Nearly two decades ago, legendary strength and conditioning coach, Charles Poliquin came up with the concept of structural balance. In its simplest terms, structural balance means addressing specific ratios of strength imbalances for optimal athletic development.
For instance, if your bench press has stagnated at 140 kilograms, it may not be necessarily the chest and shoulders that need to be developed, but instead the muscles of the upper back.
To give some more context, the upper and lower body each have “mother lifts”. The mother lift equals 100% and sets a standard for all the other lifts to compare against it.
Here is an example for the Upper Body:
Bench Press: 100%
Incline Press: 91%
Overhead Press: 60%
Weighted Dip: 105% of bench press (bodyweight included)
Supinated Chin-Up:90% of bench press (bodyweight included)
Here is an example for the Lower Body:
Squat: 100%
Front Squat: 85%
Deadlift: 125%
For instance, if you bench press 100 kilograms, and that is 100%, then to be structurally balanced your Incline press should be 91% of that number. Which would mean a 91-kilogram incline press in this example.
The whole premise of structural balance is to work on your weaknesses, of which I completely agree with… for the right person, at the right time.
Structural balance made coaches think harder about the programs they gave to their clients. It was a revolutionary concept, that made the best athletes even better, more injury resilient and better equipped to handle the demands of their sport.
The theory of structural balance I completely agree with. You want to make sure that you are not neglecting any muscles in the body, so that you are a stronger human being.
But like most things, when taken to the extreme, you can miss the forest for the trees. This in my opinion, is what is done sometimes when it comes to structural balance training.
Becoming Average at Everything
For a year or two, my goals were to be perfectly balanced.
I would spend an entire 12-week training cycle working on my weakest lifts (based on which exercises were most out of kilter) But what I found was, that I was becoming average at a lot of different things.
This would mean most of my training would centre around the weak links exclusively, whilst the others were put on the back-burner.
Over time, I realised that if I wanted to get strong, this wasn’t the way forward for me. Primarily because, there wasn’t enough specificity or repetition in the main lifts, with a heavy enough weight to continue a reasonable progression.
High Levels of Performance Are Not Balanced
If you look at the highest level in anything, there’s a trade-off with your health. Plain and simple.
Understandably, the training should be in place to help improve longevity of the athlete’s career.
But it should also help the athlete become a more dangerous human being on the field, on the court, on the track, in the ring, or on the platform.
This means, that training needs to become more specific as the athlete is approaching competition.
Specific training, at a high level is not balanced.
Trying to make it balanced will only take away from the athlete’s ability to be their best on the pitch.
Why? Because they need specific practice, to the means of their sport.
Elite marathon runners will sacrifice their muscle mass to run even faster. Top level strength athletes will peak for competition under extremely specific conditions, with weights that are crushing connective tissues, and joints.
Bottom line, being balanced isn’t practical at a high level.
If you want to be perfectly balanced, be prepared to be a little bit shit at everything.
This doesn’t mean that you throw structural balance out the window, it means that it should be used as a tool, rather than the primary focus.
My Thoughts
The concept and essence of structural balance is very important. Don’t neglect your weaknesses. But the question becomes how far do you take that before you lose sight of the overall goal?
Structural balance does play a role in my system, but in a different way to how Charles used it in his career. My thoughts are if you include a:
Squat Pattern
Hinging Pattern
Vertical Push
Vertical Pull
Horizontal Push
Horizontal Pull
Whether that be in the individual training session, across the week or in the phase, you will be structurally balanced. If you are training these movements in some capacity, then all the muscles in your body will be stimulated and will be undergoing the process of adaptation. There will be no muscles “missed out”, they will all get bigger and stronger, together.
In terms of the distribution of volume to the muscles included in these movements, it would be worth later in you training career, to dedicate more volume to the muscles that you are naturally weaker at, based on your anthropometrics. Usually, I will take one of the patterns above that emphasise that weaker muscle group and add extra assistance work to help add more volume to that area. This will help you address your weaknesses and become more “structurally balanced”.
The key difference in all this however, is that “structural balance” is used as a tool, it is not the main priority of the training program.
There’s no need to set up an entire cycle of training around your weak links specifically, instead everything can be trained together, in a logical way so no progression is lost.
I hope this has helped you understand the concept of structural balance, and how it can be appropriately applied in your training!
