The free assist you didn't know you were getting

Last week a mom asked what training suggestions I had for her son’s shoulder. He had tweaked it playing basketball, and she was looking for some exercises that he could do to improve its stability, particularly in outstretched positions.

As a physical therapist and long-time TNT member, she had already helped him rehab it and had some good initial training ideas—but was curious what I thought of them and what other suggestions I had.

Her first idea was bottom-up rack carries.

As simple of a drill as this might appear, you know how many micro-adjustments your shoulder needs to make if you’ve ever tried it. Her main concern, though, was that he’d be able to cheat his shoulder out of some of the benefits by squeezing the handle harder, thereby transferring much of the work to his grip.

So her next idea was bottom-up arm bars, reasoning that the position would challenge the shoulder regardless of the grip.

I suggested that bottom-up arm bars were doable—but also a bit more dangerous given the position of the head in relation to the kettlebell. However, I said that there was another way to make the regular arm bar more challenging, and that it would be great for her son’s shoulder.

I explained what it was and had her try it—which produced an “ah-ha” moment and a decision that it was definitely making the cut.

Early last year I actually wrote a tip about all of this: using the kettlebell arm bar to build stronger and healthier shoulders. And in that tip I mentioned this way of making the drill more challenging—twice, in fact. But both times it was tucked away among the larger details about how to do the drill.

What can I say? Sometimes you accidentally bury the good part.

Today I want to highlight it—so that, if you’ve been doing arm bars (or decide to add them), you can experience even better results in the same amount of time.

The option hiding in plain sight

First I had her do a regular arm bar, which she’d done plenty of times before. Once she was set and stable, I asked her to slowly rotate her shoulder without letting her arm drift off its vertical line.

Of course, there’s always a little wiggle as the body adjusts to the slight movement of the kettlebell, but she did fine.

Then I asked her to close her eyes—and that’s when the “ah-ha” moment occurred.

Almost immediately her arm started to wander, and she found herself hunting for the position she had been holding perfectly well a second earlier. To keep the kettlebell where it belonged, she had to know where her arm was without being able to look at it.

That hunting was the work.

The name for what she was doing—figuring out the orientation and location of all her body parts in space, by feel instead of sight—is proprioception. It’s why you can touch your nose in the dark, or find the brake pedal without looking down at your foot.

Most of the time it runs underneath the surface and you’re barely aware of it—in no small part because vision is such a dominant sense. Look at the bell and you get a free readout of where your arm is, updated continuously, at almost no conscious mental cost. Close your eyes and the readout is gone. The only information left is whatever the shoulder, elbow, and wrist can report on their own.

So the arm has to do two jobs at once. It still has to hold the weight overhead—but now it also has to figure out where overhead actually is, using nothing but its relationship to the rest of the body.

The point is that your eyes are, in a way, doing part of the lifting. And when you take your eyes out of the picture, the rest of the body has to work harder to get the job done.

Why this one is different

I’ve written about plenty of other ways to make a movement harder without reaching for bigger weights. In the tip about kettlebells you’ve outgrown, it was using a pair of bells, changing the leverage of the kettlebell, or changing the leverage of your body. Well before that, in the training template tip, it was the three dials most programs run on: volume, density, and intensity (i.e. weight).

Every one of those changes something physical. A center of gravity moves, a base of support shrinks, the load goes up, or the same work gets squeezed into less time. Put someone on a force plate before and after and you would see the difference.

Closing your eyes does none of that. The bell weighs the same. Your arm is in the same place. Your hips and shoulders are stacked exactly as they were. From the outside, nothing about the exercise changed.

Yet it’s still harder.

If that sounds like a party trick, remember that the kettlebell is still overhead and still heavier than air. Nothing about the demand went down. You just stopped getting a free assist.

When to leave your eyes open

Of course, this is a potentially bad idea in a few situations, and I’d rather name them than assume they’re obvious (or bury/gloss over them like the eyes-closed note in the original arm bar tip).

Don’t close your eyes on a movement you can’t already do well with them open. The point is to make a solid position harder to hold, not to further challenge an already unstable one.

Take extra special care where dropping the bell matters—over your face, on an unprotected floor, near anyone else.

And, at least at first, don’t do it without a safety net. Ideally that means having a competent spotter who can take the weight if things go sideways.

Putting it into practice

Closing your eyes isn’t limited to arm bars. It’ll make a variety of lifts more challenging, although I think it’s most interesting in exercises that already ask something of your stability—particularly arm bars and get-ups.

That said, I wouldn’t make it a staple. The physical adjustments (e.g. volume, leverage) I mentioned above are still the reliable drivers of progress, and they should do most of the work in your training. This is an occasional addition, not a new default.

If you choose to try it, start with a single point in the movement rather than the whole thing—a few breaths on a warm-up or otherwise easy set, with a weight you could hold all day. You’ll almost certainly learn something about your body if you do.