Showing posts with label z-health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label z-health. Show all posts
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Unpacking a mystery: when shoulder pain may be all (or largely) in the wrist (a t-phase assessment story)
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Pavel tells the joke about asking people in a weight room "so those of you who have had a shoulder injury, raise your hands" - half the people raise their hands; the other half can't.
Various types of shoulder issues are super common, and the usual go-to place is that the cause must be a rotator cuff tendon issue. But at least in my case, turns out it may be something very different: a muscle imbalance. That is, some muscles getting overworked with others getting underworked, resulting in other muscles not doing their jobs, and other muscles and associated tendons getting a bit worn out from having to do another muscle's job to pick up the slack. What's remarkable is how much immediate relief there can be once this issue is identified and actively addressed. So this is a bit of a story of unpacking that mystery through a lens that says always remember the site of pain mayn't be the source of pain.
Personal Case Study
A while ago i did a few posts about the latest work on tendonopathies and healing them, and a festival of posts on the amazing shoulder as a system in the body ( shoulder girdle part 1, gleno-humeral joint part 2), and then there was one about stopping reps in a set before they stopped us. These posts were largely motviated by my ongoing ache in my arm/shoulder. And i must say i was getting just a wee bit frustrated that i wasn't getting anywhere. This is the story of finally getting somewhere.
In the beginning: Seeing the MD. back in may/june the doc i first saw when my pain was at peak suggested what i had was a supraspinatus (top rotator cuff muscle) tendinitis. Ok.
Now i'm studying anatomy, and from what i could tell, all that muscle does is assist lifting the arm up to the side (like making airplane wings with ones arms). The things that hurt however were putting my coat on, when the arm reaches back to stick the arm into the jacket, and then when going the entire other way - crossing arms over to pull off a sweater. Ok, so maybe that's from a puffy supraspinatus getting jammed into the acromium of the shoulder (shown right) when the arm extends or internally rotates when abducting (emptying a pitcher). That seems pretty classic. And a week's worth of nsaids DID let me put my coat on again. So there seems to have been something going on there. But that wasn't all. Cuz it still hurt.
The Post MD Analysis, July 2010
In July, i'd asked a very competent movement scholar and chiropractic student to take a look at me, and we were rather flumoxed. He got as far as suggesting, based on loads of assessments, that perhaps it was lower trap related as doing some lower trap work seemed to bring some relief - he suggested that i spend some time with some drills focusing on lower trap work from Secrets of the Shoulder, which i did.
Time Passes - things shift/get worse. Intriguingly, the pain changed, but did not go away; my strength progress was bottoming out. My press was not only totally buggered on the left, the pain was getting triggered when doing my right press. Not good for a gal who wants to press a 24kg kettlebell for reps.
The other thing? Where it really seemed to hurt was at the top-ish of the arm. And then the pain radiated down into the biceps. Maybe supraspinatus pain refers into the arm, i wondered.
But here's another thing: both the insertion of the supraspinatus (the attachment point furthest away from the middle of the body) and the origin of the long head biceps tendon (the attachment point of the muscle closest to the middle of the body) are very close to each other. The supraspinatus inserts at the superior facet of greater tubercle (or tuberosity) of the humerus (at the top of the upper arm bone). The long head of the biceps brachii passes over a notch in the humerus to attach to the supraglenoid tubercle - a part of the surface of the scapula that the humerus abuts in the shoulder.
In other words the two tendons are almost right on top of each other, and both connect with with the upper arm/scapula, so if one's sore, perhaps the other is going to bloody feel it, too? Or perhaps they'll just be hard to discern from each other.
Why is this identification of tendon proximity important? It's going to play a role shortly.
Indeed, reading about biceps tendinitis certainly seems similar to "overhead overuse" injuries for the supraspinatus rotator cuff. Reading about it also sounds pretty dam fatal: wear and tear; doom and gloom. And strengthening the the biceps doesn't seem to be the winner here.
So what we have here is pain in shoulder extension and external rotation and pain in shoulder flexion, adduction and internal rotation. Yuck. Easier to stay naked than put clothes on or off, but not functional, and not helpful athletically. Playing frisbee all summer was a great way mainly to keep my shoulder mobile-ish without load, but i more or less had to forget about my 24kg press work.
The Analysis Redux, Oct 2010
Now we come to the latest analysis this past week with a very experienced z-health movement performance specialist whom i'd been waiting to have an opportunity to see. 1st, we went over the issue, reviewing a detailed history (any stomach upset? any elbow issues? any neck pain? etc). Second, there was a look/test of some muscles between left and right sides.
What i had noticed only recently came to view here: my posterior delt was not firing fully - lots of squishy bits in it - compared to how well the right side was firing, the left lower posterior delt was like a deflated tire. That can't be good. Indeed see this post on muscle firing through the whole of the muscle for more. From here, we started to Assume the Postion(s) - the Positions of Pain and test these.
Assessment Process, close up. After setting some global baselines, we moved through many of the muscles of the shoulder, either offering them an assist or taking them out of the equation to see what helped or did not through those movements. By this careful process of elimination, we got down to a few interesting findings:
And ta da, muscles start to re-balance, pain be much more gone; i can press again.
How could this issue come to be?
It's often just a best guess with what causes anything, but one proferred explanation for my stuff especially with the wrist/finger extensors is that kettlebelling offers a lot of opportunities for loaded wrist/finger flexion, not so much for loaded wrist/finger extension work. As in anything, balance is important. So who knows? Perhaps when doing a ton of double kb work, i pushed my less strong side to follow with my stronger side and things went sufficiently out of whack to build up an inflamation and ongoing pain. This fits more of the facts than a supraspinatus diagnosis alone.
Rehab'ing
Beyond the above mentioned mobility and nerve drills, i'm doing some specific strength work. For the extensors i'm using two props: a mini jump stretch band with very light tension focusing on only enough load that i can get full to end range of motion wrist extension and wrist circles for the extension. I'm also using ironmind finger bands to practice finger extension reps. For mobility, i'm doing a lot of finger waves.
Master Class in Test/Re-assess.
This whole suit of components listed above stemming from this assessment was very much for me a master class in what we learn in z-health t-phase (about z-health): take a great history; test and retest EACH step of an analysis (i haven't detailed all the stuff that was tested that did not get a result); apply one's understanding of muscle interaction, muscle function and nerve interaction; check function to bring it back on line; when locked in, apply dynamic joint mobility and loaded dynamic joint mobility as appropriate.
Test, re-test continuosly. Analysis is a process. And as things change/improve, retesting and refining in rehab remains important.
Analysis is also a process that follows where the path leads: despite the fact that this kind of pain is supposed to be indicative of a SITS/rotator cuff injury, it may not be. I'm also intrigued to learn about how the extensors relate to balancing the shoulder in rotation. Not something that seems obvious taking a shoulder-only focus. Likewise that working the area of the biceps tendon can be so impacted by rotation when it itself is not a rotator - makes sense looking at how rotation may stretch it, but again that's following the path and testing - and also having some faith. I *knew* i felt pain through the biceps, but just never conencted this with the biceps tendon.
A note on pain and perfromance:
One of the effects of finding these muscle imbalances and nerve issues was an immediate and pretty signficiant improved range of motion. Like way - 15-20 degrees of extension in the shoulder that i didn't even know i had.
What this experience reiterates for me is that pain is a performance signal; that having pain reduces performance, and perhaps especially that optimizing what we need for performance not only reduces that pain signal but also, as a connected process, opens up performance. The two are intimitaley and it seems inextricably related.
As i've suggested before, pain it seems is just another performance inhibitor indicator like tight muscles that restrict range of motion can be. When we take time to work with a movement performance coach to walk through the process, work the problem, both relief and performance pour in. I know this all intellectually - it makes sense in terms of what we know neurologically - but from time to time a demonstration of same is a pretty vital reminder of these issues.
In my case, the focus was on identifying performance issues: squishy muscle bits in extensors; impingement of some kind around muscles/tendons; looking at strategies to help bring performance back on line, lots of active work. Et voila: pain significantly reduced.
Coda It's only been a week since i've had this assessment but the performance improvment (and consequent pain reduction) is legion in comparison to what it's been. I'm being very gentle with working back into arm and shoulder strength work, but that i can get into these ranges of motion sans pain/ROM issues is pretty fab after months of pain/limitation.
What seems to have happened is that there is a path of unpacking/unwinding a problem going on towards addressing it. What is exciting to me is that the movement principles i've been studying for the past two and a half years keep working - even for difficult cases. The nervous system is a remarkable thing.
It's rewarding to get to a place of really starting to see how the application of these principles continually opens up new opportunities to support healing without creating more pain first and with such immeidate effect.
Self-critique. I am also somewhat kicking myself for not working these patterns myself: nothing was really done in this assessment that i haven't been trained to do myself - that's the plus side. The down side is that i didn't take the time to work through this for myself. I remember moaning over the phone to one of the z-health master trainers how frustrated i'd been that i couldn't see a z-health solution to this problem, and his calm reply was "did you do all of the assessments"? i figured out that there were literally about 14 thousand possible combinations of assessments and that i guess i really hadn't. It's a good thing we're not our own healers, and i'll say again, everyone needs a coach.
And one more time: analysis is an iterative process. Sometimes it will take more than one hour to get to the heart of a gnarly problem. In my case, it took two. Gosh. I'll also say that the confidence i have that this approach will help find a path through even gnarly performance problems elegantly has gone way up. As said, i see it in clients reguarly, but there's nothing like personal and direct experience to reenforce a value proposition, eh?
mc
Related Posts
Various types of shoulder issues are super common, and the usual go-to place is that the cause must be a rotator cuff tendon issue. But at least in my case, turns out it may be something very different: a muscle imbalance. That is, some muscles getting overworked with others getting underworked, resulting in other muscles not doing their jobs, and other muscles and associated tendons getting a bit worn out from having to do another muscle's job to pick up the slack. What's remarkable is how much immediate relief there can be once this issue is identified and actively addressed. So this is a bit of a story of unpacking that mystery through a lens that says always remember the site of pain mayn't be the source of pain.
Personal Case Study
A while ago i did a few posts about the latest work on tendonopathies and healing them, and a festival of posts on the amazing shoulder as a system in the body ( shoulder girdle part 1, gleno-humeral joint part 2), and then there was one about stopping reps in a set before they stopped us. These posts were largely motviated by my ongoing ache in my arm/shoulder. And i must say i was getting just a wee bit frustrated that i wasn't getting anywhere. This is the story of finally getting somewhere.
In the beginning: Seeing the MD. back in may/june the doc i first saw when my pain was at peak suggested what i had was a supraspinatus (top rotator cuff muscle) tendinitis. Ok.
The Post MD Analysis, July 2010
In July, i'd asked a very competent movement scholar and chiropractic student to take a look at me, and we were rather flumoxed. He got as far as suggesting, based on loads of assessments, that perhaps it was lower trap related as doing some lower trap work seemed to bring some relief - he suggested that i spend some time with some drills focusing on lower trap work from Secrets of the Shoulder, which i did.
Time Passes - things shift/get worse. Intriguingly, the pain changed, but did not go away; my strength progress was bottoming out. My press was not only totally buggered on the left, the pain was getting triggered when doing my right press. Not good for a gal who wants to press a 24kg kettlebell for reps.
The other thing? Where it really seemed to hurt was at the top-ish of the arm. And then the pain radiated down into the biceps. Maybe supraspinatus pain refers into the arm, i wondered.
In other words the two tendons are almost right on top of each other, and both connect with with the upper arm/scapula, so if one's sore, perhaps the other is going to bloody feel it, too? Or perhaps they'll just be hard to discern from each other.
Why is this identification of tendon proximity important? It's going to play a role shortly.Indeed, reading about biceps tendinitis certainly seems similar to "overhead overuse" injuries for the supraspinatus rotator cuff. Reading about it also sounds pretty dam fatal: wear and tear; doom and gloom. And strengthening the the biceps doesn't seem to be the winner here.
The Analysis Redux, Oct 2010
Now we come to the latest analysis this past week with a very experienced z-health movement performance specialist whom i'd been waiting to have an opportunity to see. 1st, we went over the issue, reviewing a detailed history (any stomach upset? any elbow issues? any neck pain? etc). Second, there was a look/test of some muscles between left and right sides.
What i had noticed only recently came to view here: my posterior delt was not firing fully - lots of squishy bits in it - compared to how well the right side was firing, the left lower posterior delt was like a deflated tire. That can't be good. Indeed see this post on muscle firing through the whole of the muscle for more. From here, we started to Assume the Postion(s) - the Positions of Pain and test these.
Assessment Process, close up. After setting some global baselines, we moved through many of the muscles of the shoulder, either offering them an assist or taking them out of the equation to see what helped or did not through those movements. By this careful process of elimination, we got down to a few interesting findings:
1) pain in the biceps: there's that biceps tendon going into the shoulder - address that, and guess what - pain HUGELY reduced.
2) help out the brachioradialis/extensors (esp carpi radialis perhaps) overlapping tendon/musle area, there's more relief (nerve work for the radial nerve included).
3) muscle test some of those extensors and there's squishy bits - get that fixed so the whole extensor is firing, more relief.
4) pay attention to the axilary nerve that fires the deltoids, and the posterior delt starts to come back on line (have some more work to do there but heck it's work i know how to do).
5) do a wee bit of hybrid minimal t-phase style kinesio taping around the long head bicpes tendon area, matched up with active dynamic joint mobility drills for the shoulder, elbow and extensors, and things start to simmer down
6) work out some of the fascial stickiness around the extenors with v.light hybrid t-phase fascial work
7) get some exercises for working the extensors in particular,
And ta da, muscles start to re-balance, pain be much more gone; i can press again.
