In a previous post, I outlined the joint-by-joint approach to performance training. This approach, based on the fact that adjacent joints tend to lie on opposing sides of the mobility-stability continuum governs every aspect of athletic movement and performance. In case you missed it, you can check it out at our blog here:

The joint-by-joint approach provides a phenomenal framework for people in the athletic world to understand how JOINTS work to create movement, but is limited in its ability to explain how muscles function to create movement.

One of the key areas of the body that dictates performance levels in most athletes is the hips. Learning how to move properly through the hips and activate/strengthen the right muscles in the surrounding areas will do more for performance and injury prevention than focus on any other area of the body (as I mentioned in last week’s newsletter: failure to maintain proper hip rotation will call excessive rotation at the lower back and eventually injury).

Is glute dysfunction limiting your performance?
One illustration of this lies in one of the most common performance limitations in athletes today: glute dysfunction. From a performance standpoint, it’s important to understand that your Gluteus Maximus (your butt muscle) is a strong hip extensor (think of the motion your hip goes through once your foot touches the ground during sprinting). It should be one of the strongest muscles in your body.

Unfortunately, because we sit so much during the day most people have what is sometimes referred to as glute amnesia. Muscles that are held in a stretched position tend to become weak and aren’t activated to the extent they should be during most movements. In this case, sitting all day causes the gluteus maximus to become weak and affects its ability to produce force. Not only is this a HUGE barrier to peak athletic performance, but it’s also a major cause of one of the most common athletic injuries.

Synergistic Dominance
I mentioned earlier that your Gluteus Maximus is a strong hip extensor. Your hamstrings are also pretty strong hip extensors and assist the Gluteus Maximus in this movement. Muscles that assist others are known as “synergists”. As is the case all over your body, when one muscle is too weak or not activated correctly (in this case the Gluteus Maximus), a synergistic muscle (in this case the hamstrings) needs to pick up the slack. Over time, the synergist (hamstrings) takes on the extra workload (a phenomenon coined as “synergistic dominance” by world-renowned physical therapist Shirley Sahrmann), becomes overtaxed and eventually fails (strain/tear).

For some people, it’s helpful to think of a coworker/family member/teammate/friend that they rely heavily on in one way or another. Now imagine if this person went on a 1-month vacation and you had to pick up the slack. You could probably handle the extra stress for the 1st week, maybe even the first two, but eventually you’d snap. After all, you can only handle so much in your life and most of us are already overworked!

Performance Implications
This example highlights how a poorly functioning glute can lead to a hamstring injury. There are other examples of this throughout the body (e.g. poorly functioning psoas major, a hip flexor, leading to high rectus femoris, one of the quadriceps muscles, strains). This also explains why so many athletes have the same injuries over and over. When an athlete strains a muscle, the 1st goal of many trainers/therapists is to stretch and strengthen the muscle. The symptoms are being addressed, but the cause is not. In the example above, it’s easy to see that the hamstrings are more than likely overly strong from having to do the extra work. Strengthening the hamstrings in this case may be counter-productive, and if glute activation isn’t addressed, the athlete is likely to re-injure his or herself in the future.

Take Home Message
The big picture here is that the body is highly adaptive, but can only sustain so much stress. Sometimes unlocking higher levels of athletic performance is a matter of “waking up” dormant muscles and THEN strengthening specific movement patterns. There are a few fundamental activation exercises that we have almost every Endeavor athlete perform on a regular basis. We’ve found that these exercises, while sometimes easy for athletes to perform, can go a long way in maximizing performance and minimizing injury risk. Athletic performance is as much about quality as it is quantity. Athletic development programs need to include an emphasis on improving joint mobility/stability according to the joint-by-joint approach and muscle firing patterns BEFORE adding load (e.g. external weight) or volume (e.g. more sets or repetitions).

