Random Thoughts

It's been some time since I posted one of these, so of course it will be long.This summer at Perform Better, I asked if we can articulate a philosophy.  By its very nature, philosophy is the study of "it."  It's the study of "why."  Why do you do what you do?Maybe the better question to get this question grounded is do you have a mission statement.  It's pretty much the same thing just maybe in a less existential packaging.  In the time it takes to get on and off the elevator, what is it that you do?My mission statement is to grow a systematic and agnostic approach to creating solutions that prioritizes all imaginable and even unimaginable methods of performance including medical, fitness, nutrition, psychological, and technical & tactical.I think this is your floor.................................Random Thoughts...........just stuff that I put into my notes all day that pretty much doesn't always make it to TwitterWhen we use technologies to measure movement skills, do we always know if we are utilizing hip extension to create locomotion, or are we just seeing hip extension as a joint angle.Does it matter?Does this make any muscle(s) weak?  Weak as defined by substandard force production?  And does it tell us how to establish force production?Ugh, it's such a mess to hitch your wagon to biomechanics.  It should be in your wagon, but it's not the whole kit and caboodle.Most of the time the only difference between Rehab and Recovery is tissue failure.And even more of the time the solution is efficiently improving blood flow for the purposes of why you are in the hole in the first place.Following concepts of a High-Low training model is a pretty good idea.What makes auditing what you THINK is happening is actually what IS happening such a bad idea?What are you afraid of, COACH?The easiest way to challenge the realities of the Interference Effect, take half your athletes and clients and violate the suggested half-lives of AMPK and mTOR, and keep to them with the other half.I tend to believe the science that AMPK last 2 hrs and mTOR lasts 14-18 hrs.I also tend to believe that in undertrained individuals, low training ages, very young or older athletes, or individuals coming off long bouts of injury/sedentary that the time frames don't matter.Regarding the above concepts, there's so many great ideas when Cal Dietz speaks.........--Holding your breath likely increases the AMPK response, so try cardio taping your mouth shut.  I haven't tried that yet, but maybe I will.--Try training cardio/endurance every 2 hours to continually amplify the AMPK response.  Then after the last 2 hours you decide, lift in the mid to late afternoon and run out your 14-18 hours.I asked Cal if he approved of this terminology to build out a French Contrast Quadset.  He did.Main Compound LiftSpeed-StrengthStrength-SpeedSport-SpecialSet schemes of 4-4-4-4 or 1-2-1-2.In subscription to the Neurodevelopmental Perspective of movement, we all verticalize and locomote without any reliable verbal cues.  We all develop with different languages, different words, different nurturing, yet we all develop relatively the same from a locomotor standpoint.In many ways this is the Dynamical Systems Theory at work, but if we reverse engineer the oddity of the process, that the external coaching is not the driving factor, then we can ask what is the driving factor.I think the driving factor is the emotion that drives us to find Mommy or food or colors or sounds or textures.Coaching movement should reflect emotion, which lives deep in our human DNA.  How you create that emotional experience is up to you and maybe more importantly what makes who you're coaching tick.  There is no cookbook.But there is emotion.Nick Winkelman strung this together well: Babies move on seeking sensory input.  When sensory input is found, it is an emotional experience.  We remember these experiences.  Words are reflections of memory and meaning.  Analogies are words to strongly reflect memory and meaning.  Make your coaching analogies trigger emotion.The best coaches probably do this without thinking.I think we can sum this up that we should coach how the individual would want to be made to feel emotion, not how the coach reflects emotion from him or herself.So Aromatherapy fits in how.....................?With the holiday broken, I have seen quite a few general population runners, and I have offered up this plan.Stick with the exact same total time or distance to run.  Just run "really fast" as long as you can and then walk until you feel ready to run "really fast" again.  Some people find they cover even more ground in their set time, and most fairly reliably outrun their overuse ailments.Easy Left Brain Way: Run while seeing orange/red/black/maroon as long as you can.  Walk until you see light yellow/green.  Repeat.Easy Analytical Way: Run at above 8/10 as long as you can.  Walk until 3/10.  Repeat.Scientific Way: Run until HR touches 90%.  Walk until touches 60%.  Repeat.Alactic Way: Sprint hard as possible until you noticeably slow down.  If this is more than 12 seconds and you are NOT a cyborg, you're doing it wrong.  Walk until the top of the next minute or until HR touches 40%.Substitute run for whatever you want.And I am less quick to advise technically on running as it is not my thing.  