Showing posts with label movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movement. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Why Not "Train Through Pain"?
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Lately i've had the opportunity to listen to a lot of athletes talk about various injuries, ongoing problems, and how many of them have tried to "train through the pain." Probably we've all done it (do it). The way our nervous systems are wired, however, that's a sub-optimal response to pain that can often lead to more problems. This post is meant to be a quick look at some strategies on how to respond to a pain cue to get back in the game.
Who needs to "work through the pain"?
In a life and death situation, a person may need to work through the pain. The price of staying alive might be worth the potential long term cost of whatever damage is sustained.
A workout in a gym is not the same (is it?) Getting in a few extra reps so as not to spoil a set and "working through the pain" may have untold consequences for no benefit. Seriously.
Apparently we just don't know what the consequences of even a seemingly trivial injury can be for cascading through our systems and causing other issues. Knowing that there may be significant consequences when we break ourselves, we may need to ask ourselves: when there's pain, why not just stop and figure it out? why put our bodies at risk just to finish a set? who cares really, ultimately, if we get in 10 reps rather than 8? or 2?
I think a lot of this just-work-through-it comes from most of us not knowing what pain really is or not having tools specifically to respond to it appropriately. So i'd like to offer a little bit about what pain is, and some simple but effective pain response strategies.
Background A lot of the work i'm summarizing stems from pain research. Books like David Butler's Explain Pain, and the Blakeslee's the Body has a Mind of It's Own are super general references in this space. I was introduced to the following models/work on pain by Eric Cobb at the first Z-Health certification. When we focus on the nervous system, as Z-Heath does, and get that Pain is an action signal from the brain manifesting through the nervous sytem, we have a whole lot more tools to deal with pain as events.
Pain is in the brain, first and foremost, and it means Threat is caused by what we're doing. So CHANGE.
Pain is not what happens at the site of pain - like the ache in the wrist or the sharp pain in the back coming up from a poor lift. It's a kind of summation of a lot of information. We've all had experiences where a paper cut means nothing we ignore it and get on with our day, and other days where the same paper cut really HURTS and demands attention. This is because pain is not about the thing itself (the injury); it's about the whole system context of how our entire system is doing at that moment, including perceived threat. Yup, we can feel pain in response to the anticipation of something occurring.
Pain is not isolated; Pain takes place in the brain. It is an action signal; it's an event that is telling the body that something, somewhere is wrong (ie under threat) and to deal with it. We ignore it at our peril, and working through the pain like an ache in a rep is actually being stupid in a non life threatening situation.
Here's part of why.
In a tissue injury, nociceptors (things that detect noxious stimulus in the body, and that live particularly around joints and in muscle) get fired up and a whole chemical soup gets going around the site of trauma to deal with it. Incredibly, that response in and of itself can be pretty varied and doesn't mean there's PAIN yet. Based on whatever else is going on in the body, signals go up to the brain, and based on that context, the brain decides whether to signal or even surpress a pain event.
If the brain says this is pain, however, it means, for whatever reason, we need to attend to it.
Pain is a Threat Response - real or perceived. The nervous system is always on; it only checks a single binary condition: threat or no threat. The response to threat to the body is to respond to the area where there is threat. Often that's a kind of shut down sequence.
Consider what happens dramatically if we have an inflamed finger. The range of motion is restricted, right? Or sore quads from DOMS - range of motion and also power can often be restricted. We are being held back from injuring ourselves further in the current circumstances.
Pain becomes a clear action signal not necessarily to stop what we're doing but to change what we're doing (which sometimes does mean "stop" - temporarily)
If we decide to go ahead with that lift anyway, when the body is pulling muscular firing power away from the site and sending up pain events to say this is not a happy thing, then we're stressing our bodies out further which cranks up stressor chemicals, cortisol can get going and well, we're well far away from an ideal environment for performance, right?
It's a feedback loop for more shutdown, more pain: by working against ourselves we start setting up the body to act more to defend itself, while we're taxing it further and potentially injuring ourselves more.
I've spoken with experts about what's going on with people who say they trained through the pain and after awhile it went away. The consensus seems to be that in those cases (a) the person is actually most likely developing new movement patterns away from the site of pain (b) doing so sub-optimally at a potential cost to overly sensitizing those sites to future pain/trauma events. Similar people who "work through" pain will often also talk about the same kind of pain showing up months/years later as a now more persistent ache, or have other physical issues.
