean: 66%
Power Snatch: 51%
8RM Peterson Step-up: 46%
Triple Jumpers Step-up 8RM: 30%
Full Snatch: 66%
Close Grip Bench Press: 66%

*All done with a 4010 tempo and strict form, except the Peterson Step-up, which can be done with a 2010 tempo, and the Olympic lifts, which don’t require any unusual tempo prescriptions. Just perform them as normal.

PUTTING structural balance drills INTO PRACTICE IN MY GYM

After the courses I was excited to start doing structural balance tests on clients. In some cases I had success, but sometimes I also struggled.

When doing a general assessment of upper body structural balance, Poliquin suggested testing all clients on:
-close-grip bench press 1RM
-weighted chin-up 1RM
-seated dumbbell external rotation 8RM on each side
-and the bent-over trap-3 raise 8RM on each side.

You could test some of the other upper body exercises if needed, but these four were the basics.

I found that most people had relatively weak stabilizing muscles and their performance in the external rotation and trap-3 raise wasn’t up to par. No big surprise there. The solution I’d learned in the courses I attended was to simply use the same testing exercises - the seated DB external rotation and the bent-over trap-3 raise - to build them up.

This is where I ran into problems. Performing sets of these exercises did work for a few clients. They got stronger. But others made minimal progress, especially in the trap-3 raise. I was frustrated and wondered what was going on. I thought this was supposed to work like magic!

WHY these drills wereN’T WORKING LIKE I HOPED

Turns out, there were two missing pieces. First, there is no magic plan or exercise prescription that works for everyone. If something sounds too good to be true, guess what? It is. Some things work well for one individual and just don’t get the same results for another. Our job as coaches is to identify what’s working and not working as quickly as possible and learn to make the right adjustments to achieve the goal.

The second thing I had to learn, which for some reason wasn’t emphasized in the course, was this: your clients need to feel the right muscles working. If that sounds like a no-brainer to you, you were well ahead of me at that stage of my career. If you’re doing an exercise to target a specific muscle group, you need to feel that muscle group fatigue throughout the set. It should be burning and pumped with blood. This is a fundamental principle of bodybuilding, which is, after all, the art and science of targeting and developing specific muscles.

As obvious as this sounds to me now, it wasn’t so clear then. The message I got at the course was this: if your lower traps are weak, do an exercise that’s supposed to target it. In this case, the only exercise I’d been taught was the trap-3 raise.

Except that most people I worked with couldn’t feel their lower traps working in the trap-3 raise, even with extremely light weights. They’d shrug their shoulder up toward the ear and quite frankly, butcher the movement. They either lacked the mobility or body control to perform the exercise in a manner that would deliver the benefit we wanted. And at that time, I wasn’t effective at making the right adjustments. These clients could do trap-3 raises until the cows came come, but they never improved the strength of their lower traps. In fact, by doing the movement with poor form, they’d simply further strengthened the wrong muscles and reinforced the incorrect movement pattern.

Paradoxically, the few people who could do trap-3 raises properly probably didn’t need to work on them. Their low traps were strong and functioned like they were supposed to. It was the people who couldn’t perform the exercise effectively who really needed them.

Did I mention that I found this immensely frustrating and confusing at the time?

I got stuck on this for over a year without making much progress on it. While developing the lower traps can be one of the harder things to accomplish in the gym, there are progressions that can work. It starts with finding an exercise - any exercise - where the client can feel the right muscles working. It all starts with building a brain to muscle connection so they understand what that muscle group is supposed to do. From there, you find ways to increase difficulty to progress strength in that muscle group.

STRUCTURAL BALALNCE 2.0

A year after the Poliquin seminars, I found James Fitzgerald.

James had developed his own take on structural balance norms. He was an early student of Poliquin, and now coaches hundreds of CrossFit coaches through his company OPEX and their Coaches Certificate Program (CCP), as well as multiple CrossFit Games competitors and other athletes.

I first started learning from James when he was based in Calgary. It was circa 2009 and he had some fresh ideas about how to do CrossFit better. Back then CrossFit was truly in its infancy, and there were so many unknowns. It’s come a long way since then.

During my first visit to see James I, along with 15 or 20 others, spent 5 days sitting in a small hotel conference room in the suburbs of Calgary to get his take on assessing athletes and writing effective programs.

I called James a while back to talk about structural balance and one of the first things he said was: “Years ago, structural balance was seen as truth. Now it’s seen as insight.”

In other words, what those ratios are missing is context. Who are you working with? What are their goals? What are their needs? Which exercises will actually work best for that individual? This echo’s my experience with structural balance over the years.

James recommends that for beginner trainees, the big picture goal is to develop good mechanics and a foundation of strength. Can they do three strict chin-ups and dips? Can they squat 1.25% of their bodyweight? Do they have basic core endurance demonstrated by holding a side plank for 90sec/side and a sorensen hold for 2min? And, do they have sufficient strength and control of their scapula?

Poliquin’s ratios can give us clues but we should be obsessed about exact ratios. Instead of getting lost in the minutia, we should be looking to achieve balanced fitness and can use structural balance tests as one method to assess where the client is.

