Hey Leopard Legion,

Today’s mission is simple, find someone amazing to smash the stiffness out of your triceps. Look, you spend a bucket load of time working your hammies, but do you spend as much time working on it’s analog at the arm, the triceps? Don’t answer that. We have addressed some triceps smashing on the barbell, but we haven’t shown it in it’s full partner smash down glory. A stiff extensor of the arm is inefficient and will cause the arm to dump torque during high load/high speed movements which can be the cause of some real shoulder dysfunction. Oh, and the athlete in this video just won the NorCal Masters Comp this weekend, and the dip portion of her muscle up looked wicked sweet.

Mission: Find a super friend and get smashing. Test one thing you think you changed, like overhead, and one thing you may not think you changed (like the push up or burpee). Stay on one arm until you 1) black out, 2) vomit 3) stop making change 4) don’t feel any more arm hate.

Kstar

Hey MWodies!

We are back! The big new gym project is behind us and I have enough available brain capacity to start this engine back up.

So let’s jump right to it.

Let’s set a few ideas up first: 1) Great athletes (Rich Froning and Dan Bailey for example) tend to have universal motor patterning. By this I mean that they will adopt a “universal motor blueprint” across movement tasks. In this video example, you will notice that both Rich and Dan have a vertical forearm during both their pushup and in the bottom of their burpee. This vertical forearm is the same they would use if you flipped them over and had them bench or even perform a hand stand push up. The vertical forearm is just coaching cue that really means full mechanical advantage of the triceps and pecs as well as correct load sequencing at the shoulder (easier to cue on the vertical forearm). Can they perform pinche bodyweight movements without perfect mechanics? Of course, but as soon as the weights of movements get more dynamic or the athlete becomes fatigued (soldier getting up off the ground with a huge pack), then this less than optimal and well practiced and ingrained pattern will rear it’s head. Remember when we used to say things like, if you are really strong, then you’ll be working at “x” percentage of your total strength when doing a lesser demand movement. Well why the heck would you opt for a less efficient movement pattern that essentially negates your strength/stamina adaptation and fails you when the load or movement demands become more critical?

Ok, so if you are starting to see my logic, then you are going to have to address the way we have traditionally let beginner athletes perform pushups from the knees. As my good friend from Hawaii, Byrant Powers says, “why don’t knee pushup people ever blossom into normal push up people?” Think about it. They don’t, and the reason is that it’s difficult to perform a mechanically good pushup from the knees (hard to maintain trunk position and load the elbow correctly). So what we’ve basically done for ever is doom beginners to practice inefficient movement patterns that are essentially dead end in nature.

If skill development is just a complex biological process of the myelination of neural pathways (and it is), then the choices we make about our movement practice are serious and real.

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s episode deals with a quite common problem we see associated with athletes complaining of knee pain. Turns out, you sort of need full range of motion in all of your joints to move correctly and at full potential. Oh, I know you can manage quite a bit of serious force without it, but eventually, you’ll need it. One way to think about why this range is important is when the knee is missing it’s capacity to achieve full terminal knee extension, every knee movement basically begins in a pre-loaded and poor mechanically idealized position. When athletes come and see me for knee pain, this is one of the things I check first! It’s difficult to talk about why the door doesn’t swing correctly if one of the hinges has a twist in it and doesn’t open all the way. A great deal of the mobilizations on the MWod are analogs to how I would treat a person in the clinic. Some turn out to be almost as effective as I can be. Here is a three part series about dealing with this missing function.

Part 1

Part 2

With Voodoo X band (most effective set up)

Kstar

Hey December Leopards,

Today’s MWod episode is homage to playing a little bit more. During the winter break, most athlete’s training schedules tend to include a slightly lighter training volume due to the natural periodization process that the holidas tend to impose. Let’s be clear, Slack lining will NOT build the kinds of elite fitness required to do anything of note physically, AND you may deem it’s risk/reward ratio to be little high (even though my four year old does it, Yeah, Yeah, I know you aren’t a four year old girl….)

