Training comes down to stress management: it’s my job to determine how much and what kind of stress to apply, and it’s your job to get yourself ready to handle as much stress as possible.

I work as a trainer, both in person and online, specializing in getting former athletes back into game shape. A lot of the time this comes down to dudes in their 30s and 40s trading a few pounds of fat in for some more muscle. The tough part? Most of them are busier than ever, and certainly busier than they were when they felt their best.

The name of the game for us—and for you—is stress management. I want to to apply as much stress to your system as it can handle. The more we can apply, and the more you can handle, the better your results will be, and the faster they’ll come.

How does stress help someone lose fat or build muscle? What do I mean by stress management? And how can you apply some of these lessons to your own training? Let’s take a look.

Stress Type

The first question I need to answer in regards to any client and stress is what type of stress do I need to expose them to? In some sense, stress is just stress, but when it comes to adaptation—more on that later—we need to get more specific.

Are we trying to improve aerobic capacity? Then we’ll need to drive capillary and mitochondrial density by starving working muscles of oxygen, and filling them with waste products—all in an effort to get your body to prevent that specific kind of badness from happening again in the future.

Wanna get jacked? We’re going to literally rip your muscles apart with heavy load (in a nice way, promise!) while creating such an acidic environment that it forces a cascade of hormones to be released, all in an effort to keep it from being so bad the next time around.

There’s a ton of detail here. Sets, reps, rest periods, training timing, and frequency. The good news for you is that that’s all on me.

The bad news? That’s only half of the equation, and the other half is up to you.

The Amount of Stress and Response

That second half of the equations is all about the amount of stress a client can tolerate. This isn’t about being tough, it’s about being prepared and being effective.

Before we go any further, it’s important we understand the stress response and what happens to us on a chemical and hormonal level when we’re subjected to stress.

At this point, it’s not important for us to differentiate between stressors—between, say, your Monday commute and your Friday workout—so instead we’ll try to get a basic understanding of the similarities. Let’s take a look at how stress works in a simple but dramatic context.

The Zebra: A Story

In his seminal book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky outlines the mammalian stress response, and how its intended effect has been subverted by modern realities. I’ll attempt to boil a few hundred pages written by of one of the world’s leading neuroendocrinologists down to a handful of bullet points (wish me luck!):

• A zebra being chased by a lion is super stressed out.
• That’s a good thing. It keeps him alive.
• A zebra’s stress halts every process that isn’t going to matter in the next five minutes—digestion, cell repair, sex hormone production—and it diverts these newly freed up resources to running fast and far.
• Once the zebra gets away, he’s not stressed. He goes back to grazing, napping—whatever it was he was up to before the mean ol’ lion showed up—and his body’s systems go back to normal. You don’t see a worried or neurotic zebra.
• We’re like zebras in some ways, and not like them in others.
• We have a similar stress response—we divert long-term resources to short term fixes when we’re stressed.
• The problem is that it’s not usually lions stressing us out. We can’t literally run away from our problems. Things like taxes. Politics. Jobs. Traffic. Boyfriends. Children. And yet the result is the same—digestion, cell repair, sex hormone production, and more all take a back seat so that resources can be freed up to deal with our modern lions.
• Look around at our chronically-stressed society and just how commonplace issues with digestion, inflammation (cell-repair), and sex hormone regulation have become. The deadliest and most expensive healthcare crises we face all come down to these factors.
• Stress is great when it’s an acute response, and dangerous when it’s chronic.
• Be more like a zebra.

The Zebra: Some Biology

Let’s take another look at the zebra, this time through a slightly more scientific lens.

Stress drives three related shifts to occur within the zebra.

The first change that occurs is that the zebra’s autonomic (or unconscious) nervous system moves from a parasympathetic state to a sympathetic state. In plain English, his nervous system switches gears from neutral to overdrive. Colorfully put, he switches from a “rest and digest” focus to the famous “fight or flight” mode.

The second shift affects the zebra’s cellular processes. The grazing zebra is in an anabolic state. All that this means is that his systems are largely devoted to building bigger molecules; turning glucose into glycogen or amino acids into proteins.

The stressed zebra shifts—in a virtual instant—into a catabolic state. Larger molecules need to be broken down. Glycogen needs to turn back into glucose, and glucose into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and water in order to fuel his escape.

The third way of examining the zebra’s shift in priorities is from a hormonal standpoint. Hormones are the body’s chemical signalers, and in the case of this particular exotic equine, the hormonal profile registers a shift away from the future and towards the present.

Testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin are all anabolic, future-driven hormones. They ensure the propagation of our genetic lineage, take care of the wear and tear of daily life, and generally get us ready to face the next challenge.

The lion is that next challenge, and so things change. The future is mortgaged for the present, and the increased presence of hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine (adrenaline), and glucagon reflect that shift.

All of these changes work in concert to keep the zebra alive. Each supports and is supported by the others, and all reflect the general principle that the future isn’t worth worrying about unless you get there.

The Drip of Stress Hormones

We face the occasional lion in our lives; a sudden, immediate, and overwhelming source of stress. You can feel the impact of these moments—suddenly swerving to avoid a car or pedestrian, rushing to grab your child before they hurt themselves—and that sensation is a reflection of the huge changes taking place internally to allow you to respond effectively. But these occurrences are rare for most of us.

