In the summer of 2019, I was looking for a course to take and challenge myself. As you may know at New Leaf Physiotherapy we pride ourselves in constantly upgrading our knowledge and to be on the cutting edge.
I saw a course ad in the Physiotherapy Association of BC newsletter about a strength training course called KLT training. KLT = Kinetic Link Training. Henry and I signed up for the course.
Kinetic Link Training was developed and taught by Wayne Rogers out of Australia. He was challenged by the Australian Sport Physiotherapy Association to develop an evidence-based strength training course. He came up with KLT.
Wayne stated that he broke human movement down to 8 basic upper body and 4 lower body movements. The 8 upper body movements are forward push, backwards pull, upwards push, downwards pull, arc coming towards the midline of the body, arc moving away from the midline in the body, upwards pull and a downward push.
The lower body movements were a 2 legged squat, lunge, split squat and lateral lunge.
The distinction of KLT with other weight training programs is that you pair an upper body movement with a lower body movement. For example, hold dumbbells in your hands, do a double leg squat and at the top of the squat do a bicep curl with both arms. This is the beauty and the finesse with the programming. Working on two movements that work well together and are challenging at the same time. By doing this you are essentially doing double the work in each set.
An example of a KLT exercise is a squat and a bilateral arm row in standing. Holding a handle from a cable machine in both hands, squat down and as you stand up pull the handle towards your waist and do a row. The mechanics are something like this, as you squat you activate your glutes and your arms go in front of the body. This motion activates your lats. As you stand up, you squeeze the glutes and pull with your lats. In humans, the glutes and the lat muscles actually run into one another, for example, the left lat comes towards the midline of the body, in the low back area, and actually crosses intermingling directly with the muscle fibres of the right glute max muscle. Brilliant!
Here are a couple of tips to help you get the most out of adding KLT to your workouts.
1) Look at flow of your movements. For example, if you were in a split squat position and were going to do a single arm dumbbell press. Right leg forward, dumbbell in the left hand at shoulder level. As you rise up out of the split squat you would press the weight up overhead. It would feel weird, if you were dropping down into a split squat and pressed up and lowered the weight as you stand up. Basically the dumbbell would almost stay in the same position and you would be moving your body around it.
2) Concentric with concentric. A concentric movement is a shortening of the muscles. When you are shortening the upper body muscles you are shortening the lower body muscles. For example a bilateral chest press done in a split squat position. You push your arms forward as you stand up from the split squat, both the chest and the legs are working concentrically as the same time (or one after the other). Likewise, you lower your body down as the arms bend and return to their start position, getting ready to press again.
Wayne comes to Canada every fall/winter to teach courses in KLT. If he is able to come back this fall, Henry and I will be taking our Level 2 courses.
For more information on KLT training you can read about it and see some videos on their website.