However, there IS immense value in how should we say, Messing Around (this is not our language btw.) And to be especially clear, getting better at reactive balance like this doesn’t really feed forward to other motor skills. Turns out that most of this reactive balance business is a function of a simple short arc loop at the spine with some heavy down regulation of spasticity from the brain. This kind of reactive balance business isn’t generated from the pre-motor cortex and so doesn’t really make you better at generating a program to move (gymnasts are kind of ahmaazing and are never standing on on an uneven/wobbly surface, or break dancers, or free runners, or martial artists etc.)

As an aside, the phyiso ball was originally developed by phyisos working with children with Polio. When these kids were on their stomaches, and made to feel like they were falling, their bodies flinched to try and right itself. The physios originally thought this was improving tone, balance, etc but decided pretty quickly that these righting reactions weren’t useful in creating better movement quality. Thus the ball was abandoned. (weird that the physio ball isn’t employed as a serious training tool anywhere that actually works with bad ass athletes unless it’s filled with water and you are holding it over your head) Is there value working on balance? Bet your ass there is. And you can always hold a wobbly bar or object over your head while you are on a stable surface.

Go play a little soccer or ultimate while you are at it. Go fart around on a bongo or indo board. There is value and merit in learning to down regulate the speed wobbles. There is value in co-contracting around your joints (banish that muscle stiffness). There is value in the kinds of error ladden, deep practice of learning a new skill. It’s even a little fun. Think of it as a dose of freestyle movement ( and you for sure need that, ask Carl Paoli of gymnastics.wod) And through the eye of the MWod, it’s yet another tool to elicit crappy movement patterning. There is really never any where you can hide your true movement self.

Bottom line, there is a great deal of value to be had in the very, very old art of messing around. Besides, when you find yourself at a campsite with: Jenny Labaw, Marcus Brown, and a nor-cal margarita, it’s time for some stupid human tricks.

Seriously. Play more.

Kstar

Ps. For those of you that asked why I didn’t jump on the slack line, it’s MY slack line.

Hey MWodies,

Today’s episode is a discussion about why we tend to see different kinds movement errors when we ask athletes to perform work on a single leg, on rings, or with dumb bells or kettle bells. Most of the the formal movement training that goes on in a good strength and conditioning program is based on bi-laterally closed torque systems, like trying to break the barbell in the bench press, snatching, pull ups or squatting. Good strength coaches from the dawn of time have also realized the importance of exposing athletes to movements like weighted step ups, dumb bell based movements, and pistols because they impose such different motor control demands on the athlete and ultimately make better athletes. While our experience is not any different, we do find that when we focus on torque development in our traditionally closed torque movements (creating torque bilaterally off of a fixed object or plane) we don’t have to perform as much open torque work. However, we have noticed that unless we go out of our way to makes sure athletes are exposed to these movements, they will forever have unexplored and missing corners of their movements. To this end, we are pleased to announce the MWod Leopard test. It’s simple, can you overhead squat? Good, now overhead squat with two kettlebells or dumbells (1.5/1 pood or 50/35′s) The difference in the difficulty is the direct result of your capacity to create torque in your hips to keep your torso upright and your inability to hide this deficiency with a closed torque barbell system. It probably also might show you how far away from full range of motion your shoulders really are. How hard is it to just keep both of those kettlebells over your head?

Tweet photo of successful Leopard Test to @mobilitywod #Leopardtest.

Kstar

The Leopard Test

Fu is a full Leopard btw.

Hey MWodies,

Today’s mission is a good example of solving a very common low back problem by changing some hip mechanic motor control cues. Turns out, creating a stable, high torque hip position creates a ton of mechanical stability for the pelvis (and by extension the lumbar spine).

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s episode is about exploring the relationship of a mechanically sound shoulder position in the front rack and it’s effects on your upper back stability. The relationship is simple. You have to have a stable, well positioned trunk off of which you can organize the primary engine of the shoulder. Here is where it gets interesting. The stability and torque created by the well organized shoulder structure creates a reciprocating stabilizing effect on the trunk. This is the same effect that we see when we create torque at the hip to keep the pelvis and lumbar upright. In essence, having to cue “elbows up” all the time is really a pathomechanical cue that an athlete doesn’t have an optimized front rack position.