The costs of risking "breaking" ourselves in some way by working through pain are potentially complex. We really have no idea what might be the one seemingly trivial thing that can set up a cascade of events in our nervous system that will have repercussions. So even though we're very robust, and will adapt to almost anything, to ensure the robustness of the system it's really easy just to learn some strategies to respond to a pain/threat event.
Here's an analogy with stress. Stress or anxiety like we might feel before having to get up in front of a group of people and give a talk is an example of a threat response. Chemicals start to get released from the brain to get us ready for fight or flight. Often people who are stressed are encouraged to go for a walk or move and they report feeling better: we effectively start to use those chemicals for the purpose they've been stirred up - to move. The same chemicals (catecholamines) pretty much get fired up every time we work out and get our heart rate up. So they're not bad, they're just physical, and there is a physical response available. If we become aware of "getting stressed" - note the breathing responses etc and respond, we can quickly get back to normal performance.
Pain is a similar kind of response to threat - perceived or actual - and is an action signal. Again, often (not 100% of the time, but often) movement can likewise help both diagnosis that there's an issue and check if there's a good response to the action signal.
The right mobility can be an optimal response to the pain action signal
So, with all the athletes i work with, i recommend that at a minimum they consider making mobility practice a regular part of their daily routine. If you're interested in more of the details of why, here's an article. Likewise, if you haven't and especially if you're concerned about your performance goals, consider getting your movement in general and your specific ahtletic form checked by a movement specialist to make sure you're repping in good patterns.
Scenario of Pain Event Listening
SO let's say you're doing something that fires up a pain signal in the elbow or forearm.
You check your shoulder range of motion.
You can only get your arm up to the start of your ear - usually you're behind it. Something's wrong.
You do some opposing joint drills and recheck - your arm mobility is back to normal. awesome.
You recheck your form for whatever was hurting, remember your form: tall spine, good breathing, focus on open form, pain is gone, life is good again.
Yes it can happen that fast. The nervous system mechanoreceptors fire at 300mph. And with the SAID principle, we respond exactly and immediately to what we're doing.
Now there may be instances where the ROM does not come back; where the pain is acute when doing ANY ROM of the given move. That may be time to bag it. Rule no. 1: never move through pain because of all the above: upping threat, further shut down, more threat response chemical events etc. Related strategies are, when and as possible: reduce the range of motion of a movement that causes pain so you work outside the pain zone; reduce the load that brings on pain in any ROM.
An intriguing benefit of regular mobility practice is that, by practicing regular and better movement, better information is getting to the nervous system about where we are and what our options are, so there is a decreased incidence of injury and in no small part increased performance as well. Why? Mobility work helps us achieve the Perfect Rep - or at least efficient movement (discussed mid article here), which is the least likely to result in problems, because it also enables the best ROM from which to respond to the unexpected.
An example of mobility and connecting up nervous system communication we've talked about at b2d before is with the arthrokinetic reflex - a powerful example of what happens (1) with a threat response in the nervous system - when it senses even the slightest impingement - and how to fix that with self-mobilization and (2) how performance improves when connecting the neuro-reflexes in the body: here connecting eye movement with hip movement.
So why shouldn't we train though Pain, in brief?
We really don't know the extent to which a pain event can screw ourselves up for right now, or for some event in the future. Like a stress fracture in metal, it may be fine for some time, but it becomes a progressive site of deterioration until suddenly there's a potentially catastrophic break. By not stopping to deal with the pain, we set up a cascade effect of progressive responses in the body to get us to attend to the ever amping up signal. These further events have further costs on our performance. A way the body may deal with unattended pain is to bring on a compensation that will lead to other/new pains. Likewise, ignoring pain can also set up various sensitizations to pain that can trip the pain from a single acute incident to something that gets would up into our nervous system and goes chronic, also potentially harder to address. All in all, it's not nice.
Bottom line?
Who needs to "work through the pain"?
In a life and death situation, a person may need to work through the pain. The price of staying alive might be worth the potential long term cost of whatever damage is sustained.
A workout in a gym is not the same (is it?) Getting in a few extra reps so as not to spoil a set and "working through the pain" may have untold consequences for no benefit. Seriously.Apparently we just don't know what the consequences of even a seemingly trivial injury can be for cascading through our systems and causing other issues. Knowing that there may be significant consequences when we break ourselves, we may need to ask ourselves: when there's pain, why not just stop and figure it out? why put our bodies at risk just to finish a set? who cares really, ultimately, if we get in 10 reps rather than 8? or 2?