I'd rather them just go see Chris Johnson when he comes to NYC next.  But his 3 paintball rules are 1) Run quietly, 2) Increase step rate, and/or 3) Run barefoot.Those technical approaches aside, my ideas are more based in what Charlie Francis taught us about the Hi-Low approach that I alluded to before.The Lows are too low for adaptation, but ideal to recovery from.The Mediums are too low for adaptation, and require significant recovery.The Highs are ideal for adaptation, and require significant recovery.Cool how I threw that Left Brain jazz in there too, huh?The humble human performance evaluations recognizes solutions can be found through...1) Equipment,2) Technical & Tactical,3) Biological Power,4) Fundamental Joint Skills and AbilitiesTo have passion and expertise in all Windows of Success is absurd.To not acknowledge that is maybe even worse.When it comes to getting stronger, I imagine it is debatable (or not) that we can increase the actual number of muscle fibers.It is less debatable that we can fill up the muscle fibers with organelles that allow for more force production in different ways.Tell me again how you do this with tonic muscles thinner than a leaf off a tree with your little yellow rubber bands..........And from the other side of getting stronger, increasing Rate of Force Development is probably simply discussed in terms of lifting as heavy as possible, as fast as possible, and as mean and angry as possible.I tend to think the rest periods is where we foul this all up.Genetics is a big piece to creating qualities.  I have a hard time buying messages from individuals that nobody every heard saying this or that about genetics.  At some point, you're not making me into a marathoner, and you're not taking a marathoner into a 4x BW squat.I'd still take my chances with the marathoner in the monolift as per what we think we know about biopsies of spinal cord patients that show Type 1 fibers pre-injury measuring to be closer to that of Type 2 qualities.The elite endurance athlete is still going to have overwhelmingly high amount of Type 1 fibers via their genetics, and if you can change some to Type 2, and then improve oxidative function of those Type 2's, I kinda like that idea.  I've not had success in selling this process to any endurance athlete I've worked with because 1) they are dumb, and 2) most of them are so injured, that training for performance is a low priority.Ha!  There's a Morpheus line in there.I used to think Train Slow, Be Slow was correct, and I was miserably wrong.  That was in reference to cyclic repeats of running, etc.I was wrong again in training as I am terribly behind the curve in understanding the Overshoot Phenomenon.And of course the cost here is establishing an off-season and deprioritizing Sport-Specific Training and/or Motor Skill Mastery.Periodization applies to the situation.Planning applies to all situations.I think when I get bored from this 5-day Alactic training, I will try the (French) Contrast Training.I just wonder if I can recovery and train as often as I'd like.Right now, 5-7 days, and I feel awesome.One thing I wish I could do more of with myself and athletes is throw medicine balls and some version of the Tom House weighted throwing or swinging program.The #1 thing in the buildout of a gym is a sizable wall area to throw medballs.When there is a counter-movement to a lift or throw or jump, it seems the quicker you turn over, the faster you load up, and you stretch somewhere in the middle of your capability, the more explosive the result.Nothing new, but also things rarely seen.Everybody loves the discern of analyzing the golf club and how it affects how the ball flies.But there's so much less interest in using that discern in how the human body affects the golf club.I just like the term Smash Factor.  https://blog.trackmangolf.com/smash-factor/In a lot of sports, we don't use our arms to jump higher.Maybe this brings us back to Bosco's Jump Testing approach of hands on hips to test lower body power and not necessarily the skill of jumping.Very underrated aspect to training for hand-held implement sports is training action at the wrists, particularly speed-strength.If there are dynamics at the wrist joints, I tend think I am missing a lot of chances and creativity to power training.The Fitness 4x4 Matrix puts this right in front of you.We can say the same thing about ankles and toes to a lesser degree.Joint motions are just the wheels for the vehicles we use to create adaptations in the body.Hotel Workout = 60' on elliptical or Javorek Complex with little baby dumbellsIt's interesting that exhalation is at time favored and claimed to be part of a parasympathetic process, yet increases in exhalation blows off increases in CO2 which makes the blood more alkaline which creates a sympathetic shift via kidneys pushing off carbonic acid via the urine.The Bohr Effect suggests in this case of more acidic blood, O2 is less ready to attach to hemoglobin, which means less distribution through the gut and more smooth muscle tension.  Constant tension can lead to Calcium and Magnesium distribution.Amazing what reading from independent resources that don't care how you train or rehab will do for the search for the truth.Forced or repeated exhalation can be useful in high-cost, high reward resistance training.  