Hey Supplenesses,

Today’s mission is a reminder to keep it simple.  I often see athletes struggling to achieve a good bottom position in the squat.  (This is Mob2 position for you M&M coaches out there.)  During the warm up, even though these athletes are struggling for a solid straight back during peak compression, they actually spend very little quality time in the the actual position in which they are struggling.  Performing some warm up sets is great, but if you bottom position sucks and you are spending exactly .023 seconds in that position during the turn around, no wonder it really doesn’t end up getting that much better with big loads on the bar.  The bottom is tricky. It’s the position where you are weakest mechanically, potentially affected by your horrible hip and ankle ROM, and a position of transition (you are changing directions here after all.)  What to do?  Mobilize the position of restriction.  You’ll catch all of the components, fascia, joint capsule, muscle stiffness.  All you have to do it reflect a good position.  Think about your last squat session for example.  Now, think about how much time you actually spent working on the most difficult positing in that squat.  Hmmm.  Oh, couldn’t keep generating torque at the bottom by keeping your knees out and your chest came forward?  Hmmm.

Keep it simple.  Here is a little hip opening sequence that cures gristle-itis. Be sure to test-retest each side so you can see how ridiculously  tight you actually are.  Good gawd man, if you were a leopard, you’d starve.

2-3 minutes a side

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s mission is to explore the relationship between torso position and hip range of motion.  As it turns out, you are an entropic, torque avoiding, force dumping beast of an animal.  As you should be.  Subsistence Torque Farming is expensive.  So when you get the chance to dunk a basket ball or land from a depth jump, you will always opt for a vertical shin and a forward leaning torso.  (This is the best way to max out your rear wheel drive system AND minimize shear at the knee naturally.  Obvs.)  The problems start to accumulate when you start adding the needs of an upright torso.  Suddenly your slash and burn/subsistence torque farming practices aren’t enough.  You’ve got to create enough torsion force through your kinetic chain to keep your torso upright AND minimize knee load shear.  God forbid you may be missing some little,tiny, critical piece of your hip ROM.  Oh, but this MWod goes to eleven. Not only are you going to have to keep your torso upright, but you are going to have to spontaneously constitute a position of high stability out of a low torque position of transition.  This as it turns out is what happens when you change direction in sport (cutting), land after blocking at the net, or have to run for cover after getting up from a sprawled position.

Mission:  Try all three jumps.  What does each tell you about your hip and ankle ROM and your motor control?

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s mission is to tie together the last few episodes of the MWod.  We want to bridge the idea of pathognomonics and movement errors.  As often as we can, we want to put the bulk of our energy into improving and maximizing motor control before we default to mobility.  Of course if every athlete had NORMAL motion ranges (not crazy gymnast/martial artist) then we’d always be dealing with aspects of motor control.  In fact, a useful way of thinking about restricted ROM is that it ultimately limits the athlete’s tolerances for poor movement and poor positioning. Healthy tissues and normal ranges equal breathing room and possibility.  If sport/mission/fighting has taught anything, it’s that we can count on less than ideal circumstances and impossibly difficult positions (running a 40m dash does not look like tackling, scrambling to cover, or modern dance for example.)  As often as possible, we need to improve the number of motor options an athlete has.  (Think brutally steep scrambling up the side of a mountain vs. a run on a track.)  The gym is the lab.  It’s where we can compress movement faults and faulty motor patterns into the course of a training session.  Got a good position? Great, now challenge that position with load, metabolic demand, cardio-respiratory demand, stress, and speed.  Good strength and conditioning is both a stimulus for adaptation and a diagnostic tool.  We measure the effectiveness of any program by measuring wattage, poundage, and reps, as well as how well the athlete performs in the sport/mission/emergency situation.  Improving position improves efficiency, maximizes output, and safeguards against tissue failure.  We don’t need movement analogs and correlates. We don’t need to learn an entirely new movement language to understand the set of movements with which we are already training.   It’s more simple than that.

We just have to “see” with better eyes.

Part 1

part 2

part 3

Kstar

Ps. I know I got the wrong hamstring!  I was thinking of the Pes Anserine.  Say grace before tea.  It’s not my fault! Jesse Burdick had me carb depleted!

Hey MWodies,

So yesterday we talked about moving away from pathognomonic cues (in engineering these are considered lagging indicators), and moving toward identifying pathomechanical cues (these are leading indicators).  A comment in yesterday’s comments asked for specifics on the pull up as an example.  So, I grabbed my Spanish Gymnast Champion (Doesn’t everyone just have one just laying around?)  Carl Paoli to demonstrate some of the force bleeds and torque dumps that we typically see in this movement.  Got an old tweak?  Well, restore your position to restore your function.  Want to go faster?  Well, improve your position to improve your function.  But for Leopard’s sake, don’t be a brohken, chicken necking, low torque puppet.  We hate puppeting.

Test/Retest:  How many of these errors do you make?  Do your pull up numbers and movement quality go up when you minimize movement variables?

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s episode is about shifting our thinking away from a reactive model of movement dysfunction to a little more sustainable way of thinking.  Athletes are stubborn “if it ain’t broke and I’m kicking your ass, don’t fix it” kind of people.   We are asking the  wrong questions.  We should not be asking, how good are you?  We should be asking, how much better can you be?  Minimizing movement variables, force dumps, and torque bleeds, is the same thing as protecting the athlete from injury.  The data sets are huge.  Run like a jackass, get hurt.  Pull with a crappy back position, get hurt.  Eventually.  And this is the problem with the reactive model, if we wait for pain or dysfunction to inform us that we need to change technique then we are being suckered out of finding out how much better we can be.  And, now we have to deal with that torn labrum or fried heel cord.  Sweet.  We have to few movement with a different lens.  Open circuit positions and over tensioned systems are the root cause of 98% of the problems that the typical athlete faces.   This means, that sore elbow from squatting and pullups? It’s a preventable disease.

Going slow and being weak isn’t cool.  Make a better decision.

Kstar