Movement Principle # 1
Posted by Gray Cook
Movement Principle # 7
Written by Gray Cook FMS
Principle 7: We should not put fitness on movement dysfunction.
It is possible for fit people to move poorly and unfit people to move well. We measure basic fitness quantity and basic movement quality with different tools. We forget this and assume that fitness is the fundamental baseline, but it is not.
Fitness and physical performance or capacity is the second step in a three-step process. As you discuss the information in this book with peers, other professionals, clients or patients, keep it simple at first. Make sure you establish agreement on the fundamentals. If there is a problem understanding the basic logic of functional movement systems, you will have little chance creating weight and appreciation for the corrective parts of the model. People must understand the basics of the pyramid approach.
I’ve used this statement; I’ve heard a lot of people repeat it and they attribute the statement to me. I think I made it up one day, but I got the sentiment from many people in addition to my own ideas.
The only practice that’s worth anything is practice that doesn’t rehearse continual, unmanageable mistakes. If you have a bad lunging pattern on the left and I load that up, moving way past the challenge and into just difficulty, your brain shifts to, ‘I have to survive this.’
Your brain forgets to move with integrity and balance and just goes into survival mode. You survive the load, but you don’t benefit from it. You don’t learn to engage or pressurize from the load. You don’t get any motor benefit.
We see a bad lunge and think we have to get that lunge better. We load it, and all of a sudden, the extra load triggers engagement. We think we’re benefiting in some way, but what we’re really what we’re doing is rehearsing compensation under load.
The load we’re talking about is weight, core impact, velocity or excessive range of motion. If you don’t have a minimum level of competency or some degree of integrity, when we stress or load unnecessarily, we reinforce whatever you have. Stress reinforces things in biological organisms. What doesn’t kill you may make you stronger, but it can make you stronger in the wrong direction.
If you’re squatting wrong and it’s not killing you, it can make your hip flexor spasm stronger. It can make your swayback worse. It can make your rounded shoulders harder to bring back.
When you go into your workout with underlying dysfunction, remember this: Exercise is trial by fire. We want to optimize the situation and then temper the steel. We don’t do it the other way around.
That’s sort of what’s behind the statement. It’s not a contradiction. When I’m talking corrective exercise, there’s not a lot of stress or load, because we should be learning to manage bodyweight. Managing balance without a load is natural. Everybody does that as they’re learning to walk.
What’s unnatural is to load a squat that doesn’t have any integrity to it. There’s no situation where a baby would think, ‘I can’t really squat that good right now. Maybe put a mini backpack on me and see if that helps my balance?’
This is another form of what we’re doing at the gym when we throw on quantity to clean up quality. If you want to clean up quality, clean up quality. If you want to reinforce quality, then throw on quantity.
This brings me to another thing.
When Brett Jones and I dissected the Turkish getup in Kettlebells from the Ground Up, our intention was not to make everybody do light getups. The idea is if you have less-than-optimal integrity in your getup, go light until you recapture integrity. Then get heavy again, because that’s the best way to see if you can hold integrity and manage quality.
Once quality has an acceptable base, start exploring greater levels of quantity—strength, speed, stamina, endurance—and see if you can maintain a minimum level of quality.
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