Instead, we face an onslaught of low-level stress. A drip, drip, drip of stress hormones rather than a tsunami. We don’t feel the rush of blood and narrowing of focus that accompanies an emergency, and so we have a tendency to ignore it, but it’s still there, eating away at our ability to prepare for the future.

Bigger muscles? Sorry, bad boss. Trimmer waistline? But what about traffic? Where the zebra ping pongs between two different states, we have an ineffective habit of living between them. And as a result, we’re ill-equipped for both present and future.

Stress and Training

What’s that all have to do with gaining muscle or building endurance? In many ways, your body has trouble distinguishing between stressors. Stress is stress. Your morning commute and leg day feel about the same on a biological level, driving similar hormones but with very different consequences.

If we can’t keep the day to day chronic stress under control then we’ll be severely limited in how much acute training stress we can apply without doing more harm than good. Releasing just enough cortisol to help remodel muscle? That’s great! Releasing a constant stream of cortisol, resulting in a constant signal to break down rather than rebuild? Not so great.

Stress evolved to be a good thing: it literally fuels the zebra’s escape.

Stress can be a good thing for us—products of modern realities—but rarely in the immediate case of running for our lives. Instead, it gets its value from the subsequent recovery it triggers. We call this stress-induced recovery an adaptation.

The Role of Adaptation

Everything you’ve ever done in the gym has been an attempt to drive adaptation. Bigger muscles? Adaptation. Better endurance? Less fat? Adaptations.

Here’s a simple experiment that nearly perfectly illustrates stress, recovery, and adaptation:

Find a carpeted floor and vigorously rub your palm on it for 5-10 seconds. You should feel heat, tingling, and maybe the start of an uncomfortable burning sensation. With me? Good. Now imagine two different scenarios.

• Scenario 1: Rub your palm on the carpet for the next 10 minutes with exactly the same vigor. Pain, sores, and blood await.
• Scenario 2: Vigorously rub your palm the carpet for 10 seconds. Stop. Wait for an hour or two. Repeat, 59 more times over the next few days. Sores have been replaced by callouses. The difference? It wasn’t the stress (both experiments involved 10 minutes of stress), it was the recovery. In this case, all that was needed was time, the stress being simple and relatively moderate.

The link between stress and adaptation lies in recovery, and recovery requires the removal of stress.

There’s more to recovery than rest—nutrition, hydration, sleep and more are all tremendously important—but none of these are effective in the face of persistent stress.

Practical Strategies to Manage Stress

We can’t eliminate stressors from our lives. Quitting your job, abandoning social media, and moving to the middle of the woods to meditate isn’t a very feasible option for most of us.

What we can do is try to minimize the influence of those chronic stressors in order to maximize the effect—via adaptation— of the acute stressor we can train.

Below are three practical strategies for mitigating stress and maximizing your gains.

1. Meditation: You can call it froufrou or hokey, but there’s some good solid research to support meditation’s effect on both the mind and the body. I’m ill-equipped to give detailed advice on the minutiae of meditation, and it’s an extremely personal practice, but I will say that habit, practice, and repetition go a long way. I use a guided meditation app called Headspace and aim for 10-15 minutes per day.
2. Sleep: The importance of sleep is almost impossible to overstate—consider it a panacea and you’re about right. It reduces the risk of cancer, heart disease, obesity, dementia, and more. We reconcile memory and emotion and restore hormonal balances during sleep, and even a few night of what’s termed “short sleeping” have immediate detrimental effects. For a lot of us, stress can actually make sleep more difficult.
   Reducing caffeine intake, exercising regularly, sticking to a consistent sleep schedule, and practicing sleep hygiene by ensuring a cool, dark room reserved for sleep and sex are good starting points for better sleep. I’d also recommend Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep as a fascinating and helpful look at the details of sleep.
3. Social Support: This one is the proverbial double edged sword. On the one hand, friends and family can add to our stress levels, while on the other these relationships can serve as an outlet and a balance for the stress of daily life. The bottom line here is that like the zebra, we have a hardwired need for positive social interactions, and even the most driven individual needs to get out of the gym and spend some time with people they care about.

Use Stress to Your Advantage

I ran into a great summary of exercise the other day:

“Exercise is just applying pain to the body until it’s immune to that kind of pain.”

Not exactly, but to be honest it’s pretty damn close.

We develop immunity through exposure. If you had chickenpox then you developed antibodies that helped you develop a level of immunity to catching the disease in the future. The disease was the stressor, the antibodies the response, and immunity is the resulting adaptation.

Stress isn’t bad. We started with the premise that I’d actually like to give you an awful lot of it in specific and calculated doses. The problem with stress is when it becomes ever-present, and understanding the stress response in general terms can help us understand how it limits our progress in the gym.

As fitness junkies we have a tendency to focus on the “hard” stuff—sets, reps, and macro counts—while ignoring the “soft” side of the equation. The problem with this approach is that human being may be the most complicated and integrated machinery in history.

The soft stuff is the hard stuff. Mean people can impact your blood work. Meditation may just help build muscle. And while we may not yet—or ever—have a perfect understanding of the innumerable ways stress impacts the body, we can be sure that it does.

