Category: Fitness

Capacity vs. Specificity

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2 approaches with different aims.

One’s goal is to make people capable or generally well-rounded at everything and one is to make people excellent at one or a few things. Which is better?

 

This discussion mirrors the Crossfit vs. sports-specific or adaptation specific conversation. In physical therapy school and in my CSCS training EVERYTHING was geared around causing specific adaptations in our clients, or even more zoomed in, our client’s tissues. If they came in with shoulder pain the goal was to figure out what specific tissue was the issue and cause adaptation specifically at that tissue. Or in the CSCS world, you have a middle linebacker that needs to be able to cover 40 yards in 4.5 seconds and be able to bring down someone that is 215 pounds. Specific demands require specific training stimuli. Right? As you can imagine I was very on the specific side of things and ended up not really liking nor understanding Crossfit/the capacity side of things.

Then I started practicing. And seeing real people. Dads with 3 kids. Mom’s who are busy. Young professionals who just want to be healthy. Older people that want to stay mobile.

What I started to see what that 99% of humans walking around did not need some very specific stimulus to meet their goals, but actually the opposite. They need to be more capable humans. Instead of getting an A+ on sprinting or vertical leap, they need to get a B in everything.

And my Crossfit hate started to break down slowly. Why would you ever program 10 reps of squat snatch, double under (jump rope twice per jump instead of once), and running all in a 15-minute workout? Squat snatches are a power developing movement, only to be done in very small sets with moderate load quickly with full rest…right? Jump rope is an aerobic endurance exercise, don’t pair that with a power development movement, then running! Noooo this is all wrong.

Or is it. What happens to the average human body when exposed to all of these different stimuli (when performed with proper technique of course). They become more capable humans. Their endurance improves, their power improves, their strength improves. The concept of concurrent training (training strength and endurance simultaneously) is typically bashed by the strength and condition world, but they are in a different world then most of the normal humans walking around.

That is the big difference. Most people, me included, want to be fit and able to do what life throws at me. I don’t care to be great at any specific thing but I want to be able to do it all at a high level if necessary. That is why I am now firmly in the creating capable humans camp. Come join me.

 

**Side note: these camps can play nice together and specific training can be incorporated into a Crossfit style program to target client-specific goals.

“What do you think of CrossFit?”

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This is probably one the questions I get most as a physical therapist, and I have now given enough thought to put it into a blog post.

My short answer is “I love it.” My long answer is below.

A few of my initial concerns with CrossFit were:

  1. It isn’t specific to any one goal
  2. It seems like an easy way to get hurt
  3. It seems like everyone does the same thing

Over the last several months though these concerns have actually be dispelled and/or properly understood.

Now these are the primary reasons I love CrossFit:

1. It isn’t specific

This has gone from a concern to something I actually appreciate about CrossFit. When I was studying for my CSCS certification I was immersed in program design, periodization and targeting specific adaptations in your clientele. CrossFit seemed like the total opposite of that. Doing high volumes of power lifting movements was the opposite of my training and I didn’t like it, until I started working as a physical therapist. Part of the paradigm shift for me came from this video from the founder of CrossFit, which essentially outlines the thinking behind all of it. CrossFit is not intended to make the athlete (or just human) specifically good at any one thing but to build the athlete’s CAPACITY. Instead of training to jump really high, or sprint really fast or lift really heavy or running really far, CrossFit trains you to perform more work. The non-specificity of CrossFit actually serves to improve the athlete’s ability to tolerate more activity, which is precisely what the average human needs. In the video, Glassman goes deeper into the topic of building fitness (or capacity) and how aiming at that goal will create not only fit people, but healthy people. I agree.

2. It seems like an easy way to get hurt

This belief stemmed from my misunderstanding of how almost all CrossFit gyms function. I thought that anyone could sign up and that day they would be doing full Rx (full weight on lifts) WODs (workout of the day). This seemed like a perfect design for injury. However, most “boxes” now have a fairly developed on-boarding process that participants are required to go through to start working out. Most of these include a communication of previous/current injuries, a movement analysis, and training on basic movements. Also, most gyms are diligent to scale WODs for less advanced people, or even have different class times for beginners. Sure people get injured doing CrossFit, just like people get injured doing any other athletic pursuit. This argument against CrossFit falls apart almost immediately for me. Does your risk of injury go up? Sure, compared to sitting on the couch, but not much more than trying to do any lifting/exercising on your own. Also, I will take occasional musculoskeletal aches and pains that can be treated effectively (by a PT, chiro, masseuse, etc.) in exchange for the [expensive] chronic, non-musculoskeletal diseases that come from being unhealthy. Heart disease, Type II diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases are considered preventable, building fit humans would help on this front. I’m a big believer in Mark Rippetoe’s quote “Strong people are harder to kill.” I think you could argue that long term exposure to CrossFit will decrease your risk of injury by building your overall tolerance to advanced movements and high loads.

