Conditioning Research

Z Health have a thing about the impact of the visual system on strength - basically if you look up it facilitates extension, while looking down facilitates flexion.  I wrote about it in a post a ways back - The eyes have it...   This idea that eye position corrolates with muscle action: flexion is enhanced by looking down; extension by looking up came to mind when I saw this report /  study: We make our eye movements earlier or later in order to coordinate with movements of our arms, New York University neuroscientists have found.

"Strength is a skill".  That has almost become a cliche, particularly around the kettlebell community, but there is much truth in this simple sentence.  I first same across this idea when Clarence Bass introduce Pavel's idea of synaptic facilitation , that so much of strength is neurological, an idea that Pavel expounded in his article Greasing the Groove (pdf) Of course this is related to the ideas of Z health too (check out the material here ) and Todd Hargrove had a great post the other day on the brain's impact on strength.  Linked to all of this I received a fascinating email this morning from Bill who often comments on the blog.  It explains his experience of how practice makes him stronger.  I'll post it all here and would be really interested in your comments of thoughts: Your recent articles on Z-Health and other neurological aspects of improving performance reminded me of an experiment I did about 6 months ago.  First a little background...

 The report that he is talking about is here by the way by the way, I wonder if neck packing works do to the arthokinetic reflex? mc has a post here that makes me think that that may be so The interview that I did with mc has a good overview of Z Health too

I saw this ebook by Tim Anderson and Mike McNiff mentioned in a post by Dan John   I have great respect for Dan so I stumped up the $7 via Paypal and got myself a copy of Becoming Bulletproof.   Somes I get a bit fed up by the macho rhetoric that can be applied to training books - they want us all to be renegade....tactical.....warriors.....men among men......but in this case bulletproof just means resilient, maintaining function. I am very impressed .  It is a relatively quick read but there is a lot of material in here.  It ties in some ideas from several sources that I have pointed to over the years and binds them together around some simple concepts and movements. If you have followed some of the people and concepts that I have pointed to over the years you will recognise much of the ideas, but there were new things to me and the basic simple set of moves that they recommend are almost obvious given the conceptual framework that they build. There are el...

I am never quite sure what I think of Eric Cobb's Z health ( mc is a big fan and I enjoyed her seminar )  Anyway, I just spotted this free 34 page pdf from him that looks worth the read.  I find his thoughts on the threat response and the arthrokinetic reflex really fascinating. 21st Century Strength: Brain-Based Training for Power Athletes.

mc ( remember mc ? there is a interview with her that I did here ) has put up a very detailed piece on the mechanics of the shoulder: Part 1 : the amazing engineering that is the shoulder, part 1: scapula and shoulder girdle Part 2 : the amazing shoulder - part 2: glenohumeral joint & muscles (yes rotator cuff too) There is some fascinating reading there. In part one of this quick tour of the amazing shoulder we looked particularly at the shoulder girdle and the muscles that act pretty much directly on the scapula. The main take away was that significant muscles like the traps, rhomboids, pec minor, serratus anterior and levator scapula all work pretty much *just* to move the scapula and so reposition the shoulder joint socket to extend range of motion for the arm moving in the shoulder. In this piece, we'll overview those pixie rotator cuff muscles and look at why they can be such a pain - in the shoulder - and how understanding the movements these muscles support may help r...

Another Z Health video. I've touched on the benefits of being barefoot before and the potential damage from running shoes. Here is another approach on why traditional running shoes can cause problems. Z Health is worth looking at

I have mentioned z health before and the seminar I attended with mc here is a video of the founder of z health talking about the concepts: There are other interesting videos just posted too like this one on the arthrokinetic reflex

So my backpain. I have also on this blog highlighted my contention that there is a big psychological aspect to all this. I read Sarno years ago and was pretty convinced by his argument. Sometimes your mind will kick off pain to divert your attention from something psychological that it really finds threatening. I interviewed Monte here too who builds on that argument. My personality is such that I do worry. Relaxed on the surface but often quite stressed out underneath. So all this makes sense....and I can correlate back pain with stresses in my life. I am still working on the mental stuff to get over this but I'm getting there. Anyway, remember Z health and mc ? The mc seminar was useful in that it built on the psychological element in a different direction. It accepted that much pain / muscular tightness was due to psychologically perceived threats. Z health is about physical ways to modulate that threat, to persuade your mind through movement that the threat is not seri...