The post An Exercise In Stress Management appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

• “I’m stressed out!”
• “Oh no, I’m stressed! I need to relax!”
• “Now I’m stressed about needing to relax!”

That’s a pretty vicious cycle, and one that can be uniquely exacerbated by a number of factors. Stress feeds on itself, and as workouts are skipped, diets ignored, and excuses are made, the stress continues to build and we’re driven further and further from where we want to be.

The research on stress is pretty compelling, and it’s no wonder we aim to avoid it. Modern life is filled with things our ancestors never dealt with like bosses and mortgages, and as Robert Sapolsky explains in his seminal work Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, our stress response evolved to fill a short-term, acute need. Modern life presents a fairly primitive mechanism with a confusing set of signals, and when that acute response becomes chronic, chaos ensues. Everything from heart disease and hypertension to diabetes and obesity have been linked to chronic stress.

The key concept here is the difference between acute and chronic. What’s good for us in the short-term can be terrible for us in the long-term.

The Beauty of Stress

Stress is not an enemy, it’s an ally. We’re not particularly good at ignoring or avoiding stress, and it’s a good thing we’re not: in its own way stress may be as effective and powerful a change agent as natural selection. Without stress you’re weak, slow, fat, dumb, and all but indistinguishable from an adult-sized lump of clay.

Stripped of any color or judgement, stress is nothing more than a signal that you need to change. Evolution has left us a uniquely conservative and efficient machine—stress is the counterpart to this efficiency. Where evolution tells the body to slow the metabolism during a famine, stress tells the body to ramp it up and find some extra energy during a fight.

A rash is a simple and primitive form of stress; odds are you shouldn’t wear that sweater or use that lotion anymore. Blushing is another fundamental manifestation of stress in humans, and is often triggered as a way of reinforcing social norms. The heat from a flame hurts when you get too close to it; another form of stress trying to force a response. Stress isn’t an enemy, it’s a teacher, albeit a fairly strict one.

Putting Stress to Work

The difference between stress pushing us to new heights or pulling us into the abyss, classically referred to as eustress and distress, respectively, lies in its application and in our response to it. Pioneering endocrinologist Hans Selye’s early work on the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) laid out three distinct phases to the stress response: the alarm stage (stress is introduced), the resistance stage (the body attempts to adapt), and the exhaustion stage (reached if and when the body’s response is insufficient).

Rather than analyzing his methods and findings, let’s use a simple example. Imagine two people, both asked to spend three hours rubbing their hands together over the course of the coming week. The first person breaks the task up into small segments—a minute or two here, a minute or two there—and accumulated 20 or 30 minutes of stress (hand-rubbing) each day. The second person decides to attack things head on, and spends three straight hours rubbing their hands together.

Both people faced the same total amount of stress, but you can imagine the difference in results—where one was inconvenienced the other was likely injured. The stress was the same, but the response was different. The stress of training works in much the same way. I’ll spend more than five or six hours this week lifting weights this week, why not just get it all done on Monday? That would be a recipe for disaster.

Listen to Your Stress

Your stress just wants to be heard. It’s a signal—it exists to force a change, and until that change is made, it will keep poking, prodding, and nudging at you like an annoying sibling in the back seat. The solution? Listen up, and change what you can. You may not be able to skip the traffic (especially if you live in New York and have family in Boston), but there are plenty of ways you can heed your body’s primal advice.

In the words of the immortal Pavel Tsatsouline, “Change is a form of rest.” Time with family may be stressful, but it can be a break from work. Your workout is absolutely a form of stress, but it’s a chance to duck out of the house or the office for an hour. Rather than trying to avoid stressors or pretend you’re immune to them, recognize them for what they are and embrace them in limited doses.

References:

1. Sapolsky, Robert. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1994.

The post Learning from Stress appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The last place these companies would look when trying to build better production cars would be to the junk yard or the repair shop, yet that’s precisely what our industry has done with functional training. Rather than looking to sports performance for insight and inspiration, we’ve turned to therapy and rehab to learn how to work with people who may not be physically fit, but who haven’t been sent in for repairs either.

Functional training is broken, because it looks to a field filled with “broken” bodies for its inspiration. 

In many ways, the problem with functional training lies in how we’ve approached and understood functionality itself. As an industry, we’ve either created perplexing parodies of daily movement—each limb attached to a different band or cable and all heading in separate directions—or else borrowed many of our functional methodologies from a world filled with dysfunction. We’ve borrowed heavily from the world of the therapist, perhaps believing (wrongly) that if a movement can restore function, it can also create, protect, and improve the same. Compounding the issue is the fact that NASM, one of the most popular certifying bodies in the industry, was founded by a physical therapist, Michael A. Clark. In fairness, he’s not hiding anything; he named his organization the National Institute of Sports Medicine. But how exactly have we confused medicine with health?

Both approaches—the overly complex and the wannabe therapy—are faulty, and neglect or distort some of the more fundamental principles of program design. Rather than imitating complex movement patterns or looking to a dysfunctional population for our functional methods, my belief is that we should look to performance-driven populations and applications. In short, we should look to the world of sport. This may seem counterintuitive; Grandma Ethel doesn’t need a 42” vertical or a 4.4 40, she needs to be able to sit and stand comfortably, and get to and from the mailbox safely. We’ll address this apparent gap later on, but for now, consider the analogous example of the automotive industry, in which performance informs the practical.

