Many people think that the exercises performed in a training room are an end in themselves, when the reality is that they are a means to be able to carry out actions in our daily lives. Climbing a staircase, getting up from a chair, picking up an object that falls to the floor, carrying shopping bags, walking as much as necessary to visit a city, running after a bus… All of these acts involve movement. But what happens when our body limits us when it comes to carrying out these activities?
Moving well could be key to preventing aches and pains from appearing. The studies show how the risk of injury can increase with low-quality movement patterns, low levels of flexibility, and previous injuries. Gray Cook, author of the book The business of movementco-founder of Functional Movement Systems (FMS), is a physiotherapist and one of the world’s leading experts on exercise.
Capacity and freedom
“For me, moving well means, above all, being able to carry out my daily activities, leisure and work without pain. I don’t expect them to always be done comfortably, because sometimes we train to exhaustion and can stay stuck in certain postures longer than we would like. But for the most part, you should be able to get through the day without pain by putting yourself in a certain position or doing a certain movement pattern,” Cook says. “Second, you should have the freedom and comfort to do most things in different ways,” he adds.
The biomechanics specialist talks about the importance of understanding that human behaviors have predictable patterns. “They take us to good or bad places. Moving well means avoiding them, being aware and protecting yourself. When you encounter them, realize and correct yourself. They have as much to do with behavior modification as they do with the products and services you might purchase or consume,” he admits.
Given this, the question is: Why would we move wrong? The way we breathe, sleep, eat, in which we adopt unfavorable habits are what the expert would call “short-sighted or one-sided” activities. In dietary terms, it would be like eating the same two vegetables for a lifetime instead of discovering the benefits of variety. We overtrain or undertrain. We work more or less. “Us we overrecover or we we sub-recover”says Cook. The first thing we should do to have the opportunity to move correctly, according to this specialist, would be to “not destroy our natural cycles, that is, the things that happen marked by our clock such as respiratory rate, the way we consume energy, rest. and we recover; the way to manage training loads and patterns. And the postures.”
Only by knowing your cards will you be able to play them in the best way possible. Many times the impetus to start training or lack of knowledge can lead users to start building the house from the roof, use shortcuts and avoid spending time building good foundations that support their construction. The movement evaluation would be that basis, the starting point to know how you move and, from there, begin to make a plan to move better. Cook’s advice is: “Don’t assume you need exercise and don’t assume you have a medical problem. Let an assessment based on data and years of experience tell you where your weakest point is, because working elsewhere in the movement may not be the best decision for your focus and effort.”
The pain
Imagine that you are going to carry your backpack to go to work, you feel discomfort in your spine. Pain can be a condition of movement disorders. As Cook explains: “There are two types of movement that can easily cause damage: normal movement in a defective structure (such as a fracture or sprain of a ligament) or excessive movement in a normal structure (which could be speed, impact , range or torque). Acute pain prevents you from moving in a way that could cause more damage. But chronic pain can be a distorted signal that is amplified or suppressed and must be investigated, because it is rooted in movement behavior itself.”
Cook’s team realized that pain can dictate movement behavior and alter it in many ways, both as a subconscious messenger and as a conscious thought switch. Therefore, as the specialist admits, “we must take pain off the table and never answer questions about exercises or therapy without a complete evaluation as to the source, area and associated dysfunctions. This will allow us to carry out an assessment of risk factors to demonstrate all the things that the patient or athlete could do better in their self-care, in order to facilitate the rehabilitation process and eliminate the risk of relapse in the future, which is obviously present. during this stage.”
Exercises
In gyms you can see many amazing exercises, but when it comes to training, what gestures would help you move better? “In simple terms, any exercise that allows you to get on and off the ground in a smoother, easier, more organized way, with more options and ease would be good,” says the expert. Most people try to run, climb, swim, lift things, throw or kick things better. But if that search makes it slower for them to get up and down from the ground; reduces their options to do so, then it means they have given up function in favor of skill. Function, in reality, is the basis of skill. Or as Cook explains: “Keeping the skill efficient and functional fuels consistency and this in turn reinforces motor learning. So, we must maintain the functions. “Those functional position changes that lift us up and lower us to the ground are the backbone of knowledge in the evaluation of functional movement.”
First, stability
Would you be able to bend down completely to pick up a pen without then falling to the ground? According to Cook, mobility comes first. Stability comes second. And movement patterns come third. “This is how it happens in neurodevelopment and this is how we need to reorganize the system. But that does not mean that we should start each workout with a stretch: simply that mobility represents freedom of movement. If that is not possible, we would be facing a “mobility problem”, although a good night’s rest as well as massages or stretching can improve it. Lack of freedom is a mobility problem. Whereas, if freedom is good, but movement is bad, then we must assume that it is a stability or control problem.
The environment – many jobs require long days in a chair in front of a computer – can push you towards a sedentary lifestyle and its risks, including joint pain. Putting a brake on it would involve knowing what its movement is like, evaluating it and increasing it. The human being is designed to jump, run, bend down, get up; not to spend eight or ten hours sitting. Movement is life.
From the theory to the practice
- Get to know yourself. Pre-assessment of movement by a qualified professional will help you understand what the problem is, direct work along the most productive paths to grow, maintain and sustain good movement, regardless of your problem and rate of improvement. Randomly consuming an exercise program without knowing the outcome of your movement assessment will only cost you time and results.
- Warming up is key. As Gray Cook explains, “It’s important to warm up before training, because if someone could improve their preparedness by one or two percent, that could mean the difference between a good training session and a bad training session, between a “an excellent day of exercise or an average one, between an ordinary competition or an excellent one.” Therefore, the state of preparation is important, whether we are training, spending a normal day or competing. But you should review your warm-up to see if it really improves your state of readiness. Your state of preparation improves your ease of adopting and undoing positions and postures. And it also generally improves your balance, because you’re making your body organize its signals, its reception system, and its response with movement in a more refined way.
- Look at how the best work. Gray Cook has published three warm-ups with different movements on Youtube called flows (flows). One targets mobility, the hips, ankles and upper back, the place where the most common mobility problems occur.
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