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TRAINING GEAR

Weightlifting belts
Weightlifting belts are arguably the most popular form of exercise gear. The common belief
is that a belt helps prevent injury by stabilizing the spine. On the other hand, many lifters
don’t use a belt because they view it as a crutch that decreases the work done by their own
muscles.

Safety is why many bros wear the belt during their entire training session. After all, those
biceps-curl-turned-power-clean are heavy on the spine…

If your biceps curls look like this, you may indeed want to wear a belt…

The practice of wearing a belt throughout the entire training session reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding of the way a weightlifting belt functions. For one, the belt needs to be
tightened to the point of significant discomfort for it to be effective. The whole point of the
belt is to create stability. The stability is achieved mainly in 2 ways:

1. The belt simply acts as a brace, preventing spinal motion. As such, the belt needs to
be as tight as possible without interfering with the ‘core’ musculature’s own ability to

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brace (core here refers mostly to the erector spinae, rectus abdominis and external
obliques). The bracing effect becomes more powerful with greater levels of spinal
flexion. The more your back rounds, the more pressure is applied to the belt and the
greater the elastic recoil from the belt to help you lift the weight.
2. The belt increases intra-abdominal pressure. This decreases spinal compression
force. This effect is similar to that of the Valsalva maneuver you naturally perform
when you’re exercising: you stop breathing out air but maintain the force of
exhalation against closed airways. This creates a source of internal stability.

Note that these effects are entirely passive. The belt helps you lift more weight without your
muscles performing more work. People can generally squat and deadlift a good 5% more
weight with a belt, sometimes much more, but EMG activity of the leg and core muscles is
generally unchanged. (Most references are in the recommended reading.)

If anything, there’s a trend in the research towards lower activity of the external obliques
and greater activity of the rectus abdominis. This may be due to higher benefits of intra-
abdominal pressure and a lower need for stabilization against lateral and rotary forces.

There is also one study finding greater leg muscle activity in some of the repetitions when
wearing a belt, but this study is contradicted by several others [i.a. 1, 2]. The study also
found no increase in ground-reaction force. You would expect an increase if the leg muscles
actually produced more force. This suggests that the muscle activity pattern across the
movement changes, but total muscle activity remains the same. Given that this study only
had 5 subjects and it tested a large amount of variables, the chance of a false positive (type I
error) is also likely.

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Muscle activity when squatting with a belt (WB) vs. not with a belt (NWB).

The stability provided by the belt doesn’t just change how much you can lift, it also changes
how you lift in several ways. People are more explosive with a belt, at least with submaximal
weights. The belt itself encourages ‘dive bombing’ down explosively in the squat and
rounding your spine and pelvis because then the elastic recoil is highest. In research, we also
see greater vertical displacement, meaning people squat down lower. However, rounding of
the lumbopelvic complex greatly increases shearing stress on the lumbar spine and the
sacroiliac joint and is therefore considered poor technique.

Horizontal displacement also increases as a result of greater spinal stability, allowing you to
squat with more forward lean.

Perhaps more importantly than the actual change in biomechanics is that people feel much
more secure with a belt and are generally willing to lift heavier weights (or the same weight
more explosively). This is a false sense of safety, since the increase in spinal stability is
generally offset by the higher weights you’re lifting. An extensive amount of research on the

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injury rate of lifting with and without a weightlifting belt has found that there is no benefit to
wearing a belt. In fact, some data indicates that the injuries that occur when wearing a belt
are more severe. This makes sense; you’re lifting more weight, more explosively with
greater forward lean. If something goes wrong, it’s likely to go way worse.

Moreover, since you’re lifting more weight, the knees and hips are stressed more with a belt.
The back is stabilized by the belt, but the limbs are not.

A final safety consideration is that a belt increases blood pressure during training. For lean,
physically active and healthy-eating individuals, this is likely not a serious concern. But it’s
worth noting for people that are overweight or have cardiovascular problems.

Conclusion

So should you wear a belt? It’s absolutely not necessary for most bodybuilders. Until
someone has mastered perfect squatting and deadlifting technique, a belt can easily provide a
false sense of security and function as a crutch, making the lifter rely on the elastic recoil at
the expense of good form. More experienced lifters should be fine, but since muscle activity
generally doesn’t increase significantly, there is also no reason to use a belt other than
personal preference (which again, is likely to be a poor intuition of safety).

