a moving target

A Good Reminder as you move forward:

It is exciting to know that as you move through this program and complete your 28-day plan, you are very likely moving better and more authentically than you have for a very long time – perhaps ever.

As someone who’s focused on training smart – which includes moving well and aging gracefully – I believe that when you are MOVING WELL and authentically and follow that quality movement with appropriate and progressive strength training, the greater levels of endurance, power, and speed improvements you seek are relatively easy to achieve.

In other words, your training begins to work to help you improve at a rapid rate!

Put another way…

When the stabilizer muscles are doing their job stabilizing, and…

The prime movers are doing their job moving us, and…

Our joints are able to move freely through an appropriate range of motion, and…

When muscles are strong enough to resist and transfer the forces inherent in running and in other sports…

GREAT things can happen!

The main thing we need to remind ourselves of routinely as we move forward is this:

IT IS A MOVING TARGET.

What do I mean?

 

If you’re a runner, you’ll want to ramp up your training – and it can be easy to forget that a single mile is the equivalent of 1500 one-leg squat jumps. Residual fatigue can add up to a tendency to fall back into old patterns. Stay on top of the basics, that is your rule!

If you are a triathlete that is spending time on your bike, remember that when you sit on the saddle for 2, 3, or more hours, HOW YOU move the next day changes. For example, your hip flexors will have tightened, and that tightness changes glute activation and effective glute strength.

When you sit in your car or at your desk for hours on end, how you will move in the hours AFTER that marathon desk or driving session, changes.

Any time your overall exercise volume goes up or the intensity of that exercise goes up, how you will move in subsequent training sessions, may also change. Simply put, compensation (the recruitment of inappropriate muscles to perform a task, such as stabilizing your pelvis) patterns are easier to fall back into, due to the increased demand on your body.

If you were to “lightly” sprain an ankle, or strain a hamstring, hip flexor, or groin muscle, your MOTOR CONTROL and STABILITY changes, very often AWAY or far from the actual site of the injury or issue. You will move differently, in many ways, on the heels of what might “seem” like a very minor tweak. Again, compensation for that injured area, can turn your movement from authentic to dysfunctional, in one fell swoop.

If you were to exercise intensely and experience some post-exercise discomfort and soreness after that workout, the “pain” may impact how you move following that session.

Simply put, pain and injury CHANGE how we move. They alter MOTOR CONTROL, which is another way of saying your stability changes.

The bottom line, as the training hours or miles pile up, you night not be moving in quite the same way as you did PRIOR to the repeated bouts of training stress, minor “tweaks,” and lifestyle challenges.

There is no guarantee that a neutral pelvis today, ensures you will have that same neutral pelvis, 1 week, month, or year from now.

In other words, and to summarize…most of us will never reach a point where we can say, “I move well now, so I don’t need to think about that anymore.”

What to do?

Depending on what you are doing, how you are living, and what is happening in your training, you could be one step closer to injury than you might think, due to those potential changes.

If you “tweak” something, for whatever reason, accept that you ARE going to have to go back and RESET core stability and motor control.

The solution will be to TAKE IT BACK to the BASICS and reset authentic movement, such as:

Return to basic pelvic stability, abdominal bracing. Authentic movement happens first, with the most basic of movements.

Tadasana, aka Mountain Pose: Relearn and recommit to what it means to stand tall, neutralize the pelvis, and bring posture back into proper balance.

Wall Slides: Very few exercises can do a better job of resetting t-spine mobility, a neutral pelvis, posterior muscle strength and anterior muscle flexibility, and a basic squatting pattern.

Remember that you really have NOTHING from a training standpoint, IF YOU don’t have healthy muscle tissue. In other words, where it is painful to rub, massage, or touch an area of your body, could be an indication of tissue stress/trauma, and perhaps compensation. Take care of your soft tissue!