I think a lot of this just-work-through-it comes from most of us not knowing what pain really is or not having tools specifically to respond to it appropriately. So i'd like to offer a little bit about what pain is, and some simple but effective pain response strategies.
Background A lot of the work i'm summarizing stems from pain research. Books like David Butler's Explain Pain, and the Blakeslee's the Body has a Mind of It's Own are super general references in this space. I was introduced to the following models/work on pain by Eric Cobb at the first Z-Health certification. When we focus on the nervous system, as Z-Heath does, and get that Pain is an action signal from the brain manifesting through the nervous sytem, we have a whole lot more tools to deal with pain as events.
Pain is in the brain, first and foremost, and it means Threat is caused by what we're doing. So CHANGE.
Pain is not what happens at the site of pain - like the ache in the wrist or the sharp pain in the back coming up from a poor lift. It's a kind of summation of a lot of information. We've all had experiences where a paper cut means nothing we ignore it and get on with our day, and other days where the same paper cut really HURTS and demands attention. This is because pain is not about the thing itself (the injury); it's about the whole system context of how our entire system is doing at that moment, including perceived threat. Yup, we can feel pain in response to the anticipation of something occurring.
Pain is not isolated; Pain takes place in the brain. It is an action signal; it's an event that is telling the body that something, somewhere is wrong (ie under threat) and to deal with it. We ignore it at our peril, and working through the pain like an ache in a rep is actually being stupid in a non life threatening situation.
Here's part of why.
In a tissue injury, nociceptors (things that detect noxious stimulus in the body, and that live particularly around joints and in muscle) get fired up and a whole chemical soup gets going around the site of trauma to deal with it. Incredibly, that response in and of itself can be pretty varied and doesn't mean there's PAIN yet. Based on whatever else is going on in the body, signals go up to the brain, and based on that context, the brain decides whether to signal or even surpress a pain event.If the brain says this is pain, however, it means, for whatever reason, we need to attend to it.
Pain is a Threat Response - real or perceived. The nervous system is always on; it only checks a single binary condition: threat or no threat. The response to threat to the body is to respond to the area where there is threat. Often that's a kind of shut down sequence.
Consider what happens dramatically if we have an inflamed finger. The range of motion is restricted, right? Or sore quads from DOMS - range of motion and also power can often be restricted. We are being held back from injuring ourselves further in the current circumstances.
Pain becomes a clear action signal not necessarily to stop what we're doing but to change what we're doing (which sometimes does mean "stop" - temporarily)
If we decide to go ahead with that lift anyway, when the body is pulling muscular firing power away from the site and sending up pain events to say this is not a happy thing, then we're stressing our bodies out further which cranks up stressor chemicals, cortisol can get going and well, we're well far away from an ideal environment for performance, right?
It's a feedback loop for more shutdown, more pain: by working against ourselves we start setting up the body to act more to defend itself, while we're taxing it further and potentially injuring ourselves more.I've spoken with experts about what's going on with people who say they trained through the pain and after awhile it went away. The consensus seems to be that in those cases (a) the person is actually most likely developing new movement patterns away from the site of pain (b) doing so sub-optimally at a potential cost to overly sensitizing those sites to future pain/trauma events. Similar people who "work through" pain will often also talk about the same kind of pain showing up months/years later as a now more persistent ache, or have other physical issues.
The costs of risking "breaking" ourselves in some way by working through pain are potentially complex. We really have no idea what might be the one seemingly trivial thing that can set up a cascade of events in our nervous system that will have repercussions. So even though we're very robust, and will adapt to almost anything, to ensure the robustness of the system it's really easy just to learn some strategies to respond to a pain/threat event.
Here's an analogy with stress. Stress or anxiety like we might feel before having to get up in front of a group of people and give a talk is an example of a threat response. Chemicals start to get released from the brain to get us ready for fight or flight. Often people who are stressed are encouraged to go for a walk or move and they report feeling better: we effectively start to use those chemicals for the purpose they've been stirred up - to move. The same chemicals (catecholamines) pretty much get fired up every time we work out and get our heart rate up. So they're not bad, they're just physical, and there is a physical response available. If we become aware of "getting stressed" - note the breathing responses etc and respond, we can quickly get back to normal performance.