How could this issue come to be?
It's often just a best guess with what causes anything, but one proferred explanation for my stuff especially with the wrist/finger extensors is that kettlebelling offers a lot of opportunities for loaded wrist/finger flexion, not so much for loaded wrist/finger extension work. As in anything, balance is important. So who knows? Perhaps when doing a ton of double kb work, i pushed my less strong side to follow with my stronger side and things went sufficiently out of whack to build up an inflamation and ongoing pain. This fits more of the facts than a supraspinatus diagnosis alone.
Rehab'ing
Beyond the above mentioned mobility and nerve drills, i'm doing some specific strength work. For the extensors i'm using two props: a mini jump stretch band with very light tension focusing on only enough load that i can get full to end range of motion wrist extension and wrist circles for the extension. I'm also using ironmind finger bands to practice finger extension reps. For mobility, i'm doing a lot of finger waves.
Master Class in Test/Re-assess.
This whole suit of components listed above stemming from this assessment was very much for me a master class in what we learn in z-health t-phase (about z-health): take a great history; test and retest EACH step of an analysis (i haven't detailed all the stuff that was tested that did not get a result); apply one's understanding of muscle interaction, muscle function and nerve interaction; check function to bring it back on line; when locked in, apply dynamic joint mobility and loaded dynamic joint mobility as appropriate.
Test, re-test continuosly. Analysis is a process. And as things change/improve, retesting and refining in rehab remains important.
Analysis is also a process that follows where the path leads: despite the fact that this kind of pain is supposed to be indicative of a SITS/rotator cuff injury, it may not be. I'm also intrigued to learn about how the extensors relate to balancing the shoulder in rotation. Not something that seems obvious taking a shoulder-only focus. Likewise that working the area of the biceps tendon can be so impacted by rotation when it itself is not a rotator - makes sense looking at how rotation may stretch it, but again that's following the path and testing - and also having some faith. I *knew* i felt pain through the biceps, but just never conencted this with the biceps tendon.
A note on pain and perfromance:
One of the effects of finding these muscle imbalances and nerve issues was an immediate and pretty signficiant improved range of motion. Like way - 15-20 degrees of extension in the shoulder that i didn't even know i had.
What this experience reiterates for me is that pain is a performance signal; that having pain reduces performance, and perhaps especially that optimizing what we need for performance not only reduces that pain signal but also, as a connected process, opens up performance. The two are intimitaley and it seems inextricably related.
As i've suggested before, pain it seems is just another performance inhibitor indicator like tight muscles that restrict range of motion can be. When we take time to work with a movement performance coach to walk through the process, work the problem, both relief and performance pour in. I know this all intellectually - it makes sense in terms of what we know neurologically - but from time to time a demonstration of same is a pretty vital reminder of these issues.
In my case, the focus was on identifying performance issues: squishy muscle bits in extensors; impingement of some kind around muscles/tendons; looking at strategies to help bring performance back on line, lots of active work. Et voila: pain significantly reduced.
Coda It's only been a week since i've had this assessment but the performance improvment (and consequent pain reduction) is legion in comparison to what it's been. I'm being very gentle with working back into arm and shoulder strength work, but that i can get into these ranges of motion sans pain/ROM issues is pretty fab after months of pain/limitation.
What seems to have happened is that there is a path of unpacking/unwinding a problem going on towards addressing it. What is exciting to me is that the movement principles i've been studying for the past two and a half years keep working - even for difficult cases. The nervous system is a remarkable thing.
It's rewarding to get to a place of really starting to see how the application of these principles continually opens up new opportunities to support healing without creating more pain first and with such immeidate effect.
Self-critique. I am also somewhat kicking myself for not working these patterns myself: nothing was really done in this assessment that i haven't been trained to do myself - that's the plus side. The down side is that i didn't take the time to work through this for myself. I remember moaning over the phone to one of the z-health master trainers how frustrated i'd been that i couldn't see a z-health solution to this problem, and his calm reply was "did you do all of the assessments"? i figured out that there were literally about 14 thousand possible combinations of assessments and that i guess i really hadn't. It's a good thing we're not our own healers, and i'll say again, everyone needs a coach.
And one more time: analysis is an iterative process. Sometimes it will take more than one hour to get to the heart of a gnarly problem. In my case, it took two. Gosh. I'll also say that the confidence i have that this approach will help find a path through even gnarly performance problems elegantly has gone way up. As said, i see it in clients reguarly, but there's nothing like personal and direct experience to reenforce a value proposition, eh?
Personal Practice So suggestion? If you're having hinky performance/pain issues, check in with a movement performance specialist. Here's a trainer listing. If you'd like a referal, call the office, and let them know mc suggested you ask them.Best with your practice,
mc
Related Posts
- Tendinopathy, tendinitis and Eccentric Exercise for rehab
- Ensuring that the *whole* muscle fires in a movement for real strength
- Why not move through pain
- dealing with chronic back pain
- active vs passive care/therapy
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Saturday, August 14, 2010
A Model of an Athlete, of Athletecisim: z-health's 9s - also a model of coaching
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Here's a question that seems to be poking me on from the earlier "do we enjoy all our workouts/practices/training sessions?" And it's: What is our model of performance? what are the qualities to which we aspire in terms of living what i'm increasingly seeing as "embodied" lives - where we get that we're not just brains with bodies, but that our bodies are life enhancing? Before answering this, one might wonder why do we need a model? Why not just you know, keep moving? Eat well, rest well, move well.
Yup. That's great. For a certain quality of well. But what makes up that "wellness"? How do we understand that wellness so we can make decisions about what to include in our practice and what to discard; what's useful and what's for later, or not at all? Frameworks, models of a system, an organism can help. Indeed, these kinds of templates are usually more effective than specific programs. They usually relate to principles from which skills and pragmatics can be derived, progress or just needs assessed. And if we're actually in a place to coach someone, the value of such frameworks becomes even greater.
Let's consider what we mean by principle centered frameworks, consider the athlete in this, and take a look at the benefit of such an approach as a coaching model, too.
Principle Informed Frameworks - Models in Other Domains
We have examples of such adaptable models in other aspects of our way of being in the world. Steven Covey, author of the ubiquitously cited 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
demonstrates why
having a framework informing what we do is part of being truly effective. For instance, he's well known for his expression rather than prioritise your schedule "schedule your priorities." In other words, make deliberate time for what is important. That's a principle. He calls it "put first things first" or suggests that "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." To figure out what comes first, he has strategies to align with one's "true north" - one's principles. Come from principles first, not strategies like to-do lists or calendars. Those are tools; they are just the implementation details.
In another now-foundational text about business success, Jim Collins and his team in Good to Great 
attempt to reverse engineer a set of principles that are in common with companies that made the leap from being Good companies to Great companies - companies that have beaten the market repeatedly for a particular period, by a particular percentage consecutively.
Themes recur from attitudes of leaders to the way organizational management works. One of my favorite principles from the book is Get the Right People on the Bus. With the right folks, one can do almost anything, and thrive in any climate.
What's also interesting about the book is how many times Collins finds himself asking participants in the interviews about what their company's mission or vision is - and how this wasn't necessarily ever an explicit thing for people. The actions they took were not necesarily part of a pre-fabricated plan. It was just the right thing to do.
The role of folks like Covey and Collins is to analyse the seeming instinctive behaviours of the Great
and translate them into principles first and, following this, skills that can be practiced in line with these principles. For Covey, i'd suggest that the book First Things First 
is very much the workbook for the temporal organization part of the Seven Habits.
By developing skills practice, as in anything, skills are first paths towards accessing an action we want to accomplish - from a better tennis swing to a better email response practice (which may mean less email). Second, the repeated practice of a skill makes it a kind of habit or even reflex. That is we do it without having to think about it. It becomes engrained. For folks who constantly practice their skills, they become not just reflexive habits but stronger patterns. Talking with Steve Cotter the other day about a really nice GS snatch tutorial video he did, he was saying he had to do a new one because he was finding his technique was refining much faster now - months rather than years. Steve has been so focussed on his snatch technique and on teaching that technique in his IKFF for GS practice and competition, no kidding he's finding new performance refinements fast. It's amazing what having to teach does to thinking about breaking something into the most teachable units.
Model of the Athlete means Focus for Skills Development
Which brings us back to athletics from a principle driven model. So what is an athlete? or what are the attributes of athleticism? That's almost as bad as asking "what is motivation?" It's a skill too.
SO here's a model of an athlete that Eric Cobb put together and around which Z-Health (overview and index of related articles) is based.
Strength, sustenance, skill, suppleness, stamina, structure, spirit, style and speed. All *equal sized* nodes on this graph. We all need strength: what kind of strength do we need in particular for what we do? Likewise suppleness. We all need to eat and recover. How tune that? How might one's structure be utilized or tuned to better support one's athletic goals? What about sports skills? How's one's physiological stamina mapped to one's ability to endure, to support, to be? to one's spirit? And what about one's own way of doing things, one's style? How support that to enhance rather than break one?
In graphing terms, this equal-node model is also a hub and spoke diagram where "the athlete is at the center" (the phrase you will here Cobb and Co. repeat often) and where everything is mediated through that center. This paradigm of the athlete as the mediating center of some core attributes takes coaching in an interesting direction, and situates Z-Health as a robust approach to training longevity that goes way beyond the foundation of movement drills.
I've written quite a bit about the principles from neuroscience that Z-Health translates as a kind of engineering of movement science or neuroscience into training practice. We've looked at Z-Health from dynamic joint mobility, to pain models, to threat modulation to CNS testing. the focus has been to improve movement quality and thereby to improve movement performance. These are the fundamental components of Z-Health. Moving limbs well, threat modulation for effective adapatation, these are the primary building blocks of the Z-Health approach as taught in the R,I,S and T certifications. But these fundamentals are themselves motivated by this overall model of the athlete, where the goal is how best support the athlete.
In other words, the goal of Z-Health as an approach is actually to use this model of the athlete (and in Z the starting point is "everyone is an athlete") as a principle-oriented, skills-based guide to coaching> The goal, as a coach, is to learn the skills - driven by the best practical, clinical and science lead research out there - to guide an athlete's performance on each of these parameters. Cobb talks about the best coaching is knowing when to emphasize which of these compnents in training, which then means knowing how emphasize the component, and within that, what content specifically to offer the athlete. That's non-trivial. That's serious stuff. Principles are serious. And the expectation is rather that as coaches we walk the walk not just talk the talk. I've said it before: everyone needs a coach. Do you have a coach who can talk with you about your speed and your swing and your sustenance? Why not? Here's a list of master trainers who really walk the walk.
Great Coaching - Practical Principled Coaching
for Deliverable, Repeatable, Skills-based Athleticism
We are wired to learn and to adapt - it's part of our survival mechanism.
Part of the approach of the 9S model is to break down components of practice into learnable skills. All of the movements in the basic drills of R and I phase are based on athletic movements (this is particularly apparent in I-Phase).
In the 9S courses, the emphasis is on getting at these larger components of athleticism and focusing on usable knowledge and practical skills, from nutrition to strength to speed to style, to make us better coaches, so that we have the depth and breadth to provide the right knowledge, the right tools, at the right time, within a pretty broad, holistic view of an athlete fundamentally as a person. As an example, last year in Sustenance and Spirit, we spent considerable time practicing coaching skills as drills. Active Listening anyone? This was really challenging work for a lot of us: how to listen and respond rather than just program and push. That was aside from the depth of detail we got into on basic nutrition, inflammation processes, supplement studies and related. Not just knowledge; not just tools but how to engage, when to deliver the right ones and the right time.
The cool thing i think is that stuff when we see someone great do it, we often take the approach of "wow, that person is really gifted - they just have that talent. what a gift" But a lot of that stuff can be taught. And practiced. With intent. We can develop skills. We can learn not only the tools to have to be a great coach, but how to BE a great coach.
And sure there may be folks who are naturally gifted. But as Geoff Colvin notes in Talent is Overrated
, and as Gladwell notes in Outliers
, putting in the time to practice a skill is what separates the best from the rest. We need our ten thousand reps. But knowing the skills to rep, when, for how long - that's what makes a great coach, and how to be a great coach is no small thing. But a lot of it is skills too, and skills can be (a) taught and (b) practiced.
There's an elegance to Cobb's model that i suspect as it becomes better known will end up plastered over strength coaches' walls. Sports programs will teach the 9S's as a way of communicating training goals and measurements. And what a day that will be.
It takes a certain kind of genius to ask the obvious questions and then find not only the non-trivial answers but the solutions that make them tractable, teachable, learnable while letting them still be wonderful. I think that likely Eric Cobb has done this with this approach to coaching, with the athlete-centred model of athleticism. Why? because it is principle centered, science based and skills-oriented. Each course, each cert is always geared to "what can you do with this monday morning when you're back with your athletes?"
Taking It Home.
This post started with a question about how do we guide our pursuit of embodied happiness, embodied well being? Having a model of what makes up success in a given domain seems to be a pretty good approach. Covey has such a model for engaging with others. Collins has a model for corporate progress. And i'd suggest Cobb (wow, another C) has a model for athletic well being. And since we all have bodies and move, well, everyone is an athlete.
So if you've been riffing on Z-Health as a great approach to movement, and feeling better, maybe moving out of pain or into better performance having seen a Z-Health coach, that's great. It is super fantastic for this. If you're interested in getting started with Z-Health, here's a big fat Z-Health overview.
