Conditioning Research

I have had Esther Gokhale on this blog before ....but it was a while ago.  She is still going

Todd has an excellent post on the impact of posture on pain: Posture and Pain Tolerance In the first experiment, participants who assumed a dominant posture displayed higher pain tolerance than those in submissive postures. In the second experiment, subjects had differing strength and pain tolerance levels depending on whether they interacted with a partner who used either dominant or submissive posturing.

Hope you don't mind me posting all these infographics, but I think they are really good.  This one on posture is superb, even down to the hints on running form, sitting and walking. More Health and Fitness News & Tips at Greatist.

Kelly gave me a shout out on his blog the other day .  I've already said that I didn't deserve to be on that list, but it is nice to be mentioned.  It’s a pretty powerful statement that a brilliant Scot (Conditioning Research) and a guy with an Iphone and an obsession with performance (me) are on the same list as the NYT, and WSJ?  Crazy. If you don't know Kelly here he is talking about the importance of maintaining proper posture in movement.

Bret Contreras pointed to an interesting post by Nick Tuminello .  Nick is questioning the way in which so much of the current training wisdom seems to be watered down rehab / physiotherapy.  He points out that most of the things that are to be addressed by physical training are actually  straightforward. For most people things are pretty simple: If we can all agree that: People don’t move enough (possibly because they’re plain lazy) They don’t get enough variety in movement (from always performing the same work or sporting movement pattern) They sit too much They’re overweight They’ve got Poor Postural habits They lack of a well balanced training program (from maybe performing too much chest strength work w/o much high-quality mid-back strength work, etc:) Then we can also agree that these are simple problems, which have these simple solutions : Move more Sit less Loose that gut! Get a more balanced workout Get more variety of movement Enjoy moving so...

wow....it even features the great Brian MacKenzie

At long last Colin has posted the third in his series on posture. In this post we’ll be dealing with upper body issues as they relate to poor posture and as with the lower body there are again a couple of areas that can give us quick results., the thoracic spine and ribs and the big movers of the humerus the lat’s and pec’s. There are obviously other areas that need to be examined but these are a great starting point. Check it out!

My pal Colin - from Edinburgh Deep Tissue Massage -  has posted a superb new piece in his series on posture: Improving your posture Pt2 Excellent ideas which I will steal when I come to write a future article on the dangers of sitting too much. One of the quickest ways of getting big improvements is to target the hip flexors and superficial fascia of the pelvis. Tight hip flexors inhibit the glutes, hip extensors, and through our largely sedentary life styles are one of the big contributors to disrupting our posture and this is also a big issue in athletic performance where the glutes are the powerhouse of so many activities. This inhibition of the glutes makes it difficult to recruit them to pull the pelvis posteriorly and back into balance. The anterior tilt also makes it difficult to recruit the musculature of the lower abdominals so you can see why when you are asked to bring your pelvis back to neutral by contracting both these groups it is possible to do but difficult ...

I saw this on Bret Contreras' blog the other day.  Interesting concept and worth some thought and tinkering.

My pal Colin ( Edinburgh Deep Tissue massage ) has written a great piece on posture Improving your posture We see a lot of talk about having good posture and what to do to achieve it but what is good posture? It’s probably easier to think of it as how you would stand if you didn’t sit at a desk for 8 hours a day or hadn’t picked up any injuries from playing your chosen sport. You’re spine has natural curves that get disrupted if you don’t pay attention to how you are sitting and the effects of long periods of doing so even with good posture and what happens to how you move when you get injured. Your hips, knees, ankles, shoulders are all affected by the sitting for long periods and obviously can all be injured playing sport. If your pelvis is not constantly pulled forward and down by overly tight tissues will sit relatively level, your shoulder girdle would sit comfortably back if it wasn’t being pulled forward by your tight pec’s etc (this is simplifying it but you get the point)...

Rannoch pointed to this article over on Facebook - How You Can Become More Powerful by Literally Standing Tall More impressively, expansive postures also altered the participants’ hormone levels. Using salivary samples, Carney and colleagues found that expansive postures led individuals to experience elevated testosterone (T) and decreased cortisol (C). This neuroendocrine profile of High T and Low C has been consistently linked to such outcomes as disease resistance and leadership abilities. Although past research has found that occupying a powerful role leads to expansive postures, Carney et al.’s paper is the first to investigate the reciprocal relationship – the causal effect of posture on the mental experience of power.  We talk a lot about hormones and the importance of minimising chronically high cortisol.  The implication of this is that you can consciously have an impact on limiting this hormone simply by adopting a more confident posture.   Make yours...

Some interesting mobility moves and stretches via Lifehacker    to tackle the problems tha flow from sitting at a PC all day

I heard this mentioned on the radio yesterday - a story in the Telegraph about how men become more masculine if they tilt their head back a bit and look slightly down their nose, according to scientists. There is more in the story .  What intrested me is that this chimes with some of the things about posture that have been here over the last few years. I was thinking of some of the things that Esther Gokhale says and also the instructions of Art DeVany, as explained by Dan John the other day : Art De Vany’s wonderful presentation in Las Vegas (May 18, 2008), and available on DVD, sums a very simple way to follow this idea: Lift your Heart! Not only does it have a beautiful ring to it as a way to live one’s life, it is a simple (elegant) way to move. Allow the heart to rise up to the sky (again, what a great idea for living: Heart to the Heavens!). He also noted to “ look over the cheekbones” as you walk and it ties in very well with Gockhale’s insights. From an evoluti...

I just spotted this one while browsing. Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness Alters the Response to Postural Perturbations. There are maybe some interesting implications - like DOMS could lead to injury through making you less able to maintain a stable and safe posture?   So therefore training that promotes extreme soreness may be counterproductive.

I have previously pointed to the works of Esther Gokhale and Kathleen Porter .  Here are a couple of new videos from Kathleen.  Good Stuff.

Time for another interview. Paleo has become fashionable. It is a movement now with thousands of people on the band wagon. That is not wholly a bad thing, and the many of the popularisers have done a good job. Despite the recent media interest, there were a few souls who discovered this way of thinking years ago. Art DeVany is well known and Tamir Katz ( interviewed here ) was also an “early adopter”, but there were others. I think I initially came across all this stuff about 5 or 6 years ago and one of the first resources that I studied was called EvFit , a fascinating website of thoughts, analysis, references and ideas put together by Keith Thomas in Australia. I’ve returned to Kei th’s writings repeatedly and I thought that it would be useful to ask him a few questions and dig a little deeper into his approach - not just to eating and training but to the influences that have shaped his thought. Keith, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. As I said, I’ve been readin...

I think I have mentioned her book before.

This also follows on from Sunday's seminar . One of the things I had read about concerning zhealth was that it makes a big thing of eye movements, the visual system. We spoke about the nervous system acting in terms of THREAT or NO THREAT . One of the ideas of the threat state was that the body will seek to fold in on itself - to go into a foetal position to some degree. As Rannoch said on sunday - you try to protect the soft sensitive parts with the hard bony bits. You curl up and bring your arms in front of you as you flinch, protecting your face, gut and genitals with your shoulders and arms. In that post on Sunday I also talked about Rif / Chek's take on this: going foetal is basically about flexion - everything flexes: biceps, abs, hamstings, pecs. The opposite is going erect - the extensors work - the quads, the lats, the triceps, the lower back, the glutes. It is about extension . Now another thing that mc mentioned on Sunday was about the impact of your eye ...

I do this exercise fairly regularly as a warm up... Eric Cressey has a post on it today