Showing posts with label zhealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zhealth. Show all posts
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
PDF
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Head Shift: Why not look for More Time to Move rather than as Little as Possible?
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Maybe we should seek to move more rather than the least amount possible in a week. Maybe that's a much better place to be. Let's consider why that might help us out in so many parts of our lives, and the research that supports it. This proposal is set against popular approaches to fitness. Lots of folks celebrate ways for us to "take less time" to work out. After all, there's more to life than being in the gym. For sure. And i'm all for efficiency and elegance in all things. A stupid workout may just be a stupid workout: when you take an hour, make it a beautiful hour.
But what i've been thinking about really is that we are so wrong wrong wrong when we take what i'm increasingly seeing as the "brains with bodies" approach to movement: we seek to find the smallest slice of time during the week for our movement, like that's the least important part of our day, a chore to be got rid of. As exciting and necessary as flossing one's teeth.
But we are not just brains with bodies that like the neighbour's dog we are burdened with having to take for a walk once a day when they're on holiday. How many of us make excuses like we don't have time to move - to walk, to run, to pick stuff up and put it down, to play a game? Our bodies are often constructed culturally as burdens rather than collaborators in our life's work and pleasure.
And sure those "workouts in 6 mins" or 20 mins or whatever are all trying to get folks "at least doing something" - but again, maybe that's just the wrong message to be sending. In whose interests is it for us to be just well enough to keep going to work and not costing a health plan or workers comp for down time?
Movement is Smart(er) - no really.
As i do more work on movement and the way we are wired, it's increasingly clear that the opposite is true: we owe it to ourselves, cognitively and physically to find any time we can to move; in as many ways and at as many speeds as we can. When we don't use parts of our brains, the circuits re-route to what we do use. This is verified in the past 20 years of neurology.
We are use it or lose it systems. Our bodies adapt all the time. And this is systemic. What we don't use - like bone mineral density - gets taken away. Seriously, no joke. Likewise when we don't move joints in their ROM they start to osify or go arthritic in the unused portions.
The above use it or lose it paradigm may still be read as we are enslaved by our bodies and so we must find the shortest most optimal path to do the least amount of work to get the most benefit. And that, too, seems to be a way way wrong and unhealthy and unhelpful life attitude. Phooey, i say.
Consider this: life may be more fun and brilliant if we see our bodies as part of who we are.
Skilled movement practice, for instance, lights up our brains in MRIs. There is increasing evidence likewise that movement enhances intellectual performance. Studies done with kids show especially the earlier "exercise" starts, the greater the intellectual benefits [2007, 2009a, 2009b ]. But at the other end of the scale, movement has been seen to help elderly at risk of observed cognitive decline, recover function, too [2010a]. Likewise, general memory function endurance is assisted by exercise/movement, and enhances brain plasticity [2010].
Indeed, the studies have become so rife connecting movement with intelligence that there's even a popular press book out right now called Spark: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain
. The book summarizes a lot the findings and puts together cognitve enhancing exercise programs.
Inert = Loss of Comepetetive Edge
It seems pretty clear now that for those of us who are "knowledge workers" we are also actually doing ourselves a competitive disservice by staying as innert as possible, moving as little as possible - whatever that means. But again - that may sound like a threat, and the body/burden thing raises its head. We imagine scenes from Gattica and forced treadmill running and heart rate monitoring.
Moving, though, if we take it that that's what we're designed to do, is something we can do everywhere at anytime - or at least we can so imagine. In the work environment, there are desks that let us stand or sit; working at whiteboards that let us stand and walk around. These facilitate movement. And no i'm not a fan of treadmill desks. They may burn calories but can play havok with gait, visual and vestibular systems - juries way out and tending to no. Lord, if we got beyond the "calorie burn" as the only reason to move it move it, we wouldn't have to worry about desks.
Example of Action Work. A colleague of mine has only a standing desk in his office, and otherwise has many rehab balls (usually pretty squishy) for lounging. No chairs. He gets up in the middle of meetings and paces. He's also a dancer, not just a field leading computer scientist. It's great. That's movement. He bikes to work and his main moving gig is his folk dancing. That's healthy. Multiplanar movement. Awesome. AND HE ENJOYS IT - he loves to dance. It's part of his life; not something that he must do. He actually shapes his "real job" schedule around his weekly dance classes. And boy is he smart. Sharp sharp, that one. Connection? As we've seen, research suggests it helps.
I wrote about awhile ago how pick up games of five a side football were about the best blend of strength workouts one could get and got lots of comments from colleagues about how much they enjoy that kind of thing "when it happens" - maybe we need to make it happen.
Perhaps we need to fall in love with being in our bodies? Want to take them out on dates. Play dates. Learn to enjoy treating them/ourselves to what turns on the happy hormones and helps us feel better. Which is another cool thing: the more we move, the better we tend to feel overall - again, cognitively as well as in terms of general wellbeing. Stress gets blown off better; food gets processed better. We feel better about ourselves
Five+ Hours a week - to be happy with ones body?
John Berardi of Precision Nutrition has worked with hundreds (or thousands now) of clients for years. His take away has reinforced that folks who move it a minimum of five hours a week seems to correlate most strongly with greatest self-satisfaction with body image. My sense is increasingly that five+ hours a week correlates with more kinds of wellbeing than just body comp.
Now some of us can't imagine five whole hours a week just getting our body to move. We want to do the intervals or the whatever that are at most 3 sessions per week for 20 mins. And heck, i've written about working out for just 6 mins a week that has equivalent effect as hours of cardio, or elsewhere 660secs a week to show a considerable difference for overweight geeks. The theme is always "it only takes this teeny weeny amount to have an effect" - so why do more, right? Like we're off the hook then. I mean if all we need is 6 super intense minutes, the rest be dammed. We can get back to the screen.
What Systems Are Measured in Minimal Movement Studies?
But what's the effect? cardio vascular well being. Heavens knows that's important. But what about the rest of us? The respiratory and cardiovascular systems - the two most often discussed in health as part of "aeorbic fitness" - are only two of eleven physiological systems in the body. That leaves nine more to go. Consider the skin, skeleton, muscles, nervous system, hormones, lymph, sex, waste, digestion. What do they need? Turns out movement is pretty good for all of them.
To give one example, breathing is a big pump for lymph circulation and flushing. Exercise helps work breathing, so that has an impact on immune function. Movement, especially loaded work and c/v work, we know helps fascilitate nutrient uptake, and hormonal balance like insulin sensitivity. Stop/start movement like socer or weight lifting is great for our use-it-or-lose-em bones. Indeed we know that joints literally start to seize up from lack of movement in full range of motion, or develop pain conditions like RSI from overuse of one movement direction unbalanced by the others in that joint/muscle combination. It's amazing that we don't all keel over with *only* 20mins, 3 times a week of some kind of activity
Being Embodied Can be Fun
Brad Pilon made an observation on facebook lately
As an antidote, Frank Forencich at exuberant animal has an entire blog dedicated to movement/play. At the recent zhealth strength and sustenance course, we learned so many ways to move - including not moving but different forms of concentrics - or exhausting mircro movements - that it seems movement can be got from just about anywhere. And since one of the pay offs of movement can be endorphin rushes, finding any excuse to do it may just be the best thing in the world.
Also before the strength and suppleness course, we played frisbee at the end of the day. An hour of catch and a game of Ultimate each night and you've bagged your 5 hours without even thinking about it. The challenge is now to implement something similar back in Normal World.
Changing Perspective; New Discoveries.
Einstein is attributed with saying something to the effect that we can't solve our problems with the tools that created them. Easy for Mr. Paradigm Shifter I invented Relativity and topped Newtonian Physics guy to say, perhaps, but it's a salutory thought.
In this case, the fast food head space that wants what it wants now and for the minimal effort in order to go do something else - to not pay attention to what we eat; to not pay attention to how we move - is the problem, and trying to find a solution for our emotional (stress), physical and nutrional whiles with the least effort/time possible is entirely the wrong paradigm.
Maybe the paradigm shift is - what do i need to change to move the MOST i can during the day, the week, now? Related might be: What do i need to do to get the most pleasure from the best food today, to be present to being here as much as possible, to have the best rest tonight to concentrate the most i can on what i do now and later?
We're fully integrated, physical creatures, though our world is increasingly designed to shape us as brains with bodies. Abandoning that belief and moving towards the Movement Light as much rather than as little as possible feels and performs, it seems, a whole lot better - across all the rest of what we do, too, don't you think?.
Refs
Maybe we should seek to move more rather than the least amount possible in a week. Maybe that's a much better place to be. Let's consider why that might help us out in so many parts of our lives, and the research that supports it. This proposal is set against popular approaches to fitness. Lots of folks celebrate ways for us to "take less time" to work out. After all, there's more to life than being in the gym. For sure. And i'm all for efficiency and elegance in all things. A stupid workout may just be a stupid workout: when you take an hour, make it a beautiful hour.But what i've been thinking about really is that we are so wrong wrong wrong when we take what i'm increasingly seeing as the "brains with bodies" approach to movement: we seek to find the smallest slice of time during the week for our movement, like that's the least important part of our day, a chore to be got rid of. As exciting and necessary as flossing one's teeth.
And sure those "workouts in 6 mins" or 20 mins or whatever are all trying to get folks "at least doing something" - but again, maybe that's just the wrong message to be sending. In whose interests is it for us to be just well enough to keep going to work and not costing a health plan or workers comp for down time?
Movement is Smart(er) - no really.
As i do more work on movement and the way we are wired, it's increasingly clear that the opposite is true: we owe it to ourselves, cognitively and physically to find any time we can to move; in as many ways and at as many speeds as we can. When we don't use parts of our brains, the circuits re-route to what we do use. This is verified in the past 20 years of neurology.
We are use it or lose it systems. Our bodies adapt all the time. And this is systemic. What we don't use - like bone mineral density - gets taken away. Seriously, no joke. Likewise when we don't move joints in their ROM they start to osify or go arthritic in the unused portions.The above use it or lose it paradigm may still be read as we are enslaved by our bodies and so we must find the shortest most optimal path to do the least amount of work to get the most benefit. And that, too, seems to be a way way wrong and unhealthy and unhelpful life attitude. Phooey, i say.
Consider this: life may be more fun and brilliant if we see our bodies as part of who we are.