For powerlifters the issue is very simple. A belt allows you to lift more weight, so use it if it’s
allowed during competition. And be sure to practice with it. It’s nonsense to only use a belt
during your heaviest sets, since the belt alters your biomechanics. A squat with a belt is a
different skill than a beltless squat. Remember the SAID principle. If you don’t, revisit the
course topic on understanding muscle growth.

As for how to use a weightlifting belt, you basically just strap it on tight around the lumbar
spine and your abdomen. Some people prefer it up higher on the belly. Most people prefer it
lower with the bottom of the belt touching the hips. A good starting point of tightness is as
tight as you can strap it when your belly is completely filled with air. Bodybuilders can use it
however they prefer. Powerlifters should go with what delivers the greatest increase in
performance.

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Most powerlifting belts are fine, but most people prefer a belt that has the same width
around its entire length. And for the love of iron, don’t get a Velcro belt with a hook-and-
loop fastener. It’s not a toy, so get a sturdy leather belt.

Left: good. Right: badboy.

Recommended reading
 On the use weight belts
 A review of the use of lifting belts

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Knee wraps
Knee wraps consist of thick canvas, often lined with rubber. With few
exceptions, only powerlifters, Olympic weightlifters and a few
bodybuilders wrap their knees. If you’ve never worn knee wraps, you
probably can’t imagine how tight they are compared to knee sleeves. To
give you an idea, some powerlifters in the lower weight classes have to be
carried up the stairs to the podium because they can’t flex their knees
enough to walk the stairs themselves while wearing the wraps.

Knee wraps function much like weightlifting belts in principle, but they rely
much more on their elasticity rather than creating stability via increased intra-abdominal
pressure.

Concretely, knee wraps only stabilize the knee by acting as a brace. It’s an elastic brace, so
just like a belt, it encourages dive bombing down during the squat. Since the elasticity comes
from knee flexion, the wraps encourage a more knee dominant squat. Note that this does
not necessarily mean a more upright squat: the research is mixed about whether horizontal
barbell displacement decreases when wearing knee wraps.

In contrast to the above findings from most studies, it has been observed that powerlifters
squat the same way with or without knee wraps. This was an uncontrolled study, however,
so it is possible that either the powerlifters were not making optimal use of the wraps or
that they were so used to squatting in knee wraps that their motor patterns were fully
engrained and no longer changed acutely when performing regular squats. The weights used
were also submaximal.

What is certain though, is that knee wraps make you able to lift more weight. Using knee
wraps increased peak power and vertical impulse by 10% in one study, so a decent guideline
is that you can squat 10% more when wearing knee wraps. However, other studies have
found much higher values. Knee wraps increase isometric belt squat performance by ~21.5%.
In another study where trainees were lowered on a scale with a parachute to the squat
position (see image below), vertical force was 25.1% higher with knee wraps. Finally,

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Brazilian powerlifter and professor Marilia Coutinho has done unpublished research that
suggests knee wraps increase squat force production by 19.8%.

That’s a major advantage to competitive strength athletes, but the increased force is entirely
passive. Your muscles do not need to perform significantly more work and your joints will
be subject to higher stress.

In fact, one study found that quadriceps activity is lower when squatting with knee wraps at
high intensities. Interestingly though, at 60% of 1RM, both quad and glute activity were higher
with knee wraps. This may have been simply because of the difference in vertical barbell
displacement. This was greater at the low intensity and smaller at the high intensity. So with
the low weight, the wraps facilitated lifting explosively and going down lower, but with the
heavier weight, the wraps may have prevented excessive ROM. As such, the differences in
muscle activity could be due to the difference in ROM instead of the use of knee wraps per
se.

An alternative explanation for the lower quadriceps muscle activity when wearing wraps is
that the wraps no longer allow the knee joint to function in a natural manner, since the knee
cap normally moves in several directions when squatting. Restricting the joint’s natural

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movement or the high pressure from the wraps may cause neural inhibition of the
quadriceps. It may also increase the risk of knee injury, especially in combination with
heavier and more explosive lifting.