To your success,

Kevin Neeld, MS, CSCS
Director of Athletic Development
 

Over the last several years, Michael Boyle and Gray Cook’s “Joint-by-Joint Approach to Training” have changed the way the sports performance world looks at athletic development. Starting from the ground up, the joint-by-joint system outlines that the body has joints alternating in emphasis on whether they need mobility or stability to maximize function. Look at the chart below for more specific details on which joints need mobility and which need stability (note that if you read from left to right, you’ll see the progression from the ground up within the body: ankle -> knee -> hip -> lumbar (low back) -> thoracic (upper back) -> scapulothoracic (shoulder blades) -> glenohumeral (shoulder joint) -> elbow). 

The Mobility-Stability Continuum

This breakdown helps us understand a lot of common injuries. To be overly simplistic, if a joint in the mobility column has sub-optimal mobility (or range of motion), an adjacent joint will need to “fill in the gap” by providing the additional range of motion. Usually this “compensatory movement” occurs at the next joint up. Following this idea, you can refer back to the table and see that mobility restrictions in the left column lead to compensatory movements (and consequent injuries) to the joints in the right column.

Performance Implications
If your ankle lacks mobility, you’ll get it from your knee. Result = knee pain (common in basketball players. If your hip lacks mobility, you’ll get it from your lumbar spine. Result = back pain (common in just about everyone, but especially hockey players and golfers). A lack of glenoumeral mobility results in increased range of motion and stresses across the elbow (common in tennis and baseball players). The list goes on. You can see how this joint-by-joint approach creates a paradigm that explains so many athletic injuries.

While I’m sure this wasn’t the original intention of either Coach Boyle or Gray Cook, this idea has been interpreted in a black and white fashion: Joints either need mobility or they need stability.

The truth is that EVERY joint falls somewhere on a mobility-stability continuum:

←---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------→
Mobility                                                                                                      Stability

Core Rotation Example
Let’s take a look at the lumbar spine. Each segment of the lumbar spine has about 2-4 degrees of rotation range of motion, for a total of about 13 degrees total rotational capacity. In contrast, the thoracic spine has in excess of 70 degrees (and so do the hips: about 30-50 degrees in both internal and external rotation). From this viewpoint, it’s obvious that we should be emphasizing rotation through the hips and thoracic spine and NOT through the lumbar spine. This fits well in the mobility/stability table above. Failure to do so results in excess rotation through the lumbar spine, which can cause a host of disc and spinal bone issues.

With that said, it’s important to note that we still NEED that 13 degrees of rotation range of motion in the lumbar spine and should use it. We don’t want to force motion past the end range of the joint, but using the allowable motion is absolutely essential to efficient movement.

Coming back to the continuum, understand that even joints that necessitate a high level of mobility (e.g. the glenohumeral or “shoulder” joint) absolutely need some requisite stability. The same is true for the ankle. In both cases, ligament damage due to injury creates an increase in joint laxity, which by definition improves mobility. However, this mobility comes at the expense of NECESSARY structural stability and increases the risk of subsequent injury to that joint (one example of why previous injury is the best predictor of future injury). In reality, these joints probably don’t belong in columns as much as a continuum as displayed below.

←---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------→
Mobility                                                                                                      Stability 
              Glenohumeral       Hip/Ankle                            Lumbar


Take Home Message
When we think of maximizing human performance, we can never think in black and white terms. Each joint needs a specific balance of mobility and stability. If you take only one thing from this discussion, it should be that the body functions as a cohesive unit, meaning limitations in one area will absolutely affect (usually negatively) both adjacent areas and areas further up/down an anatomical pathway. This is just one more reason why isolation training is moronic.

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld, MS, CSCS
Director of Athletic Development
kneeld@endeavorfit.com

Last week, Eric Cressey put up a few great posts on an issue that I think everyone working in the human performance arena should be aware of. You can check them out here:

Preventing Lower Back Pain: Assuming is Okay

Healthy Shoulders with Terrible MRIs?

Who Kneeds Normal Knees?

