Monthly Archives: September 2014

Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

The slow progression

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When most people start the long process of becoming a runner, they often begin with a question: “how can I run so that I won’t get hurt?” The very short answer is to begin from almost absolutely nothing, and to go very slow.

I first heard of the slow progression from a story told to me by a friend of a friend (who is a devoted martial artist), who went to China, and sequestered himself with Shaolin monks to develop his skills. For those who don’t know, the Shaolin are a centuries-old order of martial artists, and according to legend, the precursor of Kung Fu.

What I expected were accounts of brilliant and esoteric meditation techniques and rigorous, multifaceted training routines. But what I heard instead was about simplicity. This story has to do with how young monks are taught to jump high. They are told to plant an apple seed, and jump over it 100 times each day.

The first week, the monks only need to jump on flat ground—a challenge so easy that it almost seems like a joke. But slowly, the tree gets bigger. Soon, the monks are jumping inches, and then feet into the air. And they are doing this 100 times a day.

That might seem unremarkable, except for its hidden brilliance: the sheer slowness of the increase. To jump one sixteenth of an inch higher every day does not take remarkable effort—not even when it’s a sixteenth of an inch up from six feet. That’s the point. It takes so little effort to make that tiny increase that the relative wear on the muscles, connective tissues, skeleton and connective tissue is tiny. But the task continues to demand increased power.

The body responds…and continues to respond. The slow progression does its work at the threshold of our awareness: if we’re barely aware of the changes, it’s only because the difficulty of the task is almost nonexistent. To put this in context, think about a contrasting situation: we’re usually hugely aware of something like twisting our foot. Awareness signifies a notable change—an alteration to our structure. We become very aware of twisting our foot because the body will need a long time to heal the bone, tendon, and muscle damage incurred.

In simpler terms, making such a small change is easy. And when the changes remain that small,  even when we’ve already progressed a bit, they get relatively smaller to our perception—the same reason that months and marathons fly by when we’re older, but drag on forever when we’re younger: since we experience more time as we grow older, another month is a comparatively smaller chunk of our experience.

Similarly, as the slow progression continues, development becomes easier (less effortful). And because performance is not only based on power and tissue density but on the brain’s grasp of the task at hand, we develop ever more effective strategies fro engaging with the task—making the relative burden on our biomechanics and metabolism even smaller.

But how should we apply this to endurance running?

Run every day for 2 minutes, at whatever speed you want. Keep that up for 2 weeks. The next 2 weeks, run 4 minutes. The two weeks after that, run 6. 2 minutes is a tiny increase, especially when the previous increase occurred two whole weeks before.

Although this may seem extremely slow at first, why don’t we do the math: There’s 52 weeks in a year. That means that at the end of the year, you can be running 52 minutes a day, every day.

There’s madness to this method. Many of us are inclined to run more at first, because 4 minutes seems like nothing. Like I mentioned above, that’s the point. With the slow progression, we can stay ahead of a multitude of components, including the psychological:

If we run less than we think we can, soon we’ll want it more, and soon we’ll become hungry for it.

How’s that for developing a habit?

There’s more: Most running injuries occur due to the body’s inability to cope with the stresses of the run, in concert with the lack of mechanical knowledge of how to use the body to better deal with those stresses. The sheer slowness of this progression allows our body to learn exactly that—more effective strategies of how to run.

In addition the slow progression develops the fasciae, the fibrous connective tissue of the body, which hold together muscles, tendons and bone. They are only developed under certain conditions: low levels of activity, high repetitions-per-minute, and low strain (effort). As soon as the activity becomes difficult, the body will shunt all blood to the muscles, to meet the demand, and away from the fasciae. We’ve got to keep it easy. For the beginner athlete, effort must be kept at a minimum. All we have to do is follow the slow progression in a disciplined manner.

Developing the fasciae will allow the body to become denser, more interconnected, and more competently able to resist stresses. If the body can’t resist the stresses of the task, it’s will know, and the athlete will feel fatigued and without energy. Fatigue is how the body protects itself.

