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

Hey Mwodies,

As we get closer to wrapping up the mobility project (don’t worry, the MWod will go on in and be way better), we need to make sure that we spend ample time understanding some of the ways that the Movement and Mobility model works.  In this mission, we examine how speed and lost connection make creating positions of high torque and stability difficult.  For example, think of the difference between a strict overhead press and a jerk.  In a press, the athlete can theoretically generate a great deal of tension on the set up, and actively press through the range (with connecting tension on the tissues) to the overhead (ideally/theoretically stable)  position.  But what happens when  a movement removes the through range torque like the jerk?  Reconstituting a position of high stability with a lost “through” connection creates enormous challenges to motor control and mobility.  This is why for example, stiff and muscle bound guys can press and even push press, but find push jerking horrible.  Removing connections is a way to illustrate the real athlete self.  Most of sport and mission requires spontaneous force and torque production out of difficult and definitively not preset positions.  Oh, and most likely the best athlete will also be able to create the highest  torques, greatest stability, and best position the MOST quickly as well.  Oh, you can air squat?  Try and drop into the bottom position.  How’d that go?  Drop and rebound?  Sounds like plyo-training and wall balls.  Athletes will fool you with their sneaky compensation ways.  Your job is to understand what you see.  Make the invisible visible. Remember, the stimulus for adaptation (exercise) is also the best diagnostic tool. We have to teach the principles of olympic style weight lifting and gymnastics to our athletes or we can’t see what’s really happening in our training. Cut the connection cord.  See what happens.

Kstar

Hey MWodies,

Happy new year and welcome back to the Mwod 2012.  I’ve just landed after traveling to Australia with the family and it’s time to wind this show back up!

Today’s episode is really geared towards everyone, but it is a special homage to all of those baby mommas and athletes out there that experience the dreaded pee-drops that happen during intense jumping or force production episodes.  We tend to not talk directly about the pelvic floor too much in exercise (besides always yelling sphincter to belly button before you get tight),  but if you understand how the the trunk creates stiffness at all, then you are certainly aware of how this lower muscular system creates  the floor to your diaphragm roof.  As we’ve always maintained on mobilitywod, position is king.  If you recall, poor mechanics and set ups can cause a whole host of neuromuscular shut down that we call positional inhibition.  Well, the same is true of the pelvic floor.  In the Movement and Mobility trainer course, we perform a demo that illustrates how poor spinal positioning literally forces people to breath up in their necks not effectively with their diaphragms.  Well, the lower pelvic floor diaphragm doesn’t behave any differently.  Set your spinal position first (butt sets position, abs brace position) by getting neutral, set your abs, take a big breath, and then brace into extension like it’s your job.  I suspect that traditionally, we’ve had to talk about pelvic floor dysfunction a bit more when we’ve worked with athletes that aren’t regularly handling large loads.   For example, we tend to see much more attention to the details of bracing and bracing sequencing under the high tensions developed in squatting and deadlifting.  Interestingly, we tend to see the dreaded pee leak occur most often in “lower” intensity exercises like jump roping, that require much less bracing to successfully (albeit not optimally) completed.  I’m sure that the pelvic floor masters out there would also agree that there is an additional component of duration/endurance in these tasks as well.  Besides, most coaches obsess about lifting spinal mechanics with barbells, but spontaneously go spine-awareness blind and unconscious when their athletes start jumping, running, or perform any sort of mundane conditioning.

Today’s Mwod stars one of my Australian colleagues that specializes in retraining and rebuilding the pelvic floors of athletes and non-athlets like.

As one of my friends says, practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.  Reinforcing poor pelvic positioning and sequencing in “basic” movements will set the stage for greater loss of spinal stability and pressures  when the stakes get higher.  Load ordering matters. Position matters.  Bring some new awareness to your sphincter and see what happens to your deadlift. And Double under.

Kstar

ps. Not sure why this video is green.  I can only guess that my Australian friend altered someone to reflect the Green and Gold….

Hey Leopard Legion,

Today’s mission is about improving the stable position of the shoulder in extension.  When the arm starts to go behind the torso in the bench or the dip for example, the stable position of the joint is in internal rotation.  Often when athletes are stiff in the thoracic spine, they aren’t able to effectively position the shoulder blade, and subsequently can produce a stable internally rotated and extended shoulder position.  The solution is simple.  Place your hand behind your back, lay down on a pain ball in the region between your spine and  mid-shoulder blade, and have a super friend drop a 65 stone on your chest.  Breath deeply, don’t pass out.

Test/Retest, Pushup, dip, high hang on the snatch

Mission:  2-3 minutes a side working one rib segment at a time.

Kstar

Hey Leopardinos,

Today we have a killer mobility assignment.  Get some friends (with sore bits), get everyone a barbell, and mash the frak out of what hurts.  The only rule is that you have to collect 12 minutes of uninterrupted mashing. Think of this as a sort of choose your own adventure for pain. And speaking of adventure, it is my pleasure to introduce The Modern Gypsies.  Eric, Taylor, and John recently won an ABC network reality show (they were fit and unscared, wore purple shirts, and had amazing mustaches…of course they won.)  They quickly figured out that they could leverage their passion for adventure travel with changing the world.  These guys blew into our gym a few months ago and poof, a bromance was born.  They recently regrew their staches for MOvember, but we know they were just looking for any excuse the travel like Tom Seleck.

Like so many of the other people doing amazing things we’ve highlighted on the MWod, these guys make it look easy.  And classy.

The Mash Party was inspired by super star Katie Hogan and the crazy athletes at Valley Crossfit.  I can’t think of a better homage to the Gypsy Boys.

Themoderngypsies.com

Kstar

Hey Mwodies,

Today’s episode is like a horrible mash up between Martha Stewart Lifting, Holmes on Homes, and the Science Channel.  First up is a quick primer on how to make your own compress and floss band.  Then, we take on what I think is the best use of the band yet, the high hamstring and groin.  And because we are always working on making your life more horrible, we add some joint distraction to the mix. Oh, you thought flossing was cool?  Meet super flossing.  I just killed your face!

Mission: Make you own compression floss band;  Then:  2 min super flossing each side, each mob.

K-handy-star

Part of the mission of the mobility project is to highlight the work done by some of our amazing friends.  One of the lessons that 350+ plus episodes has taught us, is that unless you take a crack at solving your own business, no one else is going show up and do it.  It turns out, this is exactly why The Disposable Heroes Project is so badass.  A few friends decided that unless they took a swing at a big problem, it wasn’t going to be solved or dealt with.  What’s the MobRx for helping a family put itself back together after multiple deployments and horrific injuries?  Start with the problems right in front of you (family needs furniture).  Then, work up and down stream.  Pretty soon, you and a couple of friends have made a huge change, that everyone can see.

www.thedhproject.org

Not sure what to get Dad for Christmas or Hanukkah?  Get him a kickass shirt at the link above.

Kstar