Despite the last title, these three posts contain a lot of great information. The big take home message from all these posts is that many people (athletes and non-athletes alike) have positive MRI findings (positive MRIs means something is wrong), despite not having ANY symptoms. This is most profound in the lower back area, where one study found that 82% of the 98 MRIs taken of asymptomatic individuals came back showing a spinal disc abnormality (Jensen et al, 1994). Eric points on in these posts that similar (although not QUITE as profound) findings have been found in the knees and shoulders of various athletic and non-athletic populations.

Recall from my post Off-Season Hockey Leads You to Surgery? that similar findings have been found in the hips of elite level hockey players. To refresh your memory, the article found that MRIs of 39 NHL and NCAA Division 1 players, twenty-one (54%) had labral tears, twelve (31%) had muscle strains, and 2 (5%) had tendinosis (degeneration of the tendon). Overall, 70% of these hockey players, who otherwise present as "healthy", had irregular findings on their MRIs.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

Last week’s email on aerobic training/testing for athletes sparked a few questions that I think need to be addressed:

1) Should young athletes be tested at all? If so, what’s the point?

2) If aerobic testing isn’t good, what should we use?

3) Is interval training appropriate for everyone?

Let’s start at the top:

Should young athletes be tested at all? If so, what’s the point?
This is a great question. The easy answer is, “it depends.” It really depends on what the point of your testing is.

My colleague Michael Boyle, who has over 30 years experience developing and training professional athletes in every sport, once said that he NEVER tested at his private facility in Winchester. He said the kids hated it and that most testing was just for the parents. I partially agree.

However, many sport team coaches do have their athletes perform a series of tests, especially if they’re going to be away for a while (e.g. team tryouts followed by a substantial off-season before the initiation of the season). I think this is a GREAT strategy to hold kids accountable to some form of training while you aren’t directly supervising them. In other words, the testing is really just a motivational strategy to get the athletes to do what they should be doing anyway. It’s brilliant, and it works.

I think the biggest flaw in all of athlete testing, especially at the youth level, is that kids are compared to each other. The most important thing is how the athletes perform in their sport. The best testers aren't always the best athletes. Especially with teenagers, the stage of development plays a huge role in their strength, speed, and conditioning. Simply growing up will improve almost all of these measures. At Endeavor, we have a few kids that are around 15 years old that are built like many of the athletes I’ve worked with at the collegiate level. Is it fair that their testing scores are compared to someone that hasn’t developed as quickly?  

I do like the motivational value of tests, and if performed with the right emphasis, I think testing is a great tool. Testing just needs to be placed in the right context. Every individual should aim to train to improve his or her previous best, NOT to beat the kids around them.

If aerobic testing isn’t good, what should we use?
With the growing body of research supporting the benefits of interval training and the improved specificity to almost all team sports, I think team sport athletes’ conditioning should be tested using an interval test. Many collegiate programs use 300-yard shuttle repeats.

A team of athletes is broken into two groups. A baseline is set up and another line is set up 25 yards away. The athletes must perform 6 full laps (up and back is 1) as quickly as possible. As soon as they finish, the second group goes. When the second group is finished, the first group goes again, repeating this cycle until both groups have gone 3 times. This test provides information on the speed at which you’re able to complete the test and your ability to recover between bouts. Because the test requires about 60s of work and a 1:1 work:rest ratio, the test really provides information about anaerobic AND aerobic capacity within the athlete. Alterations can be made to the test depending on the specific sport (e.g. football players would likely want to use a smaller total distance since the average play is around 4-5s).

Is interval training appropriate for everyone?
Yes, if performed correctly. Having a group of athletes that haven’t been training jump right into a conditioning session of all out shuttle runs is pretty irresponsible. At Endeavor, we break our athletes into shuttle runs by having them perform them at around ¾ speed for the first several weeks (referred to as “tempo runs” by some people). As athletes adapt, we mix in all out efforts within a session. Towards the end of an off-season, we’ll dial back the strength work we do, and increase the intensity of the intervals. Remember that stress comes in many forms. You can’t ratchet up the intensity of one thing without making the accommodating decreases in intensity in something else.
 

To your success,

Kevin Neeld