For myself, I know it's true. You end up with a bent look due to over-development of the front delts, which went away. Balancing out also fixed the constant shoulder soreness, mobility and minor injury problems. Balancing hams with quads did the same and made my knee problems disappear.
A physical therapist once told me that my rounded shoulders and shoulder pain when lifting came from a combination of overdeveloped pecs and traps, and underdeveloped lats and rotator cuff muscles. Gave me a bunch of rotator cuff and scapular retraction exercises to do and told me to reduce my volume of benching and shrugs. Took a while, but eventually corrected my posture and helped with the shoulder pain.
That is extremely important and often overlooked because studies generally aren't looking at corrections for these common ailments, they're just looking at effects on a 'normal' population. It's easy to get tunnel vision and not realize how valuable these corrective exercises can be.
Balance is important, especially for joints that have a high degree of stability via muscles vs ligaments. Best example is the shoulder. If you do a lot of pushing and not enough pulling, chances are that the shoulder will have a hard time balancing itself, or more accurately, centering the joint because the anterior part of the shoulder will be a lot stonger than the posterior part. My personal experience is that if I don't balance it my left shoulder will be so much out of balance that it'll begin to make noise and hurt with external rotation and have instability with overhead movements. To be honest a lot of my problems resulted from imbalances with my training routine. So I personally contine to keep my body balanced because I know my body needs it and I will suffer if I don't do it.
working a muscle out tightens it and working the opposing muscle loosens it up on a neurological level so if you don't want to wind up with a caved in chest it is not a bad idea to do some pulling. Your back is also a lot stronger than your front, so if you do way less volume on the back then someone is seriously wrong with your training.
I think a lot of people are more concerned with posture and spinal health when it comes to balancing between pushing and pulling? Don't know if there's much evidence on that
Physiotherapists will say this a lot. Is the education they're getting just not up-to-date then? I personally got the advice that I need to bump up my backside training a lot to rebalance things. Now I feel like my front is super weak instead..
@@wilsonman8661 Basically, "I think maybe this belief comes from an analogy with the lower body, therefore belief is unfounded because analogy is not a good argument." I've never heard anyone say they thought push/pull ratio was important because of quads and hammies.
@@mag537 At the risk of sounding like an apologist or whatever, he said that _may_ be _one of the_ reasons, primarily because as far as I can tell, there isn't any scientific evidence that this should be a concern. In other words, I don't believe he said it's unfounded *because* of this analogy; rather, I think he's saying it's unfounded (given lack of scientific evidence, and of course acknowledging that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack), so let me try to hypothesize why this has come up as an idea in the first place. Hope that makes sense. Out of curiosity, what reasons _do_ people give for why push/pull ratio is important? I've never really encountered this idea much and never with a real reason why.
Thats right. Lower vs upper body can not be compared because of the vastly different mobility of upper va lower body joints. Its not even close. The hip for example is tightly stabilized by ligaments, while the shoulder is a lot more mobile and for that reason mainly stabilized by muscles. There is simply no meaningful correlation between upper and lower body there. Not saying that there cannot be any balance issues in the lower body - its just a whole different level.