Conclusion

After studying the effects of knee wraps on squat biomechanics, a group of researchers
concluded the following: “The elastic properties of knee wraps increased mechanical output
but altered back squat technique in a way that is likely to alter the musculature targeted by
the exercise and possibly compromise the integrity of the knee joint. Knee wraps should not
be worn during the strength and condition process.” Even more so than with a belt, there’s
an increased risk of injury without any discernable benefit, other than boosting your ego.

Powerlifters and Olympic weightlifters should wear knee wraps during training if, and only if,
they may wear them when they compete. If so, they should be worn most of the time, since
squatting with knee wraps is a different skill than squatting without them. Get the thickest
ones you’re allowed to wear and experiment with the wrapping technique that allows you to
lift the most weight. The figure-8 method depicted below is a good starting point, as it has
been scientifically validated. Based on the research, the x-wrapping technique is no more
effective than the spiral wrapping technique though [2] and it doesn’t appear to matter if you
do many looser wraps or fewer tighter wraps.

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Lifting straps
Most lifters can’t max out on deadlifts with a double overhand grip. Yet untrained individuals
generally don’t have any problems with grip strength.

The reason for the loss of relative grip strength as you get stronger is because grip strength
is strongly genetically determined. Some people naturally have an extremely strong grip,
while others never get that strong, even after years of training. Researchers often measure
grip strength in untrained individuals as a measure of overall strength.

The genetic influence of grip strength also explains why men have a so much stronger grip
than women. If you don’t think this is a surprising finding, consider that women have the
same relative muscular potential as men and only a slightly lower potential for strength. This
difference cannot even remotely explain the massive gap in grip strength between men and
women: 90% of women have a weaker grip than the weakest 5% of men. Even elite female
athletes, including national level judokas, don’t score better than the weakest 25% of men
and the very strongest women in that group of athletes only reached the 58th percentile of
untrained men. So even most untrained men are significantly stronger than some of the
strongest women, even after controlling for the difference in muscle and hand size.

In short, you can definitely make your grip much stronger with training, but the development
of your grip size will generally be outpaced by the development of the rest of your body. As
a result, your grip will become relatively weak. Men have trouble deadlifting without the bar
slipping out of their hands and women often experience a whole lot more issues. Many of
my female clients become too strong in single leg calf raises to load the exercise by holding
on to a dumbbell. Same for holding on to the dumbbell during hyperextensions, not to
mention pretty much every deadlift variant.

Lacking grip strength is problematic, because as you learned in the course topic on exercise
selection, this makes your grip the limit factor during the exercise. When your grip limits
your performance, the target musculature of the exercise remains understimulated.

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Which brings us to lifting straps. Strapping a bar around your wrist makes it much easier to
hold onto it. Problem solved, at least for bodybuilders and strength athletes that are allowed
to wear lifting straps during competition.

If you don’t know how to use lifting straps, here’s an instructional video. There are many
ways to use straps though and it doesn’t really matter which one you use as long as it’s safe
and it works.

If your gym allows chalk (i.e. magnesium powder) and that’s enough to maintain your grip,
that’s even better than using straps. The less training gear you need, the better.

Gripping the bar with chalk before deadlifts.

Some people don’t like the solution of using straps because it’s a crutch. Based on the above,
however, you can see that it’s more of a legitimate aid than a crutch.

Moreover, it’s not like your grip muscles stop working when you’re using straps. If you even
lift, you’ll know that your grip will still get fatigued from deadlifting with straps. In fact, it
wouldn’t surprise me if a study in the future will find that muscle activity in the forearms is
not affected during heavy deadlifts. Even with straps, most people cling on to the bar as if
their life depends on it when grinding out a heavy deadlift rep.

However, there’s a limit to the use of straps. Straps should only be worn when they are
actually needed to avoid limiting performance. Otherwise you’re creating a problem instead
one. Men should also basically only have to use straps during deadlifts. In my experience, any
other need for straps is almost always due to bad gripping technique, using excessively heavy
weights or just being a pussy. Women have it worse, but still straps should only be needed
during heavy lower body work.

