you don't have to move fast to develop enhanced explosive capability

Just to add to the controversy

Effects of strength training with eccentric overload on muscle adaptation in male athletes

The enhanced eccentric load apparently led to a subtly faster gene expression pattern and induced a shift towards a faster muscle phenotype plus associated adaptations that make a muscle better suited for fast, explosive movements.

So the negatives - not "fast" moves - worked towards making the athletes faster....

Barefooting

I've posted a few things before (e.g. here) about the benefits of being barefoot. (Something mc has written about too)



Here is an interesting video of a guy running barefoot. It is informative to watch his gait - how he lands on the forefoot. Natural.

Fasting and muscle.....

Way back I pointed out something about fasting - that fasting "turns on" autophagy.

Autophagy is described by this article:

Autophagy is a cellular process that occurs during states of low energy such as that seen with fasting. Autophagy literally means self consumption. During low energy states the cell actually eats itself and the internal material is recycled and used to fuel other cellular processes. It’s basically cellular energy management. So during states of fasting, autophagy takes place to reduce the number of cells, reuse and recycle the materials from the cell for fuel. The neat thing is that newer younger cells are much more adept to this process compared to older cells, which is why older cells end up accumulating, and contributing to aging. This means that regular states of fasting would keep your cells younger and more efficient.

I also pointed to research that weight training promoted autophagy.

Anyway, I saw this today that says that autophagy is essential to maintaining muscle strength:


To Keep Muscles Strong, the 'Garbage' Has to Go

In order to maintain muscle strength with age, cells must rid themselves of the garbage that accumulates in them over time, just as it does in any household, according to a new study in the December issue of Cell Metabolism. In the case of cells, that waste material includes spent organelles, toxic clumps of proteins, and pathogens.

The researchers made their discovery by studying mice that were deficient for a gene required for the tightly controlled process of degradation and recycling within cells known as autophagy. Those animals showed profound muscle atrophy and muscle weakening that worsened with age.

Researchers knew before that excessive autophagy could also lead to muscle loss and disease. The new findings highlight the importance of maintaining a normal level of autophagy to clear away the debris and keep muscles working properly.

Bone Rhythm

Another thing from the weekend is the idea of bone rhythm.

This is explained a bit in this video



The idea as I understand it relates to thinking about the femur as a lever. There is a hinge at the knee and hip. To move efficiently you want both ends of the lever to be moving as the same speed. For example in a squat your knee and hip should start moving and finish moving at the same time. That makes the lever more efficient? If the knee locks but the hip keeps going for example or vice versa then the lever is not operating as efficiently as it could do with matched speeds.

mc explains it thus:

Bone rhythm effectively means that one gets the top and bottom of a prime mover bone move at the same speed in an action. In a push up, we see this when the shoulder and the elbow finish the move together - both in the press up and in the descent. This move tune alone is worth the price of admission. In the DVD both upper and lower body drills are taught, as well as how to cue another person to get the ryhthm.

I wonder.

I am pondering how /if this fits with Bill DeSimone's approach in Moment Arm Exercise. Bill uses some limited ranges of motion to address the levers, focussing on matching maximum moment arm with the position of the muscles maximum strength. I wonder if you could see the limited range of motion as facilitating better bone rhythm?

Levers.....moment arms

The eyes have it.....

This also follows on from Sunday's seminar.

One of the things I had read about concerning zhealth was that it makes a big thing of eye movements, the visual system.

We spoke about the nervous system acting in terms of THREAT or NO THREAT. One of the ideas of the threat state was that the body will seek to fold in on itself - to go into a foetal position to some degree. As Rannoch said on sunday - you try to protect the soft sensitive parts with the hard bony bits. You curl up and bring your arms in front of you as you flinch, protecting your face, gut and genitals with your shoulders and arms.

In that post on Sunday I also talked about Rif / Chek's take on this:

• going foetal is basically about flexion - everything flexes: biceps, abs, hamstings, pecs.

• The opposite is going erect - the extensors work - the quads, the lats, the triceps, the lower back, the glutes. It is about extension.
  

Now another thing that mc mentioned on Sunday was about the impact of your eye direction, where you are looking. She goes into this more in a post today

eye movements connect with actions: up for extension; down for flexion.

If you are performing an extension - a push, a press for example - you will be stronger if your eyes - not your head - look up. If you are flexing - a pull, curl, row etc - you will be stronger if your eyes look down.

Try it for yourself, experiment. Strangely it works

Think about it in terms of posture. When people are threatened and they start to curl up - where do their eyes go? They look down, they look submissive, it accompanies flexion..... Confident, fully extended people are look up. The actions naturally go together. When you go with what is natural, you are reinforcing things perhaps?

Just some rambling but it all seems consistent.

'you are what you do' and 'practice makes perfect'

This follows on from the post I had up on motor learning a couple of days ago.

ASCLEPIUS has just posted this today which is really worth reading

I have just finished reading Daniel Coyle's 'The Talent Code'. It adds some biology to the idea that 'you are what you do' and 'practice makes perfect'. It is no revelation that our brains are plastic and can adapt throughout life - but Coyle digs a little deeper.

