Functional Path Training

Focus on Function

The body is a system. It is a system like no other. It is a completely open system, that is highly adaptable. The whole of the actions that the body can achieve is greater than the sum of its parts. When the body needs to solve a moment problem it is almost magic what it can do. Never sell the body and its capabilities short.

If you want to understand function start with walking gait. Gait is very basic but incredibly complex when you put it under a microscope. Gait is the basis of function. The legs and arms move in opposition and the shoulders move in a counter rotation to the hips. There is constant loading and unloading from toenails to fingernails in response to the ground and gravity. Running adds another degree of complexity because of the flight phase but the principles are the same. Learn to look at movement with new eyes. Look at gait as the basis of throwing, jumping and freestyle swimming.

Searching for symmetry is contrary to how the body is constructed. The body is fundamentally asymmetric. The heart is on one side, one lobe of the brain is slightly larger than the other, there is a dominant foot, leg, arm, hand, eye, and ear. Because the body is smart this fundamental asymmetry is proportional and has no negative effect. Today because we are able to measure more, there has been a tendency to look at these asymmetries as something that must be corrected. If fact these perceived asymmetries may actually be what makes the athlete able to perform at their best injury free. We must also remember that as an athlete accumulates training age in a particular sport that the body will adapt and favor a limb or a side of the body.

To understand function in the body and how to train it don’t forget to look under the hood. You must understand muscle function which in most cases is significantly different that what is taught in traditional anatomy courses. We do not live in an anatomical position; we move all joints through multiple planes of motion heavily influenced by gravity and the ground. The brain does not recognize individual muscles, it recognizes muscle synergies and patterns of motion, therefore it is futile to isolate individual muscles. Isolating individual muscles results in neural confusion. Train the linkages and connections and the links will take care of themselves. The goal in training movement is to link, connect, sync and coordinate to produce efficient flowing athletic movements.

The solution is quite simple -  take advantage of the bodies wisdom and construction to train and rehab movement using multiple joints, working through multiple planes of motion in a proprioceptively enriched environment. Never lose sight of the fact that each athlete is a case study of one and will respond slightly differently so it is important to base training on principles and can be adapted to each individual.

Hopefully this post has raised some questions and will stimulate thought and discussion. The longer I coach, the more I am in awe of what the body can do. Just like I present movement problems for the athlete to solve, each day as they solve those movement problems raises more question about what I need to do to make the athlete better. It’s a process!

Firing Away ( An Old Post Resurrected)

"A lot of things weren't firing -- his glutes, his hips, thighs," (Training Guru to the star players – name deleted to protect the guilty) told the newspaper. "I wouldn't say his condition was the most severe, I wouldn't say it was the best. ... But if I were to classify it on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most extreme, I'd say he was definitely in the seven, eight category."

If those muscles were not firing how did this player walk? Let’s get logical rather scientific. If there is an injury the body is very intelligent much smarter than the coaches and therapists who try to intervene by turning muscles on or off. The body will guard and call in substitute, as in most teams the substitutes are not as good as the starters, what we need to need to do is figure how to get the first string back into the game and playing as a team. We don’t do that lying on a training table trying to get individual muscles to fire and then hope we can get them back into sequence. We need to figure out what muscle synergies we can use to coordinate all those muscles to work together as a team. Otherwise it would be so simple, just find the master switch, program the body, turn it on and just like flipping a light switch beautiful motion. Hate to break it to the gurus, but there is no switch. We need to understand planes of motion and muscle actions and be able to figure out how to manipulate those variables along with the ground to get the first team players back on the floor playing together. Just remember if they ain’t firing you ain’t moving. It is not about firing it is about coordination and teamwork. Join the team and skip down the functional path to movement bliss. (This is a post I wrote many years ago, if anything this thinking is more pervasive now than it was then.)

Focus on the Basics

Do you know the basics? What are the basics? What do you have to do to develop the physical qualities appropriate for the sport or activity you are training for? Everything I do now and have done for the past fifty-one years is grounded in the basics. I learned early on that if I deviated from the basics there was nothing but problems. It is straightforward and simple in concept but complex in application.

The basics start with with walking gait. In walking gait the arms and legs move in opposition along with a counter rotation of the hips and shoulders. Throwing, running, jumping, freestyle swimming is all based on gait. Therefore, when we look at what underpins the basics it is walking gait.