Skilled movement practice, for instance, lights up our brains in MRIs. There is increasing evidence likewise that movement enhances intellectual performance. Studies done with kids show especially the earlier "exercise" starts, the greater the intellectual benefits [2007, 2009a, 2009b ]. But at the other end of the scale, movement has been seen to help elderly at risk of observed cognitive decline, recover function, too [2010a]. Likewise, general memory function endurance is assisted by exercise/movement, and enhances brain plasticity [2010].Indeed, the studies have become so rife connecting movement with intelligence that there's even a popular press book out right now called Spark: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain
. The book summarizes a lot the findings and puts together cognitve enhancing exercise programs. Inert = Loss of Comepetetive Edge
It seems pretty clear now that for those of us who are "knowledge workers" we are also actually doing ourselves a competitive disservice by staying as innert as possible, moving as little as possible - whatever that means. But again - that may sound like a threat, and the body/burden thing raises its head. We imagine scenes from Gattica and forced treadmill running and heart rate monitoring.
Moving, though, if we take it that that's what we're designed to do, is something we can do everywhere at anytime - or at least we can so imagine. In the work environment, there are desks that let us stand or sit; working at whiteboards that let us stand and walk around. These facilitate movement. And no i'm not a fan of treadmill desks. They may burn calories but can play havok with gait, visual and vestibular systems - juries way out and tending to no. Lord, if we got beyond the "calorie burn" as the only reason to move it move it, we wouldn't have to worry about desks.
I wrote about awhile ago how pick up games of five a side football were about the best blend of strength workouts one could get and got lots of comments from colleagues about how much they enjoy that kind of thing "when it happens" - maybe we need to make it happen.
Perhaps we need to fall in love with being in our bodies? Want to take them out on dates. Play dates. Learn to enjoy treating them/ourselves to what turns on the happy hormones and helps us feel better. Which is another cool thing: the more we move, the better we tend to feel overall - again, cognitively as well as in terms of general wellbeing. Stress gets blown off better; food gets processed better. We feel better about ourselves
Five+ Hours a week - to be happy with ones body?
John Berardi of Precision Nutrition has worked with hundreds (or thousands now) of clients for years. His take away has reinforced that folks who move it a minimum of five hours a week seems to correlate most strongly with greatest self-satisfaction with body image. My sense is increasingly that five+ hours a week correlates with more kinds of wellbeing than just body comp.
What Systems Are Measured in Minimal Movement Studies?
But what's the effect? cardio vascular well being. Heavens knows that's important. But what about the rest of us? The respiratory and cardiovascular systems - the two most often discussed in health as part of "aeorbic fitness" - are only two of eleven physiological systems in the body. That leaves nine more to go. Consider the skin, skeleton, muscles, nervous system, hormones, lymph, sex, waste, digestion. What do they need? Turns out movement is pretty good for all of them.
To give one example, breathing is a big pump for lymph circulation and flushing. Exercise helps work breathing, so that has an impact on immune function. Movement, especially loaded work and c/v work, we know helps fascilitate nutrient uptake, and hormonal balance like insulin sensitivity. Stop/start movement like socer or weight lifting is great for our use-it-or-lose-em bones. Indeed we know that joints literally start to seize up from lack of movement in full range of motion, or develop pain conditions like RSI from overuse of one movement direction unbalanced by the others in that joint/muscle combination. It's amazing that we don't all keel over with *only* 20mins, 3 times a week of some kind of activity
Being Embodied Can be Fun
Brad Pilon made an observation on facebook lately
"Obesity. We concentrate on nutrition and exercise, but some other things are going on too. Did you know that 'sporting goods sales' have been steadily declining for the last several years? Why buy a soccer ball when you can buy fifa 2010? Hockey? that's what the Wii is for right? Bikes & skateboards? Too dangerous. There's excuses for it all, but still..lack of play time may be one of the biggest factors." July 23, 6:56 pm, 2010
Also before the strength and suppleness course, we played frisbee at the end of the day. An hour of catch and a game of Ultimate each night and you've bagged your 5 hours without even thinking about it. The challenge is now to implement something similar back in Normal World.
Changing Perspective; New Discoveries.
Einstein is attributed with saying something to the effect that we can't solve our problems with the tools that created them. Easy for Mr. Paradigm Shifter I invented Relativity and topped Newtonian Physics guy to say, perhaps, but it's a salutory thought.
In this case, the fast food head space that wants what it wants now and for the minimal effort in order to go do something else - to not pay attention to what we eat; to not pay attention to how we move - is the problem, and trying to find a solution for our emotional (stress), physical and nutrional whiles with the least effort/time possible is entirely the wrong paradigm.
Maybe the paradigm shift is - what do i need to change to move the MOST i can during the day, the week, now? Related might be: What do i need to do to get the most pleasure from the best food today, to be present to being here as much as possible, to have the best rest tonight to concentrate the most i can on what i do now and later?
We're fully integrated, physical creatures, though our world is increasingly designed to shape us as brains with bodies. Abandoning that belief and moving towards the Movement Light as much rather than as little as possible feels and performs, it seems, a whole lot better - across all the rest of what we do, too, don't you think?.
Refs
Castelli DM, Hillman CH, Buck SM, & Erwin HE (2007). Physical fitness and academic achievement in third- and fifth-grade students. Journal of sport & exercise psychology, 29 (2), 239-52 PMID: 17568069Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Eveland-Sayers BM, Farley RS, Fuller DK, Morgan DW, & Caputo JL (2009a). Physical fitness and academic achievement in elementary school children. Journal of physical activity & health, 6 (1), 99-104 PMID: 19211963
Chomitz, V., Slining, M., McGowan, R., Mitchell, S., Dawson, G., & Hacker, K. (2009b). Is There a Relationship Between Physical Fitness and Academic Achievement? Positive Results From Public School Children in the Northeastern United States Journal of School Health, 79 (1), 30-37 DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-1561.2008.00371.x
Baker LD, Frank LL, Foster-Schubert K, Green PS, Wilkinson CW, McTiernan A, Plymate SR, Fishel MA, Watson GS, Cholerton BA, Duncan GE, Mehta PD, & Craft S (2010a). Effects of aerobic exercise on mild cognitive impairment: a controlled trial. Archives of neurology, 67 (1), 71-9 PMID: 20065132
Berchtold, N., Castello, N., & Cotman, C. (2010b). Exercise and time-dependent benefits to learning and memory Neuroscience, 167 (3), 588-597 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2010.02.050
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
How get strong if (part of) our muscles aren't actually on?
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So that seems like a dumb question, doesn't it: how do we get strong if our muscles aren't actually on? After all, we work out; we get lots of reps in - we seem to get stronger, and then someone says about that plateau we're hitting "maybe the reason you're not getting that press is that you're weak." Excuse me? You talking to me?
That happened to me today. As some of you know i'm trying to get the 24kg KB press - hence the wee recent chat with Dan John about pressing. But today, at the 9S strength and suppleness course, one of the components was getting some muscles checked to see if they were firing on demand. Eg, anterior delt. Pretty important in pressing. What did i learn? It wasn't staying on through a good part of the range of motion possible of that muscle. Let me clarify - part of the muscle wasn't staying on through the ROM. In my case, close up to the origin was having a hard time. Just part. Consequence? Sucky press progress.
So we looked at ways to help a person (a) learn the range of motion of the muscle with respect to its action on a joint and (b) how to cue the person to get that part of that muscle to come on in that range of motion. Gotta tell you there were a lot of "Oh so that's what that muscle feels like when it's working" comments.
The big deal here is that we're talking about parts of the whole muscle - not the big "my glute med isn't firing" but "this part of my glute med at this ROM is not firing."
Why would we Care to get More Muscle going?
Contractions: Muscle fibers are wee wee things making up the body of a muscle. Motor units - nerves going to the bundles of muscles - don't all come on at once. But they also don't come on part way. THere's no dimmer switch to a muscle. They're either on or off. The strength of a contraction is relative to the number of motor units that come on. Another cool point is that the ratio of motor units to fibers changes depending on body parts. Hands, feet and eyes have for instance way way higher rations of motor unit to fibers than say the legs or the forearms. There's also issues around the squencing of motor units firing in a contraction, but we'll set that aside for the moment
So the potential to see the effect of motor unit shut down may be greater in the bigger muscles with fewer individual motor units per fiber.
Main point: If a bunch of motor units are not being recruited, or they turn off part way through a motion, we get squishy bits or what feels like dead zones in the body of the muscle.
Conversely, the more motor units firing, the more fibers get triggered, the more force can be produced, the more easily we lift - or the more load we lift and the smoother the lift that can keep the muscle on throughout the action. THis is likely a gross oversimplification that does not take into account recruitment patterns and wind speed etc, but it seems to work as a general model.
Example I had the pleasure to work with a great guy and super coach, big guy too, muscle wise, who said that he had trouble with his squat - his DL overtook it completely. By comparison his shoulders are beautiful. So let's see if those massive delts may also be associated with sans squishy recruitment.
WHen muscle testing his shoulders - the delts and the teres major in particular - everything was solid throughout the range of motion. No squishy bits (unlike mine). Wow. When we tested the quads it was quads be gone. They were just a sea of squishy bits. Wow.
Now, obviously this guy could squat me on his back all day long no problem, so he's not "weak" in the 99lb sand kicked in his face kinda way. But it's plain that he could be stronger and faster if more of the muscle was willing to come on.
Aside: Nervous System Perspective. Everything's connected.
In many cases that weekend, we worked on muscles, helped folks get squishy bits to come on more fully, and tested that yup performance was going up. And in some cases pain was going down at the same time.
With super coach's quads, we did not get so much action back in the legs. A bit of history revealed that super coach's biggest issue is plantar fascitis right now and that's his priority. It may be that in his case, his nervous system is not willing to pour more juice into his quads to let him go heavier if his base is in pain. Poor feet feeling, not so safe for adding greater load. Could be. So wisely super coach is focusing on what his bod is telling him to do.
In other cases, helping one muscle to fire better, helped an entire system to opening up and got people to a whole new level of happy.
Plugging in Muscle Work.
Learning to feel what a muscle feels like - what it's role is in a movement is an interesting exercise.
Here's where some kinesiology can help
- by knowing what muscle is reponsible for what action in a movement, we can see if it's doing its job to support that movement.
