Protecting Your Potential | Part 2 (Skills & Programming)

Our bipedal bodies and their many joints afford us a menu of playful pleasures. Our gigantic brains deserve credit too, for they conduct symphonies of sinew and assign meaningless points for balls flung in nets and then cascade emotions for the players, and even those who watch. But to preserve those gifts, we must understand that they arise from complex interactions. Easier said than done but teachable nonetheless.

When you see something abnormal on the Apiros IG not only is it fun, it is an attempt to replenish normal human complexity after an athlete has simplified her movement. The more complexity she can keep, the better. 

I have three points to teach you about our sapien sophistication.

1) Segmental Movement & Shared Load

If you bend your spine in any direction, masterful movement would be a scythe-like bend of your midline, with each moon-white bone angling a few degrees more than the next. Movement that is simplistic and risky would be crinkling your column at one disk—as if it were a knee.

Moving with human complexity allows you to distribute forces across a greater number of muscles, tendons, and bones, which is good for health and performance. Moving remedially allocates forces to acute areas, and unless you have the capacity in that area, you’ll increase your risk of noncontact injury and decrease your potential.

Image from a previous blog post.

2) Freedom

When it comes to movement in therapy and training, one way I assess mastery is by the behavior of the lesser involved joints during movement. Are they tense or relaxed? (You saw this in part one with Nick.) If you lunge, does one of your arms unconsciously float upwards as if you were a marionette? Or does it dangle, relaxed, free, and ready for an additional task? 

Anther way I assess is variability: how many different ways can you squat? How many different pull-ups can you do? What angles can you rotate your pelvis around your femur during a single-leg RDL?

Here are a few more prompts for you: Do both of your arms swing while walking or running, and equally? What about a pull-up, are your legs free enough to come to your chest or go to the side? Does your neck or foot contort in an odd way as you ascend? Go find out. 

3) Skills, Options, & Programming

The most skilled athletes have a wider range of options. Steph Curry has mastered the three-pointer because he can shoot in a myriad of other ways. It’s more accurate to say he has mastered the trajectories of basketballs than the three. So, are you restricted to serving, throwing, juking, or forehanding in one way, or can you succeed when embodying the creativity of Curry?

Secondly, it’s hard to move fast, or skillfully, through a range of motion that you don’t own. Athletes tell me all the time they’ve strived for a technique change but failed to get it until I helped them get the specific endurance and strength in those positions. These facts are why my programming hierarchy is built on prerequisites.

3.1) Programming

1. Awareness & Access

1. You need to be able to move your bones in the ways you need for your sports, and to train your body in more specific ways. This sounds obvious, but the majority of athletes I see do not move how they think they do. It’s no one’s fault. Most people lack this awareness because our culture is far-sighted. They have no reason to become that aware. And so, they lack access to the patterns they need to play the games they love. 

2. Endurance

1. Your muscles need the local capacity to endure fatigue. Meaning the muscles you need to move like a human need certain cellular adaptations to keep producing energy when you get tired. Otherwise, you’ll revert to simpler patterns that can sustain fatigue when sports and training inevitably get tough. Your body only moves where you can produce energy.

3. Strength

1. If you need a movement pattern at speed for your sport, which is almost all sports, you need to be able to sustain high forces in that pattern. So, strength is a prerequisite to speed. Get strong in the specific positions you need to move like a human, and those you need to play your sport. Otherwise, once you put the gas pedal down, you’ll reinvest into remedial patterns.

4. Speed

1. Once athletes have enough strength in a human movement pattern, or sport-specific one, I on-ramp them. I progressively increase their speed and intensity as long as they maintain the movement pattern we are working on. 

5. Skills

1. Just because you’ve owned your movement skills in the weight room does not mean they will show up on the field. While preserving your new patterns, you need progressive immersion into simple and then complicated environments, ones that are sport-specific. Oh, and dancing around plastic ornaments telling yourself “it’s football!” won’t work. You need opponents and teammates and game-like situations because those are what trigger movements, and you need to blend those catalysts with the patterns you’ve earned in the weight room or physical therapy clinic. 

Now, there are more complicated reasons behind my programming flow, but this blog post is not the appropriate place for them. My course is. These five steps allow me to restore people’s complexity in every way they need it. 

• Subscribers get first access to the goodies I’m developing 👀.

• You’ve probably heard about my course many times, the one where I teach how humans evolved to move and how they devolve. The next one starts July and it’s filling up. Here’s that link again.

• If you liked, loved, or laughed with this post, share it. You know I’m on a mission to make noncontact injuries extinct and evolve performance. If just one more of your friends reads this post and then subscribes to this newsletter, you’ll help make this mission a reality. And I do need your help. This ain’t easy.