Before we get into the specifics of the argument, it’s worth defining what functional training is—and should be—as well as examining a few of the ways our approach has broken down.

Adding a resistance band does not make a movement more “functional.” [Photo credit: stroopsmma | CC BY 2.0]

What the F@$k is Functional, Anyway?

A dictionary definition of functional might not look like much of the training of the same name. In its simplest form, functional simply means something that is, above all, practical or useful—something that works. It stands to reason, then, that function is dependent upon use and user, and therefore we should expect some degree of difference from one person to the next. While we all share common fundamental movement patterns, we all engage in different daily activities and have varying needs and functions. We’ll revisit this idea later, but for now let’s look at the three biggest breaks in the current approach to functional training.

Problem 1: Scope of Practice

I work as a strength coach and personal trainer. My job is to increase various fitness capacities and qualities, and make you better at doing things and staying healthy. That’s it. If you’re in pain, it’s not my job. Legally it’s beyond what I can and should be focusing on. Sure, I can try to promote better movement patterns in the hope that they prevent present and future pain, but trying to diagnose and treat existing pain, or playing around with other aspects of medicine? Not. My. Job.

Problem 2: Specificity Gone Bad

Programming 101 is rooted in specificity. Appropriate use of this principle informs intelligent athletic programming and ensures something called “rate of transfer,” which is in itself a measure of effectiveness and, arguably, functionality. Sadly, functional training has confused specificity with imitation, resulting in loaded movement patterns so specific as to be comical: I’ve seen people loading their putting stroke. Seriously, talk about “majoring in the minors.”

Instead, specificity should look to broader concepts such as plane of motion, base of support, rate of force development, load and load position etc., and challenge the body with a robust combination of the above. Let’s look at an example: thoracic rotation is a key component of a gait pattern, a single-arm throwing motion, a variety of reaching, lifting and chopping patterns, as well as scores of other movements in life and sport. A “functional trainer” might attempt to recreate each of these, banding and cabling their little heart out, while a much more practical and effective approach would be to ensure effective thoracic mobility in a variety of positions and settings over the course of a macrocycle—standing and seated, kneeling and quadruped, loaded and unloaded. Better, safer results with less time invested, leaving more time for improving fitness.

Problem 3: Function From Dysfunction

The persistent assumption that therapeutic methods imply functional methods is built on the same faulty logic that materials intended for repair are appropriate for construction. Nobody needs a bridge built out of duct tape. Dysfunction requires repair, while function requires challenge, integration, and development. If the goals are different, the methods should be as well, and yet we’re still burdened with the idea that a BOSU ball automatically makes a squat functional by recruiting proprioceptive and stabilizing resources. Unless an injury or resultant compensation is present, a human being probably has no business squatting on a BOSU ball unless their daily life involves working in a bouncy castle. It’s not functional, it’s ridiculous. Give them an asymmetrical stance, an uneven load, a shifting load, but don’t pretend that rehab is anything but that.

Why are we using tools meant for repair on people who aren’t broken? [Photo credit: LocalFitness.com.au]

Functional Requires Specificity

Earlier we defined functional as practical and useful, and acknowledged that certain fundamental patterns would be shared, but that daily life, activities, hobbies and histories would influence what might be deemed useful for an individual. For something to be useful, it must be used; specificity in its simplest form. 

As a starting point, we can acknowledge that squatting (sitting and standing), hinging (bending over), pushing and pulling (moving and lifting objects), and ambulation (walking, running and crawling) patterns are nearly universal. If we temporarily set aside any differences, we can begin to look at how the general population might benefit from a performance-influenced mindset. Where an athlete may need to squat with the same depth, load, speed and frequency as their given sport, the rest of us need to squat with a depth, load, speed and frequency similar to what we experience in our daily lives. If we’re expected to carry groceries or luggage it might be a good idea to get better at carrying things. If we have a toddler it might be a good idea to get comfortable on the floor, and to get better at both getting there and getting back up.

Functional patterns may be complex, but they may also be simple. Just as athletic performance allows training to be dictated by need and results, functional training should be dependent upon the actual needs of the individual rather than an arbitrary set of ideas governing methods and modalities.

Performance and Rate of Transfer

Training for sports performance offers us an unparalleled opportunity to measure and evaluate not just an athlete’s performance, but through that performance, the effectiveness of their preparation. In other words, athletes do well with good programming and poorly with bad programming. If an athlete needs to jump higher and we prescribe a 12-week training program that results in improvement, we can assume some level of effectiveness. The better they do, the better the program. In scientific studies working with substantial populations this is referred to as the “rate of transfer,” and is commonly represented as a number between 1 and -1. An exercise scoring a 1 has the highest possible level of transfer, one scoring a 0 has no impact at all, and one scoring negatively has a negative impact on performance and therefore a negative rate of transfer.

In order to ensure the highest possible rate of transfer as well as the best on-field performance, Cal Dietz, head Strength Coach at the University of Minnesota, argues that well-designed athletic programming follows a clear pattern of progression. It will develop specific and appropriate strength qualities across a wide variety of movement patterns, and whittle away movements until only the most sport-specific remain.