This approach to performance checking is another reason why we all need a knowledgeable coach. If progress is stalling it may be that it can be addressed more rapidly by a quick anatomy function check to see if something needs a little attention to be brought to it to come to the party than looking at 20 different lift variations to see if that's the ticket. It's not to say that those lift variations aren't key plateau busters, but for them to function optimally, it would be better for them to be situated on an optimally functioning base, no? Accelerate progress.
A coach can cue our awareness of the muscle, it's ROM and check when it's coming off and help us practice attention to keep that part of a muscle on.
Tuning
Muscle work like this, it seems to me, is tuning. It's not the single factor foundation thing in itself that will solve all ills or create training shortcuts. It's a refinement on top of good movement quality to begin with and *then* tuning the muscles within this quality foundation.
It's polishing part of the global picture. But goodness what a big difference a little bit of polish, a little bit of tuning can make: the image is clearer; the music more harmonious - the effect more enlivening.
Muscle tuning in this way therefore seems to make great sense as part of a whole package of coaching/tuning for performance and well being: start with cleaning up whole movement (i like z-health r-phase for this); then dial it in even more with a coach who can offer muscle tuning (and more - like working in the wonderful world of ligaments - no kidding - but that's for another time).
Related Posts
That happened to me today. As some of you know i'm trying to get the 24kg KB press - hence the wee recent chat with Dan John about pressing. But today, at the 9S strength and suppleness course, one of the components was getting some muscles checked to see if they were firing on demand. Eg, anterior delt. Pretty important in pressing. What did i learn? It wasn't staying on through a good part of the range of motion possible of that muscle. Let me clarify - part of the muscle wasn't staying on through the ROM. In my case, close up to the origin was having a hard time. Just part. Consequence? Sucky press progress.
So we looked at ways to help a person (a) learn the range of motion of the muscle with respect to its action on a joint and (b) how to cue the person to get that part of that muscle to come on in that range of motion. Gotta tell you there were a lot of "Oh so that's what that muscle feels like when it's working" comments.
The big deal here is that we're talking about parts of the whole muscle - not the big "my glute med isn't firing" but "this part of my glute med at this ROM is not firing."
Why would we Care to get More Muscle going?
Contractions: Muscle fibers are wee wee things making up the body of a muscle. Motor units - nerves going to the bundles of muscles - don't all come on at once. But they also don't come on part way. THere's no dimmer switch to a muscle. They're either on or off. The strength of a contraction is relative to the number of motor units that come on. Another cool point is that the ratio of motor units to fibers changes depending on body parts. Hands, feet and eyes have for instance way way higher rations of motor unit to fibers than say the legs or the forearms. There's also issues around the squencing of motor units firing in a contraction, but we'll set that aside for the moment
So the potential to see the effect of motor unit shut down may be greater in the bigger muscles with fewer individual motor units per fiber.
Main point: If a bunch of motor units are not being recruited, or they turn off part way through a motion, we get squishy bits or what feels like dead zones in the body of the muscle.
Conversely, the more motor units firing, the more fibers get triggered, the more force can be produced, the more easily we lift - or the more load we lift and the smoother the lift that can keep the muscle on throughout the action. THis is likely a gross oversimplification that does not take into account recruitment patterns and wind speed etc, but it seems to work as a general model.
Example I had the pleasure to work with a great guy and super coach, big guy too, muscle wise, who said that he had trouble with his squat - his DL overtook it completely. By comparison his shoulders are beautiful. So let's see if those massive delts may also be associated with sans squishy recruitment.
WHen muscle testing his shoulders - the delts and the teres major in particular - everything was solid throughout the range of motion. No squishy bits (unlike mine). Wow. When we tested the quads it was quads be gone. They were just a sea of squishy bits. Wow.
Now, obviously this guy could squat me on his back all day long no problem, so he's not "weak" in the 99lb sand kicked in his face kinda way. But it's plain that he could be stronger and faster if more of the muscle was willing to come on.
Aside: Nervous System Perspective. Everything's connected.
In many cases that weekend, we worked on muscles, helped folks get squishy bits to come on more fully, and tested that yup performance was going up. And in some cases pain was going down at the same time.
With super coach's quads, we did not get so much action back in the legs. A bit of history revealed that super coach's biggest issue is plantar fascitis right now and that's his priority. It may be that in his case, his nervous system is not willing to pour more juice into his quads to let him go heavier if his base is in pain. Poor feet feeling, not so safe for adding greater load. Could be. So wisely super coach is focusing on what his bod is telling him to do.
In other cases, helping one muscle to fire better, helped an entire system to opening up and got people to a whole new level of happy.
Plugging in Muscle Work.
Learning to feel what a muscle feels like - what it's role is in a movement is an interesting exercise.
Here's where some kinesiology can help - by knowing what muscle is reponsible for what action in a movement, we can see if it's doing its job to support that movement.This approach to performance checking is another reason why we all need a knowledgeable coach. If progress is stalling it may be that it can be addressed more rapidly by a quick anatomy function check to see if something needs a little attention to be brought to it to come to the party than looking at 20 different lift variations to see if that's the ticket. It's not to say that those lift variations aren't key plateau busters, but for them to function optimally, it would be better for them to be situated on an optimally functioning base, no? Accelerate progress.
A coach can cue our awareness of the muscle, it's ROM and check when it's coming off and help us practice attention to keep that part of a muscle on.
Tuning
Muscle work like this, it seems to me, is tuning. It's not the single factor foundation thing in itself that will solve all ills or create training shortcuts. It's a refinement on top of good movement quality to begin with and *then* tuning the muscles within this quality foundation.
It's polishing part of the global picture. But goodness what a big difference a little bit of polish, a little bit of tuning can make: the image is clearer; the music more harmonious - the effect more enlivening.
Muscle tuning in this way therefore seems to make great sense as part of a whole package of coaching/tuning for performance and well being: start with cleaning up whole movement (i like z-health r-phase for this); then dial it in even more with a coach who can offer muscle tuning (and more - like working in the wonderful world of ligaments - no kidding - but that's for another time). Related Posts
- What is z-health
- Pelvis Power - working hip opening in the press.
- the other side of the gym: sensory motor work
- Fatigue testing: is the next rep one too many
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sports Training on the other side of the weight room with Sensory-Motor Perception
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Does Make me Stronger Make Me a Better Athlete? When athletes talk about getting stronger for their sport, what's the goal behind that quest? Is that because we think that strength is the missing ingredient that will actually make us *better* athletes in a game situation? If so, why? We want to hit the ball harder, throw faster, kick further and we think strength's it? Is that the key part of our game that's weak? And if that's it, is raw strength the real issue?
If we're swinging a bat, and our hips and pelvis move as a unit rather than serially into the swing (bacause they can't move separately), that's a power leak that where more strength mayn't make much of a performance difference without correcting that hip/pelvis issue. If we're going to grab the bar for a deadlift but our wrist mobility is shonky, are we going to be able to control our grip with the strength it takes to make the pull? More leg strength isn't the issue. If we want to kick a football really far but our balance is off so our coordination is a bit askew, more power may continue to be directed away from optimal contact.
likewise, there's a lot of decision processing going on whether on the court or on the field, right? Our brains are making tons of decisions so quickly from where to put a ball on the opponent's side of the tennis court, to where the best path is to run a ball down the field, to who's open for a shot. If we're not really seeing the field, we can't make optimal decsisions about it.
So maybe we need to consider the sensory-motor connections of visural, vestibular and proprioceptive perception and associated skills to enhance our sports performance training. Each of these systems can be trained deliberately to behave more reflexively to these very normal sports situations.
In the following sections, we'll look at these areas of the sensory-motor processing within our sensory systems AND there'll be some quick self-checks you can run to check parts of these perceptual systems' performance. We'll also consider the time a person would have to put into this program to see real performance change, and i've peppered in links for resources either to doing each bit at a time, or training to put each part together at once.
The goal is that with this overview you can begin to ask the questions - and have some answers - about how to assess yourself in terms of performance, not just strength. You may find that your strength simply improves as a consequence of better work here, too.
Tuning Sensory-Motor Performance.
By way of a quick overview the proprioceptive system, as i've written about at b2d rather a bit, is the monitoring system in our bods that lets us know what's happening to us from a range of awarenesses: pressure, temperature, chemical shifts, elecro-magnetical sensing, and particular for athletic movement, positional and noxious (aka pain in many cases) awareness.
For positional awareness, we're wired up with propriocpetive mechanorecptors ( a special class of mechnoreceptors), with a good many of them being around the joints, the bendy bits of the body (makes sense - good to know where the mobile parts of a limb can be) and in the musles that detect stretch, motion, pressure. This being the case - that these receptors convey alot about the state of our limbs moving in space - the corollary of this is the better a joint can move, or the better the range of motion and the control of that range of motion around a joint, the better the information that joint is putting out.
Eric Cobb talks about this enriched sensory action as "map clarity" - the more data points the more detailed the map; the more mechanoreceptors available to give positional information the more options the body has about where and how it can go somewhere. If there's restrictions in the ankle or knees so that range of motion is not available there's in effect a sensory deprivation and a performance decrement: the body doesn't tend to go down blind alleys; it makes the best decisions it can based on the available map. Which can mean - you body don't have the resources to step quickly over that stump, you're going down suddenly. Ugh! shock! sprain!
Similarly if an athlete's restricted in their hips for instance (the hip and pelvis behave like a fused unit rather than separate joints) how the heck are they going to perform optimally? What will pay for this lack of mobility? the Low back maybe?
Preliminary Assessment
So one key part of athletic training can be a good movement assessment before any training takes place. An assessment helps discover where an athlete may need to do some work to reduce restrictions in mobility in order to open up better movement options - and thus the athlete has a better set of options for responding to situations without getting hurt when in play: yes the body has a very clear sense of where it is and (b) with lots of range of motion available, has more options for moving the ankle rather than going over on it.
At an even more basic level, mobility work is simply the practice of the joint movements to make sure an athlete can they move the joints well on demand and effortlessly.
Aside: such assessments can also check visual and vestibular performance too.
Movement Quick Check: Here's a simple check you can do with yourself or your athletes to explore joint freedom for greater movement options. Stick a leg out in front of you, and then put the leg out and straight so that it crosses the body where the foot of the outstretched leg goes past the foot of the stance leg. Check in a mirror: is the pelvis torquing around to let the leg reach this far? Now make little circles there with the knee locked out and the leg crossed over: is the pelvis torqued over? still? going up and down? If the pelvis is still and not torqued forward as if moving towards the other leg, in that position at that speed, super. Try going slower and faster. Still good? super duper. If not, that may be a sign that the pelvis and hip don't know how to work independent of each other - and so the mechanoreceptive information is less clear/accurate, and the functional options for movement less optimal. Mobility work can often address this and recover that more discrete hip/pelvis function.