Kstar

Hey Leopard Legion,

Today’s MWod episode is a great fix for those pesky tight tissues of your armpit/scap region. When athletes are missing basic range of motion (Ie. they are dys-supple) the body has to account for force generation in those compromised and compensated positions. For example, if your shoulder sits anterior in the socket (Delta-Bravo shoulder postion) muscles of your rotator cuff like the subscapularis have to work in really horrific positions. This is one of the reasons why poor positioning begets poor mobility (it’s a wonderfully developed positive feed back loop that creates work for doctors, physios, chiros, osetos, etc). So a matted down sub scap is likely just a symptom of poor shoulder mechanics. So, fix your shoulder mechanics, and treat the symptom. We work with some pretty badass/strong athletes, I have to get my hands pretty fired up to get into the armpit of the likes of a Diane Fu or Jesse Burdick. So I don’t. Instead, they are waaaay more effective at treating this stiff rotator cuff tissue. Heck, you’ve already gone to the trouble of tapping or voodoo flossing a ball to a barbell. Might as well clean up this shoulder while you are at it.

Mission: Two min a side.

Test/Restest: Shoulder extension and pull up

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

I am often asked the question, stability or mobility first? It turns out that this question is very straight forward. The answer is both. It’s not exactly possible to pull out the stability requirements out of the movements of your limbs. The stable shoulder position in overhead movements (in end range flexion) is always accompanied by an external rotation torque force in the shoulder joint. If you are missing this rotation, you are missing full range of motion. Period. You can’t simply take out the rotational components (read: stabilizing and positional) of a movement and train it later. Hell, 90% of the cues given by any coach in any gym are rotational in nature (knees out, armpits forward, back foot in, block, etc).Sometimes it’s just tricky to understand the implications of a missing range of motion. In today’s episode, we have a brilliant athlete missing some shoulder internal rotation. What is difficult to appreciate is the impact this has on her shoulder stability and capacity to even start in an uncompromised position. So mobility or stability first? Stable always, but make sure your athletes aren’t so bound up that they can’t ever be stable. So mobility if you can’t get stable. But the limits of stability first and always. StabMo. There I said it. StabMo first. ™

Kstar

Hey Leopards,

Today’s episode is homage to the fact that we are in this thing together. You’ve got to have a coach, training partners, or a training community. It’s really hard to coach yourself all the time. Seriously, even all the major religions share the same idea; praying alone is great, but you’ve got to also do it with some other folks. As it turns out human beings are wired as social animals. And no matter how much of a lone wolf (solo weight lifting running ninja) you are, you can’t help but be influenced directly and indirectly by the people around you. Seriously, look at all the goal setting literature. Want to accomplish something, tell everyone that you are doing it. Good luck trying to bail on that commitment. I’m waaay more likely to follow up on something if I’m accountable to someone, say, like Jstar my wife. (You musn’t make Whisky angry). And although my wife is likely to make the comment that I should just ”care” about taking the recycling out, it certainly helps when I know someone else “cares” that I “care” about taking out the recycling. Social pressure is strong. Just ask the Mo-vember folks out there growing very, very silly mustaches for charity. They can’t shave those things now, everyone will know they couldn’t hack it. We use the social pressure model all the time in our gym. If we agree that the movement standard of the day is to not chicken neck at the top of the pull up (head fault), every time someone does it, we call out that person’s name and everyone owes a penalty movement (burpee, run, etc). As you may guess, the behavior changes quickly under these conditions. Negative reinforcement of noxious behavior works. Want to quit drinking? Take some antibuse and enjoy the vomiting when you drink that Nor-cal marg. You get the idea.

So let me introduce the MWod Fight Club drill. Agree on good movement, then kill and banish someone when they fault. It’s not your fault you had to kill them. They: 1) asked you to do it 2) decided it was easier to be in a crappy position than it was to stay alive or not be banished.

You need a coach and training partner. Do you really think that guy in “Fight Club” went back to working at that crappy job? I don’t think so.

As Jstar says, “make a better decision”. You just may need super friends to do it.

Kstar