Strengthen the fasciae, and the body won’t feel the need to protect itself as much from those small shocks—the fasciae have become capable of absorbing the excess energy. The body won’t be worried about developing muscle power anymore, and pretty soon it’ll want to cut loose.

So, you’re 4 weeks in. You just moved up to 6 minutes a day. During those 2 weeks you got progressively faster, as your body became more comfortable with the strain associated with that time. But now it’s 6 minutes. Detecting the slightly increased load, your body slows down. But towards the end of those 2 weeks, you speed up again: your fasciae and other often-uncredited subsystems have gotten more powerful. This is reflected not in the fact that you speed up, but in the ease and the naturalness with which you do so.

You continue the progression up to 52 minutes, and beyond. The limits are far enough away at this point for them to be nonexistent.

A bit of caution: This version of the slow progression will get the beginner athlete far, but it’s not the only necessary exercise for someone who did not spend most of their childhood strengthening their muscle, bone, and connective tissue through competition and play. If you train the correct form for running in parallel to the slow progression, you’ll go much further, much faster. A way to do that, of course, is by jumping rope.

Hint: You can build a slow progression into jumping rope too.

The philosophy of the slow progression is exemplified by a saying that I keep attributing to the special forces (but who knows where these sayings really come from):

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

Internalize that, and hold it in your mind when you’re thinking of setting your timer for just one more minute, and you might go further than your best expectations. After all, this was never about reaching some goal. It was just about taking another tiny little step. If you keep going like that, sooner or later you’ll leave the finish line in the dust.

Biomechanic Issues, Defining our Terms

(Re)defining the notion of “sport” through an argument from biomechanics.

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In my opinion, a “sport” is any activity for which an increase in the relevant hip extension abilities is a necessary component of developing greater performance in that activity.

(“Hip extension” is the ability to move our thighs back and forth. When we consider what function the act of moving our thighs back and forth has in relation to the whole system, hip extension amounts to the ability to push on a surface or object with our feet by using our thighs and butt as the primary movers).

But why would I define “sport” that way? Because I’ve looked at which activities we tend to label as “sports,” which we don’t, and which fall somewhere in the middle. Furthermore, I’m interested in what ideas we use to categorize these activities. In my opinion, the idea that most people use to categorize activities as sports—or not—is whether hip extension (the ability to move our thighs back and forth) is a central component of that activity.

Admittedly, I believe that when they categorize activities in this way, most people aren’t aware that their parameters for defining a “sport” are tied much more closely to the presence and importance of hip extension, than, say, to whether it is goal-oriented or physically strenuous.

However, for most people, a big part of calling something a “sport” comes from the notion that it is—or must be—physically strenuous. But that alone is not enough: although we certainly consider football, baseball, the decathlon, weightlifting, and sprinting to be sports, what about going to the gym and lifting dumbbells?

As opposed to the first examples, lifting dumbbells seems like “working out,” or like “exercise,” but not like a “sport.”

Why is that?

And for that matter, how about ballet dancing, yoga, and other forms of physical expression?

This is where the line begins to get murky, and, in the opinion of some, with good reason. Yoga and dancing are, at first blush, not goal-oriented. There is no competition involved. And yet, the intuitions of many people would squarely place these disciplines within the boundaries of the concept of “sport.”

Those intuitions strongly correspond with the knowledge that dancers and practitioners of yoga have: that these arts are as goal-oriented as “typical” sports—if not more. Most “sports” have a single goal: winning in one form or another, whereas these pursuits have a multitude of goals. Posture, consistency, and strength are all goals of dancing and yoga. But let’s look at a deeper difference (or similarity—however you look at it): other sports also value posture, consistency and strength. It’s impossible to become an elite athlete in just about any discipline without mastering these. Except that they are placed in service of an external goal. For dancing and yoga, the aesthetic qualities that appear through function are ends in themselves.

So, there seems to be quite a bit of overlap between dancing, yoga, and “typical” sports, even on commonly-contested grounds. But let’s discuss a more interesting topic: why do some people have such strong intuitions that these activities are sports? In other words, what is it about yoga and dancing that prompts people to try and classify them as sports in the first place?

