“Everything in moderation, even moderation.”
Category: Blog
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What Do I Give a Shit About?
I was asked this very simple question by a psychologist and business coach the other day. Despite its simplicity, it evokes a lot of thought.
One thing I give a shit about is the concept of strength and conditioning regarding training intensity. Zatsiorsky breaks training intensity into stimulating, retraining, and detraining.
I give a shit about this because its applications span across multiple areas of significance in my life – from enhancing my strength training regimen to optimizing my manual therapy practice and even streamlining my daily administrative tasks. The essence lies in recognizing that to elicit meaningful change or impact, we must apply the appropriate stimulus.
A simple analogy of a cluttered house: it won’t magically tidy itself up. The effective response is to engage in cleaning. Similarly, if the goal is to maintain the current state, a consistent effort akin to maintenance is required, where neither addition nor subtraction to the clutter occurs (a retraining intensity). However, should the clutter increase unchecked, it leads to detraining, necessitating more extensive efforts to restore order.
Essentially, understanding and applying the right level of stimulus is pivotal, whether in the context of physical training, therapeutic practices, or daily routines. It’s about striking the delicate balance between progress and preservation, ensuring that our efforts yield the desired outcomes.
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The Valley of Death
Our strategy to get you out of “the valley of death.” Recall that this is the area where we have fallen due to a lack of specific training in the forms of joint-specific training and others.
The only logical means of getting out of the valley is training and treatments that specifically treat and manage what you need, given your goals and lifestyle (demands). The concurrent strategy of using both treatment and training simultaneously will hedge against the volatility of setbacks.
Over time, with proper training, the valley will become shallow, as will the frequency of setbacks. Keep in mind that this is a long game that is non-linear and is a game of marginal gains–making small incremental improvements resulting in multifaceted effects.
Thank you to John and Olin for their Lineman Special Strength manual. This was my actual email and whiteboard illustration for a client last month. Showing that their concepts and systems apply elsewhere.
#ManualTherapy #linemanspecialstrength #systems #valleyofdeath #treatment #training #conjugate
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Your Shoes Didn’t Get Rid of Your Plantar Fasciitis.
I recently listened to a clip from a podcast where one of the guests was talking about the plantar fasciitis issues he’d been experiencing while running prior to being given a pair of running shoes. He says the shoes got rid of his plantar fasciitis. This simply isn’t the case.
For some more context. The person making this claim is overweight and alcoholic comedian. Not to be mean, but this person is not a runner. He’s known for his wild lifestyle and his comedic persona. From what I’ve gathered, they are running a race in May and is training with an actual high-level runner, amongst other athletic and sport achievements, Cameron Hanes.
Hanes supplied a pair of his custom-made running shoes, which he had designed for his 100-mile runs. The comedian says that the design of the shoes, specifically the laces, prevents the heel from moving, thus curing his plantar fasciitis.
In reality, the new runner still has plantar fasciitis. Only the shoe’s design, specifically the sole, fills in the gap between his plantar fascia’s physical capacities and the demands of a 250-pound man running miles at a time. In other words, the shoes absorb and dissipate the forces that his plantar fascia isn’t capable of doing, thus doing the work.
Our fun comedian will likely still experience his plantar fasciitis symptoms in Hanes’ shoes in time. Because his body will soon accommodate the shoes. Also, because of the lack of capacity, his shoes seemingly have to work harder. Thus, they will wear out faster because they’re now functioning as a shoe and his plantar fascia.
The issue here is changing elements that he thinks will change his symptoms. Falling for the trap of not seeing the forest for the trees. He’s not just symptom-chasing but only focusing on the external environment. If he changed the internal environment, i.e., the architecture and load-bearing capacity of the plantar fascia, and actually trained the internal environment to be greater than the demands of the external environment (running), he likely wouldn’t have plantar fasciitis.
