Gary Gray Methodology

Charlie,

As someone on the outside looking in on this, in the sense that I am not an active professional in either physical therapy or strength coaching, I wanted to ask you if past possessing the ability to actually flex and extend the spine optimally at each articulation/segment, is it a case of avoiding lumbar flexion and lateral flexion as much as is humanly possible, regardless of what we are doing? Basically from your comment regarding those suggesting training in certain positions for “resiliency” I get the feeling that you feel that strength and mobility in these areas do not require active work to maintain, which is contrary to how many of us typically approach things when we don’t know any better.

I suppose my confusion on the neutral spine vs. flexion front stems from some coaches who are adamant about maintaining neutral spine in all lifts and then are less stringent about lumbar spine movement during a bodyweight drill like mountain climbers. While I certainly don’t think that a relatively healthy spine will explode if it encounters some flexion here and there, that never struck me as any reason to seek it out one bit…………………but now I seem borderline militant about maintaining a tall spine during everything loaded or otherwise, and as someone who isn’t well-educated in these areas, I was simply wondering if my tendency to avoid even the hint of lumbar flexion and lateral flexion as often as possible, whether in the gym or just going about daily life, could actually be missing the boat in some respect or set me up for some type of problem down the road.

When it comes to flexion of the spine (specifically in the lumbar region), does it come down to essentially maintaining it once we have it, but not seeing it out? i.e. saving flexion for when we may randomly encounter it in daily living but never seeking it out in anything we do in the gym.

Bruce – I think you are following where I am coming from here.
Poor movement stresses passive structures. You only get so many bad moves in these structures.
And just when you least expect it, the straw that breaks the camel’s back abounds. It’s not getting folded up in a squat turned into a dumped good morning. It’s from picking up a piece of dust in the kitchen.

The assumption that we are going by is for example once you get the toe touch, you keep the toe touch with great advanced corrective exercise as long as needed and deadlifts in the program.

Keep in mind that there is 45-50 degrees of lumbar flexion in a normal spine as well as about 12 degrees of rotation. These are normal ranges that should be evident. Going beyond is not appropriate, nor is repeatedly going through what is available.

This model that values t-spine, hip, and ankle mobility through stable movements actually should expect to yield less frequency of bad positions in “real life” and game-play.