The program will ensure transfer to the field of play by replicating:

• Amplitude and direction of movement (ROM)
• Accentuated region of force production: Where does an athlete need to be strongest? Generally found within 10 degrees of starting position.
• Dynamics of the effort: Training should always meet or exceed the speed and force requirements of the target movement.
• Rate and time of maximum force production (RFD)
• Regime of muscular work: Reps or training time.

Is there any difference between the approach outlined above and well thought-out programming in general? Every one of us has daily movement patterns and activities that can be subjected to the same analysis listed above. How much range of motion do we need strength in for our various activities? Do we need to be able to produce force quickly in any patterns? Which patterns need to be sustained (endurance) and which need to express maximal strength?

Athletic training has a far higher rate of transfer for the general population than therapy protocols.

Periodization for the People!

The classic block periodization model generally involves three distinct training mesocycles or blocks, each with their own particular objective:

1. The accumulation block is devoted to the acquisition of a broad base of motor skills and fitness qualities for an athlete.
2. The transmutation block shifts training methods to more sport-specific choices.
3. The realization block typically involves a reduction in training volume to allow for the full expression of the newly acquired or improved abilities.

Applied to the general population who just hopes to look, feel, and move better, this same approach is still very much applicable. The accumulation block for everyday people would involve creating a variety of fitness qualities—strength, endurance, and power to name a few—across a wide range of movements and situations. This is as simple as learning new movements, using a variety of modalities, and appropriately progressing difficulty via load, complexity, stability, and volume.

Having done that, during the transmutation block we would pare down the movement library until we’re left with the movements that apply most directly to daily life and specific needs, from work to hobbies to injury or illness risks, and focus a little more on those.

Finally, realization for the general population may not require tapering, but would include some training to target these movements with varied elements of functional specificity: squatting with the feet on an uneven surface (replicating one foot on a curb or a step), deadlifting a moderate load in the transverse plane (hoisting groceries out of the trunk at a funny angle), or having good old Grandma Ethel create tension from the bottom of a squat up by starting her seated on a box while holding a moderate load (getting up from the couch while holding her cat).

Does My Grandma Need to Power Clean?

By now, it should be clear that the point of championing the world of sports performance as an inspiration for a more thoughtful version of functional training is not to blindly adopt its specific methods, but rather to embrace the fundamentals of the system.

In the context of athletic performance, rate of transfer measures how well an exercise regimen improves the target activity. In the context of functionality, the same standard would measure the impact on daily life. Do BOSU squats reduce falls in the elderly? Do single leg RDLS? Any coach worth his salt will value system over method, and in this case, the system is one that expects transfer. The methods? I’m not married to any, and while I have my doubts about a few, I’m willing to put those aside in favor of objective evidence of their effectiveness.

Does This Mean Everything is Simple and Sagittal?

No. Complexity is important, but complexity in the service of true need, rather than as a marketing gimmick or a way to improve a movement’s social media worthiness. Specificity has its limitations, and when training fitness rather than skill, we should be cautious when replicating complex movement patterns so as not to interfere with the complex neuromuscular interplay involved. Skill and fitness are at the far ends of an athlete’s repertoire and shouldn’t be confused with each other.

A baseball pitcher may benefit from throwing a weighted ball on occasion, but I’ll leave that portion of his training to someone with a more expert eye for the mechanics of his throwing motion, and limit myself to things like improving his ability to generate force in the transverse plane, drive off of his leg and stride forward, and effectively generate and link force through his entire kinetic chain. In the same spirit, I’m not prepared to load each and every specific motor pattern an individual may encounter, and will instead limit myself to training broad categories of movement and developing strength, endurance, speed, or power within those more general movements.

Your Take-Home Cheat Sheet

I have effectively buried you under an avalanche of words. Let’s simplify my arguments by giving you some talking points to summarize how we can all train like athletes:

• Skill and fitness are not the same thing and cannot be trained the same way.
• Fitness qualities should be developed across a diverse and robust set of movements.
• Complexity does not equate to functionality.
• Neither does simplicity.
• Rate of transfer can be applied to sport and life alike.
• Methods are neither functional or not; instead, they depend on an objective measure of transfer to the target movement.

More about the F-word:

What Is Functional Training?

The post How Sports Performance Can Fix Functional Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’ll admit to never having met a leopard with poor thoracic mobility from a lifetime of sitting, but I still think we can borrow more from their approach to movement than just their namesake as we try to hack our own.

Let’s start with the assertion that leopards never stretch and are somehow genetically endowed with instantly accessible stores of mobility. I may be wrong, but that cat in the photo below looks like he’s stretching to me. What’s more, I’ve seen my dog do it—I’ve even done something similar as I try to shrug off the last remnants of sleep. In humans we call this stretch-yawn syndrome (SYS), while in a broader sense it’s referred to as pandiculation.

Even the supple leopard has to take care of his body. [Photo credit: Thimindu Goonatillake  CC BY-SA 2.0]

Panda-What?