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Second-Order Effects
Secondary effects occur as a consequence of the primary effects and can lead to emergent behaviors. For example, if you turn the air conditioner down in your hotel room to 60 degrees from the initial state of 70 degrees, the primary effect, the people in the room may start to get chilly (second-order effects) and put jackets in response to being cold (emergent behavior).
Can you think of an instance where you want to change the conditions of an environment to create a different effect and behavior? This can be the mood of employees in an office, an injured joint, a company’s quarterly earnings, the range of motion of a joint, or the amount of money in your savings account.
What action can we take to stimulate positive change from a system’s current state?
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Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Not seeing the forest for the trees implies a person is overwhelmed with focusing on every small detail that they fail to recognize or comprehend the broader picture or context. This concept often applies in a clinical setting.
When people experience pain or injury, they tend to pathologize everything they experience, thinking that each symptom or experience are individual of one another. People tend to walk around “marking trees” so to speak, looking for patterns or associations, but really just creating chaos, confusion, and frustration for themselves.
Depending on the timescale a person has been uncomfortable or dealing with symptoms, these issues can compound and can become a comprehensive inventory of experiences. A person who meticulously documents each symptom and experience and completely loses sight of the forest.
Chasing symptoms and treating them individually is a quixotic task, much like trying to improve the health of a forest by going tree to tree. Better to nurture the forest environment and the trees, and other bits will improve on their own.
Point being…
Just as trying to improve the health of a forest by focusing solely on individual trees would be impractical, treating symptoms in isolation without addressing their root causes or the overall environment may not lead to lasting improvement. Instead, nurturing the entire ecosystem or addressing the issue systemically can lead to more comprehensive and sustainable solutions.
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How Long Will It Take?
In his book Supertraining, Mel Siff quotes a research paper describing time scales of muscle and connective tissue adaptations: “Muscle tissue adapts to increased loading within several days, whereas connective tissues (such as tendons, ligaments, and joint capsules) or systems which contain a high proportion of connective tissue (such as bone or cartilage) only display significant adaptation and hypertrophy after several weeks or months of progressive loading.”
In knowing these details of specific tissues, and educating client-patients with this information, makes the treatment and training frequency recommendations more accurate and the client understands how and why I’m recommending such.
Choosing which ecology, or ecologies, to scale up will help determine things like treatment and or training visits, intensity, load, and volume.
For example, do you need more connective tissue architecture? That will take weeks to scale up and “see” some improvements. Do we need more muscle mass? That change happens over days. Do we need to make plastic changes to the central nervous system? We can train the CNS to change it’s response to an intrinsic or extrinsic stimulus in much shorter time periods, like a single treatment.
Here’s the thing…
We can recreate nature in a constrained environment using treatment and training. We have to choose which ecology we want to scale up. Use logical and specific methods and means sequentially and progressively, stimulating changes over time.
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Music
Who doesn’t love music?
I love music. I have so many memories with music to do with them. Music can be very nostalgic.
Personally, I tend to connect more to the music than I do the lyrics.
What type of music do you listen to? Do you connect more with a song’s music or its lyrics?
In my clinical practice as a manual therapist, I try to match the music with the person I’m treating or working with. Over the years, it’s been interesting to see the nuances music has from person to person. People will make no comment on the music selection, ask to turn it off, comment how much they “love this song,” or we will guess the artist for every other song.
Depending on the client, I will play soundtracks to movies to keep it random. We’ll blast Queen, Metallica and rock, my favorite hip hop, movie scores, 80’s anything, Soul, Motown, country, the list goes on and on.
The music gives each client interaction our own little soundtrack. It’s how I create a little more connectedness.
More useless info:
A song I could listen to 50 times is “Pick Up the Pieces” by Average White Band.
Some of my favorite vocalists are Chris Cornell, Janis Joplin, John Fogerty, Freddy Mercury, and Amy Winehouse.
My favorite rappers are Black Thought, Mos Def/Yasiin Bay, Andre 3000, Eminem, 2Pac.
Go listen to some good music or try something new.
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