The link Victoar sent said don’t do belts if you have high blood pressure or a problem with inguinal hernias.
Sounds kind of brosciency to me. I’ll check it out later.
Also I used to do a belt, then I got double inguinal hernias.
I’m not doing a belt again. I don’t need to add 10% weight, and the link says they really don’t help with safety.
Studies have shown an increase in blood pressure in subjects who wear a weight lifting belt. If you suffer from high blood pressure, you might want to think twice about something that will increase the already elevated blood pressure response you get from high intensity strength training.
On the hernia part, it makes sense that if you block the abdomen (where sports hernias happen), the pressure might push out somewhere else - like your groin. Obviously makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true. But it’s enough for me. I don’t want to put extra pressure on the mesh that’s inside me.
Now that the Peleton came down in price, we’re getting one. I think it’s $1400, minus 100 referral bonus, and then some first responder perks like free shoes and hand weights for my wife being a nurse.
In my running, I discovered that running on flats is much easier than running on hills (fire hot!). I got back from a hilly run over half an hour ago, and my lungs still hurt. I did better than last time on this course, when I walked up most of the hills.
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Today went really well. I finished in 1:33:30, beating my PR by just over 2 minutes, and getting a 10K PR in the process. I decided to go out fairly strong and just see if I could maintain a strong pace. And I did. Given my fairly low mileage, I think the strength, stretching, and biking classes on Peloton must have played a big role.
This was a good opportunity to PR. The course is pretty flat, weather was pretty great (mid 40s with not too much wind), and I started near the front so I didn’t have to weave through a lot of people. Total GPS distance was 13.2 miles, which isn’t a bad increment over the official 13.1. I got nervous at about mile 6 when the ball of my left foot started getting sore, but that didn’t last too long.
My splits:
Now I just need some rest.
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Can you tell me exactly where you saw this. I can’t find it.
If mile 13 is any indication, it looks like you still had some in the tank.
Congrats on the PR!
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First, let’s talk about who shouldn’t wear a belt.
If you have blood pressure problems or issues exacerbated by blood pressure elevations, you’d probably be better of not using a belt (or the valsalva technique at all, for that matter).
If you have issues exacerbated by spikes in intraabdominal pressure (like an inguinal hernia), you’re probably better off not using a belt.
This reasoning doesn’t make a lot of sense , imo. If you’re lifting properly, you are going to be doing a pretty massive valsava maneuver to get tight. The belt makes it easier to do that, but I don’t know that it makes the max intrabdominal pressure that you could generate higher (or higher enough to make a difference).
So, if you’re really afraid of those things, then you probably just shouldn’t lift. The belt is basically a rounding error.
Or to think about it another way, if you’re squatting X without a belt, it is not clear that squatting X with belt increases your intrabdominal pressure that much (unless you are doing something intentional to achieve that; belted or not, you’re going to be trying to get similarly tight).
Now if the belt makes it easier for you to get tight, so you can lift more/longer, then I can see how that could have an effect on intrabdominal pressure, But the problem is not the belt per se, it’s that you’re lifting more/longer.
Let’s look at the bullet points here:
- I used a belt when I first started squatting in 2008 or so. Then I got a double-inguinal hernia around the same timeframe.
- From everything I’ve read belts are mostly for increased performance not any kind of safety. I don’t care about lifting 10% more.
- I found multiple sources that said belts could be a concern for someone with high blood pressure.
- At least one source says a belt could be a problem for inguinal hernias, which I already had.
- A belt clearly puts a lot more abdominal pressure, because you can push against the belt. I can feel it. For some reason you handwave off pressure as a rounding error but then tell me I’m looking at bro-science.
There is almost no potential reward to me for wearing a belt and at least some possibility of potential risk. And it’s one less thing to hassle with. It’s a complete no-brainer for me.
Read all the various squat stuff from the guy Victoar posted. He sure sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. He specifically lists the two things I have as a bad candidate to use a belt. I’d be an idiot to ignore that.
I’ve got no problem with beltless lifting. I think it’s better in a lot of ways. I’m just saying those specific reasons for not using a belt are not good ones. There are definitely better reasons, some of which are mentioned in the very same link.