The basics are the building blocks of the foundation! Here are the basic qualities that you must develop and components that must be worked on:

Speed

         Start

                  Stationary

                   Moving

         Acceleration

                  To optimum speed in C of D sports

                  To maximum speed in Athletics

         Maximum Speed

         Speed Maintenance/Speed Endurance

Agility

         Recognition & Reaction

         Starting

         Change of Direction

         Stopping

Strength

         Relative

         Maximum

Strength Endurance

Power (Ballistic/Explosive)

         Plyometrics

                 Jump

Hop

Bound

         Throws

Endurance (Energetics – Anaerobic and Aerobic)

         Capacity

         Power

         Short Term (2 minutes or less)   Medium Term (2 to 5 minutes)  Long Term (5 minutes and longer)

                        (5 minutes and longer)

Flexibility/Mobility

         Static

         Dynamic

Recovery/Regeneration

Sleep

Nutrition

Hydration

Warm-up (Active/Dynamic)

         Appropriate for the activity being trained for.

Over Recovery Syndrome

I have identified a new syndrome – the over-recovered athlete. I look at the landscape and I see athletes and teams spending as much or more time doing ice baths, cryotherapy massage etc. as they do in actual training. Rest and recovery are fine and necessary but only of benefit if you first do the necessary work. I am fearful that today we have a generation of over-recovered and undertrained athletes so overly mindful of training load that they are not doing enough to stimulate adaptation and prevent injury. Overload and progression are the first principles of training you learn. Progressive overload with rest and recovery cycled just like training are the answer. Sometimes TUF – Training Under Fatigue if acceptable and necessary. Look carefully at what you are doing and what you are not doing to prepare and sometime exceed sport demands. Remember after the work the rest is easy, but first you must do the work!

Walking on Eggshells – Creating Fragile Athletes

What I am seeing today is an ever-widening gap between how the athletes prepare for the game in contrast to the actual game demands. This gap is creating fragile athletes more prone to injury than ever before. Due to artificial restraints placed on training load imposed by a negative medical model that emphasis what the athlete can’t do as opposed to what they must do to prepare. In the attempt to “protect” the athlete we have severely restricted training load instead of systematically overloading the athlete to prepare for actual game demands. I was taught many years ago that one of the purposes of training was to make the game easy, in essence to slow it down by imposing stress in practice that was beyond what was imposed in the game. In other words, don’t try to duplicate game demands, distort them!

We need to rethink our approach, because it is apparent the current approach of walking on eggshells in practice is not reducing injuries. We need to be informed by science, practice sound pedagogy and impose training loads that are realistic to develop robust, resilient athletes who thrive in competition. You will NEVER be able to perform above your level of training but that is what we are currently expecting out athletes to do week after week. There must be progressive overload that exceeds game demands in small doses. We can never forget you play the way you practice. Let’s recognize that being risk averse in unrealistic. To perform at the elite level demands playing on the edge.

The Hamstring Paradox

This is from the 2018 AFL Injury Report produced in collaboration with AFL Doctors Association, AFL Physiotherapists Association, and AFL Football Operations Department. “Hamstring strains remain the most common injury, with an incidence of 6.3 new injuries per club and are the most common cause of matches missed (25.2 matches missed per club), with a recurrence rate of 20%. These are the highest rates we have seen for a number of years.”

This is in the hamstring paradox: we have more research, more data, and more experience. Yet we continue to injure hamstrings at high and higher rates.

Ever since my first trip to Australia in 1996 I have followed the AFL. The sport is one of the most demanding in the world. I thought their approach was systematic and progressive, so it appealed to me. They were the first league in the world to embrace sports science and came to be looked upon as the global model. They were the first league to allow in-game GPS monitors. In short, they are very progressive except one area: hamstring injury prevention. On a visit to OZ in 1999 some of my Australian colleagues and I started brainstorming on this because hamstring injuries have always been a problem. We offered solutions which eventually were published a couple of years later in an article that Dean Benton and I co-authored. You can read that here. There are some changes I would make today in exercise selection which I will go over either on a podcast or another post.

The only result of that article was abuse I received for listing Nordic Hamstring Curl as a contraindicated exercise. But nearly 20 years later I stand by that. Why? Just look at the statistics. No one does more NHC and measures the movement more than AFL teams. So why the continued increase in hamstring injuries? I would suggest they need to rethink their approach; injury avoidance is not a good strategy. They need to look at teams and systems that do not have hamstring injuries and see what they are doing and what they are not doing. If they keep doing the same thing, the problem will only continue to grow more.