Pain is a similar kind of response to threat - perceived or actual - and is an action signal. Again, often (not 100% of the time, but often) movement can likewise help both diagnosis that there's an issue and check if there's a good response to the action signal.
The right mobility can be an optimal response to the pain action signal
- So first things first: never move through pain. If pain happens, stop and check. That stopping is a movement response.
- Next, pending severity we can quickly check where the mobility around the joints where the pain occurs may be restricted. So sore elbow - how's the shoulder movement, wrist movement, elbow movement without load (it helps also to learn what the ROM of these joints is for yourself). If there's pain through everything, just frickin' stop.
- Knowing some mobility work for the related joints, going through them where there's no pain, and rechecking range of motion - better worse no change - is again a great fast way to see how things are going. If things are improved awesome, you may want to try - gently - to see if the original move is ok, and if the load has to be reduced to move through the ROM without pain
- Recheck regularly to see where the threat is
- Move a bit as soon as you can without ever moving into pain.
So, with all the athletes i work with, i recommend that at a minimum they consider making mobility practice a regular part of their daily routine. If you're interested in more of the details of why, here's an article. Likewise, if you haven't and especially if you're concerned about your performance goals, consider getting your movement in general and your specific ahtletic form checked by a movement specialist to make sure you're repping in good patterns.
Scenario of Pain Event Listening
SO let's say you're doing something that fires up a pain signal in the elbow or forearm.You check your shoulder range of motion.
You can only get your arm up to the start of your ear - usually you're behind it. Something's wrong.
You do some opposing joint drills and recheck - your arm mobility is back to normal. awesome.
You recheck your form for whatever was hurting, remember your form: tall spine, good breathing, focus on open form, pain is gone, life is good again.
Yes it can happen that fast. The nervous system mechanoreceptors fire at 300mph. And with the SAID principle, we respond exactly and immediately to what we're doing.
Now there may be instances where the ROM does not come back; where the pain is acute when doing ANY ROM of the given move. That may be time to bag it. Rule no. 1: never move through pain because of all the above: upping threat, further shut down, more threat response chemical events etc. Related strategies are, when and as possible: reduce the range of motion of a movement that causes pain so you work outside the pain zone; reduce the load that brings on pain in any ROM.
An intriguing benefit of regular mobility practice is that, by practicing regular and better movement, better information is getting to the nervous system about where we are and what our options are, so there is a decreased incidence of injury and in no small part increased performance as well. Why? Mobility work helps us achieve the Perfect Rep - or at least efficient movement (discussed mid article here), which is the least likely to result in problems, because it also enables the best ROM from which to respond to the unexpected.
An example of mobility and connecting up nervous system communication we've talked about at b2d before is with the arthrokinetic reflex - a powerful example of what happens (1) with a threat response in the nervous system - when it senses even the slightest impingement - and how to fix that with self-mobilization and (2) how performance improves when connecting the neuro-reflexes in the body: here connecting eye movement with hip movement.
So why shouldn't we train though Pain, in brief?
We really don't know the extent to which a pain event can screw ourselves up for right now, or for some event in the future. Like a stress fracture in metal, it may be fine for some time, but it becomes a progressive site of deterioration until suddenly there's a potentially catastrophic break. By not stopping to deal with the pain, we set up a cascade effect of progressive responses in the body to get us to attend to the ever amping up signal. These further events have further costs on our performance. A way the body may deal with unattended pain is to bring on a compensation that will lead to other/new pains. Likewise, ignoring pain can also set up various sensitizations to pain that can trip the pain from a single acute incident to something that gets would up into our nervous system and goes chronic, also potentially harder to address. All in all, it's not nice.
Bottom line?
- A pain event is non-trivial. It means something. So it's a good idea to listen to that signal.
- At a minimum, never move into pain: reduce range of motion/load/speed as necessary (for awhile this may mean non-movement, but getting to possible movement is a good idea)
- Mobility work like z-health rphase/iphase is a fabulous tool kit to be able to self-assess to respond to that pain event and get back to practice asap.
- lots of articles about the z-health approach to movement/mobility
- Mike T Nelson's great exercise approach to Tendonitis/Tendonosis
- mike t nelson presents a new study on pain/performance.