Pandiculation is a very specific form of stretching, characterized by high levels of muscular tension and joint rigidity. It’s most common in animals transitioning from restful states to active ones (as in waking, or when rising from a long period hunched over your computer), and is characterized as a reflexive action. More strictly defined, pandiculation is a stretching and stiffening of the trunk and extremities, followed by a sharp drop in tension levels and a general sense of pleasure or well-being. Those big cats may extend their claws, make use of the ground, and even involve their tails, but we share the same characteristic spinal extension with nearly all vertebrates.¹

From a neurological standpoint, pandiculation is interesting in how it differs from a more typical passive stretch. The active and near-maximal contraction of muscles around the joints in question requires nerve impulses to travel to and from the brain and the motor units, while a passive stretch stops at the spinal cord. This extra step may be significant in how it promotes lasting changes to the entire neuromuscular system, rather than just passive, inactive tissues. Additionally, pandiculation is thought to be regulated by the limbic system, also known as the paleomammalian brain, which is a more primitive brain system often tasked with emotional responses. You mobility geeks perked up when I said “paleo,” didn’t you? Good, because there’s more to come.

From a broader physiological perspective, pandiculation mimics some of the characteristics of a joint under load; the joint stiffness and muscular activation are similar to the isometric stabilizing contractions that occur when, say, pressing overhead. The fact that we’re not under load makes it a safer way to explore extreme ranges of motion.

Given this, is it possible that some of that supple leopard’s natural mobility is owed to this mechanism? And if so, are there methods by which we can adopt the same approach, hack our own adaptive response mechanisms, and add something to our movement toolboxes?

PNF and the GTO

In an attempt to keep using big words, let’s examine proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF). PNF is a category of stretching techniques that attempt to make use of the muscle’s proprioceptors (specifically the Golgi tendon organ or GTO) and their interplay with the nervous system.

The role of the GTO is to protect the muscle from itself; specifically, to protect it from too much tension. If you go try to deadlift a pickup truck, odds are good you’ll trigger the GTO and, while you won’t pick up a pickup, you also won’t tear a hamstring. By applying tension to a muscle (slowly, so as to avoid activating the GTO’s counterpart—the muscle spindle—and triggering a contraction) the GTO is activated and releases tension from a muscle.

One specific form of PNF stretching, called the “contract/relax” method, bears a striking resemblance to pandiculation. As the name implies, the muscle is moved into a stretched position, contracts aggressively against outside resistance, and then relaxes into a deeper stretch than before. The higher levels of muscle tension and nervous system involvement result in noticeable improvements in range of motion, and seem to echo one of nature’s strategies for movement prep. What’s more, by limiting the amount of time spent in a stretched position, subsequent reduction in force output—critical for leopards and lifters alike—is minimal when compared to static stretching.²

Controlled Articular Rotation

Sticking with our three-letter acronyms, we come to an interesting technique from Dr. Andreo Spina. Known as controlled articular rotation (CAR), it involves what should be an increasingly familiar combination of aggressive muscular tension, full-range movement, and subsequent improvement in mobility. The science and theory behind CARs involves signaling between the joint capsule and the brain, blastic cells and cartilage formation, and a tension-transference concept known as irradiation.

The application, on the other hand, is relatively simple. The technique—focused as it is on rotation—is best-suited for our ball-and-socket hip and shoulder joints. Let’s use the shoulder as our example:

1. Begin by standing tall and creating full-body tension.
2. From there, reach the fingers of one hand down towards the floor. Imagine trying to scrape your nails along the surface.
3. Slowly start to move your arm through the arc of a circle.
4. As your arm moves forward, reach for the wall, maintaining tension through every bit of your body as you do.
5. As you pass your arm overhead and behind you, flip your hand and continue until you reach the bottom position, and reverse.

That’s one. Try three per side and see how you feel. For me it’s a fantastic way to improve some pretty beaten-up shoulders and recapture a little lost mobility long enough to train overhead safely.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Our third example of an existing approach to movement prep builds upon the principles of pandiculation. Progressive muscle relaxation is often relegated to world of meditation, and while it has value there for recovery and regeneration, it also has value on the other side of the workout as we prepare to move with power and efficiency.

As it happens, Baechle and Earle³ were prescient in their explanation of progressive muscle relaxation:

“In essence, by going through a series of alternate muscular tensing and relaxing phases, the athletes learns to become aware of somatic tension and thereby to control it. Theoretically, the technique exerts its effect by means of a process termed reciprocal inhibition… In many cases, a positive side effect of the reduced muscle tension may be an… increased range of motion around the joint. This can be an effective self-regulation technique for some athletes before practice or competition.”

Hardwired Patterns

At this point, the link seems fairly robust between the leopard’s reflexive mechanism and our own more contrived systems for creating aggressive stiffness and subsequent improved movement function. What’s more, we have our own natural mechanism for mobility; the SYS is characteristic of the transition from restful states to active ones, and is even thought to help shift the central nervous system from sleep to wakefulness.⁴

We may have lost some connection to our more animal-selves and some mobility along with it, but we’re still hardwired with primal preparatory patterns designed to facilitate movement. This instinct is so vital to our survival it’s been linked through eons of evolution to the same primitive drive and reward systems as those for food, sex, and defecation. Pandiculation is a function of something known as homeostatic drive, and when we do it, we feel the same general sense of satisfaction we get from any of those other primal urges.⁵ Don’t believe me? Try interrupting somebody’s yawn and see how annoyed they get with you. Remember, pandiculation is governed by the limbic system, literally our emotional nerve center; of course it feels good to do.