I've talked about joint mobility before. Most recently I have referred to the z health seminar I went to with mc . Here is another approach from Dutch Lowry It would be an exercise session in itself for many

Following on from the piece I put up a couple of weeks ago after the seminar with mc , I found this article by Eric Cobb on Dragon Door. Reflexive Lifting: How To Make Your Neural Reflexes Work With You And Not Against You! In almost all sports, including lifting heavy weights, the eyes play a vital role. While a heavy deadlift doesn't require much in the way of great vision, it does require great eye position! Let me explain. The muscles that surround the eyes, called the extraocular muscles, are all innervated by small nerve endings. These small nerve endings provide propioceptive (body awareness) input to various neuromotor sensors in the spinal cord and the brain. The primary reason for this is that the eyes and the inner ear work together to create balance and stability in virtually all of our movements. How does this apply to your lifts? It's quite simple, really. The small nerve endings in the extraocular muscles actually create full body muscular responses to help guid...

This is a bit of a daft post....that probably just reveals my OCD side. I was thinking about both intermittent fasting and mobility work. I do practice intermittent fasting, often taking a 24 hour break from eating - as described in Brad Pilon's Eat Stop Eat . Other times I will simply miss breakfast. Kurt Harris describes the advantages of less frequent meals : 1) Enhanced metabolic training in the direction of fat metabolism 2) Lower insulin levels and fewer insulin related diseases (Metabolic syndrome, degenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, common cancers) 3) Greater tolerance for fasting makes it easier to tolerate not eating - this give you "metabolic headroom" -it makes you more functional and resilient - You are a Porsche with a 40 gallon gas tank instead of a truck running on lead acid batteries. 4) If you exercise while fasting, the lack of insulin in the fasting state improves the fat-mobilizing and insulin-sensitizing benefits of the exercise. I eat aro...

I've posted some stuff in the past about back pain , particularly looking at TMS - the pain being real but a physical manifestation of something going on psychologically. Your mind creating real pain in your body to distract you from subconscious worries and anger and other emotions. Your mind is giving you real physical pain to distract you from what is really stressing you.... My interviews with Monte and Adam explain this all in more detail. Then I was at that workshop with mc last week and she was talking about how the body reacts unconsciously to threat....health is about threat modulation....Emotions effecting, causing something physical.....now something physical can affect emotions..... Things connect...that there are emotional factors at play, even at an unconscious level. In my interview with Frank Forencich he alluded to something similar: Depression is epidemic. The World Health Organization forecasts that, by 2020, “depression will be second only to heart disea...

Another thing from the weekend is the idea of bone rhythm. This is explained a bit in this video The idea as I understand it relates to thinking about the femur as a lever. There is a hinge at the knee and hip. To move efficiently you want both ends of the lever to be moving as the same speed. For example in a squat your knee and hip should start moving and finish moving at the same time. That makes the lever more efficient? If the knee locks but the hip keeps going for example or vice versa then the lever is not operating as efficiently as it could do with matched speeds. mc explains it thus : Bone rhythm effectively means that one gets the top and bottom of a prime mover bone move at the same speed in an action. In a push up, we see this when the shoulder and the elbow finish the move together - both in the press up and in the descent. This move tune alone is worth the price of admission. In the DVD both upper and lower body drills are taught, as well as how to cue another per...

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 ...

This follows on from the post I had up on motor learning a couple of days ago . ASCLEPIUS has just posted this today which is really worth reading I have just finished reading Daniel Coyle's 'The Talent Code'. It adds some biology to the idea that 'you are what you do' and 'practice makes perfect'. It is no revelation that our brains are plastic and can adapt throughout life - but Coyle digs a little deeper. I encourage you to read more

A few weeks ago I posted an interview with mc , talking about the seminar that she was to do here in Edinburgh today. Today's seminar was fascinating and I am really grateful to mc and to Rannoch for promoting it. What I found really interesting was the way in which the teaching pulled together a range of different threads of topics which I have been thinking about for years. I'll post some of these ideas in some additional posts. I think I've been a bit dismissive of mobility work and z health in the past - I have done it and enjoyed the feeling, but was somewhat bemused by the way in which it was often presented as the solution.... This seminar did what the books and articles I've read previously have failed to do - it put the exercises into context, it explained the reasoning and the theory that justify the moves. It makes more sense now - it is about threat modulation ...reassuring your nervous system that things are OK. We went through a lot of theory and th...