If you're thinking about an approach to training, about learning skills to train better, and about getting at the science of movement and these 9S's in an intelligent, useful and usable way, Z-Health is really reaching to get folks there. And that's kind of a new paradigm too for fitness, strength and conditioning, and sports-oriented training. Kinda makes me go hmm. This is an interesting place to be, and i'm inclined to watch this space. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Yup. That's great. For a certain quality of well. But what makes up that "wellness"? How do we understand that wellness so we can make decisions about what to include in our practice and what to discard; what's useful and what's for later, or not at all? Frameworks, models of a system, an organism can help. Indeed, these kinds of templates are usually more effective than specific programs. They usually relate to principles from which skills and pragmatics can be derived, progress or just needs assessed. And if we're actually in a place to coach someone, the value of such frameworks becomes even greater.
Let's consider what we mean by principle centered frameworks, consider the athlete in this, and take a look at the benefit of such an approach as a coaching model, too.
Principle Informed Frameworks - Models in Other Domains
We have examples of such adaptable models in other aspects of our way of being in the world. Steven Covey, author of the ubiquitously cited 7 Habits of Highly Effective People demonstrates why having a framework informing what we do is part of being truly effective. For instance, he's well known for his expression rather than prioritise your schedule "schedule your priorities." In other words, make deliberate time for what is important. That's a principle. He calls it "put first things first" or suggests that "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." To figure out what comes first, he has strategies to align with one's "true north" - one's principles. Come from principles first, not strategies like to-do lists or calendars. Those are tools; they are just the implementation details. In another now-foundational text about business success, Jim Collins and his team in Good to Great attempt to reverse engineer a set of principles that are in common with companies that made the leap from being Good companies to Great companies - companies that have beaten the market repeatedly for a particular period, by a particular percentage consecutively. Themes recur from attitudes of leaders to the way organizational management works. One of my favorite principles from the book is Get the Right People on the Bus. With the right folks, one can do almost anything, and thrive in any climate.
What's also interesting about the book is how many times Collins finds himself asking participants in the interviews about what their company's mission or vision is - and how this wasn't necessarily ever an explicit thing for people. The actions they took were not necesarily part of a pre-fabricated plan. It was just the right thing to do.The role of folks like Covey and Collins is to analyse the seeming instinctive behaviours of the Great
and translate them into principles first and, following this, skills that can be practiced in line with these principles. For Covey, i'd suggest that the book First Things First is very much the workbook for the temporal organization part of the Seven Habits.By developing skills practice, as in anything, skills are first paths towards accessing an action we want to accomplish - from a better tennis swing to a better email response practice (which may mean less email). Second, the repeated practice of a skill makes it a kind of habit or even reflex. That is we do it without having to think about it. It becomes engrained. For folks who constantly practice their skills, they become not just reflexive habits but stronger patterns. Talking with Steve Cotter the other day about a really nice GS snatch tutorial video he did, he was saying he had to do a new one because he was finding his technique was refining much faster now - months rather than years. Steve has been so focussed on his snatch technique and on teaching that technique in his IKFF for GS practice and competition, no kidding he's finding new performance refinements fast. It's amazing what having to teach does to thinking about breaking something into the most teachable units.
Model of the Athlete means Focus for Skills Development
Which brings us back to athletics from a principle driven model. So what is an athlete? or what are the attributes of athleticism? That's almost as bad as asking "what is motivation?" It's a skill too.
SO here's a model of an athlete that Eric Cobb put together and around which Z-Health (overview and index of related articles) is based.
 |
| The Z-Health 9S model of the Athlete |
Strength, sustenance, skill, suppleness, stamina, structure, spirit, style and speed. All *equal sized* nodes on this graph. We all need strength: what kind of strength do we need in particular for what we do? Likewise suppleness. We all need to eat and recover. How tune that? How might one's structure be utilized or tuned to better support one's athletic goals? What about sports skills? How's one's physiological stamina mapped to one's ability to endure, to support, to be? to one's spirit? And what about one's own way of doing things, one's style? How support that to enhance rather than break one?
In graphing terms, this equal-node model is also a hub and spoke diagram where "the athlete is at the center" (the phrase you will here Cobb and Co. repeat often) and where everything is mediated through that center. This paradigm of the athlete as the mediating center of some core attributes takes coaching in an interesting direction, and situates Z-Health as a robust approach to training longevity that goes way beyond the foundation of movement drills.
I've written quite a bit about the principles from neuroscience that Z-Health translates as a kind of engineering of movement science or neuroscience into training practice. We've looked at Z-Health from dynamic joint mobility, to pain models, to threat modulation to CNS testing. the focus has been to improve movement quality and thereby to improve movement performance. These are the fundamental components of Z-Health. Moving limbs well, threat modulation for effective adapatation, these are the primary building blocks of the Z-Health approach as taught in the R,I,S and T certifications. But these fundamentals are themselves motivated by this overall model of the athlete, where the goal is how best support the athlete.
In other words, the goal of Z-Health as an approach is actually to use this model of the athlete (and in Z the starting point is "everyone is an athlete") as a principle-oriented, skills-based guide to coaching> The goal, as a coach, is to learn the skills - driven by the best practical, clinical and science lead research out there - to guide an athlete's performance on each of these parameters. Cobb talks about the best coaching is knowing when to emphasize which of these compnents in training, which then means knowing how emphasize the component, and within that, what content specifically to offer the athlete. That's non-trivial. That's serious stuff. Principles are serious. And the expectation is rather that as coaches we walk the walk not just talk the talk. I've said it before: everyone needs a coach. Do you have a coach who can talk with you about your speed and your swing and your sustenance? Why not? Here's a list of master trainers who really walk the walk.
Great Coaching - Practical Principled Coaching
for Deliverable, Repeatable, Skills-based Athleticism
We are wired to learn and to adapt - it's part of our survival mechanism.
Part of the approach of the 9S model is to break down components of practice into learnable skills. All of the movements in the basic drills of R and I phase are based on athletic movements (this is particularly apparent in I-Phase).
In the 9S courses, the emphasis is on getting at these larger components of athleticism and focusing on usable knowledge and practical skills, from nutrition to strength to speed to style, to make us better coaches, so that we have the depth and breadth to provide the right knowledge, the right tools, at the right time, within a pretty broad, holistic view of an athlete fundamentally as a person. As an example, last year in Sustenance and Spirit, we spent considerable time practicing coaching skills as drills. Active Listening anyone? This was really challenging work for a lot of us: how to listen and respond rather than just program and push. That was aside from the depth of detail we got into on basic nutrition, inflammation processes, supplement studies and related. Not just knowledge; not just tools but how to engage, when to deliver the right ones and the right time.
The cool thing i think is that stuff when we see someone great do it, we often take the approach of "wow, that person is really gifted - they just have that talent. what a gift" But a lot of that stuff can be taught. And practiced. With intent. We can develop skills. We can learn not only the tools to have to be a great coach, but how to BE a great coach.And sure there may be folks who are naturally gifted. But as Geoff Colvin notes in Talent is Overrated
, and as Gladwell notes in Outliers, putting in the time to practice a skill is what separates the best from the rest. We need our ten thousand reps. But knowing the skills to rep, when, for how long - that's what makes a great coach, and how to be a great coach is no small thing. But a lot of it is skills too, and skills can be (a) taught and (b) practiced.There's an elegance to Cobb's model that i suspect as it becomes better known will end up plastered over strength coaches' walls. Sports programs will teach the 9S's as a way of communicating training goals and measurements. And what a day that will be.
It takes a certain kind of genius to ask the obvious questions and then find not only the non-trivial answers but the solutions that make them tractable, teachable, learnable while letting them still be wonderful. I think that likely Eric Cobb has done this with this approach to coaching, with the athlete-centred model of athleticism. Why? because it is principle centered, science based and skills-oriented. Each course, each cert is always geared to "what can you do with this monday morning when you're back with your athletes?"
Taking It Home.
So if you've been riffing on Z-Health as a great approach to movement, and feeling better, maybe moving out of pain or into better performance having seen a Z-Health coach, that's great. It is super fantastic for this. If you're interested in getting started with Z-Health, here's a big fat Z-Health overview.
If you're thinking about an approach to training, about learning skills to train better, and about getting at the science of movement and these 9S's in an intelligent, useful and usable way, Z-Health is really reaching to get folks there. And that's kind of a new paradigm too for fitness, strength and conditioning, and sports-oriented training. Kinda makes me go hmm. This is an interesting place to be, and i'm inclined to watch this space. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Eyes Have It - sometimes: using eye position to enhance strength
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I was fascinated by Geoff Neupert's article in the latest Power by Pavel Newsletter (issue 209, 08/09/10) about his experience using eye position in the press. Geoff is the author of Kettlebell Muscle. Absolutely awesome to see eye position highlighted in relation to how that action can support movement practice. That support is rather dependent on where and how in a compound move it's being used, and also what else may be happening in our somato-sensory systems. So let's look at eye position and postural reflexes and how they support muscle action a little more.
Geoff writes:
Geoff reports that this didn't work for him. When we understand the roll of vision in position, that result is not surprising, so we'll come onto why. He then proposes a revised move with a different head, jaw and eye position: the neck back a bit, chin up a bit and eyes slightly up.
Geoff says of this approach:
Test Early; Test Often The key thing to me in this article is that Geoff did "test" his new approach: did it improve his press? he says so an i believe him. Yet while he proposes a new technique for his press, and has some interesting theory to support it, whether or not that approach will be universally successful may be as likely as eyes down through the lift was successful for Geoff. May be. Dunno, maybe.
The take away from this story, at least for me, is less about a new technique that will work for everyone and more about: test it, because what works for you mayn't work for me, or for you later today, no matter how well we hypothesize why something works after the fact.
Let me step back a bit and say here's why i'm not surprised by GN reporting that eyes looking down *through the whole press* would likely/potentially not be a good idea: there's more going on than shoulder flexion in the press.
Eye Position and Reflexes when Reflexes work. Let me back up even further and say that the eyes are tied to reflexes that support extension, flexion, adduction, abduction, rotation. By reflex we mean involuntary automatic and near immediate response to a stimulus. Intriguingly, sometimes these reflexive responses can get buggered up, (and with the eyes, have particular effects on posture, among other things) but more on that anon.
When things are working right, we see looking down triggers flexion, looking up triggers extension looking in one direction triggers complementary adduction/abduction/rotation in the direction viewed.
Eye position is then used to complement/strengthen what can most benefit from that reflex. That may change throughout a lift. And what if while one thing is extending something else is flexing? What do we need help with the most? We'll look at an example to try in a sec.
Strengthening what needs to be strengthened throughout a lift
As an example of how eye position might change in a lift, let's take a look at the example from Geoff's article, the kettlebell press. The press is a rich movement: one may need eyes down to support shoulder flexion at the beginning of the lift coming out of the rack, then eyes towards the horizon and looking at the bell when the delts are at the weakest point, so strengthening rotator cuff movements, and post sticking point, eyes up to support the triceps extending (thanks to conversations last year with Zachariah Salazar Z-Health Master Trainer and RKC on these multiple positions in the press). In Pavel's pressing, as RKC Ken Froese pointed out to me, his eyes seem to follow the bell throughout, which may be great for someone with even strength, but not for someone with say a shoulder issue.
So keeping eyes down throughout the movement may be less productive for some people if where the weak link in the move shifts, and changing eye position will enhance that.
Try this at Home: A chin up (hands supinated) uses extension of the shoulder/lats firing, but it also uses elbow flexion (biceps coming into a curl). So what needs more help for you in a chin? Best way to find out: test either/or positions, depending if one's weaker link is shoulder extension/lats (eyes up) or biceps flexing (eyes down). Try both: what works better for you -when? Which is which may change as training progresses, or for just about any other reason, as we'll see below.
When reflexes seemingly aren't firing normally
Why would a doctor whack a knee if a reflex always fired as it was supposed to? We wouldn't need to test something that always works one way. Same thing with eye responses as demonstrated in what are referred to as postural reflexes, richly informed by the visual (and vestibular and proprioceptive) system(s):
Sometimes due to trauma or sometimes a long flight and jet lag, one's postural reflexes get really muted or actually cause the inverse effect reflexively in the body. There are tests for this (if you visit with a z-health certified coach who's done i-phase, for instance, they'll know these position/vision tests). The important thing to get is that our muscular responses - things as seemingly simple and immutable as flexion and extension - are intertwined with the somato-sensory system (visual, vestibular and proprioceptive function), and that these intertwined systems are constantly dealing with various stimuli. As Reiman and Lephart found in 2002:
Obviously, if one's visual responses to a direction are screwed up (say looking down doesn't strengthen your bicep curl, or cue an appropriate postural reflex), then using your eyes in a movement in that direction is also likely not going to help - in some cases it may seem to work against you if your body doesn't like that eye position, performance is going to suffer - until the thing gets fixed. And it is addressable.
Repetez après la model: Test It. So rather than getting super prescriptive about what will achieve what, great to have some heuristics about reflexes and eye position and of course form. But great too (a) to be sure to be able to refine application - like multiple eyes positions may be needed throughout a move and (b) to know that those reflexes are working as designed and (c) just test it.
If an eye position doesn't work - doesn't provide a performance boost or takes away from one - try something else. And if in a simple move like a biceps curl where eyes down should make that curl stronger and it doesn't work, maybe check with that qualified coach who knows how to work with these positions in case it's either a technique thing or something else that may need a bit of work.
We are Complex Integrated Systems There are 11 systems in the human being. They all interact with one another, from our skin to our reproductive system. There's no way we're going to be able know, a priori, what will unequicoably work for ourselves, little own everyone at all times. only salespeople seem to make such unequivocable claims about their products - it slices; it dices. always for everything. Really? What other domain is so certain?