Superficially, the argument is simple: there’s something about the mechanical particulars of yoga and dancing that should put them in this category, alongside running and football. After all, they are somehow different from, say, chess, (which is more “typically” goal-oriented).

To throw a kink in my argument, the International Olympic Committee does consider chess to be a sport. I don’t—and not because I don’t think it’s worthwhile. I’d call instead that chess is an athletic endeavor (the greek word athlein means “to contest for a prize”). I don’t include chess in my list of sports because I’m interested picking apart the intuitions that underlie the common usage of the term “sport,” which emphasizes the physical use of the body.

In that sense my argument does massage institutionalized notions of what a “sport” is.

However, we can still make the argument that chess is physical, in ways that are both obvious and non-obvious. The obvious, of course, is that we use our hands to move the pieces. That observation is also uninteresting. But there is also the non-obvious: in The Art of Learning, former chess champion Josh Waitzkin talked about how his rivals would often tap the board in a certain rhythm to quicken his thought process and make strategizing more difficult. In other words, competitors in chess often find themselves in physical battles of some sort. But enough to term chess a “sport” (beyond its obvious status as an athletic endeavor)? That’s a long shot.

Then what makes yoga and dancing different from chess, but similar to “sports”?

Simply stated: hip extension.

I turn to a discussion in a book by editor Ian Jeffreys, Developing Speed. Jeffries writes:

“During a sprint, forces are developed initially through the hips, then the knee joint, and finally through the ankle joint. Therefore, activities that maximize the triple extension abilities of the athlete should play a large role in the training to enhance speed and acceleration. Exercises such as the squat, Olympic lifts, and hip extension exercises such as the Romainan deadlift should form the basis of a strength and power program for speed enhancement.”

In other words, one of the most important components of increasing the level of performance in sports is to develop the hip extension characteristics necessary for that sport. Different sports will need different hip extension characteristics, such as strength, flexibility, explosiveness or dexterity, but they all center on hip extension.

This brings us back to my definition of a “sport:”

A sport is any activity for which an increase in the relevant hip extension abilities is a necessary component of developing greater performance in that activity.

For clarity’s sake, let’s reiterate this backwards: if developing some kind of hip extension ability is not necessary to become increasingly skilled in some activity, it is not a sport.

For reasons that I will discuss in the future, the center of gravity (and therefore the mechanical center of the body) lies in the hips. In order to achieve proper flexibility, and range of motion of the entire body, practitioners of yoga must emphasize the flexibility, range of motion and strength of the hips (as well as the core). But no amount of core strength and flexibility will allow a yoga practitioner to climb the tiers of difficulty—that can only be achieved by increasing the relevant hip extension abilities: flexibility and strength.

The same goes for all varieties of dancing. Expressing the body against the ground (and fine-tuning that expression) is centered around the speed, power, and explosiveness of hip extension.

The hips are present in all sports: martial arts, wrestling, even arm wrestling. Hence the following saying:

“Have you noticed that whatever sport you’re trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent?”

-Dave Barry

(Bending the knees stretches the gluteus maximus, such that all subsequent movements depend on its contractions).

In conclusion, I believe that because we have intuitive (and often completely unconscious) knowledge that certain activities engage the mechanical center of the body (the hips), we lobby to categorize those activities as “sports.” 

Thinking in Systems

Let’s embrace complexity—and work to understand it.

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Some of the posts on this blog will be highly technical; others will be tailored for the beginner athlete and the layman in systems. One of my most deeply held beliefs is that for a western athlete, performance is achieved through knowledge.

Therefore, my mission for this blog is to acquaint the casual athlete with technical concepts in systems thinking, sports psychology, and biomechanics. As I alluded to in this post, the vast majority of us don’t have the necessary upbringing and the cultural surroundings to “simply run.” It must be learned. It is vital that we not only learn the knowledge of how to run, but that we internalize two ideas: firstly, that we must learn to run uninjured and free—that for many of us this freedom will not just “appear”—but also that learning, that is, developing ever greater and more complex knowledge of running, (and not just stronger muscles), is where true speed lies.

