A Little Bit About the Nervous System

Nerves don't just go to one specific area of the body. Rather, the nervous system is an interconnected web in which something that happens in one end of the web affects other parts of the web. In fact, every movement that we do has an effect on the entire body!

What does this mean for training? A few things. First of all, if any part of the body is out of position, it can fire incorrect signals to other parts of the body and sabotage our efforts. It also completely undermines the idea of core training or separating body parts -- the human body is a unit and must be trained like one.

On a more positive note, if the body is in proper position and does any movement correctly, that feedback can cause positive adaptations throughout the entire body. As we will continue to mention, training done in proper position at max velocity will create greater amounts of correct feedback than training at low velocity and/or out of position.

This last principle has many ramifications, particularly in rehab. For example, say you have one broken leg that is immobilized in a cast. Moving the other leg or the arms per the above guidelines (proper position, high velocity) can prevent some of the atrophy in the injured leg and keep that injured leg ahead of where it otherwise would be once the cast comes off.

When it comes to ARP treatments, this knowledge of the nervous system takes on a new light. The ARPwave system works by finding the "short circuit" in the nervous system that is preventing the muscles from absorbing force. Because of the interconnectedness of the nervous system, the relevant short circuit can be anywhere in the body. We have seen a torn hamstring healed by working on a spot on the scapula, and a shoulder injury healed by working on the opposite ankle. The beauty of our system is that we listen to your body to find where the problem really is, and it could be anywhere.

Training to Eliminate Compensation Patterns

In the previous post we covered what compensation patterns are and how they both cause injury and rob people of their ability to perform at their physical peak. Now, it is time to delve into ways to fix these problems through training. Compensation patterns have been ingrained in the body through repetition. More and more repetitions build up a greater body of information, and in order to rewrite that information we need to input a large amount of new information.

Training is simply a stimulus to the body. This stimulus causes adaptation in the body based on many different factors, with the amount of adaptation being directly related to the amount of stimulus. To maximize adaptation, we want to maximize the information that we put into the body through training; that means high load and high velocity.

At first it may not be safe or effective to train using weights at high load and high velocity. Also, if this training is done before the body is properly prepared, it is more likely to actually reinforce compensation patterns rather than eliminate them.

The most effective way that we've found to prepare the body for efficient movement with minimal compensation is the extreme isometric protocol. Iso extremes, as we call them, involve holding the body in proper position for several minutes. Of course it may take several sessions to work up to being able to hold for this long, and that's fine.

One example is the iso extreme lunge. In this exercise, one gets into a lunge position and pulls maximally with the hamstring of the front leg to drop the hips as low as possible. Pulling with the front hamstring accomplishes many useful things. For example, the concentric contraction of the hamstring activates several reflex arcs. It causes eccentric contraction of both the quad on the same leg as well as the hip flexor of the opposite leg. And what do we know about most injuries? They occur during the eccentric phase of movement. Hmm...

Actively pulling to the maximum range of motion also causes the body to contract the muscles in the exact same way as a max effort sprint. How much feedback (or information) do you think is sent to the brain during a max effort sprint? That's right, a lot! During a five minute iso extreme lunge, we can actually achieve the same adaptation that we would get from five minutes of max effort sprint. This is a big deal, because very few (read: none) humans are able to maintain a max effort sprint for five minutes. If you don't believe it can be done, check out this video.

So, we know that doing the iso extreme exercises sends a lot of information to the brain. But what's the big deal? Well, as mentioned earlier, we need a lot of input to overwrite compensation patterns. While performing iso extremes, the information that we send to the brain is going to ingrain correct movement patterns related to proper position and patterns of muscle activation. Therefore, if we do enough iso extremes, we can actually overpower those built up compensation pattern. This leads to efficient movement. And efficient movement translates to more speed and strength with less effort, as well as fewer injuries.

Compensation Patterns

There is only one correct way for humans to move. We all have the same muscles, and they are designed to work in one way, with only minor variations for factors like limb length, muscle insertion points, etc. So why, you may wonder, do humans move so differently from each other? The answer is compensation patterns. If you are an athlete or active person, compensation patterns can rob you of your physical ability and must be overcome by proper training.

For our purposes, a compensation pattern is an adjustment in muscle activation made by the body. Sometimes the body adjusts to use different muscles to work around injury, sometimes it pulls new muscles into a movement because the muscles that it wants to use are too weak.

Let's look at one way a compensation pattern can develop. Say you have pain in your hip. This pain is caused by the muscles not being able to absorb force properly, and the body senses that weakness or inhibition. In response, the body causes other muscles to tighten up in order to protect the joint. The conventional thought process is to stretch the tight muscles, but that does nothing to address the underlying cause.

Now let's take the example one step further. If one of these muscles that tightens up is the psoas (one of the primary hip flexors), several problems can occur. For instance, tight hip flexors act as brakes on movements that involve hip extension, like a vertical jump. These brakes will rob you of your power. Tight hip flexors can also lead to anterior pelvic tilt, which will cause the femur to internally rotate. This internal rotation inhibits the functioning of several muscles, such as the hip adductors, which can in turn lead to knee and back pain.

If you are a sprinter trying to run down the track, and your body has to call on three or four muscles to do the job of one, you are going to be expending much more energy than you need to be. To improve your performance, you have two options. The first is to keep training the body to work as well as possible with the compensation patterns, which wastes a lot of effort and energy in activating those improper muscles. The second is to reprogram your nervous system to restore correct movement patterns, with the end result that you will use the correct muscles to run with less effort. We've seen time and again that the second option will produce better results than the first.

In the next post, I will address ways of training the body to move as efficiently as it can with as few compensation patterns as possible.