At the end of the day, beginners need lots of quality repetitions at moderate intensity to build mechanics, neural efficiency, and strengthen connective tissue. They also need some semblance of balance and should strive to hit basic strength levels. We can ask: are the client’s ratios pretty close or are they way off? How much of a priority is it based on their needs?

For intermediate athletes, structural balance ratios take on a different role. Now we can look at the ratios more broadly to determine training priorities. We can compare the trainee’s ability in major movement patterns. How does their performance compare in single leg vs. hinging vs. squatting vs. upper body pulling vs upper body pushing vs. core stability? Is the upper body or lower body generally in need or more development? Structural balance helps us identify areas of weakness, allowing us to focus more training time on them.

For advanced athletes in the sport of fitness there are two big reasons to use structural balance. One is in the off season. James argues that, at this point, training should include plenty of technique practice, corrective work, unilateral work, and specific efforts to build neglected muscle groups, which is sometimes called functional bodybuilding. This helps the athlete prep the body for harder training to come. In fact, one of James’ nuggets was this: although he regularly integrated unilateral work into training early in his career, if he could go back he’d do more of it.

The second importance of structural balance for advanced trainees is comparing the athlete’s ability in slow and fast lifts. This gives insight into where they sit on the speed-strength continuum. If you’re not familiar with this concept, watch this video by Eric Cressey. He’ll explain it better than I can in one paragraph.

Different sports have different strength vs. speed requirements. In the sport of CrossFit, athletes mainly need to move moderate loads quickly, while keeping the efforts as aerobic/sustainable as possible. Absolute speed and absolute strength aren’t the predominant characteristics that are tested. That means speed-strength and strength-speed activities are prized in this sport.

For example, James argues that CrossFit athletes should be able to do 5 touch and go reps at 75% of the clean, power clean and snatch. Power clean should be roughly the same as a closed grip bench press, which should be roughly 66% of your 1RM high bar back squat.

If you’re training athletes from other sports, their needs will differ, but structural balance ratios still give insight into where they’re lacking.

SEVEN BIG TAKEAWAYS ON STRUCTURAL BALANCE TRAINING

Based on working with the knowledge for almost 10 years, here's what I've learned.

The big idea, that athletes perform best when they're operating in basic balance, is 100% sound. Charles Poliquin got people thinking about this, and that’s huge. The exact ratios down to the last percentage point aren't as important, but generally speaking use structural balance testing to uncover major imbalances. Then adjust training accordingly.
Certain sports favour imbalance. For example, pressing strength is much less important for a rock climber than pulling strength. You'd expect (and want) a climber to have higher than normal pulling strength compared to some other values. Ultimately, it's up to the coach to determine how much "imbalance" is too much. Know why you’re doing what you’re doing for each individual.
Having said that, for most sports and definitely for the general population who seek fitness for part of a healthy lifestyle, the basic ratios are an excellent guiding principle.
Most of Poliquin’s original ratios are more applicable to intermediate and advanced athletes than beginners. Since beginners, by definition, haven't mastered the key lifts, the benefits of a thorough structural balance assessments are limited. Instead, use basic assessments focused on building sound fundamentals - good movement patterns, sufficient core control, and strong stabilizing/postural muscles. With beginners you get to build them from the ground up. Don’t sweat all the details, but ensure balance in training and build to an appropriate level of fitness.
We’ve all heard of muscle imbalances, but most of the time it’s some vague idea. That makes client buy-in harder to achieve. One of the best features of structural balance ratios is that they immediately prove to the client that there’s a problem. They make the problem real. Tangible. You can say: “you can bench 250lbs, but you can only do 5lbs in an external rotation drill. You should be able to do 20-25lbs for 8 reps. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if your stabilizing muscles worked?” That’s a lot stronger than saying “your shoulder is imbalanced. Let’s work on it. When a client is way off from the ideal ratio, they’ll know there's a problem and exactly what the standard is to bring their weak muscle group back into balance. This is a huge benefit.
Don’t just pay attention to the ratios. Get clues from every exercise. Imperfect technique often results from a weakness or imbalance. In that way, every rep of every exercise becomes its own assessment.

Even if you can perform a structural balance assessment and achieve the ideal ratio, how did those reps look? How was the range of motion? Were the mechanics correct?

For instance, can the client maintain a stable shoulder position in the bench press all the way up to their max? Where do they break down? What weakness could be causing that? What about their squat? Can they maintain proper position on the way down, at the bottom, and the way up? Is there a breakdown and what’s the cause? Structural balance ratios are great because they provide hard data. You either hit the ratio or you can’t. But you also need to honor the subjective aspect of good form. You have to develop your coaching eye to see the things that the ratios can’t adequately capture, and then use all the information to make a judgement call.
You need to be strict with form and tempo to get consistent testing results. Most structural balance assessments have a very specific testing procedure to get dependable results. Follow the guidelines to improve the reliability of your data. Most of this info is available online, but most exercises are done at an 4010 tempo. That means a 4sec lowering phase, no pause at the bottom, 1sec on the way back up, and no pause at the top. If the athlete is no longer able to hold tempo, or needs to pause between reps, the set is terminated.