In my main domain of human factors, this is why we can't make claims about the effectiveness of an interface based on how it works for ourselves alone, but have to test it rigerously so that we can say with some statistical power that it is effective to some degree, and even that is constrained like: for people aged x-y with these particular skill sets, they were able to use this tool to complete this task A% better than the previous tool design. Without that - even though we've developed that design with the best models of human performance from motor control to cognition available to us - the best we can say in our domain is "we liked it; why don't you give it a try and let us know if it worked for you."
Broken Record: Test it. Frequently, regularly. Vision is a potent system - the top of the somato sensory hierarchy. Makes sense that when it's firing well, it can help our other systems respond well. To use eye position to enhance a lift, therefore, means testing the eye position to see what action in a lift may need that enhancement - presuming that our visual reflexes are working as they're supposed to work. So again, if eyes down doesn't enhance that biceps curl, may be time to check vision, too. If it is, check eye position with the move. Test various positions through the move.
It's a really simple principle. It means having strategies to deal with a weak result to help make improvements. but at the very least it gives us information about tuning what we're doing.
Citation
Related Posts
I was fascinated by Geoff Neupert's article in the latest Power by Pavel Newsletter (issue 209, 08/09/10) about his experience using eye position in the press. Geoff is the author of Kettlebell Muscle. Absolutely awesome to see eye position highlighted in relation to how that action can support movement practice. That support is rather dependent on where and how in a compound move it's being used, and also what else may be happening in our somato-sensory systems. So let's look at eye position and postural reflexes and how they support muscle action a little more.Geoff writes:
For the last four years, until recently, I promoted a neutral head, eyes down posture for presses and jerks, thinking that this would increase flexion at the shoulder and therefore increase shoulder mobility and allow for the weight to go up easier.
Geoff reports that this didn't work for him. When we understand the roll of vision in position, that result is not surprising, so we'll come onto why. He then proposes a revised move with a different head, jaw and eye position: the neck back a bit, chin up a bit and eyes slightly up.
Geoff says of this approach:
This is excellent: Geoff tested the move to see if it worked better for him, today. Testing a technique is critical as adaptation is pretty individual; testing that neutral head / eyes down thing sooner might have been a good idea too for addressing four years of press frustration.I then corroborated my findings with what the absolute best in the world do, confirmed my position, applied my "new" techniques, and started making progress once again.
 | |
| For more ideas on how to train these eye muscles, see Eye Heatlh: How Fast can you switch focus? |
Test Early; Test Often The key thing to me in this article is that Geoff did "test" his new approach: did it improve his press? he says so an i believe him. Yet while he proposes a new technique for his press, and has some interesting theory to support it, whether or not that approach will be universally successful may be as likely as eyes down through the lift was successful for Geoff. May be. Dunno, maybe.
The take away from this story, at least for me, is less about a new technique that will work for everyone and more about: test it, because what works for you mayn't work for me, or for you later today, no matter how well we hypothesize why something works after the fact.
Let me step back a bit and say here's why i'm not surprised by GN reporting that eyes looking down *through the whole press* would likely/potentially not be a good idea: there's more going on than shoulder flexion in the press.
Eye Position and Reflexes when Reflexes work. Let me back up even further and say that the eyes are tied to reflexes that support extension, flexion, adduction, abduction, rotation. By reflex we mean involuntary automatic and near immediate response to a stimulus. Intriguingly, sometimes these reflexive responses can get buggered up, (and with the eyes, have particular effects on posture, among other things) but more on that anon.
When things are working right, we see looking down triggers flexion, looking up triggers extension looking in one direction triggers complementary adduction/abduction/rotation in the direction viewed.
Eye position is then used to complement/strengthen what can most benefit from that reflex. That may change throughout a lift. And what if while one thing is extending something else is flexing? What do we need help with the most? We'll look at an example to try in a sec.
Strengthening what needs to be strengthened throughout a lift
As an example of how eye position might change in a lift, let's take a look at the example from Geoff's article, the kettlebell press. The press is a rich movement: one may need eyes down to support shoulder flexion at the beginning of the lift coming out of the rack, then eyes towards the horizon and looking at the bell when the delts are at the weakest point, so strengthening rotator cuff movements, and post sticking point, eyes up to support the triceps extending (thanks to conversations last year with Zachariah Salazar Z-Health Master Trainer and RKC on these multiple positions in the press). In Pavel's pressing, as RKC Ken Froese pointed out to me, his eyes seem to follow the bell throughout, which may be great for someone with even strength, but not for someone with say a shoulder issue.
So keeping eyes down throughout the movement may be less productive for some people if where the weak link in the move shifts, and changing eye position will enhance that.
Try this at Home: A chin up (hands supinated) uses extension of the shoulder/lats firing, but it also uses elbow flexion (biceps coming into a curl). So what needs more help for you in a chin? Best way to find out: test either/or positions, depending if one's weaker link is shoulder extension/lats (eyes up) or biceps flexing (eyes down). Try both: what works better for you -when? Which is which may change as training progresses, or for just about any other reason, as we'll see below.
When reflexes seemingly aren't firing normally
Why would a doctor whack a knee if a reflex always fired as it was supposed to? We wouldn't need to test something that always works one way. Same thing with eye responses as demonstrated in what are referred to as postural reflexes, richly informed by the visual (and vestibular and proprioceptive) system(s):
Visual and vestibular input, as well as joint and soft tissue mechanoreceptors, are major players in the regulation of static upright posture. Each of these input sources detects and responds to specific types of postural stimulus and perturbations, and each region has specific pathways by which it communicates with other postural reflexes, as well as higher central nervous system structures.There's even work to suggest that blinking or performing visual sacades may improve postural stability.
Sometimes due to trauma or sometimes a long flight and jet lag, one's postural reflexes get really muted or actually cause the inverse effect reflexively in the body. There are tests for this (if you visit with a z-health certified coach who's done i-phase, for instance, they'll know these position/vision tests). The important thing to get is that our muscular responses - things as seemingly simple and immutable as flexion and extension - are intertwined with the somato-sensory system (visual, vestibular and proprioceptive function), and that these intertwined systems are constantly dealing with various stimuli. As Reiman and Lephart found in 2002:
Motor control for even simple tasks is a plastic process that undergoes constant review and modification based upon the integration and analysis of sensory input, efferent motorWe occaisionally really get how intertwined these actions are if we ever have an inner ear infection, or find ourselves experiencing sea sickness or dizziness.
commands, and resultant movements.
Obviously, if one's visual responses to a direction are screwed up (say looking down doesn't strengthen your bicep curl, or cue an appropriate postural reflex), then using your eyes in a movement in that direction is also likely not going to help - in some cases it may seem to work against you if your body doesn't like that eye position, performance is going to suffer - until the thing gets fixed. And it is addressable.
Repetez après la model: Test It. So rather than getting super prescriptive about what will achieve what, great to have some heuristics about reflexes and eye position and of course form. But great too (a) to be sure to be able to refine application - like multiple eyes positions may be needed throughout a move and (b) to know that those reflexes are working as designed and (c) just test it.
If an eye position doesn't work - doesn't provide a performance boost or takes away from one - try something else. And if in a simple move like a biceps curl where eyes down should make that curl stronger and it doesn't work, maybe check with that qualified coach who knows how to work with these positions in case it's either a technique thing or something else that may need a bit of work.
We are Complex Integrated Systems There are 11 systems in the human being. They all interact with one another, from our skin to our reproductive system. There's no way we're going to be able know, a priori, what will unequicoably work for ourselves, little own everyone at all times. only salespeople seem to make such unequivocable claims about their products - it slices; it dices. always for everything. Really? What other domain is so certain?
In my main domain of human factors, this is why we can't make claims about the effectiveness of an interface based on how it works for ourselves alone, but have to test it rigerously so that we can say with some statistical power that it is effective to some degree, and even that is constrained like: for people aged x-y with these particular skill sets, they were able to use this tool to complete this task A% better than the previous tool design. Without that - even though we've developed that design with the best models of human performance from motor control to cognition available to us - the best we can say in our domain is "we liked it; why don't you give it a try and let us know if it worked for you."
Broken Record: Test it. Frequently, regularly. Vision is a potent system - the top of the somato sensory hierarchy. Makes sense that when it's firing well, it can help our other systems respond well. To use eye position to enhance a lift, therefore, means testing the eye position to see what action in a lift may need that enhancement - presuming that our visual reflexes are working as they're supposed to work. So again, if eyes down doesn't enhance that biceps curl, may be time to check vision, too. If it is, check eye position with the move. Test various positions through the move.
It's a really simple principle. It means having strategies to deal with a weak result to help make improvements. but at the very least it gives us information about tuning what we're doing.
Citation
Morningstar, M., Pettibon, B., Schlappi, H., Schlappi, M., & Ireland, T. (2005). Reflex control of the spine and posture: a review of the literature from a chiropractic perspective Chiropractic & Osteopathy, 13 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1746-1340-13-16
Riemann BL, & Lephart SM (2002). The Sensorimotor System, Part II: The Role of Proprioception in Motor Control and Functional Joint Stability. Journal of athletic training, 37 (1), 80-4 PMID: 16558671
Rougier P, Garin M (2007). Performing saccadic eye movements or blinking improves postural control. Motor control, 11 (3), 213-23 PMID: 17715456
Related Posts
- Why I - train for the sprain
- THe other side of the gym - training the somato-sensory system
- more stuff about integration of systems: z-health overviews.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Bendy bits should bend in full range of motion, speed and control, right? So what's this mobility/stability dichotomy?
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Mobility/Stability. I confess i don't get what's meant or how this increasingly popular distinction between mobility and stability came to be seen as useful. I'm prepared to believe it's my problem, and sometimes as writing helps me work out such issues, forgive me while i lay out where the gaps seem to be in my understanding of the framing of movement as mobility/stability rather than simply a notion of movement, and ability to control ranges of motion at ranges of speed.
Here we go: Of late i've seen a number of intelligent people assert with what seems like good reasons that some joints are seemingly a priori meant to be "stable" while others are meant to be "mobile." Consider the fist article in this set kicked off by Mike Boyle, a well respected and established trainer, called A Joint by Joint Approach to Training. In this pieces, and many related articles, work by Stuart McGill on the low back is cited: in particular, McGill's findings that flexion is the root of most low back evils, and that sitting is the worst place to be of all. This is pretty compelling stuff. Seems to make sense.
But then there are seeming contradictions within this: in his discussion of the knees, not the back, Boyle sites McGill's reason for low back pain that it isn't perhaps so *much* flexion, but overuse. When other stuff - like the hips - get stuck, the back pays. So in that sense - the lumbar spine and knees should be stable, but the hips should be mobile?
The problem i find in this is that the arguments seem to suggest that pretty much all the time the lower spine should be stiffened up and the thoracic spine and hips loosened up - for instance. Mike Boyle goes so far as to ask "is spinal rotation even a good idea" He quotes a lot of work by a physical therapist name of Shirely Sharman who in her view suggests that the abs are there to stop so much rotation of the lumbar spine then that's what they should be doing. Boyle's issue seems to be that too many trainers concentrate on lumbar stretching when, citing Sharman "rotation is even dangerous" at the lower spine. He points to sprinter coach Bob Ross who did isometric work with his spinters in the abs, abandoning other forms of spinal movement work and how that was a positive thing for results.
Ok, but what do most sprinters do? Run. In pretty much straight lines. So maybe holding the spine in line and upright for 10-30secs is a good idea. In that case. That particular sport-specific constraint doesn't come up.
Rather, Boyle says he's chucked a lot of exercises designed to extend trunk range and seems to find less complaints of low back pain in clients since doing so. And that's cool. I'm not sure, however, that that means that that work has made his client's backs more stable - it just may mean that stretching a body part beyond its comfortable range of motion is painful or causes neuroligical shut down by pushing inappropriately, and that stopping doing something that hurts will reduce pain?
In other words, i'm just not sure that eliminating a set of kind of questionable stretches is therefore "decreasing mobility" or "increasing stability" - it may just be avoiding inducing threat.
And as for rotational work, surely the lack of it is one of the greatest weakness of most of us who train especially or exclusively at lifting heavy things? We tend to stick to pretty a given plane of motion for a movement, and forget about diagonal and especially rotational movements.
One of the funest ab exercises is surely the russian twist (seated) or the Full Contact Twist with the bar stuck in the corner on the floor and the other end in the athlete's hands, arms extended, arc'ing back and forth?
Pavel Tsatsouline writes of the FCT in Bullet Proof Abs:
So for truly "functional" movement, isn't it better to train strength in rotation, as well as across a range of movement planes? In other words, why not focus on building strength across the entire range of motion of the joints so that we can be - as pavel puts it - bulletproof? And that bulletproofness seems to mean being able to rotate, bend and recover as needed - and as the joints give us the degrees of freedom to accomplish that movement?
The Kneee/ACL injury- not about stability or mobility? The ACL (and MCL) are the ligaments most often torn (or pop) in knee injuries. One might say that that's because the knees are not stable enough. Indeed, again Mike Boyle tends to make this case in his Joint by Joint article. But he also seems to move away from actually saying the knee needs stability by deeking out to say the problem is that the knees pay for lack of hip mobility. I'm not sure what the bottom line is here? He digresses into back pain rather than a discussion of the knee.
Gray Cook comes in to help in his Expanding on the Joint-by-Joint approach saying,
I'm not making a joke here or being sarcastic. I'm really not sure what "the knees have a tendency towards slopiness" means in terms of real movement. All those ligaments are actually loose? Or does that mean one's leg muscles in say a squat aren't firing so the knee comes in (the Valgus knee). That's not really a knee issue though, is it? That's poor form such that the person hasn't been taught to work a better squat pattern, or hasn't worked on what may be inhibiting a good squat movement? And so they're putting strain on their knees by failing to keep good position. Too much load, and absolutely perhaps issues in the ankle and hip and upper back that need to be addressed.