After all, the body has limits. There are limits to muscle power, and lung capacity—genetic ones, even. But limits to learning? Not so much. Our brains, and our creativity, are the greatest equalizers. He or she who can rely on pure muscle power born from genetics, go ahead. But for the rest of us mere mortals, well, there are many, many variables that we can manipulate: food, energy, sleep, hormones, love, how our feet strike the trail, the sharpness of our mind, the ferocity with which we speed by a fellow competitor—all these are fair game. The physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual.

There are systems aplenty to manipulate, if we want to achieve excellence.

But we must learn how to use these systems. We must step outside of our comfort zone, and allow ourselves to transform by the weight of our knowledge, coupled with the weight of our training. And with enough time, dedication, and attention, we too will become exemplars of speed.

Let’s not be overwhelmed by new knowledge. Let’s not back away, and let’s not stick to the familiar. Let’s embrace the complexity of the body. Let’s become comfortable with it—and get to know it. The body is a system, and as such it is highly sophisticated. But that sophistication is built out of astounding simplicity. The more that we get to know how sophisticated the body is, the more its predictability, and its hidden simplicity, will stand out to us.

But there is no way to that end, except through knowledge.

(And perhaps through meditation—but that’s another story).

Ultimately, the purpose of this blog is to make complex systems and biomechanics concepts amenable to the layman, and to the beginner athlete. But excellence is not achieved through sound bites. Performance is not achieved through inspirational remarks. It takes time, deliberation, and attention.

And most of all, in my opinion, it takes an understanding of, and a comfort with, complexity.

Biomechanic Issues

The beginning of a conversation on stretching

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Here I share a few excerpts from The Big Book of Health and Fitness, by renowned researcher and clinician Phil Maffetone. (The chapter is titled “The hidden dangers of stretching”):

“It’s astounding that such huge numbers of people, young and old, athletes and those out of shape, have bought into the notion that stretching is a good idea. This view is widely held despite little, if any, scientific information demonstrating that static stretching is beneficial for most individuals, especially in the way it’s usually done. As a matter of fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence showing that stretching is harmful.”

“Clinicians who evaluated muscle function in athletes observed one outstanding factor: Stretching a muscle could make it longer, the reason it increases flexibility—and this resulted in a reduction in the muscle’s function due to a loss of power. In other words, stretching caused abnormal inhibition—a neurological name referring to a less-efficient longer moving muscle.”

“Most ligament, joint, and other physical ailments are usually secondary to muscle imbalance, which consists of a tight muscle and a loose one—you usually feel the tight one as tension or pain while its cause is a weak muscle. Treatment of these problems must be directed at the cause—the weakness—not the tightness.”

Stretching is an example of shifting the burden. Answer in the comments if you can figure out why.

Also, I’d like to hear what you have to say about stretching: why do you like it? why do you dislike it?

The conversation about stretching will be a recurring theme here on this blog; settling this issue and continuing on to train in the right way is, in my opinion, one of the most important changes we can make to the “typical” training routine.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: The do’s and don’ts of correct stretching for typical athletes do not apply for the people who need an increased range of motion (RoM), such as dancers, gymnasts and martial artists. That said, the commonly-held ones don’t apply either.

UPDATE: In future posts, I’ll be discussing the issue of stretching in a very detailed manner. There are certain strength exercises that aggressively increase RoM—especially hip RoM—but I’ll get into those once I’ve posted about the biomechanic details of stretching (and of how to develop “real” RoM).

Given the excerpts I shared above, it’s extremely important that we approach stretching from an deeply informed perspective. Actually, it’s not just important. It’s critical that we do so, for the sake of our musculoskeletal system.

Biomechanic Issues, Thinking in Systems

Working with chaotic systems: No easy diagnoses in biomechanics.

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A few days ago I answered a question by R.B. in this post. R.B. was asking what could be done do to solve a tight hip adductor problem on her dominant side.

I answered that there was a local answer (how to make the symptom better), and a global answer (how to address the underlying cause). The local answer had to do with strengthening the opposing muscles (the hip abductors of her dominant-leg). However, the underlying cause must also be addressed in parallel with the symptom, or the problem will only get worse.

