Revisiting Athletic Body in Balance

Written by Gray Cook FMS

• Share on:

In 2003, I had the honor of having my book Athletic Body in Balance published by Human Kinetics, and for the first time people could read a perspective I’d been toying with since the early 1990s. Now, just past the 10-year anniversary of Athletic Body in Balance I want to tell you what’s happened since then, and what I would add or change if I were to re-write the book today.

Before we do that, let’s take a quick look at the original premise. Think of the title first— Athletic Body in Balance. Imbalances are an indicator of disharmony and every philosophy that stands the test of time preaches balance.

For me, the entire secret sauce in my career is that I haven’t been pulled back and forth in the hypothetical debate of “Is this better than this?” when considering a horrendous imbalance.

Throughout my writing, beginning with Athletic Body in Balance, I nudge readers not to consider a parts approach to movement, but to instead consider a patterns approach. If we follow that logic, it would be more prudent to look at imbalances in patterns before we try to find imbalances in specific parts.

Let’s peel this onion for a second. If there are imbalances in a movement pattern, we break down that pattern. If there’s a problem with a specific part, we’ll find it. But if there’s no problem with a part, we work on the pattern as a whole. The parts just aren’t working well together. The whole should always be greater than the sum of the parts.

That’s what movement is.

What are the benefits of working on a whole movement pattern? You have to create your own mobility. You have to create your own stability. We can increase or decrease loads, stresses and support to make the pattern a little easier to do, but working through an entire pattern is the natural way to acquire that pattern.

Nature shows us this every day. A baby learns to walk through reciprocal patterning and crawling. Those are still patterns—they’re whole patterns. They don’t do foot, ankle and hip exercises to become walkers. They crawl, and then they struggle through the walking patterns. There are a lot of falls incurred while learning to walk.

That’s all part of the plan. It’s a negative-feedback system. If they don’t do the right strategy, program and weight shifting, they don’t get a reward of movement success, and if they don’t get a reward, they don’t save that motor program into the brain.

Everything a baby does and everything nature provides us is self-limiting. This means our ability to pursue greater amounts of volume, intensity and frequency are limited by technical ability, attention to detail, mobility, stability, sensory input and interaction with the environment.

Here’s another thing I want you to walk away with: Fix movement through movement.

In Athletic Body in Balance, one of the things I wanted to do from the very beginning was to create an appreciation for setting a baseline. A lot of people talk ‘test–retest,’ but what they do more often is ‘trial–retrial.’ They try something, do something and try it again, but that’s not really test–retest.

I introduced the Functional Movement Screen in Athletic Body in Balance, but I realized since I was writing to the consumer, I had to have a self-done movement screen—something for the reader without a professional in the room.

In this video, I’ll introduce the premise of self-movement screening and show you the original video we shot showing the self-done movement screen depicted in the book.

The self-screen is a way to gauge your own progress when you’re training yourself, and when the availability of a professionally mentored movement screen isn’t available.

That’s a quick summary of what I hope is the timeless information in Athletic Body in Balance, but you may be interested to hear about some of the additions I would make now. The best way to discuss these is through the people who influenced me in recent years.

Indian Clubs

I’d like to start with Dr. Ed Thomas, who confirmed many of the suspicions I had about learning movement. Dr. Thomas is a walking encyclopedia of physical culture, physical education and physical preparation history. He’s a Fulbright scholar; he’s a PhD. He’s accomplished in yoga and martial arts, and he’s an expert on club swinging.

Throughout Athletic Body in Balance I was passionate about keeping the reader in touch with the importance of jumping rope. Jumping rope is a remarkable self-limiting activity for lower body, core, alignment, interval training, springiness and building a good power base.

Had I known about Indian clubs at the time of Athletic Body in Balance, I would have introduced club swinging as the upper body counterpart to jumping rope for the lower body. I can’t say enough about how important it is to get a command of club swinging.

There’s a true movement difference in the upper and lower body. The upper body is mobility-driven, involving hand and eye coordination—in touch with circular patterns no matter what the sport or activity. The lower body is constantly in touch with the environment, often with a jarring impact. It’s transitional and most responsible for locomotion, whereas the upper body is mostly responsible for manipulation.

The activities of jumping rope and club swinging generate the same result—adaptability and physical resiliency—lubricating the wheels and truing the alignment. You have to stand up straight to turn Indian clubs, and you have to stand up straight to jump rope. You may think you’re standing up straight, but if you can’t turn the clubs or jump rope, you’re not.

Kettlebell Training

True alignment is something many of us aren’t aware of. We determine this when we try to learn something like the Turkish getup, another activity that didn’t make it into Athletic Body in Balance because I didn’t know about it at the time.

Kettlebells weren’t introduced in Athletic Body in Balance, and yet I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying kettlebells with Pavel Tsatsouline and Brett Jones. I came to know Pavel’s work when I watched a DVD of him talking about deadlifting and found myself in total agreement with everything he said.

At the time Athletic Body in Balance had already been published and it occurred to me that I assumed everyone knew and used the deadlift. I’ve had a huge appreciation for the deadlift since my high school football days. I was wrong for assuming that because I appreciated the deadlift, my readers already did too. I consider jumping rope a fundamental move. I think the Turkish getup and the deadlift are also fundamental moves.

A few years ago when Tim Ferris asked me to suggest some of my favorite strengthening and corrective moves for his work in Section 8 of The 4-Hour Body, I gave him the deadlift and the deadlift variations, the Turkish getup and the chop-and-lift. If you pay attention to the way your body performs and use the obvious intentional left-right comparisons of chopping, lifting, single-leg deadlifting and the Turkish getup, you will gain strength, master movement and keep your body balanced at the same time.

• Philosophy
• Application

• Share on:

Related Resources

• 

  Retrain Skill and Performance to Elevate Production

  Posted by Brandon Bennett
• 

  Texting vs. Correctives

  Posted by Dr. Lee Burton
• 

  Core Composition and Function: The Core of 2014 Part 1

  Posted by Leo Shveyd, CSCS
• 

  The Fundamental Philosophy of FMS

  Posted by Lee Burton
• 

  Gray Cook Talks Common Sense

  Posted by FMS