I encourage you to read more

Z health - it is starting to make sense (thanks to mc)

A few weeks ago I posted an interview with mc, talking about the seminar that she was to do here in Edinburgh today.

Today's seminar was fascinating and I am really grateful to mc and to Rannoch for promoting it. What I found really interesting was the way in which the teaching pulled together a range of different threads of topics which I have been thinking about for years. I'll post some of these ideas in some additional posts.

I think I've been a bit dismissive of mobility work and z health in the past - I have done it and enjoyed the feeling, but was somewhat bemused by the way in which it was often presented as the solution....

This seminar did what the books and articles I've read previously have failed to do - it put the exercises into context, it explained the reasoning and the theory that justify the moves. It makes more sense now - it is about threat modulation...reassuring your nervous system that things are OK.

We went through a lot of theory and then applied it to some kettlebell moves.

I'll try to present the arguments here and develop some of the ideas in future posts:

• The body is oriented on survival not performance (this links to some paleo/evolutionary fitness ideas. What are we designed for?....to survive, to escape danger, be it a predator or any other threat).
  
• Take a neurological perspective - look at the nervous system as central - it is always "on", it is fast and it is plastic (malleable - you can learn things that stick). It is always active, always adapting to the demands that it is facing. Back to the old SAID principle - your body will adapt to what you do with it
  
• Your neurology is binary - it recognises only 2 states - THREAT or NO THREAT
• A THREAT state limits efficient movement in some way or other - there could be pain or tightness or weakness for example, or a limited range of motion.
• A variety of things can induce a THREAT state - lack of movement, fear of falling, being unbalanced, stress.....even poor body position - the arthrokinetic reflex for example.
  
• The challenge then is to reduce threat signals to improve movement and performance

So how do you do this?

• Focus on Proprioception - this is more than balance, it is about you brain knowing where you are in space....but more it is about your state.
• Mechanoreceptors - these are within muscles focussed around joints. They map movement. It is an active map of where we are and where we are moving....They send signals to the brain, the nervous system
• Movement will send signals through the nervous system, activating these mechanoreceptors.
  
• Lots of movement can "drown out" the pain signals
• Movement will encourage the nervous system to see you as in a NO THREAT state
• It is all about trying to maximise the stimulation of mechanoreceptors, to keep movement signals going through your neurology, keeping your proprioceptive system active and so to modulate your state.
• Z Health is built around specific mobility drills to promote movement around each joint to promote a NO THREAT state.

In the interview mc explained this: (but it is only after the seminar today that things are making sense):

it turns out that there are some great ways to talk with the nervous system via movement. We’re designed to move. We have joints in our bodies for a reason. So by moving the joints actively we are sending loads of all clear/no threat signals to the nervous system. As we move joints, we are also sending a very rich map of where we are in space to give the body increased options about how it can respond to a threat: the more joints perceived as richly mobile, the more responses to avoid an incident.

There are other things you can do too to promote that state - careful breathing, go for a walk etc.

Anyway some interesting ideas that tie in to things like the ideas of Sarno and Monte, and also the idea of posture - like Esther Gokhale talks about.

In his Restoring Lost Physical Function DVD Rif draws on a related idea from Paul Chek. He says that we are basically always working into extension, against flexion. Flexion pulls you together, the flexors pull you into a foetal postions. Think about it - your abs, biceps etc, you curl up into a ball. This is how you start and also how you finish - old people gradually curl up again - there flexors get stiff and they are pulled over, stooped. As we are fit and healthy, we are extended - your back, triceps, glutes, and quads fire and you stand straight. Rif says:

It’s easy to forget that our bodies are under a constant source of pressure from gravity at all times. Gravity is always trying to bend us over, push us down and return us to the fetal position we started from. Many of the muscles in our body are all to happen to ‘go with the flow’ and bend us over into a ball. Our modern seated lives do not help this at all.It’s easy to go from bed, to chair, to car seat, to office seat, back to car seat to couch to bed every day. And then we wonder why our backs or necks hurt or why the exercise routine is not working as well as it should.

Posture is the beginning and end of movement and if our starting postures are not square, plumb and neutral at the start; especially movements that are weighted or done many thousands of times, chances are they will not be at the end.

Gravity, weighted exercises and the daily, repetitive movements we do all day long have very specific effects on our muscles .Certain muscles, referred to as ‘tonic’ ,respond to too much loading or too much inactivity by getting, and staying shorter. Examples of tonic muscles are the hamstrings, calves, the deep muscles in the glutes and the flexors of the upper arm. Tonic muscles are mostly postural ,slow twitch fibers that can get and stay tight very easily.

One the other side of the coin( and the joint) are ‘phasic’ muscles such as quadriceps, triceps, the muscles between the shoulder blades( rhomboids) that are prone to getting weak and stretched out with too much or too little use. The balance of tensions between these two types of muscles is known as a Length Tension relationship.

Where this fits in though....is that the foetal position is the threat response. All the flexors fire and you curl up. When threatened, your posture collapses.

Anyways....more to come....including - interestingly - some support for the Moment Arm approach