But i'm not really thinking about such a static movement as the squat. Really I'm thinking of the mighty number of girls who have ACL injuries in sports in the states these days. One theory (gathering momentum) has it that the girls who have ACL injuries showing up in basketball don't have a way to balance their increasingly higher (as going through puberty) center of balance. Intriguingly, the comments from the researchers is not to increase strength training (for more core or knee stability) but to increase their prorioceptive (body awareness) training.
The suggestion is not unlike studies on sensory-motor balance training with athletes to see if progressive balance work could help reduce ankle injury - another common problem for field and track athletes. They found that, effectively, progressively training for the sprain through this program helped the nervous system not go into panic, and predicted injuries would be less.
To take a lessen from martial arts as well where one practices for the fall pretty regularly, how much attention is given to working with an athlete on end range of motion work - not just balance work but what might be loaded balance work at the place where we rarely go in our training - that end range where recovery from a sudden lapse or accident is hard and where injuries occur? Is that augmenting mobility, stability or does it matter?
I go back to Boyle and Cook on the knees and back to their facesaying that these joints tend towards slopiness, and yet McGill (quoted by Boyle) saying no no, the low back in people with pain have stronger extensors than those without. So there's a lot of muscular strength around the low back already. The spine is *not* weak here (and by extension, one would say not sloppy if so much strength can be turned on?)
What's Going On? Where is this taking me? I'm hoping that Gray Cook's new book Movement will anser a lot of these queries. I'm looking forward to getting it, because right now the mobility/stability dialectic seems more problematic than helpful - at least to me. Here's why - and here's where i struggle with this as a model.
All the joints in the body have a pretty much well-scoped ranges of motion, right down to what the usual degres of movement are in each one. So why not simply be able to move all of these joints in these ranges of motion with strength and control as demanded by whatever that movement is - especially at the most vulnerable end ranges of motion?
Movement vs Mobility/Stability? Why not talk, therefore, just about "movement" (as Cook's book title suggests) rather than "mobility/stability." Is the question not really can one, for instance, hold a position for one particular movement or relax it for another? The knee needs not only to support the hinge with strength and power in say a basketball jump shot, but also needs to support the roll in with equal aplomb from standing to the ground - either when making a lunging tennis shot, or losing one's footing on a football pitch or simply getting pushed or in a fight getting from standing to knees to grapple quickly?
Perhaps there's an historical context i'm missing - Boyle talks alot about the "last decade" with too much stretching going on in the trunk and so life got too caught up on flexibility? Dunno, as i own i missed that part of the discussion not being in the space at that time. But maybe that's not it, either, as Paul Chek's Movement that Matters
and his "primal patterns" seems to have been in play since at least 1999 (ie the last decade, plus), and that is likewise focused i think on movements?
Mobile when? Stable when? But again, i'm not claiming expertise of that period - it's a genuine question - it's just that i can't find the value add in framing our bodies as there's supposed to be stability here and mobility there, and if we get this thing more stable and that thing more mobile (implicit seems to be "all the time") then everything is Functional. Mobile when? Stable when? Are we talking averages? That on average of all possible movements, these joints are more often than not needing to be stable rather than mobile? And so we need to train for the average use case, rather than the range of uses?
Can you see why i'm a wee bit flustered? It's not a dichotomy that helps me when i'm working with clients to talk about stability or mobility because i guess i'm not sure what they really mean when put in operation. Our model reflects our practice, i guess, and i'm struggling with the mobility/flexibility as a model.
For me, mobility seems pretty good on it's own: mobility is the ability to voluntarily and actively control a given range of motion. For me, in my practice, it seems pretty important simply that we be able to control that movement through all ranges of motion, and all speeds, equally. If folks have restricted ankle mobility, not only does that potentially need to be opened up but strengthened as well. Strength and ROM seem to work together.
It then seems pretty important that if there's a gap somewhere we have the tools to be able to help find a way to address that weakness. And as Cook also notes, since the site of an issue is not necessarily the source of the issue, the source of a weakness may be, as we've seen above, proprioceptive rather than musclo-skeletal, too. In other words, mobility and enhancing control of mobility seems sufficiently descriptive of the kinesthetic. And beyond this, if we do accept the site is not the source of an issue necessarily, it seems we need to take into account whatever other systems may be operating on us. From somato-sensory, to affect, to nutrition to, anything that plays on the 11 organ systems in our body.
For a bit of context, beyond the CSCS, RKC and Z-Health Certifications, i hold both the FMS qualification and the CK-FMS certification. One has to pass the FMS exam before getting to the CK-FMS quals. It's a fascinating course, and i'm looking forward to doing it again this fall because Gray Cook is teaching it with Brett Jones, and i'm sure two years after taking it initially, it will have evolved, and i certainly know a bit more than i did then, and Gray Cook has a lot of cool things to say. I am keen to learn more about this physiological piece. I confess anatomy is, to use Cook's phrasing again, the weaker link in my chain.
So i recognize i would benefit by being more au fait with kinesiology/physiology (hence more recent posts exploring things like the amazing shoulder, and kinesiology books used to assist practice with willing folk).
This article is not meant as a criticism of Boyle or Cook. I'm just saying, right now, i'm not grokking the mob/stab distinction. It seems to me both too extreme - these joints need to be mobile; these stable - and too unspecific - generally? specifically? Now maybe we're both saying the same things: have full range of motion and be strong in all ranges of motion and so be able to control all ranges of motion at all speeds. That would be cool. Then again, i'd say why not just say that? Since mob/stab can start to be heard as prescriptions: the thoracic spine MUST be mobile the lumbar spine MUST be stable.
I'm also saying that i agree with neurologists who talk about the somato-sensory system, and how that's just as improtant to be integrated into any discussion of movement, too.
So, as said, i'm perfectly prepared at this point to believe that the misapprehension is mine. That we are all on the same page. Just putting out there where i'm struggling. Perhaps some of y'all can relate, or have passed through this vale and come to a conclusion on the other side with more knowledge and insight. Look forward to meeting you there.
Best,
mc Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Here we go: Of late i've seen a number of intelligent people assert with what seems like good reasons that some joints are seemingly a priori meant to be "stable" while others are meant to be "mobile." Consider the fist article in this set kicked off by Mike Boyle, a well respected and established trainer, called A Joint by Joint Approach to Training. In this pieces, and many related articles, work by Stuart McGill on the low back is cited: in particular, McGill's findings that flexion is the root of most low back evils, and that sitting is the worst place to be of all. This is pretty compelling stuff. Seems to make sense.
But then there are seeming contradictions within this: in his discussion of the knees, not the back, Boyle sites McGill's reason for low back pain that it isn't perhaps so *much* flexion, but overuse. When other stuff - like the hips - get stuck, the back pays. So in that sense - the lumbar spine and knees should be stable, but the hips should be mobile?
The problem i find in this is that the arguments seem to suggest that pretty much all the time the lower spine should be stiffened up and the thoracic spine and hips loosened up - for instance. Mike Boyle goes so far as to ask "is spinal rotation even a good idea" He quotes a lot of work by a physical therapist name of Shirely Sharman who in her view suggests that the abs are there to stop so much rotation of the lumbar spine then that's what they should be doing. Boyle's issue seems to be that too many trainers concentrate on lumbar stretching when, citing Sharman "rotation is even dangerous" at the lower spine. He points to sprinter coach Bob Ross who did isometric work with his spinters in the abs, abandoning other forms of spinal movement work and how that was a positive thing for results.
Ok, but what do most sprinters do? Run. In pretty much straight lines. So maybe holding the spine in line and upright for 10-30secs is a good idea. In that case. That particular sport-specific constraint doesn't come up.
Rather, Boyle says he's chucked a lot of exercises designed to extend trunk range and seems to find less complaints of low back pain in clients since doing so. And that's cool. I'm not sure, however, that that means that that work has made his client's backs more stable - it just may mean that stretching a body part beyond its comfortable range of motion is painful or causes neuroligical shut down by pushing inappropriately, and that stopping doing something that hurts will reduce pain?
In other words, i'm just not sure that eliminating a set of kind of questionable stretches is therefore "decreasing mobility" or "increasing stability" - it may just be avoiding inducing threat.
And as for rotational work, surely the lack of it is one of the greatest weakness of most of us who train especially or exclusively at lifting heavy things? We tend to stick to pretty a given plane of motion for a movement, and forget about diagonal and especially rotational movements.
 |
| Pavel Tsatsouline demonstrating the Full Contact Twist in Bullet Proof Abs |
Pavel Tsatsouline writes of the FCT in Bullet Proof Abs:
The best exercise for transferring the hip power into the shoulder, with a high interest yield, is the Full Contact Twist. This exercise was originally developed in the Soviet Union for shot put conditioning.
The then-nameless twist came to kickboxers' attention when a famous Russian shot putter failed to talk his way out of a mugging. This mild mannered man got annoyed when one of the attackers cut him with a blade. He ruptured the punk's spleen with a single punch.
Igor Sukhotsky, M.Sc., formerly a nationally ranked weightlifter and an eccentric sports scientist who took up full contact karate at the age of fort-five, popularized the twist among Russian fighters. This renaissance man noticed that the twist not only had increased his striking power, but also had toughened his midsection against blows by toning it up. Sukhotsky was so impressed with the Full Contact Twist, that he added it to his super abbreviated strength trainingIt's interesting that Sukhotsky came to the value of rotation - moving across planes of motion - in moving from a more linear sport of weighlifting to the more richly plane-crossing Karate. It's also intriguing that it is a life event - a mugging - that fostered interest in this movement.
routine which consisted of only four exercises: squats, bench presses, deadlifts,
and good mornings.
So for truly "functional" movement, isn't it better to train strength in rotation, as well as across a range of movement planes? In other words, why not focus on building strength across the entire range of motion of the joints so that we can be - as pavel puts it - bulletproof? And that bulletproofness seems to mean being able to rotate, bend and recover as needed - and as the joints give us the degrees of freedom to accomplish that movement?
The Kneee/ACL injury- not about stability or mobility? The ACL (and MCL) are the ligaments most often torn (or pop) in knee injuries. One might say that that's because the knees are not stable enough. Indeed, again Mike Boyle tends to make this case in his Joint by Joint article. But he also seems to move away from actually saying the knee needs stability by deeking out to say the problem is that the knees pay for lack of hip mobility. I'm not sure what the bottom line is here? He digresses into back pain rather than a discussion of the knee.
Gray Cook comes in to help in his Expanding on the Joint-by-Joint approach saying,
"The knee has a tendency toward sloppiness and therefore could benefit from greater amounts of stability and motor control. This tendency usually predates knee injuries and degeneration that actually make it become stiff."He also states
Knees are simple hinge joints. They’re supposed to flex and extend, and when they rotate too much or move valgus or varus too much, we start seeing problems with the knee. Does the knee need to be mobile? Yes, but once it’s mobile, it needs to be stable enough to stay inside the proper plane of movement where its functional attributes are possible and practical.Now Gray Cook is a knowledable phyiscal therapist who knows a lot about movement and how joints operate. He's also worked with a ton o' athletes and helped them restore function when others were ready to cut them open and write them off. So it's with respect that i wonder what's meant by 'mobility" with a "simple hinge joint"? What does a stable knee joint mean? That the femur stays attached to the tib/fib bones on the minisci? That it doesn't slide off to one side when it goes to bend? What?
I'm not making a joke here or being sarcastic. I'm really not sure what "the knees have a tendency towards slopiness" means in terms of real movement. All those ligaments are actually loose? Or does that mean one's leg muscles in say a squat aren't firing so the knee comes in (the Valgus knee). That's not really a knee issue though, is it? That's poor form such that the person hasn't been taught to work a better squat pattern, or hasn't worked on what may be inhibiting a good squat movement? And so they're putting strain on their knees by failing to keep good position. Too much load, and absolutely perhaps issues in the ankle and hip and upper back that need to be addressed.
To take a lessen from martial arts as well where one practices for the fall pretty regularly, how much attention is given to working with an athlete on end range of motion work - not just balance work but what might be loaded balance work at the place where we rarely go in our training - that end range where recovery from a sudden lapse or accident is hard and where injuries occur? Is that augmenting mobility, stability or does it matter?
I go back to Boyle and Cook on the knees and back to their facesaying that these joints tend towards slopiness, and yet McGill (quoted by Boyle) saying no no, the low back in people with pain have stronger extensors than those without. So there's a lot of muscular strength around the low back already. The spine is *not* weak here (and by extension, one would say not sloppy if so much strength can be turned on?)
What's Going On? Where is this taking me? I'm hoping that Gray Cook's new book Movement will anser a lot of these queries. I'm looking forward to getting it, because right now the mobility/stability dialectic seems more problematic than helpful - at least to me. Here's why - and here's where i struggle with this as a model.
All the joints in the body have a pretty much well-scoped ranges of motion, right down to what the usual degres of movement are in each one. So why not simply be able to move all of these joints in these ranges of motion with strength and control as demanded by whatever that movement is - especially at the most vulnerable end ranges of motion?
Movement vs Mobility/Stability? Why not talk, therefore, just about "movement" (as Cook's book title suggests) rather than "mobility/stability." Is the question not really can one, for instance, hold a position for one particular movement or relax it for another? The knee needs not only to support the hinge with strength and power in say a basketball jump shot, but also needs to support the roll in with equal aplomb from standing to the ground - either when making a lunging tennis shot, or losing one's footing on a football pitch or simply getting pushed or in a fight getting from standing to knees to grapple quickly?