As I was describing how to address the local problem, I pointed out very specific exercises that could be used to take care of it (which I still haven’t posted about). But if we are to extrapolate from there to the global problem (a weakness in the non-dominant leg), we can only have hypotheses, and not conclusions, about what the specifics of the problem are. In other words, we cannot be certain at all of the specifics of the global mechanical problem.

The reason for this is that the body behaves partially as a chaotic system. In layman’s terms, chaotic systems are systems which respond very strongly to very tiny changes in the initial conditions. (Double pendulums are a great example of this). The first time that you let a double pendulum go from a static position, it will exhibit a certain behavior (i.e. spin around in a particular sequence). But the second time you let the double pendulum go from the exact same initial position, the series of spins that it will do will be completely different from the first.

The thing is this: that exact same initial position wasn’t really the same one as before; it was almost the same one. Maybe we would have needed a micrometer to measure the difference, but that’s the thing about chaotic systems—they respond in wildly different ways to very similar conditions.

(The butterfly effect is an example of pop-culture knowledge of the behavior of chaotic systems).

Let’s bring this back to R.B.’s question.

Let’s say that I did indeed properly diagnose R.B’s symptom: Tight hip adductors causing knee pain. But suppose that R.B. had experienced a shoulder injury as a child, which caused tendon damage. Because all of the muscles and tendons of the body are mechanically connected and influence one another (since the entire bone structure shifts as if it were a mobile), that shoulder injury matters both to the global tension pattern in the body and to the brain’s calculations of how it is going to solve the mechanical challenge of keeping R.B. balanced on two feet.

That slight addition to the initial conditions (the addition of a supposed shoulder injury) could make for a wildly different compensation pattern. It’s important to know whether or not that’s the case. The only way to become completely certain is to do an analysis in addition to R.B.’s report of the apparent symptoms. (Medicine practitioners will recognize this as a signs and symptoms assessment).

It’s important to note that because of the brain, the the body a more easily predictable system than a double pendulum, because the brain regulates the body’s behavior. No such regulatory apparatus exists for the pendulum; the pendulum is both chaotic and ballistic; its trajectory cannot be altered from within after it is put into motion. (Hence the saying “he went ballistic”).

The problem with diagnosing R.B. is that it’s necessary that I make a very accurate inventory of the initial conditions (the symptoms) before I extrapolate and ask, “given these conditions, how is the body most likely to solve the global problem of maintaining R.B. vertical?” In fact, even that is irresponsible—which is why I only gave R.B. a set of general exercises that address the whole region of the body that will need to get strong in order for the non-dominant leg to take more of the support.

(Remember that the body is only somewhat chaotic; there are regions of the body designed to perform certain functions). Most of the muscular burden for supporting the body goes to the outside and back of the body. This is especially true for the leg and hip: The largest muscles of the body, the quads and the glutes, are located on the back and sides of these bodily regions.

And it’s not just me that knows this—R.B.’s body also does. In other words, I can depend on R.B.’s brain (that regulatory mechanism), to find a mechanical solution for how to keep R.B. on two feet somewhere within that region. So, by strengthening those muscle groups and muscle chains, we can be reasonably certain that the problem will go addressed.

But for those same reasons, I couldn’t give a specific exercise. There’s no way to know, except by taking that knowledge and making an organized (and hands-on) mechanical diagnosis of the region. Only then can we know what specific effects those particular initial conditions turned out to have in this case.

 

 

Uncategorized

The New York Times says: More (polyunsaturated) fats, fewer carbs.

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The New York Times posted an article today about how eating more fats of a particular kind (polyunsaturated fats, from vegetables and fish sources) is beneficial to the body.

(And no, eating fat doesn’t make you get fatter).

This is a great primer for a series of topics that I’ll be discussing at length here:

Why does our body get fatter when we feed it carbs, but less so when we feed it fat (What are the mechanisms and hormones at play)?

Why would the body even work that particular (counterintuitive) way, and not just get fatter if you feed it fat?

Why do dynamic systems respond in such a counterintuitive way?

But most importantly: What are the implications of this for us as runners, athletes, and people?

Understanding this kind of stuff is really worth your while. You put food in your body three times a day, but run (maybe) only one.

That said, what do you think about the article?