Real Work

I had an appointment with one of my best movers today. Sessions like this ground me for two reasons; they allow me to work dynamic movements into dynamic programs, and it reminds me to dot my I's and cross my T's.

She's a former ballerina, now mother of three (not entirely sure which accomplishment I admire more). After her movement assessment, I discovered her muscles coordinate with an ease that can only be described as grace and is the only client I feel comfortable doing a loaded overhead squat with, an exercise that requires end game hip mobility matched by upper body stability. But we encountered a problem on our first attempt to load the exercise. The more hip flexion she gave up, the more she shifted laterally to the right. Not an uncommon compensation, but no more overhead squats, or any squats, until it was fixed.

Patterns are all your brain really recognizes. It's so good at facial recognition that we can recognize faces from birth to death. So why would anything be different about how our brains move our bodies? We move in patterns. The work of Gray Cook taught me that fitness' deconstruction of the human body and blind devotion to isolation training forced our brains to check out during exercise. Ever have a conversation with someone who's completely checked out? Like I am right now? It's hard work not to punch them in the neck, no?

Our ability to recognize facial patterns isn't unique to us, monkeys are powerful facial recognizers too. And since vision accounts for more than a third of your ability to balance, it's safe to say a huge amount of that ability originates in the brain. Gain strength on a machine, and I'm not sure the brain will use it very much, which is why people can press hundreds of pounds on a machine, and can't produce a single stable push up.

Mr. Cook taught me that to get functional movement from the body, the brain has to allow it. If it isn't along for the ride, we have to question whether the movement is of any worth to us. His seven movement pattern assessment, the Functional Movement Screen, wasn't proffered from his belief of where functional movement originates from, he looked at what the brain was patterned to do without anyone's help. No one taught you how to walk. The prep work alone required before you ever took that first step is truly impressive. You first needed the core strength to roll onto your belly. I've always marveled at the lack of arm and leg control newborns have. They flail helplessly, assaulting our sense of hearing because their limbs are pretty useless at meeting their needs. Upon further inspection you might notice that this seemingly chaotic flail might actually be the brain's attempt at building core strength. Without rolling, there is no crawling, so not only is the brain trying to master specific patterns, it also begins to assemble those patterns into larger movements, patterns building on patterns.

Assessments like the FMS allow us to follow certain algorithms once dysfunction is found. Re-patterning allows the brain to feel muscles work within their own subsystem. The assistance of bands allows you to engage in a movement you otherwise could not complete on your own. If the brain and body never actually feel the coordinated movement of the muscles, it can't recreate that movement without the assistance. Using the adductor and abductor machines do not help these stabilizers fire with the glutes during hip movements. Gray warns us not to just load our clients with positive changes, a staunch removal of negatives, or dysfunction, will yield positives by default. Re-patterning allows you to reengage in a pattern you're brain lost familiarity with. Moving correctly a few times coupled with a decrease in whatever assistance you used to get into the correct pattern, seals it in, giving the brain more options once instability presents itself.

The brain doesn't like inefficiency and prefers to know your travel plans ahead of time, so it adapts, and quickly. Science tells us that a muscle adaptively shortens or lengthens, depending on whatever pattern you're over engaging in, in twenty minutes. Spend twenty minutes sitting, and the brain recognizes it as a pattern it might want to remember, shortening and lengthening muscles accordingly. This is precisely why your program needs multi-joint and multi-directional movements.

Back to our ballerina; After a few weeks of trying to correct what I though was a hip issue through re-patterning her squat, I caught something that led me to wonder if she really had the shoulder stability to complete the movement. I palpated her lower traps, important stabilizers of the shoulder blade during overhead movements. The right fired like it was loaded with hollow points. The left took a break at a crucial point in the movement. I usually yell, STOP RIGHT THERE!, like Meatloaf's counterpart before she acquiesces to what I can only imagine are sweaty advances. But like I said, she has great motor control, and since it was something we had worked on before, she knew how to depress the blade and get the left trap to fire. Once she did, the shift went away. We put stability in the shoulder and got more mobility from the hip.

Of course, we'll continue to work on this , but what fascinates me is that she presented a hip issue that we improved with an upper body intervention. Ultimately, all she needed was a little more motor control. I could only have seen this by stepping back and looking at what the whole was doing, brain included. It's moments like that I am grateful to Mr. Cook and anyone else carrying on the crucial task of reevaluating how we look at the body and include it's circuitry in our programming. The brain begs incorporation into your program or you'll never keep the motor control your brain tries so hard to gain the second it leaves the womb.