Perhaps there's an historical context i'm missing - Boyle talks alot about the "last decade" with too much stretching going on in the trunk and so life got too caught up on flexibility? Dunno, as i own i missed that part of the discussion not being in the space at that time. But maybe that's not it, either, as Paul Chek's Movement that Matters
and his "primal patterns" seems to have been in play since at least 1999 (ie the last decade, plus), and that is likewise focused i think on movements?Mobile when? Stable when? But again, i'm not claiming expertise of that period - it's a genuine question - it's just that i can't find the value add in framing our bodies as there's supposed to be stability here and mobility there, and if we get this thing more stable and that thing more mobile (implicit seems to be "all the time") then everything is Functional. Mobile when? Stable when? Are we talking averages? That on average of all possible movements, these joints are more often than not needing to be stable rather than mobile? And so we need to train for the average use case, rather than the range of uses?
Can you see why i'm a wee bit flustered? It's not a dichotomy that helps me when i'm working with clients to talk about stability or mobility because i guess i'm not sure what they really mean when put in operation. Our model reflects our practice, i guess, and i'm struggling with the mobility/flexibility as a model.
For me, mobility seems pretty good on it's own: mobility is the ability to voluntarily and actively control a given range of motion. For me, in my practice, it seems pretty important simply that we be able to control that movement through all ranges of motion, and all speeds, equally. If folks have restricted ankle mobility, not only does that potentially need to be opened up but strengthened as well. Strength and ROM seem to work together.
It then seems pretty important that if there's a gap somewhere we have the tools to be able to help find a way to address that weakness. And as Cook also notes, since the site of an issue is not necessarily the source of the issue, the source of a weakness may be, as we've seen above, proprioceptive rather than musclo-skeletal, too. In other words, mobility and enhancing control of mobility seems sufficiently descriptive of the kinesthetic. And beyond this, if we do accept the site is not the source of an issue necessarily, it seems we need to take into account whatever other systems may be operating on us. From somato-sensory, to affect, to nutrition to, anything that plays on the 11 organ systems in our body.
For a bit of context, beyond the CSCS, RKC and Z-Health Certifications, i hold both the FMS qualification and the CK-FMS certification. One has to pass the FMS exam before getting to the CK-FMS quals. It's a fascinating course, and i'm looking forward to doing it again this fall because Gray Cook is teaching it with Brett Jones, and i'm sure two years after taking it initially, it will have evolved, and i certainly know a bit more than i did then, and Gray Cook has a lot of cool things to say. I am keen to learn more about this physiological piece. I confess anatomy is, to use Cook's phrasing again, the weaker link in my chain.
So i recognize i would benefit by being more au fait with kinesiology/physiology (hence more recent posts exploring things like the amazing shoulder, and kinesiology books used to assist practice with willing folk).
This article is not meant as a criticism of Boyle or Cook. I'm just saying, right now, i'm not grokking the mob/stab distinction. It seems to me both too extreme - these joints need to be mobile; these stable - and too unspecific - generally? specifically? Now maybe we're both saying the same things: have full range of motion and be strong in all ranges of motion and so be able to control all ranges of motion at all speeds. That would be cool. Then again, i'd say why not just say that? Since mob/stab can start to be heard as prescriptions: the thoracic spine MUST be mobile the lumbar spine MUST be stable.
I'm also saying that i agree with neurologists who talk about the somato-sensory system, and how that's just as improtant to be integrated into any discussion of movement, too.
So, as said, i'm perfectly prepared at this point to believe that the misapprehension is mine. That we are all on the same page. Just putting out there where i'm struggling. Perhaps some of y'all can relate, or have passed through this vale and come to a conclusion on the other side with more knowledge and insight. Look forward to meeting you there.
Best,
mc Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Tempo as bulletproofing - at how many speeds do we practice a move?
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When we think about speed - we usually think about one direction: going fast. Acceleration. Explosion. But it seems there is benefit to rethinking a little bit the roll of speed in our practice in terms of what we want to achieve beyond or even within the faster finish, the bigger lift, the quicker 40. Control at ranges of speed - including the super fast of the sport speed is skill work that may also not only make us better athletes but protect us from movement-based injury.
The Big Lift. If we lift stuff, we generally practice lifting at the speed we think best for our goals: in lifting we hear a lot about acceleration. Get up as fast as possible; put the thing up as fast as possible. Explode explode. And with good physics behind that: acceleration is part of Force, so the more we can get speed to ramp up, the more force the more we lift.
The debates about speed optimisation for hypertrophy are legion: x seconds up y seconds down. What's best? Well, what are we trying to do? Me,
for hypertrophy, i do like Chad Waterbury's Huge in a Hurry
with its use of a punchy tempo, sticking with that, and dropping weight if the tempo goes down (book overview by Waterbury). Waterbury's goal, he says, is to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible.
While Waterbury's article doesn't explain how that happens, here's an idea to do with energy systems and fiber types: faster muscle fibers (type II's mainly) that are used first in a fast burst of force can give lots of energy to power work. They're also the ones that hypertrophy particularly well.
Those fibers, however, fatigue out fastest though. 10secs of work for Type IIa's; Type IId's go for about 30secs. As they fatigue other muscle fibers (Type I, slower but longer lasting ) come on. Hence more sets: initial sets do the fatiguing with dominant one type of fiber; later sets get more muscle fibers, too but of a different type. Even with recovery of 30 secs between longer rep sets, we are only partially recovering that IId energy system - and that's a good thing: better fiber mix, better strength/hypertrophy response.
In other sports, too, it's speed that wins the race. Even in endurance sports, it's still who crosses the line first that counts. Very linear, these things.
So fast sounds great. Why go slow(er)? Control!
While there's a nice linear cross the finish line first in many sports, other games require other tempos to be available at all times, don't they? Scoring in baseball, football, rugby definitely has speed as a component, but it's not always the fastest person who sets up the goal, or scores the run, is it? Great tennis players are able to move very fast, but they are also able to control ball position to the opponents court at slower speeds, giving their oponent less energy on that ball either to get to it or return it. That takes control.
To attain that control, it seems we're actually using different muscle patterns. Not only that, muscle patterns change with practice. IF we only practice at one tempo we will not be as comfortable or smooth or controlled at those different speeds, and so if that different tempo is required of us, we may not be as effective as we would like to be, especially through a full range of motion.
By not training at different speeds, we therefore miss out on opportunities to get stronger, use a richer variety of fibers and, perhaps especially, have that advanced control of our bodies - something that comes in extremely handy when the ground shifts from under us either on a bouncy bus, or rolling over a divot in the grass, or making that weird pass around an oncoming player in an Ultimate game.
Finding the Weak Spots and Improving their Performance. While different speeds helps us learn how to control our bodies at different paces, and thus gives us a greater skills palette, we can also find holes in our range of motion control by practicing at a variety of speeds, where, what direction and at what tempo do we hit a movement dead zone for instance, where control seems to fall off? Let's bring some focused attention and practice to that part of the movement at that tempo.
Sloooow Speed for Skill Building. An oft-cited example by folks who love training at speed variety is Ben Hogan and his slow motion swing work. One of the best golfers of the game, with perhaps the most admired swing, he reputedly practiced regularly going through each part of his swing with intent, as shown below, with the miracle of youtube:
Even No Speed
Relatively recent research has also shown that mental imagery practice, while not effecting reaction speed, does effect muscle strength, power and work "signficantly."
Technique Challenge: use a metronome
During the S-Phase Z-Health course (yup, S is pretty much for Skills for Speed), we did some great speed work that was about using a metronome to get used to working at differnt tempi than those to which we are accustomed (i.e. in a rut). Our practice was to do mobility drills to the tempo of the metronome.
Not too suprisingly, folks who dance or play an instrument seemed more at ease with the exercise, but even here, working outside familiar pacing (103 beats per minute, anyone?) was more of a challenge than standard quarters and thirds.
Practicing Speed at all Joints and Loads of Angles
Z-Health's R-Phase (overview) and I-Phase programs (overview) are dynamic joint movement programs. The DVD's for each take us through each joint in the body and we do a sequence of movments for each to get the various ranges of motion. R-Phase does all the movements from neutral stance; I-phase gets going with a variety of stances and positions. Getting from R to I is a good idea for having the mastery to apply the movements to sport specific actions.
While the DVDs show a single speed for each drill, the manuals describing the training programs for each make it clear that the drills are designed to be "owned" at at least 4 speeds from super slow to "sports speed" (really fast). Control control control. The brain maps not only position of where we are but how fast we're moving each part of us to get there. Practicing speeds builds patterns for managing actions at speeds.
Once these drills/speeds are owned, S-Phase: the Complete Athlete Vol 1 puts these drills into more loaded conditions for actual full body speed/tempo work.
Side Note: If you're intrigued by these progressions in control/speed for each joint ROM, the speediest way to get a primer in them is either the Essentials of Elite Performance 3day workshop (calendar here) or DVD mini course, distilled from the workshop (overview), if you can't make the event.
Summary
There are it seems specific speed combinations that lead to specific effects. Being able to use speed in a controlled way to achieve those effects is a Good Thing. But part of having control of speed at one end of the spectrum (the fast end) seems to be pretty tied up with the neural patterning that goes on to control speed at t'other end (very slow) too.
Adding in speed work - where speed means from the slow to the fast - as part of our regular practice may just be one more way to improve our overall well-being and bullet proof ourselves better against the unexpected - when that unexpected requires a movement response. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
The Big Lift. If we lift stuff, we generally practice lifting at the speed we think best for our goals: in lifting we hear a lot about acceleration. Get up as fast as possible; put the thing up as fast as possible. Explode explode. And with good physics behind that: acceleration is part of Force, so the more we can get speed to ramp up, the more force the more we lift.
The debates about speed optimisation for hypertrophy are legion: x seconds up y seconds down. What's best? Well, what are we trying to do? Me,
for hypertrophy, i do like Chad Waterbury's Huge in a Hurry with its use of a punchy tempo, sticking with that, and dropping weight if the tempo goes down (book overview by Waterbury). Waterbury's goal, he says, is to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible.While Waterbury's article doesn't explain how that happens, here's an idea to do with energy systems and fiber types: faster muscle fibers (type II's mainly) that are used first in a fast burst of force can give lots of energy to power work. They're also the ones that hypertrophy particularly well.
In other sports, too, it's speed that wins the race. Even in endurance sports, it's still who crosses the line first that counts. Very linear, these things.
So fast sounds great. Why go slow(er)? Control!
While there's a nice linear cross the finish line first in many sports, other games require other tempos to be available at all times, don't they? Scoring in baseball, football, rugby definitely has speed as a component, but it's not always the fastest person who sets up the goal, or scores the run, is it? Great tennis players are able to move very fast, but they are also able to control ball position to the opponents court at slower speeds, giving their oponent less energy on that ball either to get to it or return it. That takes control.
To attain that control, it seems we're actually using different muscle patterns. Not only that, muscle patterns change with practice. IF we only practice at one tempo we will not be as comfortable or smooth or controlled at those different speeds, and so if that different tempo is required of us, we may not be as effective as we would like to be, especially through a full range of motion.
By not training at different speeds, we therefore miss out on opportunities to get stronger, use a richer variety of fibers and, perhaps especially, have that advanced control of our bodies - something that comes in extremely handy when the ground shifts from under us either on a bouncy bus, or rolling over a divot in the grass, or making that weird pass around an oncoming player in an Ultimate game.
Finding the Weak Spots and Improving their Performance. While different speeds helps us learn how to control our bodies at different paces, and thus gives us a greater skills palette, we can also find holes in our range of motion control by practicing at a variety of speeds, where, what direction and at what tempo do we hit a movement dead zone for instance, where control seems to fall off? Let's bring some focused attention and practice to that part of the movement at that tempo.
Sloooow Speed for Skill Building. An oft-cited example by folks who love training at speed variety is Ben Hogan and his slow motion swing work. One of the best golfers of the game, with perhaps the most admired swing, he reputedly practiced regularly going through each part of his swing with intent, as shown below, with the miracle of youtube:
Even No Speed
Relatively recent research has also shown that mental imagery practice, while not effecting reaction speed, does effect muscle strength, power and work "signficantly."
Technique Challenge: use a metronome
During the S-Phase Z-Health course (yup, S is pretty much for Skills for Speed), we did some great speed work that was about using a metronome to get used to working at differnt tempi than those to which we are accustomed (i.e. in a rut). Our practice was to do mobility drills to the tempo of the metronome.
Not too suprisingly, folks who dance or play an instrument seemed more at ease with the exercise, but even here, working outside familiar pacing (103 beats per minute, anyone?) was more of a challenge than standard quarters and thirds.
Practicing Speed at all Joints and Loads of Angles
Z-Health's R-Phase (overview) and I-Phase programs (overview) are dynamic joint movement programs. The DVD's for each take us through each joint in the body and we do a sequence of movments for each to get the various ranges of motion. R-Phase does all the movements from neutral stance; I-phase gets going with a variety of stances and positions. Getting from R to I is a good idea for having the mastery to apply the movements to sport specific actions.
Once these drills/speeds are owned, S-Phase: the Complete Athlete Vol 1 puts these drills into more loaded conditions for actual full body speed/tempo work.
Summary
There are it seems specific speed combinations that lead to specific effects. Being able to use speed in a controlled way to achieve those effects is a Good Thing. But part of having control of speed at one end of the spectrum (the fast end) seems to be pretty tied up with the neural patterning that goes on to control speed at t'other end (very slow) too.
Adding in speed work - where speed means from the slow to the fast - as part of our regular practice may just be one more way to improve our overall well-being and bullet proof ourselves better against the unexpected - when that unexpected requires a movement response. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Run longer, easier right this minute - with a wee breathing technique shift.
