Armwrestling thoughts (14): who cares about pronation? — Transcript

Hello boys and girls, it's Mindy here again.

Bringing my huge biceps together with me.

And uh today I would like to make a video about pronation.

I can see that uh everyone is talking a lot about it, everyone in our wrestling communities keeps mentioning pronation, pronation.

All the time, doing pronation lifts, pronation exercises, talking about pronation being very useful, very good.

And I'm somehow not really convinced if it's really that important, simply because um I haven't really done a lot of pronation during my trainings.

And uh somehow everyone keeps asking me how do I, how do I train pronation, how am I so good at uh top rolling, and uh everyone somehow assumes that my, you know, hand control and pronation is very dominant and that's why I keep winning, but I I look at it in a little bit different way.

So let me try to explain um uh what I mean.

Let me bring you guys to the table here.

And um so pronation is basically the opposite of supination, supination is going in, pronation is going out, right?

Where is the muscle here which is responsible for this movement, and uh let's say I want to top roll, right, I want to be effective at top rolling people, meaning to go over, to attack your fingers, attack your hand, get a good position and then finish sideways.

So if I just keep, you know, staying, standing in my initial starting position and when I apply a lot of pronation after the go, it doesn't really do that much, you know, it's very hard to um to buckle my opponent's wrist by only using pronation.

Just because the pronating, the pronator is not very a big muscle, um it's quite a small movement, you know, so it's not really effective.

I think what's uh much more effective is uh um the back pressure and the ability to go back while of course holding your pronation, holding your hand in a kind of pronated position, so I think um instead of focusing that so much on pronation, I would maybe focus a little bit, but mostly still work on the back pressure.

Because the the guy who is attacking, being aggressive, going inside, it's very, it's much harder, it is quite easy for him to just jump around you if you are only doing this little pronation movement and not doing any back pressure, right?

Okay, I hope it's somewhat clear, and uh so the main idea here was to simply tell you guys that I would maybe focus a little bit more on the back pressure, not so much on pronation, because I really haven't focused that much on pronation and I'm still good at top rolling.

Another very important detail which I would like to mention is that there are many ways to create back pressure, um the first one which seems the most obvious is of course maybe biceps power while posting a little bit or whatever, just just doing this movement with your biceps, right?

While it is not a bad thing, much better than only doing pronation, there are other ways how you could create maybe more back pressure.

Remember, we always want to use big muscles uh to be the most efficient, you know, so pronation muscle is super small, not very effective, biceps is a much bigger muscle, immediately much more effective while going backwards, um your, ah, so yeah, the trick is of course, I'm holding my pronator statically, you know, uh hold your biceps in place statically, try to not open up, and then use your your lat muscle, your back, your back muscles, which are even bigger than your biceps, so now you would hold your pronation in place statically, you know, uh hold your biceps in place statically, try to not open up, and then use your your back muscles, your lats to pull back.

This way you are actually able to create even more pressure, and the most advanced thing which I, I am always using, or at least I try to use as much as I can, is to basically keep everything statically, again, pronator, biceps, my, my lat, my back, uh muscles, everything stays in place before we go, and I really focus on, you know, uh loading the muscle already before, and then I move everything together, so basically I'm using my hip to push back a lot.

As you can see nothing is moving, none of the all of the muscles are somehow statically loaded, which gives them quite a lot of power, and then the hip movement allows me to create a lot of back pressure by just moving my whole body backwards, so uh that's what I just kind of tried to explain to people that uh stop focusing that much about these small muscles like a pronator.

Of course you have to make sure your hand is strong and everything is strong because if if one of the upper parts in the chain will fail, the whole movement will most likely fail, so you will be maybe, you will open up.

But uh still the somehow the more important idea behind this top rolling movement is still um using your uh, you know, bigger muscles, whole body, not really uh the smaller ones, and let me just uh let me try to do some training at the same time, I'm actually just uh creating this setup these days here and I'm not really sure how should I really make it ready so it's comfortable for me, but um I guess it will look similar to this and I will just keep loading up.

But yeah guys, that was the idea, I hope you got something useful out of it and uh enjoy your day.