Maybe He Wasn’t Just Stretching

If we revisit the much-lauded leopard from before and consider his mobility routine, maybe he’s doing both more and less than we thought. As we’ve seen, “stretching” may not be the best way to describe such an important and universal process. And anyone who’s ever tried a few reps of CARs has experienced just how fatiguing they can be.

Instead, pandiculation represents an evolutionary hybrid that taps us into some of the body’s most powerful adaptive mechanisms for opening up movement, initiating new cartilage formation, and transforming not only the body’s hardware (myofascial tissues) but also its operating system and associated software (the CNS) into a more malleable, mobile system.

I’m not likely to surrender my lacrosse ball, foam roller, voodoo floss, or any of the other tools that keep me semi-limber, nor do I think you should. What I would advocate is a more inclusive, less dismissive approach to self-maintenance; after all, even the supple leopard has to take care of his body.

What happens in your head as you learn a new thing?

The Psychology of Skill Development

References:

1. Bertolucci, L.F., “Pandiculation: Nature’s way of maintaining the functional integrity of the myofascial system?” Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies (2013) 15(3): 268-280), accessed September 7, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbmt.2010.12.006.

2. Marek et al., “Acute Effect of Static and Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation Stretching on Muscle Strength and Power Output,” Journal of Athletic Training (2005) 40(2): 94-103. 

3. Baechle, Thomas R., and Roger W. Earle, Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, (2008) 2nd ed., Champaign: Human Kinetics.

4. Walusinski, Olivier, “Yawning: unsuspected avenue for a better understanding arousal and interception,” Medical Hypotheses (2006) 67(1): 6-14, accessed September 7, 2016. DOI:10.1016/j.mehy.2006.01.020.

5. Fraser, A.F., “Pandiculation: the comparative phenomenon of systematic stretching,” Applied Animal Behavior Science (1989) 23(3) 263-268, accessed September 2, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/0168-1591(89)90117-2.

The post How the Leopard Got So Supple appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I grew up, strength-wise, when, “no pain, no gain” could be said without irony or ridicule. I came of age believing that more really was better, and that progress started where my comfort zone ended. Along the way I picked up some of the injuries you might expect, but I also made a ton of progress.

For better or for worse, we’ve all gotten “smarter” than that. Somewhere along the line we read an article about signs we were overtraining and thought we saw ourselves in the mirror: poor sleep, increased illness, low energy, and decreased motivation? Yikes, I must need to back off!

You might just need to train on the edge. [Photo credit: Pixabay]

It’s Just Overtraining, Right?

The problem is that most of us aren’t elite, competitive athletes. We’re not training twice a day, or trying to balance practice with a full course load and lifting sessions. And those symptoms we read about could all be signs that we’re just modern humans; over-caffeinated and under-recovered.

Compare these two (partial) lists of symptoms and decide for yourself:

Look at some of the data: the average American drinks just over 2 cups of coffee per day; energy drinks grossed more than $9 billion in the US in 2015; 68% of American adults are overweight; and we spend nearly as much time watching television as we do sleeping. All this, and still that glossy magazine has a story about overtraining rather than adrenal fatigue and under-recovering.

Just so I don’t bury the lede, I’m going to argue that overtraining is not your problem. In fact, I’m going to argue in favor of pushing right up to the edge of actually overtraining, and give you some science for why that’s going to be good for you. It’s time to live on the edge a bit more. This consists of two specific strategies: push yourself to the point your body has to change and work just as hard at your recovery and regeneration.

GAS Theory and Overtraining

Whether you train for hypertrophy, strength gains, body composition changes, or improvements in speed or endurance, you can rely on a simple formula for that improvement:

Sufficient Stress + Sufficient Recovery = Improvement

Originally put forward in the 1950s by Hans Selye, the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) theory states that the body improves in response to a perceived threat to its survival. This simple but enormously fundamental idea is the first evidence that we need to live on the edges of our training.

In its simplest form, Selye’s GAS theory describes three stages of reaction to any given stressor:

Stage 1: Alarm

During the alarm stage, the body recognizes the stressor for the first time (be it an invading organism or an increased workload) and labels it as either mundane or a threat to survival. In the case of the more severe threat, a cascade of stress-driven hormones including adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released. In acute doses, these hormones allow us to respond to threats of all kinds, and we see the body adjust itself to release and conserve energy for the fight to come.

Stage 2: Resistance

As the body enters the resistance stage, it begins to shift its priorities from responding to the immediacy of a new threat to repairing the damage caused by the threat. In the case of training, this includes replenishing glycogen stores and repairing damaged tissue. While the focus has shifted, the body is still effectively on-guard, particularly if the stressor has not abated.

Stage 3: Recovery or Exhaustion

The third stage of the GAS model represents a fork in the road. If the body has effectively overcome the stressor through adaptation or elimination (or if we remove an external stress such as training) it returns to a new level of homeostasis; one that has adapted to better handle this new stress. If, on the other hand, the stressor continues unabated, we reach the exhaustion stage.

During the exhaustion stage, the body’s adaptive resources have been effectively tapped out, and the stressor begins to win, with illness, injury, and even cell necrosis (death) being potential outcomes. Taken too far, the exhaustion stage is overtraining syndrome.