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When i used to run x-country "seriously," the coach said go for time, not distance. So getting more minutes in in a single run was always the biggie: increase our minutes, much of the rest - especially speed - follows this first priority. Maybe that's changed over the years in running circles but it still seems a pretty good way to build a foundation: main work is quality runs improving time (duration and speed); other sessions: technique and speed work.
I've been experimenting for a few months now with revising the breathing technique in my runs. It's immediately let me run longer and have gas in the tank when i'm done. It's going to sound obvious, i'm sure but let me try. Here it is: gait the run by the tempo at which one can inhale through the nose, exhale through pursed lips, and use the belly, not the upper chest, to breath.
In other words: only run as fast as you can maintain breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth, with a focus on getting the breath from the belly region rather than just the top of the chest.
Yes, that slows the tempo of the run down from what i can run if i'm sucking air in through my mouth - but the difference is actually quite small in terms of speed and the benefit seems to be a smoother stride, more effortless-feeling movement, no cramps and of course, building up more running minutes.
I feel that this approach has let me, personally, concentrate more on my form while i'm running - it's a sufficiently relaxed pace that i can think about and practice head and eye position, breathing from the belly, where my hands are, what my hands are doing, shoulder drive, body position. It also lets me play with things like A march steps for sprinting practice without sprinting (detailed in the s-phase complete athlete DVD (review here)- with tons of sprinting technique stuff). And all literally without getting out of breath.
And here's a kicker - the other day i noticed doing some hills where i hadn't noticed i'd done some hills. Now that's likely a product of improved endurance, i grant you, but i don't recall ever previously not feeling hills like that. Hard to describe.
i haven't done a longish run in eons; running's not a main thing in my training life right now. Last weekend i wanted to see how long i could go with this technique. I ran out of time to test it. Made me wonder if gosh, this IS how we as humans could outlast a horse.
This is also turning out to be an interesting way to do Fartlek: going as HARD as possible for as long as possible not based on distance but on capacity to nasal inhale. Oh, and i don't seem ever to get any kind of cramps with this technique either - could be coincidence. But maybe not.
Just as an aside, i'm also running in vff's (and sunday's run was in the new bikilas without socks), and that's done a lot for improving the energy in my form too over the past year+.
So, really simple technique:
What i've found is initially, once i switched over to mouth breathing to recover, the rest of the run was mouth breathing - i couldn't seem to get it back to nasal inhalation. Now, it's no biggie to switch - it's just about pace. And once i let go of the issue around slowing down for a bit to recover then picking up, all seemed to be ok.
So not sure why this is turning out to be a cool way to extend and tune my running, but here's a theory. In the Z-Health frame this would be threat reduction/modulation, and we know, as a part of that, easier breathing also helps manage stress hormones. If we also accept that we're wired for survival not performance, if we keep those stress hormones that are released when we exercise managed, perhaps the threat perception to the nervous system is also reduced, so survival issues go down, performance focus can open up. Sure felt that way on the wee hills i did yesterday. Personally, i have never found running so easy even going at a good clip and kinda delightful to have as an aside fun movement thing to do since practicing this technique.
If you try it, please let me know what you find.
Related posts
I've been experimenting for a few months now with revising the breathing technique in my runs. It's immediately let me run longer and have gas in the tank when i'm done. It's going to sound obvious, i'm sure but let me try. Here it is: gait the run by the tempo at which one can inhale through the nose, exhale through pursed lips, and use the belly, not the upper chest, to breath.In other words: only run as fast as you can maintain breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth, with a focus on getting the breath from the belly region rather than just the top of the chest.
Yes, that slows the tempo of the run down from what i can run if i'm sucking air in through my mouth - but the difference is actually quite small in terms of speed and the benefit seems to be a smoother stride, more effortless-feeling movement, no cramps and of course, building up more running minutes.
|
| Complete Athlete DVD: includes sprinting techniques |
And here's a kicker - the other day i noticed doing some hills where i hadn't noticed i'd done some hills. Now that's likely a product of improved endurance, i grant you, but i don't recall ever previously not feeling hills like that. Hard to describe.
i haven't done a longish run in eons; running's not a main thing in my training life right now. Last weekend i wanted to see how long i could go with this technique. I ran out of time to test it. Made me wonder if gosh, this IS how we as humans could outlast a horse.
This is also turning out to be an interesting way to do Fartlek: going as HARD as possible for as long as possible not based on distance but on capacity to nasal inhale. Oh, and i don't seem ever to get any kind of cramps with this technique either - could be coincidence. But maybe not.
So, really simple technique:
- i keep the pace to what can be maintained with nasal inhalation, mouth exhalation.
- i focus from time to time on ensuring the breath comes as much from the belly (not upper ribs/chest) as possible
What i've found is initially, once i switched over to mouth breathing to recover, the rest of the run was mouth breathing - i couldn't seem to get it back to nasal inhalation. Now, it's no biggie to switch - it's just about pace. And once i let go of the issue around slowing down for a bit to recover then picking up, all seemed to be ok.
So not sure why this is turning out to be a cool way to extend and tune my running, but here's a theory. In the Z-Health frame this would be threat reduction/modulation, and we know, as a part of that, easier breathing also helps manage stress hormones. If we also accept that we're wired for survival not performance, if we keep those stress hormones that are released when we exercise managed, perhaps the threat perception to the nervous system is also reduced, so survival issues go down, performance focus can open up. Sure felt that way on the wee hills i did yesterday. Personally, i have never found running so easy even going at a good clip and kinda delightful to have as an aside fun movement thing to do since practicing this technique.
If you try it, please let me know what you find.
Related posts
- vff's after five months
- wearing vff's after a year
- pose running and vff's
- calf muscle cramps and vff's
- Delayed onset muscle soreness - overview
- vff bikila preview -about bikila
- The Complete Athlete Vol 1 DVD review - lost on sprinting/speed technique
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Hormones - what are they really? upper level managers for the body's state.
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What do you think of when someone says Hormones? Maybe muscle oriented folks think about testosterone. Women tending towards a certain age think about estrogen. Athletes may think about adrenelein. Diet conscious may think about Insulin. Someone totally stressed may not know what to think about but that's epinepherine and cortisol. In the sesame street way of what goes together, all of these are hormones. But what does that mean?
If we pull up from the particular view of what an individual hormone does, it seems the big picture on hormones is that they are messengers or signals for the body - or some part of the body - that something has happened to it or part of it that has induced a state change. They are, in effect, state change managers.
Food enters the gut, hormones are released to tell the gut to get certain enzymes going to start breaking up the food, tearing it apart to do something with it - put it away, actually. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Different hormones take care of different parts of the change process. Carbs are broken down and are ready to enter the blood stream, insulin shows up to say "right this way" to ensure the glucose is used. Heck, even being hungry is perceived as a state change (check out ghrelin) where hormones are released to get an action happening (eg, feed me. feed me now).
Women are intimately familiar with hormonal changes that occur on a monthly basis to handle all the state changes that menses sets off. But that's what's happening: a change in our homeoSTASIS triggers these little do gooders - our hormones - to make sure that our bodies have an optimal response to that change for our survival.
Injury. Getting the blood to act in particular ways to clot - not something it does when its just pumping through our veins - is the response of our bodies to a pretty specific state change. And so what's the body doing? Providing an optimal response to survive by taking energy to get into the inflammation and healing process (whether we register the injury as pain or not depends on the richer context of what's going on with our body and mind at the time. We also have hormones to self-medicate, making opiates for us).
Need to sleep? Great big survival state change? Melatonin regulates that, too.
And last example, if we get startled or stressed, that is likewise a signal to the nervous system for a state change, in this case, prepare to flee. And its one most of us get triggered to some degree daily.
From a bang going off behind us, to having to give a public speech, to anticipating a bill we can't pay, our very physical being interprets these experiences as threat (or startle in some literature). At this threat signal, a slurry of different hormones are released to optimize our system to survive and get us away from tiger tiger burning bright.
One set of hormones (epinephrine or adrenaline) accelerates heart rate and inspiration to get the peripheral system (our limbs) ready to move fast. Other catecholamines are released to mobilize fat from storage into free fatty acid to be right ready to be used as fuel for the long run away from the predator. Cortisol kicks in to shut down digestion: we really don't want to burn precious ATP for digestion when we'll need it for motoring. If we survive we can digest later. Testosterone (tarzan's chest beating, for instance) actually gets turned on in these situations to help reduce the fear response and "man up" as it were so we don't go totally fetal. Intriguingly, estrogen also seems to have similar calming effects to startle (at least in rats). Gender - in rats - is a player, too, it seems in whether testosterone or estrogen reduces either accoustic verses light based startle too. Isn't that wild? Indeed there's a great quote in that source that says "testosterone skulpts the male brain [of the rat]"
Anyway, suffice it to say - there's a lot of hormones released in stress to deal with a lot of the systems in
Similar Profiles: stress and exercise
What is quite cool is that exercise has just about the same profile as stress in terms of hormonal responses. Catecholamines, which are great for fat mobilization, are triggered as soon as we get moving at a clip. The greater the intensity, the greater the release. So HIIT does get more fatty acids mobilized that slower steady state, as we discussed looking at Trapp's work over in this piece on different HIIT modes.
SO it seems even if we're not in startle or threat, the fact that we're moving requires similar hormonal responses: energy to the limbs rather than digestion, fat mobilization to keep going. Even the speed of hypertrophy occurring is as we know, an adaptation to demand. It seems in some cases where the environment is also perceived by the nervous system to be a potential threat, the adaptation (hypertrophy and strength) is accelerated. We saw awhile ago in Get Huge or Die that resistance workouts in a reduced oxygen chamber also caused faster hypertrophy - and that the hormanal cascade in that case seemed greater than the normal air environment: survive and get bigger to be better adapted to survive that again. Maybe.
Connecting Stress and Exercise: move it move it
Fact is, we can see two things from this understanding of hormones as state change managers (upper level management to be sure).
First, exercise is a state change (from stasis to motion) that sends hormones to optimize our body for that movement. When we move with those hormones in an exercise state, we usually feel pretty good. The hormones do their job: support movement. We derive benefits.
Second, stress has pretty much the same hormonal profile as exercise type movement - getting the heart rate up being the main observable factor. So, if we're having hormones released to say "i've just had a signal for you to get going: here come the chemicals to turn your body into a mean moving machine" and then we DON'T move, what happens?
Let's see, we feel like crap, we don't sleep, we gain weight, our skin can get funny, we are more susceptible to disease. Why?
In part because our body will keep trying to pull us out of the fire the only way it knows how. It seems to assume if we don't respond we must be deaf and so it amps up the signal.
Use it or ... Break It
As proposed, our hormones are signals responding to state change requests (startle or fear or stress are all requests to our nervous system to get us somewhere safe), if we do not respond to the message to change, it seems that the message gets louder: more hormones will get poured on the fire.
That is, our bodies are trying to tell us to use what thoes hormones have evolved to do: optimize getting away, that's movement, and if we don't listen to them, they get louder and louder until we finally break.
Like pain is a signal to change that gets louder until either we finally do something about it, or we become incapacitated, likewise these other hormones. Stress goes up. Digestion goes down. Sleep degrades.
We see this kind of signaling to support change not just in stress but in digestion: the in rush of fast digesting starchy carbs to our system is seen as a state change. That triggers insulin to get the sugar into the blood cells for conversion to energy. When we overeat regularly - put in more fuel than is required for a state change (we don't need the energy to do something), we can develop insulin resistance - the cells that usually respond to insulin knocking at the door to pop in some fuel for energy say bugger off. Or go deaf. So what does the body do? "you're not listening to me: let me amp up the signal" - more insulin to say "knock knock I AM HERE, CELL, WITH A DELIVERY" - and what can't be used by those cells gets moved to fat.
Eventually there's a viscous cycle in highly restistant (and often overweight or obese) folks, where even when they're eating well, the body is so resistant to insulin's effects, they are effectively starving while gaining more fat.
AT this point as well someone may be on insulin injections because the pancrease cannot produce enough volume on its own for these now-deaf cells literally to GET the message. And as you can image, large folks who aren't getting energy from their food are going to feel too pooped to get mobile. When we break, we really break.
Intriguingly (at least i think so) - movement can once again help accelerate the repair process because we are so plastic and adaptable. If we move we can redevelop insulin sensitivity. Strength training is fabulous for this. Dave Barr has a nice piece explaining this process. In other words get insulin levels to where they need to be to process the food into energy for the cells, get nutrition under control, and then get moving to develop greater sensitivity again - and we do see many people backing way off in type 2 diabetes from their shots: their messengers have been heard, the system realigns. Homeostatis and safety once again.
Move it Move it, Walk it Off.
So what do we see?
With both stress and eating, it seems the simple way to deal with the hormonal pattern we recognise as stress is to move: we thereby use the hormonal signals for what they were designed to support: physical action. Kill it or run away. Mission accomplished, back to calmer state. And from that calmer, stabler place, we can can look for strategies to help us deal effectively with whatever is freaking us out.
Before we get to calmer state is the run away or kill it process to blow off the physiological effects of the hormal cascade. Literally. Indeed, breathing, as we've talked about before, is a huge part of movement to rebalance our carbon dioxide and oxygen in our bodies, which helps send signals that ah ha yes we're dealing with the threatening situation; it's over; our system is going back to homeostasis thank you very much.
Something we rarely do when we're feeling our hormonal cascade for fight of flight kick in at a work place is to go for a walk. With my students, i'll do a coach and stroll from time to time. Walking has many great benefits from mirroring what the other person is doing to this physical use of these signals to DO something physical. We both calm down and engage better. One of my colleagues is also a dancer. He paces frequently when we're working together. That's a good thing, again for many reasons, but processing hormones that are signalling MOVE is a good thing.