Time to train: every joint in the body takes 10 mins a day, once a day. Can work different speeds/drills on different days.
Roles: So mobility work has two main functions: (1) ensuring optimal signal for optimal options of movement in live situations (Example programs for self-development).; (2) practicing movements in a variety of positions with the joints so that getting into weird (eg accident) type positions are not shocking, but relatively adaptable (program for self-dev)
Vestibular Acuity.
The middle of the neural hierarchy is the inner ear: it is predominantly the balance system of the body. BUT it also relates to motion detection, proprioception and even muscle tone. Everything is interconnected. That's really critical to understand that these systems in the neural hierarchy are not independent of each other: an issue in one has consequences in the other, and multiple systems contribute to different degrees in different contexts to the same thing. Here, for short hand, we're focusing on the balance role of the vestibular system.
The balance system is mainly located in the inner ears. We have two inner ears - one for each
ear. That sounds obvious, but just like each eye may be slightly different in strenghts/weaknesses, likewise the inner ears may have different dominances. How well are they behaving in general to support sports movement? And how well are they behaving in concert?
Assessments of the vestibular system may show a discrepency on either side specifically, or generally that there may be some weaknesses. The cool thing is, the balance system can be trained. Intriguingly this doesn't mean stepping onto unstable surfaces. IT may mean skills development on very stable surfaces (see middle of this post) .
Quick Test: Here's an example. Stand on one foot for more than fifteen seconds. Now stand on the other. Is one side more wobbly than the other? Why is that? How common is it for someone on a sports field to have one leg off the ground at a time? So might it be valuable to ensure that one can be as stable as possible in that circumstance?
Time to train: 3x's a week, 10 mins/session, 8 weeks. Then maintenance.
Visual Accuity
At the top of the neural hierarchy is visual acuity - not eye sight, but they get sports vision evaluations to see how they're doing, and they practice visual acuity (here's one example) so that they can respond quickly to what's happening on the field - so their ability to perceive the situation under pressure improves.
When we work on visual accuity, we not only look at the function of the two eyes and how well they're working together, but we also work on improving the time, complexity and distractions that can be processed concurrently for quicker visually lead responses to action in the environment.
Quick Test - check out the near/far drill modelled in the link above.
Time to train: basic drills, 2 mins a day, can be combined with mobility work.
Practice sessions for cognitive load, 15 mins a day, 3times a week, 8 weeks, then maintenance.
Great program for self-development: great visual drills and speed work, too.
Putting This Sensory-Motor Work into Practice: Speed/Quickness:
As said in vision, we work with athletes to improve visual acuity of eye performance like speed of changing focus, but also work on processing dynamically changing visual information more quickly. When we have discrete loaded mobility, balance and visual acuity firing, we can also consider putting these together at "sports speed."
But speed is also a skill, too. Strength and conditioning has for awhile now been looking at sprining mechanics and technique and training - like plyometrics - to improve quickness. All sorts of things like towing a partner or being towed can get into faster turn over.
There are other techniques, too, though, that have to do with putting all the mobility and visual and vestibular accuity to work to move quickly and more efficiently at quickness. So sometimes speed is speed, but sometimes it's being faster in response to something than the opponent.
Speed in Context.
This one seems so obvious - to move fast is a good thing. And that's where our example athlete came in at the beginning: someone who wanted to move faster (i think that's what the fast twitch is about) but the skills described here would be not about making the person faster once they're up and running (how far do they have to go on a field?) but
I've bet guys much younger than i am that i can beat them getting turned around or i can get a faster start off the line from a standing start than they. What's the difference? Technique and practice of technique for moments of change where the technique is efficient and it respect the brilliance that is the athletic ready position.
Strength: what kind of strength. Finally, after all the above neural stuff happens, we might want to come back to the question: so do you really need to be stronger in your current deadlift to be a better socer player?
I generally find that most guys who have been playing for awhile are plenty strong on the teams but their endurance in the last part of the game can flag. So if anything gets added to the program, kettlebells can be great and very efficient for brute strength and stamina: two simple moves - swings and turkish get ups.
Quick Test If ya don't believe me, try this for ten minutes:
- (assuming you know how to swing a kb safely) you swing a heavy kb while your partner TGU's left and right with a medium bell, then swap and keep going non-stop for ten minutes. These two moves have the advantage of also developing hip and lat strength, pretty key for that athletic ready position.
Time to train - 20-40 mins every other day except in season. In season, coach's discretion.
Ask any coach if the strongest athlete in the dressing room is their best athlete on the field.
Taking the Pieces Further: getting more drills and skills and program plans. If the above kinda program sounds interesting to you, beyond the links to various bits above, there's a three day workshop that gives a great intro to self-assessment and practice on this performance pyramid of vision, vestibular, proprioception calledessentials of elite performance (overview).
Some of us also coach this stuff (look for S-phase (review) in the training certifications). If you can't find someone in your neighborhood, i also coach via email/skype. Contact me with the email link at the bottom of this post if you're interested in neural hierarchy for sports training.
Take Away: Better is not necessarily Stronger.
Assuming the goal is to be a better field player, not just stronger, there may be more and other ways to look at performance than just raw strength. And that OTHER which we may often think of as rather fixed - vision, balance, movement - is highly plastic and trainable. When we start with the nervous system, too, the biomechanics seem to come online, stronger, faster, better.
Update: related new resource (may 2010)
DVD Mini Course - 6.5 hours of the essentials of elite performance workshop on three divds. If you can't make the workshop, or just want to get going on this stuff NOW, this new dvd mini course is a great way to get going. I'll have a full review soon, but in the meantime, there's way more self-tests and practices than covered above. Please check the link for the full nine yards on the details.
Get it, love it, sign up for the essentials workshop or R-phase cert (overview) within 30 days of purchase and get $100 off tuition of either course.
Great way to get a richer sensory-motor training tool box and tune up. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
If we're swinging a bat, and our hips and pelvis move as a unit rather than serially into the swing (bacause they can't move separately), that's a power leak that where more strength mayn't make much of a performance difference without correcting that hip/pelvis issue. If we're going to grab the bar for a deadlift but our wrist mobility is shonky, are we going to be able to control our grip with the strength it takes to make the pull? More leg strength isn't the issue. If we want to kick a football really far but our balance is off so our coordination is a bit askew, more power may continue to be directed away from optimal contact.
likewise, there's a lot of decision processing going on whether on the court or on the field, right? Our brains are making tons of decisions so quickly from where to put a ball on the opponent's side of the tennis court, to where the best path is to run a ball down the field, to who's open for a shot. If we're not really seeing the field, we can't make optimal decsisions about it.
So maybe we need to consider the sensory-motor connections of visural, vestibular and proprioceptive perception and associated skills to enhance our sports performance training. Each of these systems can be trained deliberately to behave more reflexively to these very normal sports situations.
In the following sections, we'll look at these areas of the sensory-motor processing within our sensory systems AND there'll be some quick self-checks you can run to check parts of these perceptual systems' performance. We'll also consider the time a person would have to put into this program to see real performance change, and i've peppered in links for resources either to doing each bit at a time, or training to put each part together at once.
The goal is that with this overview you can begin to ask the questions - and have some answers - about how to assess yourself in terms of performance, not just strength. You may find that your strength simply improves as a consequence of better work here, too.
Tuning Sensory-Motor Performance.
By way of a quick overview the proprioceptive system, as i've written about at b2d rather a bit, is the monitoring system in our bods that lets us know what's happening to us from a range of awarenesses: pressure, temperature, chemical shifts, elecro-magnetical sensing, and particular for athletic movement, positional and noxious (aka pain in many cases) awareness.
For positional awareness, we're wired up with propriocpetive mechanorecptors ( a special class of mechnoreceptors), with a good many of them being around the joints, the bendy bits of the body (makes sense - good to know where the mobile parts of a limb can be) and in the musles that detect stretch, motion, pressure. This being the case - that these receptors convey alot about the state of our limbs moving in space - the corollary of this is the better a joint can move, or the better the range of motion and the control of that range of motion around a joint, the better the information that joint is putting out.
Eric Cobb talks about this enriched sensory action as "map clarity" - the more data points the more detailed the map; the more mechanoreceptors available to give positional information the more options the body has about where and how it can go somewhere. If there's restrictions in the ankle or knees so that range of motion is not available there's in effect a sensory deprivation and a performance decrement: the body doesn't tend to go down blind alleys; it makes the best decisions it can based on the available map. Which can mean - you body don't have the resources to step quickly over that stump, you're going down suddenly. Ugh! shock! sprain!Similarly if an athlete's restricted in their hips for instance (the hip and pelvis behave like a fused unit rather than separate joints) how the heck are they going to perform optimally? What will pay for this lack of mobility? the Low back maybe?
Preliminary Assessment
So one key part of athletic training can be a good movement assessment before any training takes place. An assessment helps discover where an athlete may need to do some work to reduce restrictions in mobility in order to open up better movement options - and thus the athlete has a better set of options for responding to situations without getting hurt when in play: yes the body has a very clear sense of where it is and (b) with lots of range of motion available, has more options for moving the ankle rather than going over on it.
At an even more basic level, mobility work is simply the practice of the joint movements to make sure an athlete can they move the joints well on demand and effortlessly.
Aside: such assessments can also check visual and vestibular performance too.
Movement Quick Check: Here's a simple check you can do with yourself or your athletes to explore joint freedom for greater movement options. Stick a leg out in front of you, and then put the leg out and straight so that it crosses the body where the foot of the outstretched leg goes past the foot of the stance leg. Check in a mirror: is the pelvis torquing around to let the leg reach this far? Now make little circles there with the knee locked out and the leg crossed over: is the pelvis torqued over? still? going up and down? If the pelvis is still and not torqued forward as if moving towards the other leg, in that position at that speed, super. Try going slower and faster. Still good? super duper. If not, that may be a sign that the pelvis and hip don't know how to work independent of each other - and so the mechanoreceptive information is less clear/accurate, and the functional options for movement less optimal. Mobility work can often address this and recover that more discrete hip/pelvis function.