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You may be wondering, ‘why not just use an alternate grip?’

A mixed grip is beneficial for strength athletes that can’t use straps during competition, but it
comes with 2 problems compared to using straps.

1. A mixed grip puts an asymmetrical stress on the upper body, from the wrists and
elbows all the way to the shoulder and quite possibly affecting the spine. Supination
of the wrist extends the elbow and flexes the biceps. This puts the biceps and its
proximal tendon in a much more injurious position. You almost never hear of anyone
tearing their biceps with a double overhand grip, but with a mixed grip, it’s relatively
common at the elite level.

The extension of the elbow of the supinated arm can also cause uneven positioning
of the shoulders, which can in turn affect the spine and the hip. Considering the huge
weights used during deadlifts and the relatively high risk of back injury and form
degradation, there is little reason to exacerbate these risks because you’re too cool
for straps.

A mixed grip results in asymmetric muscle activation, even affecting the lats. Even aside from
the injury risk, this can result in strength asymmetries. As you’ve learned in the topic on
structural balance theory, further increases the risk of injury.

So a mixed grip is not advisable unless it’s needed for a competition. In that case, you’ll want
to alternate your grip as much as possible to avoid creating strength asymmetries and
asymmetric overuse injuries. And before you try a mixed grip, experiment with a hook grip.
Most people don’t like it, but then again, most people never really try it.

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Footwear
The heel

It is telling of our current society that men wear heels and you’re considered weird if you
don’t. And no, I’m not talking about 5” stiletto heels or those monstrosities the Spice Girls
and other ‘music artists’ from the 80s wore. I’m talking about the heel lift in your shoes,
both your everyday shoes and your gym shoes.

That heel lift greatly changes your posture. Yes, even if you’re a man. It’s quite ironic how
little attention is paid to the effect of footwear on posture, considering all the crap people
are willing to buy into to change their posture. A heel lift puts your ankles in plantarflexion.
This shifts the knee forwards. As a result, knee stress increases significantly when wearing
heels [2]. Both the height of the heel as well as its width affect how badly your posture
changes. The hips have to compensate by shifting the pelvis to anterior tilt or by flattening
the spine. Either scenario tends to increase the stress placed on the spine. It can also makes
your belly protrude and your butt stick out.

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The posture resulting from a heel lift is not necessarily all bad. In the gym, it can help you
squat deeper. However, deeper doesn’t necessarily mean you increase overall range of
motion. A heel lift generally sacrifices range of motion at the ankle for the potential for more
range of motion at the knee. The greater the heel lift, the less dorsiflexion occurs at the
ankle, the more knee flexion may occur and the more the trunk stays upright.

That’s the best case scenario if your structure is well suited for squatting with a heel lift.
One study found that the increased squat depth from squatting in Olympic lifting shoes
(which have a significant heel elevation) is purely because of the heel lift and actual range of
motion at the knee and hip is unaffected. So in this case total ROM is actually less when
squatting in Olympic lifting shoes because you reduce ROM at the ankle.

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Unpublished data from Legg et al. on the effect of 2° heel inclinations on squatting kinematics.

Whether range of motion at the hip decreases with a heel lift depends on your
anthropometry (= bodily dimensions). If you normally squat with great forward lean, hip
flexion in the bottom will likely stay close to maximal. If you normally already squat very
upright, however, you’ll likely decrease range of motion at the hip.

A common misconception is that squatting with a heel lift increases quadriceps activity. In
reality, muscle activity in the squat changes only minimally, if at all, in shoes compared to
when you squat barefoot.

So the relevant factors to consider for squatting barefoot vs. in regular shoes vs. in Olympic
weightlifting shoes are range of motion and joint stress. Your muscles tend to have a similar
activity level during most types of squats, as it’s the same functions they’re performing.

Conclusion on heel lifts

Using a heel lift when squatting increases knee joint stress and decreases range of motion at
the ankle, thereby making squats less effective for the calves. What happens to ROM at the
hip and knee depend on your structure, but often there is no greater total ROM, just more
vertical bar displacement. Nor is there a significant difference in muscle activation. Generally,

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the only benefit is that spinal stress is often lower and hip stress may be lower too. As such,
unless your bodily dimensions are particularly well suited to squatting with a heel lift so that
you can achieve much more total ROM, you probably have no business wearing shoes with a
heel lift. And you certainly shouldn’t place weight plates under your heels.