PDF
Monday, September 8, 2008
Why Attend the Minnesota ZHealth Workshop: move better, feel better - really (a workshop preview)
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Want to last longer, move better, reduce pain? At the end of october - in fact, that's halloween (Oct. 31) to Nov 2 - Dragon Door is hosting a Z-Health workshop called " Z-Health
The Essential Secrets of Elite Performance" for Athletes. Athletes is a term defined broadly: if you move, and want to improve your movement - your athletic effort - you're an athlete.
Why would you want to attend this workshop? There's a couple of big reasons:
(1) If you're an athlete who suffers from any kind of ache, tweak or out and out pain, and have repeatedly hit the manual therapists' offices - whether chiro, massage or similar, the approach presented in ZHealth (or Z-Health or Z Health) will help. That's a bold claim. It's true and i'll come back to it.
(2) If you're an athlete who's hit a plateau, you'll learn skills that will help you tune your performance in what are likely very new ways - unless you're already working with a trainer certified in the Z approach that will help you move past your plateau.
(3) if you're an athlete who needs good hand/eye coordination for your sport, believe it or not, you'll improve it.
(4) If you're an athlete learning a new sport or have been playing a particular sport for awhile, the workshop will help you move with more efficiency. More efficiency means more power, speed - more of what's good for your game. The same goes for whether you're a powerlifter, kettlebell'er or hockey player.
You may say, ok, those sound like incremental improvements. So what?
On the one hand, the answer might be well, increments are what it's all about in sport: in the recent olympics, the difference between a world and olympic record in the 200m men's sprint was 2/10ths of a second. it took almost a generation to beat that record, too. You may say well you're not competing at that kind of elite level; those kind of increments don't mean much to you.
OK. If getting better measurable gains in your activity is not important to you, that's fine. For instance, you mayn't care that you can walk your circuit faster; you just want to keep doing it.
So therefore, on the other hand, that's the other rationale for improving efficiency: improving function while reducing wear and tear on the body. If we move with more efficiency, we're using our bodies more effectively. That means less energy is put into that movement, which means we have more energy for other things. Likewise, that efficiency means better use of our limited resource - ourselves - which means fewer problems over the long haul.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
One of the things we learn about in human physiology is that we're internally extremely well connected - a tweak that starts in the foot can effect the knee, can effect the hip, can trigger the back, can bug the shoulder, can screw up the jaw, can hurt the head. The cumulative effect of these little things can mean at the least less effective, efficient movement and at the worst means a whole host of pain, and a set up for problems like injuries in the movements to come.
The z approach takes this science of our wiring and shows us how to tune our movement to create the clearest path, the freest signal through that wiring so that we can work as effectively as possible. That efficiency means better performance, reduced pain. It's freaky how these things connect, and how quickly the effect can be demonstrated.
The Missing Manual
One of the biggest drags about us is that we don't come with The Manual.
I used to work a lot on motorcycles - this was necessary as i could only afford ones that were made a decade or more before the period in which i was riding them, and so, that telling you something about my finances, i had to be able to maintain them. One of the best resources for this up keep was (a) canadian tire, home of many parts that could be jury-rigged into working and (b) clymer manuals on how these things fit together - both the mechanicals and the all-important electrics. Without these manuals, hacking around the bike to try to tune it was just guess work. If it worked, it was often more luck than knowledge.
We don't come with Clymers. Netter's Anatomy and Guyton and Hall's Physiology while great texts on body parts and discrete physical systems, ain't great when it comes to seeing how, to put it loosely, the mechanical interacts with the electrics.
Without such a manual, what we often do in our own training, especially those of us who do not have coaches, is our best guess hacks. We read the articles, maybe follow some forums, watch friends, and try to put together an effective approach to get results, from getting the right gear to applying "correct" form. But how do we know what we're doing *is* actually right? is actually good for us? We're extremely complex, highly adaptive systems. We take tons of abuse, from poor eating to high heel shoes and keep functioning. So sometimes it's hard to tell if what we're doing is wrong - especially if we seem to be making progress. But at what cost progress? Perhaps if you're making loads of gains and are completely pain-free (either during or apart from your activity), you've lucked out and are operating optimally. Way to go. For the rest of us, well, there's this tension we get in the neck, or the back kinda aches, or sometimes when we walk our knee hurts. Pavel has this comment on his seminar with Charles Staley "Put up your hands anyone who's had a shoulder injury. Anyone who hasn't put up their hands, can't"
Anyone who's been in pain, and been helped out of it knows how much better their activities or daily lives are. For some of us, we go to manual therapies, and feel great for a time once we're off the table. For some, that treatment's enough. For many of us, we have to keep going back to get that release.