Time to train: every joint in the body takes 10 mins a day, once a day. Can work different speeds/drills on different days.
Roles: So mobility work has two main functions: (1) ensuring optimal signal for optimal options of movement in live situations (Example programs for self-development).; (2) practicing movements in a variety of positions with the joints so that getting into weird (eg accident) type positions are not shocking, but relatively adaptable (program for self-dev)
Vestibular Acuity.
The middle of the neural hierarchy is the inner ear: it is predominantly the balance system of the body. BUT it also relates to motion detection, proprioception and even muscle tone. Everything is interconnected. That's really critical to understand that these systems in the neural hierarchy are not independent of each other: an issue in one has consequences in the other, and multiple systems contribute to different degrees in different contexts to the same thing. Here, for short hand, we're focusing on the balance role of the vestibular system.
The balance system is mainly located in the inner ears. We have two inner ears - one for each
ear. That sounds obvious, but just like each eye may be slightly different in strenghts/weaknesses, likewise the inner ears may have different dominances. How well are they behaving in general to support sports movement? And how well are they behaving in concert?Assessments of the vestibular system may show a discrepency on either side specifically, or generally that there may be some weaknesses. The cool thing is, the balance system can be trained. Intriguingly this doesn't mean stepping onto unstable surfaces. IT may mean skills development on very stable surfaces (see middle of this post) .
Quick Test: Here's an example. Stand on one foot for more than fifteen seconds. Now stand on the other. Is one side more wobbly than the other? Why is that? How common is it for someone on a sports field to have one leg off the ground at a time? So might it be valuable to ensure that one can be as stable as possible in that circumstance?
Time to train: 3x's a week, 10 mins/session, 8 weeks. Then maintenance.
Visual Accuity
At the top of the neural hierarchy is visual acuity - not eye sight, but they get sports vision evaluations to see how they're doing, and they practice visual acuity (here's one example) so that they can respond quickly to what's happening on the field - so their ability to perceive the situation under pressure improves.
When we work on visual accuity, we not only look at the function of the two eyes and how well they're working together, but we also work on improving the time, complexity and distractions that can be processed concurrently for quicker visually lead responses to action in the environment.
Quick Test - check out the near/far drill modelled in the link above.
Time to train: basic drills, 2 mins a day, can be combined with mobility work.
Practice sessions for cognitive load, 15 mins a day, 3times a week, 8 weeks, then maintenance.
Great program for self-development: great visual drills and speed work, too.
Putting This Sensory-Motor Work into Practice: Speed/Quickness:
As said in vision, we work with athletes to improve visual acuity of eye performance like speed of changing focus, but also work on processing dynamically changing visual information more quickly. When we have discrete loaded mobility, balance and visual acuity firing, we can also consider putting these together at "sports speed."
But speed is also a skill, too. Strength and conditioning has for awhile now been looking at sprining mechanics and technique and training - like plyometrics - to improve quickness. All sorts of things like towing a partner or being towed can get into faster turn over.
There are other techniques, too, though, that have to do with putting all the mobility and visual and vestibular accuity to work to move quickly and more efficiently at quickness. So sometimes speed is speed, but sometimes it's being faster in response to something than the opponent.
Speed in Context.
This one seems so obvious - to move fast is a good thing. And that's where our example athlete came in at the beginning: someone who wanted to move faster (i think that's what the fast twitch is about) but the skills described here would be not about making the person faster once they're up and running (how far do they have to go on a field?) but
- how to get off the ground from a fall or tackle quickly,
- foot work on how to follow,
- turn and
- cut,
- techniques for how to accelerate for a critical 10 yards to get past their opponent.
I've bet guys much younger than i am that i can beat them getting turned around or i can get a faster start off the line from a standing start than they. What's the difference? Technique and practice of technique for moments of change where the technique is efficient and it respect the brilliance that is the athletic ready position.
Strength: what kind of strength. Finally, after all the above neural stuff happens, we might want to come back to the question: so do you really need to be stronger in your current deadlift to be a better socer player?
I generally find that most guys who have been playing for awhile are plenty strong on the teams but their endurance in the last part of the game can flag. So if anything gets added to the program, kettlebells can be great and very efficient for brute strength and stamina: two simple moves - swings and turkish get ups.
Quick Test If ya don't believe me, try this for ten minutes:
- (assuming you know how to swing a kb safely) you swing a heavy kb while your partner TGU's left and right with a medium bell, then swap and keep going non-stop for ten minutes. These two moves have the advantage of also developing hip and lat strength, pretty key for that athletic ready position.
Time to train - 20-40 mins every other day except in season. In season, coach's discretion.
Ask any coach if the strongest athlete in the dressing room is their best athlete on the field.
Taking the Pieces Further: getting more drills and skills and program plans. If the above kinda program sounds interesting to you, beyond the links to various bits above, there's a three day workshop that gives a great intro to self-assessment and practice on this performance pyramid of vision, vestibular, proprioception calledessentials of elite performance (overview).
Some of us also coach this stuff (look for S-phase (review) in the training certifications). If you can't find someone in your neighborhood, i also coach via email/skype. Contact me with the email link at the bottom of this post if you're interested in neural hierarchy for sports training.
Take Away: Better is not necessarily Stronger.
Assuming the goal is to be a better field player, not just stronger, there may be more and other ways to look at performance than just raw strength. And that OTHER which we may often think of as rather fixed - vision, balance, movement - is highly plastic and trainable. When we start with the nervous system, too, the biomechanics seem to come online, stronger, faster, better.Update: related new resource (may 2010)
DVD Mini Course - 6.5 hours of the essentials of elite performance workshop on three divds. If you can't make the workshop, or just want to get going on this stuff NOW, this new dvd mini course is a great way to get going. I'll have a full review soon, but in the meantime, there's way more self-tests and practices than covered above. Please check the link for the full nine yards on the details.
Get it, love it, sign up for the essentials workshop or R-phase cert (overview) within 30 days of purchase and get $100 off tuition of either course.
Great way to get a richer sensory-motor training tool box and tune up. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Renegade Row: dynamic strength and balance
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An exercise complex that has recently become a favorite of mine is the renegade row (with push up).
Why? Rows in general are great upper body workouts. Stuart McGill has recently done an article on rows comparing inverted, standing bent over and one arm cable rows for back activation patterns. They are powerful core workouts.
The renegade row is likely closest to the standing bent over row with a few differences - a biggie being balance/control of the weight.
The renegade row, is shown above with Power Blocks. For added strength/stability challenge, put your feet only shoulder width apart, and get out a couple of kettlebells. Why kb's? It takes a bit of extra coordination (ie muscles firing) to keep them steady. That means you're adding a wee bit of balance to the workload.
mc's Renegade Row Sequence
Just to review, here's how i do a renegade row sequence - it may vary from yours.
Pull Part
Push Part:
Now, other variants of this row are, pull left, push up, pull right. Personally, i find it more effective to focus on the pulls, L/R and then the pushes. Your mileage may vary.
Sequencing:
I like to EDT the renegade rows into a set with some lower body work. Somedays its goblet squats, or double KB front squats, or romanian single leg dl's or yesterday it was double kb single leg deadlifts for the lower body work. EDT means going for max sets of each pattern within 15 mins, using a 10RM weight going for only five reps.
Muscles Worked: why i love this excersise.
I love how this sequence makes me feel for the next few days:
A bit of Stability; A bit of Form; a bit of kalos sthenos (beautiful movement)
I also like the momentary loaded, dynamic balance / strength aspect of
Mr. mahler, pictured above, has his feet nice and close - shoulder width at most. He seems, however, to be torquing to the side here. I'd suggest stay more in the level plank and get the hand right up to the waist. You'll note the guy in the vid at the top of this story above doesn't torque but his feet are quite spread.
Get both these parts together and you'll be very pleased with yourself. For instance, take a look at this version: nice level trunk; feet only shoulder width apart; neutral neck position; no torquing on the up.
Now some folks what don't know better may say these are "sissy weights" pirctured, but they may want to reserve that appellation if they can't hold this form with their KB of choice themselves.
As you can see if you have given this sequence a go, it's not easy to get in this kind of dynamic upper body/trunk work, and the RR is way cool.
Practice staying tight (as pavel might say) in the core. You may want to practice doing planks first, or getting used to balancing in form on the bells and just bringing your hand up to your side while maintaining your plank form while one side is off the bell.
Challenging form: balance
I mention that we're working to hold balance when using the KB's rather than the very stable powerblocks. And for me that little bit of stabilization required is just right: not too much instability. What do i mean by "too much"?
Some times you'll see folks using medballs for their pushups - i'm not crazy for that much of a stability challenge - i personally don't test stronger after that; with kb's i do.
By "test stronger" - i mean something zhealth teaches: if you're wondering if a particular
form of an exercise is working for you, do a muscle test (you may need a partner for this) before the test; do the excercise; retest. If you're weaker, there may have been something saying to your nervous system that's not a happy thing.
Ok. what's a muscle test, since there are different ways this term is used. Here, it's pretty straight ahead: it's simply a test to see if your muscles are functioning properly. If you hold your arm up, and your wrist out in extension, i shouldn't readily be able to pull your hand down if everything is firing properly.
Another good example - testing hamstring strength: all's well, you standing with your hands on the wall, looking straight ahead, bent knee, i should have some good resistance pushing down on your calf. Indeed i shouldn't really be able to press a big guy's leg to the ground (as per me here, pushing on Kenneth Jay's calf as Mike Cheatham kindly plays "the wall" for this muscle test at the Denmark09 RKC). I've written before about this kind of thing with the arthrokinetic reflex.
So once you do this test, you may find that you test a little more weakly (muscle is overcome) in a test than before doing pushups on wobbly surface. This is going to get onto a whole jag about instability training, but why jump on a wobbly surface if, say, we have trouble keeping balance with one foot off the ground and we then turn our head sharply? give it a go - how'd you do? Try a few other sports positions and then turn your head (as you might in real life or in a sport); try them with your eyes closed and a good head turn.
Here's a great one: one foot in front of the other, toe touching heel. Stable, or surfer dude? Now close your eyes. More stable or more surfer?
That's our proprioceptive system working really hard since our balance comes from vision, vestibular (inner ear) and proprioception (the nerves in our joints ligaments and muscles saying where in space we are). Apparently 80% of that VVP load comes from the eyes. Take those away, you can give yourself a whole LOT of balance training very quickly.