3. Seems like everyone is doing the same thing.

This was another misunderstanding I had about CrossFit. As I mentioned above, WODs are scalable and good coaches will be able to help individuals meeting their needs with every workout. This is basically a non-issue for me. The point of CrossFit is to expose you to a continually variety of movements that you do with a group of people, under the supervision of a skilled coach (or coaches).

Overall, I love CrossFit. Building more capable humans, and more capable communities will help drive down the overall cost of healthcare.

 

Have a thoughts leave a comment and let’s chat!

Core Stability: Does it matter?

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There are camps in physical therapy that like to bash each other about their treatment styles, beliefs, gurus, etc. I think some of that is warranted, some seems a little on the rude side. One topic that tends to drive people to their camps to sling poo at the other camp is core stability. 

I have gone back and forth between camps on this one. On one side is the “activate transverse abdominous 64% while sitting on the toilet” camp and on the other is the “just make them strong humans” camp. The first would take a patient through a somewhat elaborate sequence of motor control activities to try to get the patient to independently and volitionally active their deep core muscles. The other side, championed by Stuart McGill among others, would advocate for a more general core strengthening program, including: planks, “McGill curl-ups”, bird-dogs, etc. while not necessarily giving a rip if the TA is activated or not.

I started in camp TA and have moved to camp get strong, for the most part, BUT I recently had an interesting patient that made me step back towards the middle of the camps…no man’s land, if you will. Long story short, she was a weak, middle-aged women with low back pain. No red flag scary business. After taking her through my “normal” low back assessment system, I was a little stumped. So I started to see if I could change her symptoms any other way. The only way we could decrease (and actually abolish) her symptoms was to activate her TA specifically. Now, I know team “get people strong” may be grumbling right now, saying “it’s not even possible to isolate…blah blah blah.” I get that because I usually am the one saying that. But in this particular case for this particular women for some particular reason, when she contracted her TA (or tried to) and performed a previously painful movement she had no pain. 

So what do I do with that? I didn’t just throw that tid bit of information out and continue telling myself that TA activation doesn’t matter, I ran with it. I had her activate her TA with other movements that hurt during the assessment, no pain. Then I loaded those movements and challenged her in novel movement patterns all while contracting her TA. She didn’t have any pain and she was moving her skeleton around…a win in my book.

So does core stability matter? I would say this: if doing something changes a patient’s pain, especially if it completely removes their pain, it matters. I know this is a slippery slope, but if we don’t skillfully navigate slippery slopes as physical therapists patients like her don’t have the same level of success, right? Let’s navigate the slippery slopes, the muddy waters, the no man’s land between camps well so that people don’t slip through the cracks all because our camp wouldn’t agree.

Sleep

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Depending on how tired you are, you probably read the title of this post as either a noun or a command.

Sleep is similar to drinking water and taking vitamins….we know we need to but we end up not doing it. The interesting thing about sleep though is that in our society it is celebrated to operate on very little sleep. I often hear people almost bragging about only getting 4 hours of sleep….what is that? I have never heard someone say, “hey dude…guess what…I have only had 1 glass of water today…” If anyone said that we would immediately consider them a bit strange. But sleep, we celebrate. Like oh you must be some kind of tough superhuman that is so efficient that you don’t have to waste your time sleeping.

You may be one of those people.

I think it is time to rethink the sleep problem we have in our society. There is plenty of science (summarized well in this book) that shows us that sleep is not only something that helps us stay healthy, it actually is like a performance enhancing drug. Our brains thrive when they are given enough sleep. We are more creative, productive, joyful and clear-headed.

I think it’s time we stop treating sleep as a waste of time and start treating it like a way to increase our performance. I can already hear some people grumbling while reading this post. The people who value “hustle” and don’t believe in work-life balance and the people who think that a good day of work is a long day of work. I hear you grumbling. This message is not a plea for people to be lazy or to achieve less, this is a plea for the exact opposite. We need well-rested people. We need dreamers that can see solutions and think clearly about big problems in our society.

Sleeping 8 hours a night is not going to kill your business, ruin your relationships, hurt your career or burn you out…the opposite will.

This is why I want to challenge you (and myself) to the 30-day sleep challenge. The challenge is this, for the next 30 days, you will do your best to attempt to get 8 hours of sleep per night and see how your life changes. There will be nights that you stay up too late, and nights that your 2-year-old wakes you up…that is ok. Do your best, though. Below is a list of a few things you can do to improve your sleep over the next 30 days. Good luck!

Other Resources:

12 Tips for Better Night Sleep

8 Famous Ideas That Came From Dreams

 

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