For all of us in such tweaked categories, getting a manual to deal with these tweaks proactively can make a world of difference to our performance - on and off the field; in and out of the gym.
Demystifying Movement
In the Z approach, athletes get a broader view of movement than muscle. After all, we have bones, muscles, nerves, but we also have sensory and perceptual functions or various systems that maintain those bones muscles and nerves in space. Without these we couldn't stay upright, little own move. The Z approach takes each of these components into account when talking about tuning movement.
Some folks think that Z is about joint mobility: that its thing is just to focus on moving the bendy bits instead of manipulating muscles, like other folks do.
In my experience of Z the answer is yes and no. Yes, the initial approach (Day 1 of the workshop, R Phase focus) is HUGE on getting full range of motion around joints, but the focus on joints is there as a powerful means to an end. The real meat and potatoes of the this initial phase is about what's happening around those joints with our nervous system, particularly with mechanoreceptors. Joints have more of these awareness detectors than any other part of the body. If one part of the body is having issues with its reception, the ENTIRE rest of the body responds. You'll see a demo that shows a problem with a thumb - no pain, but a less than fully mobile joint - will substantially, hugely shut down the ability of the hamstrings to generate force, but how freeing up that thumb joint will bring that strength back. That improvement in strength had nothing to do with building mass; it had to do with improving the signal path from a seemingly unrelated joint back to the brain - to give the all clear for that joint.
Bottom line of R: decreased joint mobility (a joint that cannot move through full range of motion), decreased strength; increased mobility, increased strength.
In Day 2 with I phase, the focus moves from the joints' relation to movement into how our visual and vestibular systems - balance, eye tracking and so on effect movement.
The S part of the workshop begins to put these components together into movement practice for coordinated benefit.
THE GOODS
The workshop promo uses terms like "massive" development of power and "immediate" strength gains. These sound very much too good to be true, don't they? And (to me, unfortunately) the workshop also talks about "revealing secrets" to making these gains.
For the Less Trained. The thing is, if you haven't worked with a coach before ANY good coach will help you improve your performance - likely immediately. And if you haven't worked with a coach before, they may even break your current personal best in one session. So i'm not too moved by such claims. So on the grossest level, if you take this seminar you will definitely learn stuff to improve your performance, and you will see benefits right away. But what differentiates this approach from perhaps others is the longer haul: there are many many carry over effects of the whole Z approach that go beyond sport specific training.
If you learn how to squat right, for instance, you learn how to do this one activity well. If, however, you learn how to stand in balance on your bones, using as little energy as possible to hold a "long" spine, you have a foundation for effective powerful movement in any movement/activity (on day 3, if you're a kettlebeller, ask about "femur snap rather than hip snap" in the swing/snatch).
For the More Coached/Trained. If you have worked with coaches before, or do so right now, then you know how precious any gains can be. If your coaching/training has focused on mainly muscle work, it doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to get that if you can bring on board the other systems of the body like proprioception, like the vestibular and visual systems, that you're going to do better, harmonizing more of what the body has to offer to improve performance. Check out Mike T Nelson's posts about deadlift improvements with Z approaches for more.
For Those With Pain or Injury. If you've had an injury or are coping with one now, you'll know how valuable it can be to get out of pain so you can get back to your training. You may see a specialist to treat your ills and feel great while that happens. But have you asked yourself why do you have to keep going back to feel well? Do you believe that you will have to keep going to feel well? Would you like to explore the options of how you could take care of yourself such that you could get out of the treatment cycle?
If you are in pain, and would like that attended, may i recommend booking an appointment during the weekend with Dr. Cobb who will be delivering the workshop? He can assess and point you to a proactive plan for your own well being. It's worth it.
IN SUM
If you are keen to make your body last as long as possible pain free, running effectively, and efficiently, and if you want to improve your athletic performance, the skills you'll learn over these three days will literally last a life time.
