Sidepressure

How do you win at arm wrestling? Of course, the opponent’s hand has to touch the pad, but do you win by applying techniques? Or forces?

Seeing a lot of confusion about this, the author proposes the following subdivision; Tecniques: Toproll, Hook, Press and their variants.

Applied forces: Backpressure, Pronation, Sidepressure, Wrist Flexion….

Let’s go through the matter! The “Backpressure” is nothing more than the union of our traction on a horizontal axis with the dorsal, joined to flexion, or isometry, of the elbow flexors (biceps, brachial, brachioradial, coracobrachial…).

Pronation (pronator teres, pronator quadratus…) It is more immediate to understand, as well as the flexion of the carp (radial flexor of the carp, ulnar flexor of the carp, long palmar…).

So we’ve come to the source of all misunderstandings, the “Sidepressure.” But what is the Sidepressure? Did it originate from one muscle? Is it purely a joint rotation?

If the “Backpressure” has been quick enough to delineate, and the Pronation and Flexion of the Carp are practically tautologies, the same cannot be said for the Sidepressure.

Let’s analyze the biomechanics of the gesture, first of all there is a true adduction of the arm, that is, the approach of the arm to the essay axis, the centering of the elbow with respect to the chest. This gesture is allowed by pectoral, dorsal, subscapular, which in addition to this true adduction, are also responsible for the intra-shoulder rotation. It is important not to neglect the superspinous, infraspinous and round, these muscles, potentially weakened and in lax condition, lead to spoiled movements of the shoulder and uncomfortable and chronic injuries.

Moving towards the distal end of the arm, we go down from the shoulder to the elbow. We have seen that in the sidepressure we are looking for the maintenance of the humeral gleno joint in the adduced position, we can make a similar reasoning for the radial-ulnar humerus joint. So the elbow stabilizers come into the picture, divided into static and dynamic.

The elbow joint is divided into three parts, humerular, humeroradial and proximal radioulnar, these three parts are covered by the same joint capsule, with their respective ligaments (ulnar collateral, radial collateral, radial and square). Then there is a interosseous membrane, MCL, and LCL, pronator tendon, flexor.. regarding the muscle component (and their tendon attachments) we have the Brachial Triceps, the Anconeo, Brachial Biceps, the Brachial, radial Brachium, round Pronator, ulnar flexor of the carp, radial…. how much stuff!

We’ve finally come to how to train the sidepressure. You often see exercises as imaginative as they are harmful and useless, it is too easy to get carried away by the ego and raise the load by crippling what might also be a good exercise.

Having presented a list of muscles, it goes without saying, that training them even individually would achieve significant benefits. Pettoral, “shoulders…” do you really need to tell you how to train them? Even the humble shoulder raises will give you undervalued benefits.

As far as isolated exercises bench, pec machine, side lifts, extra / intra shoulder rotations, flexion of the carp….are fine, if we wanted to perform exercises that combine these various aspects, only two exercises are really valid for this purpose.

The first, which can be found on the Rino Masic YouTube channel under the title “this is a game changer I armwrestling training” goes to work on the shoulder and elbow at the same

time, also inserting a mental aspect of self-control regarding limiting the weight to a load that allows us to keep the elbow in the adducted position, in the middle of the chest. Similarly, an exercise such as “sidepressure training for armwrestling – TOPROLL SIDEPRESSURE” on the Sandris Sedis You Tube channel is absolutely valid

in case we want to combine the training of the sidepressure with the pronation (the pronation vector can be increased by the addition of an elastic band); as before we point out the absolute need to keep the elbow inside the shoulder line, overcoming the load would rise a lot, but to the detriment of pure and unique joint stress, potentially harmful.

For both exercises it is recommended to start with a repetition range of more than 12, and then go down to 8 for advanced athletes, I absolutely do not recommend working less than 5 repetitions, marking it as useless and dangerous.

Let us conclude, therefore, by again drawing attention to some key factors for training this component in a healthy and pain-free way (how many times have you heard someone complain of elbow pain? Share this article!):

1. Keep your elbow inside your body.
2. Without a solid pronation, you end up in a supine position, which further increases joint stress.
3. Train all the antagonistic muscles (carp extensors, shoulder extra-shoulders…) to avoid imbalances and subsequent accidents.

Have a good training!