I see people using belts in training all the time. I don’t see this as a bad thing by any means but I don’t know if people fully understand why or how to use the belt. In fact I will often ask people why they are wearing a belt just to see what their response is. Typically they will respond with “it helps keep my low back stable” or something along those lines. This isn’t exactly wrong but when I see the way they use the belt I see that it isn’t exactly true.
Wearing a weight belt
To understand what the belt is for, first you need to understand few other topics:
Intra-abdominal pressure or IAP is what you are striving for. It is what it sounds like, being able to create pressure in your abdomen. This increase in pressure is what helps stabilize the spine. So being able to create increased IAP is the goal when you want to lift maximal loads with a stable midsection.
So how do you do this? Well creating increased IAP happens when you draw or breathe in air pressing your diaphragm muscle down which presses out against the rest of your abdomen. The more you can draw down the diaphragm the more pressure you can create in the abdomen (see image below).
Intra-abdominal pressure
A very simple analogy that I hear a lot and seems to make sense to people is the comparison of your abdomen to a pop can. Imagine an un-opened aluminum pop can, if you had it sitting in front of you, you could step on it without it bending or cracking. Now if you took that same pop can and opened just the top and stepped on it then it would likely crumble. And again if you took an empty pop can that had a dent in the side and you stepped on that, it would likely crumble even easier. (let’s be clear, your body is much more resilient than a pop can and you won’t “crumble” under minimal loads, this is simply a comparison so you can fully understand IAP).
When you are able to take a big breath of air in and drive your diaphragm down, this increases the IAP and your spine is able to handle much higher loads with less risk of shear forces (like an unopened pop can). Now imagine you could take that same unopened pop can and shrink it down just a little bit but keep the same amount of contents inside. This would increase the pressure inside the can making it harder for it to deform.
This is the exact mechanism of how the weightlifting belt should be viewed as. When you are ready to lift heavy you should be able to take a big breath in which lowers your diaphragm and presses out on your abdomen increasing the IAP. Then if you used a belt you could sinche down the size of our abdomen even more which increases the IAP (assuming you can get the same amount of breathe in). This is often why you will hear people say “press out on the belt”. In my opinion the way you should put on a belt is this: let as much air as you are comfortable with out of your lungs, then strap the belt tight to your comfort level and then take a big deep breath to allow your belly to be pressing out against the belt. This will give you a higher IAP and like the analogy used earlier a more “stable” spine.
Caveat: I like to develop my ability to create as much IAP without a belt as possible. I typically don’t use a belt until I am very close to maxing out my squats and I rarely (almost never) use a belt for deadlifting. I think there is a time and place for a belt but especially when the athlete knows exactly how to use it. Thanks and I hope you enjoyed it!