Movement, as a skill, is largely about coordination and integration. This goes beyond anatomy and into timing and feel. Great athletes have exceptional coordination — no surprise. But the special ones find the sports where they can best express their own unique abilities. Take high-jumpers, who seem to have the knack of making last-second micro-adjustments juuuust as they’re leaving the ground. They don’t always have more raw power compared to other athletes. But what makes them unique is their ability to adjust it and direct a higher percentage of their power into jumping at the right angle, at the right moment.
You’ve got some unique physical abilities too, which are fun to tease out and explore. Along the way, though, there’s a paradox we have to travel through… a place where we decouple multi-joint movement and isolate things. The ability to move one joint without bringing others along for the ride. This is a skill that only comes from deliberate practice.
Try this: reach behind you as far as you can, for example, and you’ll find you move from more than just the shoulder. You’ll rotate your hips and spine, among other places. Even your eyeballs will come to the party as a natural part of this motor engram.
Many personal trainers often fuss over the little details, while some only pay attention to the broad patterns. Both approaches have their merits. The sweet spot — the one that the best personal trainers seem to hone in on is where the small details whenever doing so will improve global performance. The trick is to not lose the thread. Or, as we like to say, the goal is to keep the goal the goal.
In a complex pattern, some things will move more than others. And wherever you find the most mobile bits, you’ll also find their neighbours to be the stiffest. Someone with limited rotation in their thoracic spine (bottom of the neck to lowest ribs) might max out on lumbar rotation. This is not a bad thing BUT if this same person has a chronically sore low-back, we sure would like to give them more options for getting the job done. However, the trick is that building thoracic rotation won’t happen by accident. You have to batten down the hatches for the most mobile bits so that only the stiffest are freed up. This requires a different type of coordination — one where you stabilize the spine by firing up the muscles that would normally rotate it in the opposite direction.
Part of mastery is to know thyself, including your own default settings. What muscles want to fire first in a movement? Try that reach-behind and notice what comes to the party first. Especially if that area is chronically tight or could simply use a little break. The question here is how to facilitate alternative movement strategies to take you to the same place. Sometimes, this exploration yields discover better alternatives. And sometimes, it simply provides more arrows in your movement quiver. Both are worth the exploration.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