So why not get good at that, in motion (we move in real life) before going for that wobble board or med ball or swiss ball?
So if you want to work balance, fabulous. get on one leg, turn your head. One leg, close your eyes, turn your head. When you're awesome at moving and balancing, go a bit squishier. Remember, the idea is not to be stable on a wobble board, but stable in motion.
A lot of studies about wobble board adaptations don't demonstrate translation OFF the board into real activities (note, we are NOT talking about swiss ball work in the context of rehab, but regularly fit folk doing their workouts on unstable surfaces.) Here's a great example: this is a super article at the sports injury bulletin on the relationship of the proprioceptive system's mix with the visual and vestibular for balance work. Once you finish the intro though, here comes the wobble stuff. Does it translate off the board?
McGill was one of the first to show that sitting on swiss balls doesn't actually help strengthen the low back. Likeiwise, this is eric cressey's beef with unstable surface training and athetics. All this bosu ball stuff - so what you can balance on one of these - what happens when you get off them? From the actual research Cressey's done, the answer is not alot to less than nothing. A fast muscle test pre and post will tell you the same thing.
At least the recommendations at the end of that sports injury bulletin article is to start balance training on stable surfaces; master that before adding any kind of load - and load can be doing sums while balancing - it doesn't have to be a wobble board (aside: these concepts are all very much part of the z health i phase certification, so if you're looking for a trainer sensitive to improving your atheltic performance in the real world, look for a zhealth trainer with I in the list of their certs).
Summary: Renegade Rows Rock.
Hmm. well. didn't expect a description of the renegade row to become a treatise on the evils of the bosu. The intent was to say, if you're looking for something new to challenge your workouts, the renegade row with its pull and push, done with kettlebells, and especially as part of an EDT upper/lower body set workout, can be simply awesome.
You'll love all the places you're aware of your muscles over the next few days. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Why? Rows in general are great upper body workouts. Stuart McGill has recently done an article on rows comparing inverted, standing bent over and one arm cable rows for back activation patterns. They are powerful core workouts.
The renegade row is likely closest to the standing bent over row with a few differences - a biggie being balance/control of the weight.
The renegade row, is shown above with Power Blocks. For added strength/stability challenge, put your feet only shoulder width apart, and get out a couple of kettlebells. Why kb's? It takes a bit of extra coordination (ie muscles firing) to keep them steady. That means you're adding a wee bit of balance to the workload.
mc's Renegade Row Sequence
Just to review, here's how i do a renegade row sequence - it may vary from yours.
Pull Part
- pull up one bell to belt line and belt height
- put it down
- pull up opposite side put it down
- repeat 5 times.
Push Part:
- follow the pull sets with 5 perfectly level push ups on the bell handles.
Now, other variants of this row are, pull left, push up, pull right. Personally, i find it more effective to focus on the pulls, L/R and then the pushes. Your mileage may vary.
Sequencing:
I like to EDT the renegade rows into a set with some lower body work. Somedays its goblet squats, or double KB front squats, or romanian single leg dl's or yesterday it was double kb single leg deadlifts for the lower body work. EDT means going for max sets of each pattern within 15 mins, using a 10RM weight going for only five reps.
Muscles Worked: why i love this excersise.
I love how this sequence makes me feel for the next few days:
- it hits the abs, but the obliques it seems in particular
- Lats are loved
- pecs can be quite buzzed
- traps and rhomboids of course get some attention.
- well it's the whole core, holding that plank, isn't it? (word doc about up/low core) - tall, neutral spine throughout.
A bit of Stability; A bit of Form; a bit of kalos sthenos (beautiful movement)
I also like the momentary loaded, dynamic balance / strength aspect of
- just staying stable with both hands on the bells - i think Mike Mahler who's Aggressive Strength hybrid EDT routines introduced me to this fab move once said don't do this with anything smaller than a 16k bell cuz the base of support is too small. Ha! i say. i use 12s.
- staying level in the trunk while pulling up on the bell - muscle control to stay planked and again keep stable on the balance hand/bell combo.
Mr. mahler, pictured above, has his feet nice and close - shoulder width at most. He seems, however, to be torquing to the side here. I'd suggest stay more in the level plank and get the hand right up to the waist. You'll note the guy in the vid at the top of this story above doesn't torque but his feet are quite spread.Get both these parts together and you'll be very pleased with yourself. For instance, take a look at this version: nice level trunk; feet only shoulder width apart; neutral neck position; no torquing on the up.
Now some folks what don't know better may say these are "sissy weights" pirctured, but they may want to reserve that appellation if they can't hold this form with their KB of choice themselves.As you can see if you have given this sequence a go, it's not easy to get in this kind of dynamic upper body/trunk work, and the RR is way cool.
Practice staying tight (as pavel might say) in the core. You may want to practice doing planks first, or getting used to balancing in form on the bells and just bringing your hand up to your side while maintaining your plank form while one side is off the bell.
Challenging form: balance
I mention that we're working to hold balance when using the KB's rather than the very stable powerblocks. And for me that little bit of stabilization required is just right: not too much instability. What do i mean by "too much"?
Some times you'll see folks using medballs for their pushups - i'm not crazy for that much of a stability challenge - i personally don't test stronger after that; with kb's i do.
By "test stronger" - i mean something zhealth teaches: if you're wondering if a particular
form of an exercise is working for you, do a muscle test (you may need a partner for this) before the test; do the excercise; retest. If you're weaker, there may have been something saying to your nervous system that's not a happy thing.Ok. what's a muscle test, since there are different ways this term is used. Here, it's pretty straight ahead: it's simply a test to see if your muscles are functioning properly. If you hold your arm up, and your wrist out in extension, i shouldn't readily be able to pull your hand down if everything is firing properly.
Another good example - testing hamstring strength: all's well, you standing with your hands on the wall, looking straight ahead, bent knee, i should have some good resistance pushing down on your calf. Indeed i shouldn't really be able to press a big guy's leg to the ground (as per me here, pushing on Kenneth Jay's calf as Mike Cheatham kindly plays "the wall" for this muscle test at the Denmark09 RKC). I've written before about this kind of thing with the arthrokinetic reflex.
So once you do this test, you may find that you test a little more weakly (muscle is overcome) in a test than before doing pushups on wobbly surface. This is going to get onto a whole jag about instability training, but why jump on a wobbly surface if, say, we have trouble keeping balance with one foot off the ground and we then turn our head sharply? give it a go - how'd you do? Try a few other sports positions and then turn your head (as you might in real life or in a sport); try them with your eyes closed and a good head turn.Here's a great one: one foot in front of the other, toe touching heel. Stable, or surfer dude? Now close your eyes. More stable or more surfer?
That's our proprioceptive system working really hard since our balance comes from vision, vestibular (inner ear) and proprioception (the nerves in our joints ligaments and muscles saying where in space we are). Apparently 80% of that VVP load comes from the eyes. Take those away, you can give yourself a whole LOT of balance training very quickly.
So why not get good at that, in motion (we move in real life) before going for that wobble board or med ball or swiss ball?
So if you want to work balance, fabulous. get on one leg, turn your head. One leg, close your eyes, turn your head. When you're awesome at moving and balancing, go a bit squishier. Remember, the idea is not to be stable on a wobble board, but stable in motion.
A lot of studies about wobble board adaptations don't demonstrate translation OFF the board into real activities (note, we are NOT talking about swiss ball work in the context of rehab, but regularly fit folk doing their workouts on unstable surfaces.) Here's a great example: this is a super article at the sports injury bulletin on the relationship of the proprioceptive system's mix with the visual and vestibular for balance work. Once you finish the intro though, here comes the wobble stuff. Does it translate off the board?
McGill was one of the first to show that sitting on swiss balls doesn't actually help strengthen the low back. Likeiwise, this is eric cressey's beef with unstable surface training and athetics. All this bosu ball stuff - so what you can balance on one of these - what happens when you get off them? From the actual research Cressey's done, the answer is not alot to less than nothing. A fast muscle test pre and post will tell you the same thing.
At least the recommendations at the end of that sports injury bulletin article is to start balance training on stable surfaces; master that before adding any kind of load - and load can be doing sums while balancing - it doesn't have to be a wobble board (aside: these concepts are all very much part of the z health i phase certification, so if you're looking for a trainer sensitive to improving your atheltic performance in the real world, look for a zhealth trainer with I in the list of their certs).
Summary: Renegade Rows Rock.
Hmm. well. didn't expect a description of the renegade row to become a treatise on the evils of the bosu. The intent was to say, if you're looking for something new to challenge your workouts, the renegade row with its pull and push, done with kettlebells, and especially as part of an EDT upper/lower body set workout, can be simply awesome.
You'll love all the places you're aware of your muscles over the next few days. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Monday, May 4, 2009
A Movement Assessment: what is it and why should i have one?
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Getting rid of the Parts Model of Human Pain and Performance.
Folks on various health forums will often post "i have a weak knee; what exersises can i do to strengthen it?" or "my hamstrings are tight and it's affecting my deadlift; what can i do to loosen them up?" or "my shoulder keeps bugging me; what's good for shoulder rehab?"
All of these questions, it seems, tend to consider the site of the problem to be the source of the problem.
Folks who reply often share that perspective with proposals like "sore shoulder - here's a great book/dvd/blog on shoulder rehab." or "tight hamstrings? foam roll 'em out. it's great. do that anytime before you deadlift that'll loosen 'em right up."
But what if the site of the problem isn't the source of the problem?
Then all we are providing are classic band aid solutions where the problem will just keep coming back. We know about this in any kind of mechanical situation: the car engine is leaking oil.
If all we do is keep pouring in oil to top it up, we're not dealing with the problem. The problem may require a simple tweak on a part we're not familiar with, or it may need some more serious work. We don't know; we don't have the expertise. So we get an assessment of what the problem is, and what it will take to fix it.
We know enough to do this for a mechanical machine, and yet when it comes to our far more complex organism - our bio-electrical-mechano-organic selves, we seem to take a far cheaper attitude. Perhaps because we're so resliant; perhaps because the trad. medical establishment has let us down. And how successful - in the long term - is our tire patch/band aid approach?
Avoid Frankensteining Body Work
Here's another analogy: Pavel Tsatsouline famously decries the "frankenstien monster" approach to strength/body building that treats muscles in isolation. Frankensteining the body referring to assembling parts that are shown off as parts rather than integrated elements. Many of us have experienced the benefits of compound movement work to create powerful integrated, athletic strength and power.