Also,
Why do you attribute this to the belt? Heavy lifting is a known risk factor for hernia development. Why not just blame the squatting?
hey nice job spidercrab — I’m not gonna dig up the elevation chart / wind directions etc but just from your splits seems like you ran a smart tough race, I’m especially a fan of your work in miles 8, 9, & 10. No idea if you give a shit about marathons or any other running stuff, but you could go for a sub-3 full if that ever felt important. It might take two years of showing up and fading injuries, and towards the end you’d need to goose your mileage up into at least the 50s (though at that point I’d prefer to tally it by time not miles), but hey you’ve got it in your legs, so that’s something.
But marathons are kind of silly, and anyway who cares!! Congrats on the half, that’s terrific. If your legs aren’t trashed you should consider running a strong 10K in the next month before you put on ten pounds in the halloween/thanksgiving/december bender
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Obviously I don’t know the inguinal hernias came from the belt. But the timing along with expert advice saying a belt can be a risk for inguinal hernias is a very suggestive data point. I’m looking at each bullet point in aggregate, not doing the Casey Anthony jury thing where I examine each in isolation and ignore the whole.
The evidence suggesting that heavy lifting is a risk for inguinal hernias is far more robust.
Sure. But I had inguinal hernia surgery in 2010 and I’ve been squatting and deadlifting off an on since w/o issue.
Also the blood pressure issue, which is backed up on multiple sites, renders the whole hernia issue moot anyway.
I’ve been doing more digging on the belts and blood pressure thing and it seems like more than half of the people that write about it are referring directly or indirectly to a study done in 1989 which measured pressures in 6 people and drew a bunch of pretty broad conclusions based on that. I don’t want ikes this whole thing up and demand randomized controlled trials, but the actual evidence for belts increasing blood pressure to a deleterious extent such that it results in long-term adverse outcomes is ridiculously poor.
None of this is meant to suggest that you should lift with a belt. I think that beltless lifting is fine or better than belted.
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Sure. I’m not an expert on hernia surgery but when they do it, part of the procedure is to provide reinforcement so that it doesn’t happen again. That is a major goal of the procedure. Sounds like your surgeon did a great job.
Yeah, these are all interesting questions. In going down the rabbit hole on this stuff, the reasoning on why any increased blood pressure resulting from belted lifting will lead to a bad outcome is extremely rudimentary. It basically boils down to (and I’m not exaggerating) the following:
- Wearing a belt can increase your blood pressure while you are performing a valsalva maneuver with the assistance of a belt (as opposed to the same, but beltless)
- Increasing your blood pressure is bad if you have high blood pressure
To conclude anything about long term health effects we would really need to follow people long term and see if these extremely transient increases in intrabdominal and/or blood pressure (which are apparently load-dependent and not seen at lower weights according to some studies) actually do anything bad long-term.
We could do this exact first level analysis about nearly any physical activity. Take walking, for example.
- Walking (as opposed to lying down) increases your blood pressure.
- Increasing blood pressure is bad if you have high blood pressure.
Obviously no one would accept that. Most of the what I’ve read on beltless lifting and blood pressure is basically that. I only found one article in a peer-reviewed journal on the topic of belts and blood pressure specifically (and it wasn’t lifting belts, but similar) and it was six people and really didn’t do any more analysis than above.
Again, this is not intended to be a defense of belted lifting. There are plenty of other reasons to prefer beltless.
That seems plausible to me too. I think that if one valsalved as hard as possible and really practiced it, you would probably get pretty close (and that is more or less what you should be doing), but the belt probably makes it easier to do. But there are still many questions. Maybe someone that isn’t used to beltless lifting has a large difference between belt/no belt, but someone who has trained that way has a smaller one. The data on all this stuff is scarce.
But even if we accept that premise, getting from that difference to a long term bad health outcome is a huge leap for which there is almost no evidence.
I think that the big value of a belt for novices is that it is, in my opinion, easier to teach and develop proper form with the belt. With the belt I know what that pushing against the belt feels like and I can recreate it. Once you know that, then it is easier to try to recreate that state without a belt. If you just start without a belt I think it is harder to understand what you are supposed to be doing. But maybe that is just my learning style.