Process and Goal
I arrived at the topic of this entry through a rather roundabout path. The primary goal of my training for the last little while has been achieving Master of Sport numbers in the 2 kettlebell long cycle clean and jerk. I have had some setbacks as described for instance in my last entry but I am still working towards this goal. My reasons for wanting to do this are several. Here are a couple: First and foremost I love a challenge, second I like to use goals for motivation and to keep me fully engaged in my training. What will happen when I reach this goal? Nothing. Really it is not a huge deal. I pose no threat to the international champions of this relatively obscure sport. Understand that the best guys from the EU can get MS numbers anytime, anyplace anywhere. Valery Fedorenko could probably get them sleepwalking after drinking a bottle of the finest Russian grain alcohol money can buy. That is not the point. I am a 36 year old family guy who works for a living and thus my goals have to provide challenge yet fit my lifestyle. Take home point is the goal doesn't matter. The process does. Along the way it allows the cultivation of new discipline, learning new information and hopefully renewed determination. Once I reach this goal I'll set another, maybe something a little different and I'll apply what I have learned from this endeavor towards that one. Note that I have left no room for doubt.
My experience in Toronto got me thinking. When I get under the bells I lack a certain flexibility. I understand that my low back issues may be a part of this but I am not satisfied with that explanation. I have made some inroads into resolving this with stretching and joint mobility yet it still exists albeit to a far lesser extent than it used to. I was speaking to some pretty sharp folks attending the AKC certification last week and one mentioned faulty movement patterns. I filed this away and started looking into it a bit more when I got home.
I picked up a book last week called Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living by Craig Williamson. This book talks about the dysfunctional movement patterns we sometimes have as a result of a variety of things. For example, prior injuries, emotions, experiences can all influence how we move our bodies. Over time these movement habits become ingrained and thereby set us up for tension, injury and pain. Part of why this happens has to do with diminished kinesthetic awareness. We no longer feel our muscles and therefore we use them inefficiently. Actually the title of this blog entry is borrowed from a sub-chapter of this book. Fortunately the book offers some simple exercises to increase this kinesthetic awareness. Personally I had the hardest time isolating abdominal and low back contraction. Also glute activation was difficult for me without engaging a whole lot of other muscles. The whole key to kettlebell sport as well as life in general is efficiency. Wasting movement and wasting energy are less than ideal. If you are engaging muscles at the wrong time for instance you are holding yourself back, putting the brakes on progress.
Where am I going with this? Faulty movement patterns have far reaching ramifications. Ranging from obscure sports issues to more mundane things such as back pain. For example I think they go a long way towards explaining why we in the US have had a difficult time adapting to kettlebell sport. Most of us learned kettlebells under a maximum tension generating paradigm. This in and of itself leads to faulty activation patterns and uneccessary tension. It is taking an awful long time for many of us (at least me) to unlearn this. Old habits die hard. Of course similarly things like back pain can be explained by faulty motor patterns. Often we tend to sit certain ways and stand in certain postures which lend themselves to tension. Without paying attention to this we don't realize how this contributes to a baseline level of discomfort.
Here is an interesting homework assignment. Get a small timer like a gymboss or the timer on your cell phone or even a digital watch (I perish the thought, I am a fan of analogue time display) and have it beep every 20 minutes throughout the day. At these moments observe your posture and where you are placing your bodyweight. Are you slouched forward at a computer, are you sitting with your piriformis compressed by a fat wallet, are you leaning to one side? Try it, you'll be surprised to find that often you are your own worst enemy when it comes to this. Also consider picking up Williamson's book. The drills will enhance your kinesthetic awareness and they don't involve a whole lot of effort or energy expenditure. An interesting point that the author brings up is this: the common belief that back pain is due to muscular imbalance and that strengthening certain muscle groups will solve the problem is not always true. Without muscle awareness overstrengthening certain groups can actually exacerbate the problem. Interesting stuff.
My experience in Toronto got me thinking. When I get under the bells I lack a certain flexibility. I understand that my low back issues may be a part of this but I am not satisfied with that explanation. I have made some inroads into resolving this with stretching and joint mobility yet it still exists albeit to a far lesser extent than it used to. I was speaking to some pretty sharp folks attending the AKC certification last week and one mentioned faulty movement patterns. I filed this away and started looking into it a bit more when I got home.
I picked up a book last week called Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living by Craig Williamson. This book talks about the dysfunctional movement patterns we sometimes have as a result of a variety of things. For example, prior injuries, emotions, experiences can all influence how we move our bodies. Over time these movement habits become ingrained and thereby set us up for tension, injury and pain. Part of why this happens has to do with diminished kinesthetic awareness. We no longer feel our muscles and therefore we use them inefficiently. Actually the title of this blog entry is borrowed from a sub-chapter of this book. Fortunately the book offers some simple exercises to increase this kinesthetic awareness. Personally I had the hardest time isolating abdominal and low back contraction. Also glute activation was difficult for me without engaging a whole lot of other muscles. The whole key to kettlebell sport as well as life in general is efficiency. Wasting movement and wasting energy are less than ideal. If you are engaging muscles at the wrong time for instance you are holding yourself back, putting the brakes on progress.
Where am I going with this? Faulty movement patterns have far reaching ramifications. Ranging from obscure sports issues to more mundane things such as back pain. For example I think they go a long way towards explaining why we in the US have had a difficult time adapting to kettlebell sport. Most of us learned kettlebells under a maximum tension generating paradigm. This in and of itself leads to faulty activation patterns and uneccessary tension. It is taking an awful long time for many of us (at least me) to unlearn this. Old habits die hard. Of course similarly things like back pain can be explained by faulty motor patterns. Often we tend to sit certain ways and stand in certain postures which lend themselves to tension. Without paying attention to this we don't realize how this contributes to a baseline level of discomfort.
Here is an interesting homework assignment. Get a small timer like a gymboss or the timer on your cell phone or even a digital watch (I perish the thought, I am a fan of analogue time display) and have it beep every 20 minutes throughout the day. At these moments observe your posture and where you are placing your bodyweight. Are you slouched forward at a computer, are you sitting with your piriformis compressed by a fat wallet, are you leaning to one side? Try it, you'll be surprised to find that often you are your own worst enemy when it comes to this. Also consider picking up Williamson's book. The drills will enhance your kinesthetic awareness and they don't involve a whole lot of effort or energy expenditure. An interesting point that the author brings up is this: the common belief that back pain is due to muscular imbalance and that strengthening certain muscle groups will solve the problem is not always true. Without muscle awareness overstrengthening certain groups can actually exacerbate the problem. Interesting stuff.
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