Note for Instructors: if you're a trainer and want to learn how to provide these kinds of techniques for your clients, as well as how to do assessments of performance, you may want to consider taking in a Z-Health certification course rather than this workshop (here's a review of my experience with the first z-health cert, r-phase). Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Want to last longer, move better, reduce pain? At the end of october - in fact, that's halloween (Oct. 31) to Nov 2 - Dragon Door is hosting a Z-Health workshop called " Z-HealthThe Essential Secrets of Elite Performance" for Athletes. Athletes is a term defined broadly: if you move, and want to improve your movement - your athletic effort - you're an athlete.
Why would you want to attend this workshop? There's a couple of big reasons:
(1) If you're an athlete who suffers from any kind of ache, tweak or out and out pain, and have repeatedly hit the manual therapists' offices - whether chiro, massage or similar, the approach presented in ZHealth (or Z-Health or Z Health) will help. That's a bold claim. It's true and i'll come back to it.
(2) If you're an athlete who's hit a plateau, you'll learn skills that will help you tune your performance in what are likely very new ways - unless you're already working with a trainer certified in the Z approach that will help you move past your plateau.
(3) if you're an athlete who needs good hand/eye coordination for your sport, believe it or not, you'll improve it.
(4) If you're an athlete learning a new sport or have been playing a particular sport for awhile, the workshop will help you move with more efficiency. More efficiency means more power, speed - more of what's good for your game. The same goes for whether you're a powerlifter, kettlebell'er or hockey player.
You may say, ok, those sound like incremental improvements. So what?
On the one hand, the answer might be well, increments are what it's all about in sport: in the recent olympics, the difference between a world and olympic record in the 200m men's sprint was 2/10ths of a second. it took almost a generation to beat that record, too. You may say well you're not competing at that kind of elite level; those kind of increments don't mean much to you.
OK. If getting better measurable gains in your activity is not important to you, that's fine. For instance, you mayn't care that you can walk your circuit faster; you just want to keep doing it.
So therefore, on the other hand, that's the other rationale for improving efficiency: improving function while reducing wear and tear on the body. If we move with more efficiency, we're using our bodies more effectively. That means less energy is put into that movement, which means we have more energy for other things. Likewise, that efficiency means better use of our limited resource - ourselves - which means fewer problems over the long haul.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
One of the things we learn about in human physiology is that we're internally extremely well connected - a tweak that starts in the foot can effect the knee, can effect the hip, can trigger the back, can bug the shoulder, can screw up the jaw, can hurt the head. The cumulative effect of these little things can mean at the least less effective, efficient movement and at the worst means a whole host of pain, and a set up for problems like injuries in the movements to come.
The z approach takes this science of our wiring and shows us how to tune our movement to create the clearest path, the freest signal through that wiring so that we can work as effectively as possible. That efficiency means better performance, reduced pain. It's freaky how these things connect, and how quickly the effect can be demonstrated.
The Missing Manual
One of the biggest drags about us is that we don't come with The Manual.
I used to work a lot on motorcycles - this was necessary as i could only afford ones that were made a decade or more before the period in which i was riding them, and so, that telling you something about my finances, i had to be able to maintain them. One of the best resources for this up keep was (a) canadian tire, home of many parts that could be jury-rigged into working and (b) clymer manuals on how these things fit together - both the mechanicals and the all-important electrics. Without these manuals, hacking around the bike to try to tune it was just guess work. If it worked, it was often more luck than knowledge.
We don't come with Clymers. Netter's Anatomy and Guyton and Hall's Physiology while great texts on body parts and discrete physical systems, ain't great when it comes to seeing how, to put it loosely, the mechanical interacts with the electrics.
Without such a manual, what we often do in our own training, especially those of us who do not have coaches, is our best guess hacks. We read the articles, maybe follow some forums, watch friends, and try to put together an effective approach to get results, from getting the right gear to applying "correct" form. But how do we know what we're doing *is* actually right? is actually good for us? We're extremely complex, highly adaptive systems. We take tons of abuse, from poor eating to high heel shoes and keep functioning. So sometimes it's hard to tell if what we're doing is wrong - especially if we seem to be making progress. But at what cost progress? Perhaps if you're making loads of gains and are completely pain-free (either during or apart from your activity), you've lucked out and are operating optimally. Way to go. For the rest of us, well, there's this tension we get in the neck, or the back kinda aches, or sometimes when we walk our knee hurts. Pavel has this comment on his seminar with Charles Staley "Put up your hands anyone who's had a shoulder injury. Anyone who hasn't put up their hands, can't"
Anyone who's been in pain, and been helped out of it knows how much better their activities or daily lives are. For some of us, we go to manual therapies, and feel great for a time once we're off the table. For some, that treatment's enough. For many of us, we have to keep going back to get that release.