It seems out of line to use in recovery strategies intended to decrease tone and/or establish joint centration.  It's probably the inhalation that makes that work.Oh wait, the story gets better.  Then during the acute period of time before the body is able to compensate, which appears to be 2-6 hours and is really guided by the individual's fitness level, this alkaline blood level leads to hypoxia of the local tissues.What you do next says a lot about your interest in winning.I agree that tissues are not released with techniques largely known as soft tissue release.But would we be okay to call it Soft Tissue Induction?Quick magic act for DN, DP, FP in Multi-Segmental Rotation before you go to the table: ART to the Quadratus Lumborum.What I struggle with in getting into a lot of repetitions of the different Positional Release Techniques is palpating anything that confidently leads you to a treatment.I need more exposure or base it off a frank motion loss rather than a bony palpation guide.Do you ever see someone really stiff in upper or lowers and then really, really explosive in the other half?I think this is usually no, and I bet the reason is that training specially for elastic stiffness in the mobile components is still training the fascia throughout the whole body.And this is when intelligent physiological training for densification is responded with neurological nociception because we didn't match up the whole body with what appears to be a focus of upper or lower body training.Programming is all clinical.Coaching is a mesh of clinical and personal.More interpretation and regurgitation from Nick Winkelman..........Personal = cultural, generational, motivational, vernacular, and personalityClinical = Time, Speed, Direction, Shape, Force, DexterityAfter you have a target of interest to coach, for all the words and analogies we may choose to use, there's probably 2 sets for each coaching point: one for Feed-Forward Tension and one for Feedback Tension.In training for acceleration, I think it's more than just training fast.It's having as mobile a mechanical system as possible.  It's having tissue resiliency and starting strength at end ranges, and then probably lastly, it's training speed-strength so we can load these far edges of motion with speed and plyometric movement.A big thing that I have felt good in my development of my coach is that there is a range of form that equals more safe than efficient when we are training for fat loss or work capacity................most of the time.Not all discs demonstrating pathoanatomy are responded to with pain.But some are.And if a treatment model that is based on the mechanics of the disc changes pain, then I don't think anybody has any business questioning the result.In pathoanatomical testing, is it all possible to say we are testing or measuring any finite amount of things?The best model of evaluation is one that take you away from your passion or expertise when it is clearly not useful.The challenge is many treatment techniques that have gravity and utility come already assembled with an "in-house" evaluation model that only takes you to that technique.  How can whatever this technique is solve everything?  And how is that anywhere near humble that your favorite technique is all you need?Physiogical status can acutely affect mechanical status which transduces to neurological behaviors and responses.This relates to the respiratory functions discussed above that typically associated with social responses, anxiety, and pain.When this become chronic, treatment approaches require hunt and peck as the status quo has changed.A (+) neurodynamic test doesn't have to mean it's a neurodynamic problem or treatment approach.If the symptoms of complaint aren't reproduced, it's either something else, or you may need to increase the tension of the test beyond what is traditionally discussed.  To do this, we can bring in relevant regional interdependence of the nerve and see what happens.The cloudiness of discogenic pain and directional preference and the facts that we know about the discs' response to movements like flexion and rotation is that in the presence of disc pathoanatomy, it still doesn't indicate if nociception is largely from nerve root compression, annular fissures, or both.A posterior disc gets better with flexion because that treated the nerve root brilliantly by opening the joint an allowing for blood flow.And the funny part is a keen full-body evaluation will actually make this easier to get to off the bat.A posterior disc can get worse with extension because even a minute of joint space compression can lead to SEA, and maybe that's why dry needling or manual therapy works like magic sometimes if it can be successful at decreasing SEA.It's all in the eval.ELDOA notes--The course was overall atrocious in organization and explanation.--Very hard to understand why or how subtle changes in the arms or legs change the target spinal segment, but it is not hard to offer up a good exercise that someone else says does something even if you don't understand why.--The links to what we learn from Spina and DNS are stark.  It is basically DNS with static tension instead of fluid movement.--Most people who I have used these techniques with report positively.  That's probably all that matters.