The strength training world has, like any other field, been rife with fads and trends, some good, some less good, and some downright ridiculous. But like any trends, there is an overreaction in the short term and an underreaction in the long term. This leaves room to discuss the rights and wrongs of the methods and get the real gems, those that might have been hidden in the commotion that gave rise to its popularity in the first place. Functional was all the rage a few years ago, surfing on the swiss ball craze of the early-mid 90’.
Now the intentions of functional training are excellent: focusing on athletic development, integration of movement, whole-body coordination to improve performance, and of course injury prevention, which has been a major battle horse of functional training since its beginning. Now, more than a decade later, the question of it’s efficacy is still being debated, especially on the injury prevention claim.
Training, no matter what kind, has one objective: to get better at something, no matter what that something is. The goal of this article is not to characterize functional training or judge it, but rather to establish correspondence between its claims and the benefits provided by posturology.
It is first important to remember SAID principle: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands. Most athletes perform well on the field despite more or less well-calibrated bodies. The injury risks rise with those dysfunctions, all other factors being equal. So the kind of training destined to best serve the interest of the athletes, and their performance, is one that will be useful on the playing field.
The more you can use the motor qualities developed during training, the more you can adapt them to your activity of choice. This requires an integration of known motor skills, the sports movements, with improved motor qualities: strength, explosion, speed, etc.
Think of this as a race car driver having to “learn” a new car with a bigger engine. Although the basics are the same, the reaction time, reflexes and driving are very different and need a period of accommodation to match a previous performance with a newly acquired capacity.
The way the human body this is by using better recruitment patterns for its motor unit, and activating muscle chains.
Muscle chains are a concept closely linked to motors patterns, but they are more complex motor strategies that are also influenced by soft-tissue remodeling in the body. They are associations for muscle the body uses in conjunction to produce movement more effectively and efficiently. By activating them, the body can run smoother and more economically, so to speak.
This was the goal sought after by therapists who rehabbed patients with Swiss ball. Invented in the early 1900, they were used in Switzerland mainly for training gymnasts and dancers and in the clinical settings to rehabilitate patients who had motor skill losses. They started making their way into the training world in the late 80’, in no small part due to the effort of training guru Paul CHEK, who propagated their use with his athlete clients. A functional training pioneer, CHEK make Swiss ball popular with a series a training DVDs and in his certifications. The craze started a few years after that and has gotten out of hand with claims of bullet-proofing athletes’ joints and preventing injuries. It is to be noted that CHEK himself has since them remarked that the claims were vastly exaggerated.
Science seems to abund in that sense, as later studies demonstrated that if indeed regaining lost proprioception was possible with use to the swiss ball, bosu and other unstable training devices, it had very minimal impact on its improvement.
Now fast forward to the 2010’, with applied neurology and motor recalibration techniques. Here is a video of two posturologists performing the Klatt test, a good indicator of knee stability used in clinical settings.
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/GQRFRXnUZEM”]
Such an improvement is only achievable if the underlying causes of the dysfunction have been removed. The joint centration problem at the knee that caused the initial poor performance resulted from the information that the body’s posture sensors, the eyes and the feet, were sending to the brain. The brain make a faulty movement pattern choice based on the incorrect informations it received from its exteroceptive organs. Reintegrating the proper movement pattern can be done instantaneously with posturology’s proprietary recalibration techniques, thus making a proper movement pattern the right solution that brain will choose.
The future will demonstrated that neurology has more to do with functional training than previously thought and posturology will be at the forefront of the revolution. Biomechanics will always be the nuts and bolts of kinesiology, but let us be ones that will demonstrate that posturology can be the software that unites the parts and provides the results.
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The Posturepro Team
Superior Performance
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