Many people prefer Olympic weightlifting shoes because they make it easier to hit the
arbitrary depth of ‘parallel squats.’ Shoes can then quickly turn into a crutch (no pun
intended) that will make you lose the proprioception needed to squat barefoot. It is
therefore advisable that everyone first becomes proficient in barefoot squatting before
experimenting with different kinds of footwear. Many people experience a profound new
sense of proprioception when they first squat barefoot due to the direct contact of the feet
with the ground.

If shoes with a heel allow you to squat with this much ROM, awesome. If not and you don’t have a
back or hip injury, don’t kid yourself that you’re wearing Olympic lifting shoes for any other reason
than that they make squatting to parallel artificially easier.

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Socks can be an acceptable way to squat ‘barefoot’ if your gym doesn’t allow you to squat
truly barefoot, but if the floor does not have a lot of traction, socks can be unstable.

For exercises other than the squat, there is generally no benefit and a significant potential
risk to elevating your heels. A heel lift can disrupt your technique, especially during posterior
chain dominant exercises like deadlifts where it’s important to stay on your heels.

And in daily life, if you’re not a woman wearing heels for aesthetic purposes, well, just make
sure they match your purse.

Stability

Another feature of footwear is its stability. A shoe basically functions like a brace for your
foot. The sturdier the shoe, the more stability is provided. But is this stability solving a
problem or is it creating one?

Recommended reading
The sense and sensibility of shoes

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Pronation & shoe inserts

A common method of determining which kind of shoes you need is by looking at your
walking posture (gait). The amount of pronation of the foot is then compared to the
textbook standard that should occur and a type of shoe or shoe insert is prescribed to
correct this.

While the idea of selecting footwear based on your level of foot pronation is superficially
plausible, it’s actually lousy textbook science. Research has found no relation between the
degree of foot pronation and the risk of running injury. As you’ve learned in the course topic

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on stretching, there is no such thing as optimal human posture, so it’s silly to force people
into this mythical posture. There is significant interindividual variability in human anatomy
and the motor cortex is very adequately equipped to optimize your movements based on
your individual anthropometry.

In fact, your brain’s movement center is so awesome that you are often best off selecting
your shoes simply based on how comfortable they are.

However, given that a heel lift is generally undesirable in the gym and everyday life, that
shoes have caused more problems than they’ve solved and that there’s no trend towards
technological advances in footwear conferring any kind of significant benefit for healthy
individuals, why would we wear shoes in the first place?

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Conclusion on footwear

Being barefoot is the natural default in every sense of the word. Don’t interfere with biology
when you don’t have to. Unless you have a clinical foot or gait pathology, being barefoot or
wearing minimalistic footwear is generally optimal for joint health, posture and lower body
muscle function. Trying to correct the human motor cortex, a marvel of millions of years of
evolution, with something as primitive as a shoe is like trying to tune up your computer
using a kitchen knife.

Since you probably do want to wear something protective on your feet, or your gym will
want you to because your gym sucks, a good option is minimalistic footwear with flat soles
like VivoBarefoot shoes. Alternatively, if you’re not just indifferent about fashion but you
actively want to affront people, get some Vibram five-finger shoes. (Hm, should we get an
affiliate link for that recommendation?)

Competitive strength athletes are of course an exception again. Powerlifters may benefit
from the grip and stability provided by sturdier shoes, especially because you don’t always
know what kind of surface you’ll be competing on. Still, many powerlifters prefer the
ballerina type slippers (and that says something) and the almost flat-heeled Chuck Taylors.
Minimalistic footwear in general will probably become more common in powerlifting.

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Olympic weightlifters often benefit from – you’ll never guess – Olympic weightlifting shoes.
They’re simply the only way to catch a clean or a snatch in the ass-to-grass squat position
without folding over like an accordion. Very few people can reach the deep catch position
without a heel lift or completely losing the neutral position of their lumbopelvic complex, so
shoes with a heel lift are practically mandatory for Olympic weightlifters.

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