But what constitutes taking things too far? What happens if we go down that path, to the edge even, but not quite over it? Enter the idea of overreaching.

Crack Yourself Just Enough

Where overtraining offers us illness, cellular necrosis, and injury, overreaching offers us the potential to rebound with a vengeance.

Allow me to borrow an analogy from the twisted mind of Pat Davidson: the body’s adaptive resources as told by the story of Humpty Dumpty. The role of your body and its musculature, fascia etc. will be played in this story by Mr. Dumpty himself. The role of your brain will be played by the King, while the roles of your immune and endocrine systems will be played by said King’s horses and men, respectively. Got it?

As told in its original form, Humpty Dumpty is really a story of overtraining syndrome:

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

But imagine we scaled this egg’s fall back a bit. Humpty falls gently and cracks a bit, but manages to keep his yolk to himself, so the King sends a squire or two. The result? Nothing changes. But what if we managed to push Humpty from just the right wall? He cracks and sends bits and pieces everywhere, but it looks worse than it really is. The King’s willing to spare all of his horses and all of his men, and Mr. Dumpty walks away better than ever. That’s the promise of overreaching.

In his landmark book Triphasic Training, Cal Dietz does us one better, flat-out stating the following:

My goal every May is to have as many of my hockey players sick with a cold or the flu going into finals week. I know that sounds terrible, but a sick athlete is an early warning sign of an overtrained athlete… During finals, there is a ten-day period when I’m not allowed to train hockey players at all. Therefore, I overreach them going into finals… Coming out of finals, however, when they get back to training… it isn’t uncommon to see 20-30lb increases in most of their major lifts.

If you can put 20-30lb on my bench press, you can give me a cold.

What both Pat and Cal are telling us is something we should know but seem to have forgotten: we only change when stressed. The body is a beautiful, efficient, but ultimately lazy machine. Given the choice–any choice–it will choose the path of least resistance and the comfort of homeostasis. Therefore, any efforts to induce change hinge upon the amount of stress heaped upon the body and the resources marshaled in response to this manufactured threat. Subtlety doesn’t play well when the goal is enhanced performance.

The Bounce-Back Phase

Assuming we’ve subjected our body to adequate stress, even a little too much stres, we need to recreate that ten-day period Dietz talks about in order to reveal the change. Dietz doesn’t touch his athletes, but that’s due to NCAA restrictions, not his own choosing. In our case, an intelligent deload combined with a strong regeneration and recovery plan is best. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend starting a cycle aimed to push you into an overreached state unless you’re already solidly in control of your nutrition, sleep, and tissue quality. Self-care becomes pretty do-or-die at this point, so don’t plan on figuring it out as you go. Get it right, then get after it.

During my deload, training intensity and volume both drop for a few days. I keep my caloric intake where it was during the cycle, and spend some of the extra time on additional recovery, from ice baths to contrast showers to massage and meditation. Once I’ve gotten over that first wave of overall fatigue and soreness, I’ll add the intensity back in but keep the volume down for a few more days. I won’t take sets to failure, and I’m not quite as aggressive with my rest intervals, but it looks a little more like my normal workout. By the time I’m through with this, I should be itching to train, and ready to see what kind of progress I’ve been able to make. It’s this seven to ten-day stretch that really makes use of the previous 8-10 weeks, and I can’t overstate its importance.

Don’t Be Afraid to Overreach

Unless you’re genetically gifted or chemically enhanced, odds are you can probably push through one or two planned overreaching phases per year without getting into trouble. Any more, and you’re pushing it. I absolutely want you to work harder, but you can be smart at the same time.

If you’re seasoned enough to try this, then you should have some sense of what pushes you onto your physiological warning track. But I want to provide a few examples to spur your thinking. Here are some of the ways I’ve toyed with pushing myself into that overreaching state:

• Increased training volume
• Increased training frequency
• Increased intensity (without the usual reduction in volume)
• Increased use of drop sets, supersets, and forced reps
• Decreased recovery time between sets
• “Priming” a pattern with plyometric work
• Cluster sets within plyometric work
• French Contrast Training
• Circuit training
• Full Body Training
• HIIT
• Stato-dynamic training
• Two-a-days
• Combining several of the above

As you can see, it quickly adds up to a murderers’ row of movement. My own rule of thumb is that if I don’t curse, often out loud to myself, for whatever’s written in front of me at least once or twice, I’m probably not pushing quite enough. Another is that just prior to my planned deload I should be losing a little strength, and maybe even having a little trouble sleeping well.

You Will Make Progress

We are not as fragile as we think we are. We are made of the same stuff as Olympians and Navy SEALs. The difference in capacity between you and the pinnacle of humanity is measured in inches, not miles. Humans have climbed Everest, swum the English Channel, and survived some generally terrible stuff due to their capabilities. A few extra sets or reps over the course of the next month or two won’t suddenly put you on bed rest.

Write something scary for your next training block. Remember, adaptation happens when we have to respond to threats to our survival. Curse me all you like, but with some intelligent planning you’re going to make better progress than you’re making now.

Know your training warning signs:

Understanding Overloading, Overreaching, and Overtraining

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