For all of us in such tweaked categories, getting a manual to deal with these tweaks proactively can make a world of difference to our performance - on and off the field; in and out of the gym.
Demystifying Movement
In the Z approach, athletes get a broader view of movement than muscle. After all, we have bones, muscles, nerves, but we also have sensory and perceptual functions or various systems that maintain those bones muscles and nerves in space. Without these we couldn't stay upright, little own move. The Z approach takes each of these components into account when talking about tuning movement.
Some folks think that Z is about joint mobility: that its thing is just to focus on moving the bendy bits instead of manipulating muscles, like other folks do.
In my experience of Z the answer is yes and no. Yes, the initial approach (Day 1 of the workshop, R Phase focus) is HUGE on getting full range of motion around joints, but the focus on joints is there as a powerful means to an end. The real meat and potatoes of the this initial phase is about what's happening around those joints with our nervous system, particularly with mechanoreceptors. Joints have more of these awareness detectors than any other part of the body. If one part of the body is having issues with its reception, the ENTIRE rest of the body responds. You'll see a demo that shows a problem with a thumb - no pain, but a less than fully mobile joint - will substantially, hugely shut down the ability of the hamstrings to generate force, but how freeing up that thumb joint will bring that strength back. That improvement in strength had nothing to do with building mass; it had to do with improving the signal path from a seemingly unrelated joint back to the brain - to give the all clear for that joint.
Bottom line of R: decreased joint mobility (a joint that cannot move through full range of motion), decreased strength; increased mobility, increased strength.
In Day 2 with I phase, the focus moves from the joints' relation to movement into how our visual and vestibular systems - balance, eye tracking and so on effect movement.
The S part of the workshop begins to put these components together into movement practice for coordinated benefit.
THE GOODS
The workshop promo uses terms like "massive" development of power and "immediate" strength gains. These sound very much too good to be true, don't they? And (to me, unfortunately) the workshop also talks about "revealing secrets" to making these gains.
For the Less Trained. The thing is, if you haven't worked with a coach before ANY good coach will help you improve your performance - likely immediately. And if you haven't worked with a coach before, they may even break your current personal best in one session. So i'm not too moved by such claims. So on the grossest level, if you take this seminar you will definitely learn stuff to improve your performance, and you will see benefits right away. But what differentiates this approach from perhaps others is the longer haul: there are many many carry over effects of the whole Z approach that go beyond sport specific training.
If you learn how to squat right, for instance, you learn how to do this one activity well. If, however, you learn how to stand in balance on your bones, using as little energy as possible to hold a "long" spine, you have a foundation for effective powerful movement in any movement/activity (on day 3, if you're a kettlebeller, ask about "femur snap rather than hip snap" in the swing/snatch).
For the More Coached/Trained. If you have worked with coaches before, or do so right now, then you know how precious any gains can be. If your coaching/training has focused on mainly muscle work, it doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to get that if you can bring on board the other systems of the body like proprioception, like the vestibular and visual systems, that you're going to do better, harmonizing more of what the body has to offer to improve performance. Check out Mike T Nelson's posts about deadlift improvements with Z approaches for more.
For Those With Pain or Injury. If you've had an injury or are coping with one now, you'll know how valuable it can be to get out of pain so you can get back to your training. You may see a specialist to treat your ills and feel great while that happens. But have you asked yourself why do you have to keep going back to feel well? Do you believe that you will have to keep going to feel well? Would you like to explore the options of how you could take care of yourself such that you could get out of the treatment cycle?
If you are in pain, and would like that attended, may i recommend booking an appointment during the weekend with Dr. Cobb who will be delivering the workshop? He can assess and point you to a proactive plan for your own well being. It's worth it.
IN SUM
If you are keen to make your body last as long as possible pain free, running effectively, and efficiently, and if you want to improve your athletic performance, the skills you'll learn over these three days will literally last a life time.
Note for Instructors: if you're a trainer and want to learn how to provide these kinds of techniques for your clients, as well as how to do assessments of performance, you may want to consider taking in a Z-Health certification course rather than this workshop (here's a review of my experience with the first z-health cert, r-phase). Tweet Follow @begin2dig
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COACHING with dr. m.c. 