Ok, so why then why then when we have a tweak, a pain, a weakness, do we suddenly move exactly to that body part, isolationist, frankensteining approach for how to make ourselves better?
Alternatives to the Parts Model approach to
Perceived Human Performance Problems
A movement assessment sees pain as a symptom only and respects the complexity of the body. As a result it may indeed be less interested in causes for a particular expression of the Whole Body saying HELP, and more interested in looking at and addressing movement patterns. A finding that's shocked and delighted me is how much improved movement/addressing movement reduces pain - many many varieties of pain.
Isn't that what Doctors Do?
Now, you might say well heck isn't that what a physio or a chiro does or even a doctor does?
The answer is yes and no: yes, if that physio or manual therapist of whatever stripe is hip to the notion of movement and how everything is connected in the body, possibly; if that physio person hears you say "i have sore shoulder" and goes right to assessing your shoulder - like site = source, then more likely no. The last time i went to see a doctor about a sore back i was prescribed muscle relaxants. Perhaps you have similar experiences?
The Movement Approach Difference:
Seeing a Whole Body in Motion; not bunches of parts.
While we tend to think of ourselves as a sore back, weak knee, tight hamstring. Or as strong biceps, weak shoulders, great back, our bodies are not so isolationist. The connections througout are rich and legion. Joints and muscles are connected with all sorts of tissue in all sorts of ways throughout the body such that "anything can affect anything." Really. Take a look at a book like Anatomy Trains for an incredible illustration of this point. A headache may be more tied to a tightness in the foot than a pain in the neck, as it were.
One of the best ways to see this interconnection manifest itself, it seems, is when we do what our bodies are designed to do: move.
When the body is in movement, it calls into play so many inter-related parts that when watched
via a skilled assessor or via a good screen, show off just how well our highly integrated systems are working together - or not - and provide clues of what may need to be addressed to get us moving optimally. Consider walking: we are not only moving limbs and counterbalancing tensions; we're balancing and orienting ourselves in space. Our central nervous system is, as Z practitioners (overview of zhealth)and others learn, "always on" too, always connecting all systems. I've written before about the power of the arthrokinetic reflex and how a crinked neck cuts strength in a deadlift.
The emphasis is on movement. Address the movement and other good things follow.
UPDATE: what are examples of what happens in a screen (motivated by question on DD)
Movement assessments say "let me see you move" - and based on watching you move, a certified screener/assessor can see where there are weaknesses/problems in that pattern. They then have a set of corrective strategies that map to tackling that issue. They work through these with you and retest that sore point (where the symptom is tweaking) to check for improvement, and iterate to narrow down on the best set for you.
So you may come in with a sore shoulder, and be asked for a history of your health, and then, in Z someone may say "let me see you walk" - to check for those patterns.
The issue doesn't have to be pain; it may be a plateau in a lift, or problem with part of a move. same thing. Let's look at how you move, assess, drill, retest that move that's your concern.
Here's another example for an assessment that you can step through:
on the Functional Movement Screen site, there's an overview that describes/shows the 7 screens of that assessment.
You go through each screen, each side of your body and get scored. Based on those scores, the person screening you suggests drills to address any asymmetry (differences in left/right side performance) or weakness. The foundational principle of the FMS is first address asymmetries, then improve performance.
In ZHealth (and here's an overview), there's a variety of assessments, but the fundamental one is to watch you walk. Given that, you may be given mobility drills (like those in the Rphase DVD) to address what's found.
Can i Just Screen Myself?
yes and no.
It's tricky because it's hard to see yourself from vary many angles. i can watch myself walk forward, but need a video to watch me from behind, which is really important. so ya maybe with video, if you know what you're looking for.
That said, Gray Cook's Atheletic Body in Balance had a shorter version of what was to become the FMS for this kind of self-assessment - better perhaps than a kick in the head.
More recently, Gray and Brett and Mark's work on the TGU in the Kalos Sthenos DVD has been proposed as "a screen" - in fact we've been talking about how the TGU compares with the FMS. SO if you rigorously checked yourself against the spec of the TGU on the DVD, at each of the 7 parts of that move, you could get a very good idea of where your weak link may be - Brett would be quick to say though that that may only show you where your weak link is in the TGU - we're not clear yet how well it generalizes as a diagnostic.
What one could do is say
One more point for consideration on the self-check - this is exactly what a lot of us do when checking out our own form in a mirror for the swing or the snatch, right? but if you've had the pleasure of being observed by someone trained to teach these moves, they'll see one little thing we might miss, tweak that and in two minutes it's as if we've gone to movement heaven.
So yes, it's very good to get body awareness, and in particular movement awareness. This is what something like the ZHealth Rphase/Neural WarmUp vids help build and what the KS DVD helps build from slightly different perspectives.
The benefit of then going to a certified trainer to have the assessment is like going to an RKC to watch your hard style swing or snatch to tweak it, or to an ikff ckt for your GS. Another pair of eyes; another depth of experience.
Isn't this an expensive luxury? I just have a tight hamstring...
That's a good question.
Let's qualify a tight hamstring first and then expensive.
In keeping with the view of our body as an integrated system - and not just a machine with replaceable parts, a tight hamstring could be caused by just about anything. Indeed, to quote Eric Cobb of ZHealth, anything can cause anything. What if it's just a signifier of something in your shoulder or foot that if it isn't addressed, that hamstring issue will keep coming back, and perhaps bring some of its friends and pump up the volume. The arthrokinetic reflex is just one example of how something happening in one part of our system has profound consequences *through out* the system.
So, if you take away one thing from this post i hope it's that a pain signal or perception of weakness may be a signal of a systems issue, and checking the system (in this case with a movement screen) is a good way to address that signal.
Note i'm not saying that we have to check the system to find the CAUSE of the problem - who knows what the cause is, and is that important? What we can do is check for what's happening in the movement, address that, and see the positive effects.
Now as to expense, it's unfortunate that movement assessment isn't part of medical insurance. But until it is, yes it's a choice as to how you spend your hard earned cash.
A qualified/certified trainer may well cost you as much as going to see a chiro or related therapist for an assessment. As with other disciplines/services, you get what you pay for, so a question may be:
Likewise, seeing a pro movement specialist and trainer for 30-60mins can give your performance a huge boost that well pays for itself in terms of time taken to make these strides (and ability to make them without pain).
And there's other options:
with the CK-FMS (overview of cert), folks need to do a case study: they need someone they can see usually at least twice to assess and follow up. Search for a ck-fms in training and offer to be their case study. Some folks will also trade services for services, or have student rates. So ask. Packages are a great way to get even more value from your session. More on this next.
Optimizing the Benefit of a Screen: buyer's market.
There are a ton of personal trainers available - all dying to train YOU.
A growing number of smart trainers are adding movement assessment certifications to their tool box. You can look around for trainers that have such qualifications to go with your training - and you can check out what you think of those screens.
The RKC has hooked up with Gray Cook and Brett Jones to extend the Functional Movement Screen Certification to the CK-FMS. This cert material goes well beyond what's offered at an FMS cert, and is only available to RKC's - so with a CK-FMS, you have a top hard style kettlebell trainer and someone who knows how to run the FMS and who has done at least one deep case study on how to apply this approach from diagnostic to corrective strategies for that client.
Likewise, you'll find an increasing number of RKC's (and others) who (also) have Z-Health training. That trainer has a range of movement assessment tools and strategies available to them, too.
Both the FMS and ZHealth sites list certified trainers at least by location if not by name as well. It's relatively straight forward to check for someone who looks good via google and see what all their qualifications are, along with that particular cert, and see if that person looks like a match for your intersts.
What i like about the ZHealth listing for instance, is that you'll find physio's, rolfers, chiropracters, at least one MD, who care about fitness training, and have done advanced level Z certification, too. So what's your comfort level? if you want someone with a medical background also trained in movement assessment, you have choices.
So whether you're looking for kettlebell trainers or certified strength and conditioning coaches, or physical therapists, or chiropractors to help you with your fitness performance and health and well being, really the choice is yours. One of my most popular requests is for a movement assessment combined with a kettlebell movement check/tune up. I love that. It's a great package and a great way to optimize your training dollar/pound/euro/etc.
What does a movement assessment get someone, really?
In the FMS, Gray Cook talks about identifying your weakest link in order to address this link so as not to build function or strength on top of dysfunction.
In Z-Health, Eric Cobb talks about efficient, pain free movement.
The motivation in each case is similar:
- when you take away "the site is the source of the problem" perspective, you start to see a body in motion - not a collection of parts that can be assessed in isolation, but complex connected interrelated components.
From this perspective, the bod's really complicated: anything can cause anything. So an optimal way to look at the body is not at one part that may be saying something (on behalf of everything else), but at a whole organism in motion. The pragmatic consequence is a movement assessment that:
So if you have a tweak or a perceived weakness in a limb or have hit a plateau, consider these as signals not just to poke at a part, but as a call from your body to look at your whole self, and a great way to look at your whole physiological self is when it's in movement.
Guaranteed if you do this for yourself you'll be happier and healthier for it. And you'll find most trainers do offer guarantees of satisfaction, too. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Folks on various health forums will often post "i have a weak knee; what exersises can i do to strengthen it?" or "my hamstrings are tight and it's affecting my deadlift; what can i do to loosen them up?" or "my shoulder keeps bugging me; what's good for shoulder rehab?"
All of these questions, it seems, tend to consider the site of the problem to be the source of the problem.
Folks who reply often share that perspective with proposals like "sore shoulder - here's a great book/dvd/blog on shoulder rehab." or "tight hamstrings? foam roll 'em out. it's great. do that anytime before you deadlift that'll loosen 'em right up."
But what if the site of the problem isn't the source of the problem?
Then all we are providing are classic band aid solutions where the problem will just keep coming back. We know about this in any kind of mechanical situation: the car engine is leaking oil.
If all we do is keep pouring in oil to top it up, we're not dealing with the problem. The problem may require a simple tweak on a part we're not familiar with, or it may need some more serious work. We don't know; we don't have the expertise. So we get an assessment of what the problem is, and what it will take to fix it.