No wonder archimedes flew out of his tub and ran when he discovered density - the excitement set his adrenaline going and he blew it off by running. Hopefully the later realization of his nekked butt in public didn't cause a stress cascade to ratchet up.
Vent the Hormonal Soup Pot: Feel Good with the Body where it Wants to Be - in Balance
We hear all the time that people feel so much better when they start an exercise program. We usually focus on the feeling better as down to body comp change, so improved self image, aerobic health (heart and lungs), energy up'd.
All great and true, but we kinda tend to miss, don't we, the fact that perhaps we're feeling less stressed and sleeping better because we are also venting the steam from the soup pot of hormonal build up we get when (a) we live in a stressful environment and (b) it's generally pretty sedentary.
We are physical beings rather than brains with annoying bodies. We're wired to move in response to an awful lot of our hormonal signals.
Summary
In this likely grossly oversimplified view of hormones, we could say there's a hormone to support any state change to the body. Whether the state change is from a threat, ingestion of food (or toxin), an injury, sex, anything that causes the body's state to change, there's a hormone that deals with optimizing whatever the body needs to do to stay safe - protecting itself for survival. That goes for fuel use, run away and hide, procreate, whatever is triggered.
We've seen that not listening to these hormonal messengers can cause the signals to keep coming, get louder. Their getting louder if not attended to often causes that part of the system to break, which will have incapacitating effects for us.
We've also seen that the pattern of many of these cascades seems to be addressed by movement: from large movements like going for a walk and getting the heart rate up (which induces harder breathing automatically) or smaller movements like self-induced deeper breathing.
We have not discussed that some of the signalling can be trained based on behaviour - like the cues to get hungry - but we have seen that we can often restore function to an overtaxed signalling system - like insulin resistance - by getting moving. Walking is great, breathing is great. Mobility drills, also effective. As we have seen before in Move or Die all this movement also sends lots of proprioceptive information to say "we're fine; we're in use; we're moving." All good.
So micro summary?
By the way, if you're a trainer, and are interested in how to integrate understanding this hormonal cascade with training/coaching your clients, the topic (among a lot of others - see overview here) is covered in the z-health r-phase certification. If you go for the cert, please let 'em know mc recommended you: we don't get cash for referrals - we get credit towards our continuing zed-ed. Thank you. -mc
refs
What do you think of when someone says Hormones? Maybe muscle oriented folks think about testosterone. Women tending towards a certain age think about estrogen. Athletes may think about adrenelein. Diet conscious may think about Insulin. Someone totally stressed may not know what to think about but that's epinepherine and cortisol. In the sesame street way of what goes together, all of these are hormones. But what does that mean?
If we pull up from the particular view of what an individual hormone does, it seems the big picture on hormones is that they are messengers or signals for the body - or some part of the body - that something has happened to it or part of it that has induced a state change. They are, in effect, state change managers.
Endocrine system: the generators of hormones
Women are intimately familiar with hormonal changes that occur on a monthly basis to handle all the state changes that menses sets off. But that's what's happening: a change in our homeoSTASIS triggers these little do gooders - our hormones - to make sure that our bodies have an optimal response to that change for our survival.
Injury. Getting the blood to act in particular ways to clot - not something it does when its just pumping through our veins - is the response of our bodies to a pretty specific state change. And so what's the body doing? Providing an optimal response to survive by taking energy to get into the inflammation and healing process (whether we register the injury as pain or not depends on the richer context of what's going on with our body and mind at the time. We also have hormones to self-medicate, making opiates for us).
Need to sleep? Great big survival state change? Melatonin regulates that, too.
And last example, if we get startled or stressed, that is likewise a signal to the nervous system for a state change, in this case, prepare to flee. And its one most of us get triggered to some degree daily.
From a bang going off behind us, to having to give a public speech, to anticipating a bill we can't pay, our very physical being interprets these experiences as threat (or startle in some literature). At this threat signal, a slurry of different hormones are released to optimize our system to survive and get us away from tiger tiger burning bright.
One set of hormones (epinephrine or adrenaline) accelerates heart rate and inspiration to get the peripheral system (our limbs) ready to move fast. Other catecholamines are released to mobilize fat from storage into free fatty acid to be right ready to be used as fuel for the long run away from the predator. Cortisol kicks in to shut down digestion: we really don't want to burn precious ATP for digestion when we'll need it for motoring. If we survive we can digest later. Testosterone (tarzan's chest beating, for instance) actually gets turned on in these situations to help reduce the fear response and "man up" as it were so we don't go totally fetal. Intriguingly, estrogen also seems to have similar calming effects to startle (at least in rats). Gender - in rats - is a player, too, it seems in whether testosterone or estrogen reduces either accoustic verses light based startle too. Isn't that wild? Indeed there's a great quote in that source that says "testosterone skulpts the male brain [of the rat]"
Anyway, suffice it to say - there's a lot of hormones released in stress to deal with a lot of the systems in
Similar Profiles: stress and exercise
What is quite cool is that exercise has just about the same profile as stress in terms of hormonal responses. Catecholamines, which are great for fat mobilization, are triggered as soon as we get moving at a clip. The greater the intensity, the greater the release. So HIIT does get more fatty acids mobilized that slower steady state, as we discussed looking at Trapp's work over in this piece on different HIIT modes.
SO it seems even if we're not in startle or threat, the fact that we're moving requires similar hormonal responses: energy to the limbs rather than digestion, fat mobilization to keep going. Even the speed of hypertrophy occurring is as we know, an adaptation to demand. It seems in some cases where the environment is also perceived by the nervous system to be a potential threat, the adaptation (hypertrophy and strength) is accelerated. We saw awhile ago in Get Huge or Die that resistance workouts in a reduced oxygen chamber also caused faster hypertrophy - and that the hormanal cascade in that case seemed greater than the normal air environment: survive and get bigger to be better adapted to survive that again. Maybe.
Connecting Stress and Exercise: move it move it
Fact is, we can see two things from this understanding of hormones as state change managers (upper level management to be sure).
First, exercise is a state change (from stasis to motion) that sends hormones to optimize our body for that movement. When we move with those hormones in an exercise state, we usually feel pretty good. The hormones do their job: support movement. We derive benefits.
Second, stress has pretty much the same hormonal profile as exercise type movement - getting the heart rate up being the main observable factor. So, if we're having hormones released to say "i've just had a signal for you to get going: here come the chemicals to turn your body into a mean moving machine" and then we DON'T move, what happens?
Let's see, we feel like crap, we don't sleep, we gain weight, our skin can get funny, we are more susceptible to disease. Why?
In part because our body will keep trying to pull us out of the fire the only way it knows how. It seems to assume if we don't respond we must be deaf and so it amps up the signal.
Use it or ... Break It
As proposed, our hormones are signals responding to state change requests (startle or fear or stress are all requests to our nervous system to get us somewhere safe), if we do not respond to the message to change, it seems that the message gets louder: more hormones will get poured on the fire.
That is, our bodies are trying to tell us to use what thoes hormones have evolved to do: optimize getting away, that's movement, and if we don't listen to them, they get louder and louder until we finally break.
Like pain is a signal to change that gets louder until either we finally do something about it, or we become incapacitated, likewise these other hormones. Stress goes up. Digestion goes down. Sleep degrades.
We see this kind of signaling to support change not just in stress but in digestion: the in rush of fast digesting starchy carbs to our system is seen as a state change. That triggers insulin to get the sugar into the blood cells for conversion to energy. When we overeat regularly - put in more fuel than is required for a state change (we don't need the energy to do something), we can develop insulin resistance - the cells that usually respond to insulin knocking at the door to pop in some fuel for energy say bugger off. Or go deaf. So what does the body do? "you're not listening to me: let me amp up the signal" - more insulin to say "knock knock I AM HERE, CELL, WITH A DELIVERY" - and what can't be used by those cells gets moved to fat.
Eventually there's a viscous cycle in highly restistant (and often overweight or obese) folks, where even when they're eating well, the body is so resistant to insulin's effects, they are effectively starving while gaining more fat.
AT this point as well someone may be on insulin injections because the pancrease cannot produce enough volume on its own for these now-deaf cells literally to GET the message. And as you can image, large folks who aren't getting energy from their food are going to feel too pooped to get mobile. When we break, we really break.
Intriguingly (at least i think so) - movement can once again help accelerate the repair process because we are so plastic and adaptable. If we move we can redevelop insulin sensitivity. Strength training is fabulous for this. Dave Barr has a nice piece explaining this process. In other words get insulin levels to where they need to be to process the food into energy for the cells, get nutrition under control, and then get moving to develop greater sensitivity again - and we do see many people backing way off in type 2 diabetes from their shots: their messengers have been heard, the system realigns. Homeostatis and safety once again.
Move it Move it, Walk it Off.
So what do we see?
With both stress and eating, it seems the simple way to deal with the hormonal pattern we recognise as stress is to move: we thereby use the hormonal signals for what they were designed to support: physical action. Kill it or run away. Mission accomplished, back to calmer state. And from that calmer, stabler place, we can can look for strategies to help us deal effectively with whatever is freaking us out.
Before we get to calmer state is the run away or kill it process to blow off the physiological effects of the hormal cascade. Literally. Indeed, breathing, as we've talked about before, is a huge part of movement to rebalance our carbon dioxide and oxygen in our bodies, which helps send signals that ah ha yes we're dealing with the threatening situation; it's over; our system is going back to homeostasis thank you very much.
Something we rarely do when we're feeling our hormonal cascade for fight of flight kick in at a work place is to go for a walk. With my students, i'll do a coach and stroll from time to time. Walking has many great benefits from mirroring what the other person is doing to this physical use of these signals to DO something physical. We both calm down and engage better. One of my colleagues is also a dancer. He paces frequently when we're working together. That's a good thing, again for many reasons, but processing hormones that are signalling MOVE is a good thing.
No wonder archimedes flew out of his tub and ran when he discovered density - the excitement set his adrenaline going and he blew it off by running. Hopefully the later realization of his nekked butt in public didn't cause a stress cascade to ratchet up.
Vent the Hormonal Soup Pot: Feel Good with the Body where it Wants to Be - in Balance
We hear all the time that people feel so much better when they start an exercise program. We usually focus on the feeling better as down to body comp change, so improved self image, aerobic health (heart and lungs), energy up'd.
All great and true, but we kinda tend to miss, don't we, the fact that perhaps we're feeling less stressed and sleeping better because we are also venting the steam from the soup pot of hormonal build up we get when (a) we live in a stressful environment and (b) it's generally pretty sedentary.
We are physical beings rather than brains with annoying bodies. We're wired to move in response to an awful lot of our hormonal signals.
Summary
In this likely grossly oversimplified view of hormones, we could say there's a hormone to support any state change to the body. Whether the state change is from a threat, ingestion of food (or toxin), an injury, sex, anything that causes the body's state to change, there's a hormone that deals with optimizing whatever the body needs to do to stay safe - protecting itself for survival. That goes for fuel use, run away and hide, procreate, whatever is triggered.
We've seen that not listening to these hormonal messengers can cause the signals to keep coming, get louder. Their getting louder if not attended to often causes that part of the system to break, which will have incapacitating effects for us.
We've also seen that the pattern of many of these cascades seems to be addressed by movement: from large movements like going for a walk and getting the heart rate up (which induces harder breathing automatically) or smaller movements like self-induced deeper breathing.
We have not discussed that some of the signalling can be trained based on behaviour - like the cues to get hungry - but we have seen that we can often restore function to an overtaxed signalling system - like insulin resistance - by getting moving. Walking is great, breathing is great. Mobility drills, also effective. As we have seen before in Move or Die all this movement also sends lots of proprioceptive information to say "we're fine; we're in use; we're moving." All good.
So micro summary?
- hormones are state change managers
- a lot of their messages are about movement
- when we don't respond to those messages by moving they amp up the signal
- if they keep amping up the signal, we break
- getting back to movement can help restore even pretty broken systems
- best: find a way to move first to deal with the signals
- so that the space can be found to get other strategies not to be quite so triggered by those stimuli, or to reduce the requirements for those off-setting stimuli.
- be kind to yourself if in that state: it's not optimal for lifting heavy or learning new skills - walk, mobility work - all can help restore function
By the way, if you're a trainer, and are interested in how to integrate understanding this hormonal cascade with training/coaching your clients, the topic (among a lot of others - see overview here) is covered in the z-health r-phase certification. If you go for the cert, please let 'em know mc recommended you: we don't get cash for referrals - we get credit towards our continuing zed-ed. Thank you. -mcrefs
HERMANS, E., PUTMAN, P., BAAS, J., KOPPESCHAAR, H., & VANHONK, J. (2006). A Single Administration of Testosterone Reduces Fear-Potentiated Startle in Humans Biological Psychiatry, 59 (9), 872-874 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.11.015Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Van den Buuse, M. (2001). Estrogen increases prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle in rats European Journal of Pharmacology, 425 (1), 33-41 DOI: 10.1016/S0014-2999(01)01139-6
Toufexis, D. (2005). Sex Differences in Hormonal Modulation of Anxiety Measured with Light-Enhanced Startle: Possible Role for Arginine Vasopressin in the Male Journal of Neuroscience, 25 (39), 9010-9016 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0127-05.2005
Zouhal, H., Jacob, C., Delamarche, P., & Gratas-Delamarche, A. (2008). Catecholamines and the Effects of Exercise, Training and Gender Sports Medicine, 38 (5), 401-423 DOI: 10.2165/00007256-200838050-00004
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