We know enough to do this for a mechanical machine, and yet when it comes to our far more complex organism - our bio-electrical-mechano-organic selves, we seem to take a far cheaper attitude. Perhaps because we're so resliant; perhaps because the trad. medical establishment has let us down. And how successful - in the long term - is our tire patch/band aid approach?
Avoid Frankensteining Body Work
Here's another analogy: Pavel Tsatsouline famously decries the "frankenstien monster" approach to strength/body building that treats muscles in isolation. Frankensteining the body referring to assembling parts that are shown off as parts rather than integrated elements. Many of us have experienced the benefits of compound movement work to create powerful integrated, athletic strength and power.
Ok, so why then why then when we have a tweak, a pain, a weakness, do we suddenly move exactly to that body part, isolationist, frankensteining approach for how to make ourselves better?
Alternatives to the Parts Model approach to
Perceived Human Performance Problems
A movement assessment sees pain as a symptom only and respects the complexity of the body. As a result it may indeed be less interested in causes for a particular expression of the Whole Body saying HELP, and more interested in looking at and addressing movement patterns. A finding that's shocked and delighted me is how much improved movement/addressing movement reduces pain - many many varieties of pain.
Isn't that what Doctors Do?
Now, you might say well heck isn't that what a physio or a chiro does or even a doctor does?
The answer is yes and no: yes, if that physio or manual therapist of whatever stripe is hip to the notion of movement and how everything is connected in the body, possibly; if that physio person hears you say "i have sore shoulder" and goes right to assessing your shoulder - like site = source, then more likely no. The last time i went to see a doctor about a sore back i was prescribed muscle relaxants. Perhaps you have similar experiences?
The Movement Approach Difference:
Seeing a Whole Body in Motion; not bunches of parts.
While we tend to think of ourselves as a sore back, weak knee, tight hamstring. Or as strong biceps, weak shoulders, great back, our bodies are not so isolationist. The connections througout are rich and legion. Joints and muscles are connected with all sorts of tissue in all sorts of ways throughout the body such that "anything can affect anything." Really. Take a look at a book like Anatomy Trains for an incredible illustration of this point. A headache may be more tied to a tightness in the foot than a pain in the neck, as it were.
One of the best ways to see this interconnection manifest itself, it seems, is when we do what our bodies are designed to do: move.
When the body is in movement, it calls into play so many inter-related parts that when watched
via a skilled assessor or via a good screen, show off just how well our highly integrated systems are working together - or not - and provide clues of what may need to be addressed to get us moving optimally. Consider walking: we are not only moving limbs and counterbalancing tensions; we're balancing and orienting ourselves in space. Our central nervous system is, as Z practitioners (overview of zhealth)and others learn, "always on" too, always connecting all systems. I've written before about the power of the arthrokinetic reflex and how a crinked neck cuts strength in a deadlift.The emphasis is on movement. Address the movement and other good things follow.
UPDATE: what are examples of what happens in a screen (motivated by question on DD)
Movement assessments say "let me see you move" - and based on watching you move, a certified screener/assessor can see where there are weaknesses/problems in that pattern. They then have a set of corrective strategies that map to tackling that issue. They work through these with you and retest that sore point (where the symptom is tweaking) to check for improvement, and iterate to narrow down on the best set for you.
So you may come in with a sore shoulder, and be asked for a history of your health, and then, in Z someone may say "let me see you walk" - to check for those patterns.
The issue doesn't have to be pain; it may be a plateau in a lift, or problem with part of a move. same thing. Let's look at how you move, assess, drill, retest that move that's your concern.
Here's another example for an assessment that you can step through:
on the Functional Movement Screen site, there's an overview that describes/shows the 7 screens of that assessment.
You go through each screen, each side of your body and get scored. Based on those scores, the person screening you suggests drills to address any asymmetry (differences in left/right side performance) or weakness. The foundational principle of the FMS is first address asymmetries, then improve performance.
In ZHealth (and here's an overview), there's a variety of assessments, but the fundamental one is to watch you walk. Given that, you may be given mobility drills (like those in the Rphase DVD) to address what's found.
Can i Just Screen Myself?
yes and no.
It's tricky because it's hard to see yourself from vary many angles. i can watch myself walk forward, but need a video to watch me from behind, which is really important. so ya maybe with video, if you know what you're looking for.
That said, Gray Cook's Atheletic Body in Balance had a shorter version of what was to become the FMS for this kind of self-assessment - better perhaps than a kick in the head.
More recently, Gray and Brett and Mark's work on the TGU in the Kalos Sthenos DVD has been proposed as "a screen" - in fact we've been talking about how the TGU compares with the FMS. SO if you rigorously checked yourself against the spec of the TGU on the DVD, at each of the 7 parts of that move, you could get a very good idea of where your weak link may be - Brett would be quick to say though that that may only show you where your weak link is in the TGU - we're not clear yet how well it generalizes as a diagnostic.
What one could do is say
- hmm my shoulder's bugging me,
- i'm going to do the ahtletic body in balance screen on myself and see what comes back,
- and even if it doesn't show a shoulder issue, i'm going to run the pattern for whatever comes back in my test
- do the corrective drills for the weak bits,
- and retest my shoulder, see if it feels better.
One more point for consideration on the self-check - this is exactly what a lot of us do when checking out our own form in a mirror for the swing or the snatch, right? but if you've had the pleasure of being observed by someone trained to teach these moves, they'll see one little thing we might miss, tweak that and in two minutes it's as if we've gone to movement heaven.
So yes, it's very good to get body awareness, and in particular movement awareness. This is what something like the ZHealth Rphase/Neural WarmUp vids help build and what the KS DVD helps build from slightly different perspectives.
The benefit of then going to a certified trainer to have the assessment is like going to an RKC to watch your hard style swing or snatch to tweak it, or to an ikff ckt for your GS. Another pair of eyes; another depth of experience.
Isn't this an expensive luxury? I just have a tight hamstring...
That's a good question.
Let's qualify a tight hamstring first and then expensive.
In keeping with the view of our body as an integrated system - and not just a machine with replaceable parts, a tight hamstring could be caused by just about anything. Indeed, to quote Eric Cobb of ZHealth, anything can cause anything. What if it's just a signifier of something in your shoulder or foot that if it isn't addressed, that hamstring issue will keep coming back, and perhaps bring some of its friends and pump up the volume. The arthrokinetic reflex is just one example of how something happening in one part of our system has profound consequences *through out* the system.
So, if you take away one thing from this post i hope it's that a pain signal or perception of weakness may be a signal of a systems issue, and checking the system (in this case with a movement screen) is a good way to address that signal.
Note i'm not saying that we have to check the system to find the CAUSE of the problem - who knows what the cause is, and is that important? What we can do is check for what's happening in the movement, address that, and see the positive effects.
Now as to expense, it's unfortunate that movement assessment isn't part of medical insurance. But until it is, yes it's a choice as to how you spend your hard earned cash.
A qualified/certified trainer may well cost you as much as going to see a chiro or related therapist for an assessment. As with other disciplines/services, you get what you pay for, so a question may be:
- What is your pain free movement worth?
- What is a strategy that will help reduce the likelihood of the next injury worth?
- What's your ability to train optimally worth?
- or simply to get through the day without sore shoulders and/or a headache worth?
Likewise, seeing a pro movement specialist and trainer for 30-60mins can give your performance a huge boost that well pays for itself in terms of time taken to make these strides (and ability to make them without pain).
And there's other options:
with the CK-FMS (overview of cert), folks need to do a case study: they need someone they can see usually at least twice to assess and follow up. Search for a ck-fms in training and offer to be their case study. Some folks will also trade services for services, or have student rates. So ask. Packages are a great way to get even more value from your session. More on this next.
Optimizing the Benefit of a Screen: buyer's market.
There are a ton of personal trainers available - all dying to train YOU.
A growing number of smart trainers are adding movement assessment certifications to their tool box. You can look around for trainers that have such qualifications to go with your training - and you can check out what you think of those screens.
The RKC has hooked up with Gray Cook and Brett Jones to extend the Functional Movement Screen Certification to the CK-FMS. This cert material goes well beyond what's offered at an FMS cert, and is only available to RKC's - so with a CK-FMS, you have a top hard style kettlebell trainer and someone who knows how to run the FMS and who has done at least one deep case study on how to apply this approach from diagnostic to corrective strategies for that client.
Likewise, you'll find an increasing number of RKC's (and others) who (also) have Z-Health training. That trainer has a range of movement assessment tools and strategies available to them, too.
Both the FMS and ZHealth sites list certified trainers at least by location if not by name as well. It's relatively straight forward to check for someone who looks good via google and see what all their qualifications are, along with that particular cert, and see if that person looks like a match for your intersts.
What i like about the ZHealth listing for instance, is that you'll find physio's, rolfers, chiropracters, at least one MD, who care about fitness training, and have done advanced level Z certification, too. So what's your comfort level? if you want someone with a medical background also trained in movement assessment, you have choices.
So whether you're looking for kettlebell trainers or certified strength and conditioning coaches, or physical therapists, or chiropractors to help you with your fitness performance and health and well being, really the choice is yours. One of my most popular requests is for a movement assessment combined with a kettlebell movement check/tune up. I love that. It's a great package and a great way to optimize your training dollar/pound/euro/etc.
What does a movement assessment get someone, really?
In the FMS, Gray Cook talks about identifying your weakest link in order to address this link so as not to build function or strength on top of dysfunction.
In Z-Health, Eric Cobb talks about efficient, pain free movement.
The motivation in each case is similar:
- when you take away "the site is the source of the problem" perspective, you start to see a body in motion - not a collection of parts that can be assessed in isolation, but complex connected interrelated components.
From this perspective, the bod's really complicated: anything can cause anything. So an optimal way to look at the body is not at one part that may be saying something (on behalf of everything else), but at a whole organism in motion. The pragmatic consequence is a movement assessment that:
- looks at you as a whole person who moves, and seeing that whole person move, help assess and improve that movement so that it's at its best. The usual consequence of this is improved overall performance and reduced pain.
- provides you with strategies to address any movement issues to help improve your movement performance, and again the results of this are better overall movement; less pain; reduced risk of injury.
So if you have a tweak or a perceived weakness in a limb or have hit a plateau, consider these as signals not just to poke at a part, but as a call from your body to look at your whole self, and a great way to look at your whole physiological self is when it's in movement.
Guaranteed if you do this for yourself you'll be happier and healthier for it. And you'll find most trainers do offer guarantees of satisfaction, too. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
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