Functional Movements are Athletic Movements

What qualities must a movement have to be considered functional?

Crossfit defines functional movements as those which;
(1) move a relatively heavy load
(2) a relatively long distance
(3) quickly

I like this definition for its simplicity. If you fulfill these three requirements, you are very likely performing a functional movement that will advance your athletic abilities. However, there are many functional/athletic movements that are performed slow and controlled or without a load and this definition does not account for those. I found a move detailed definition of functional movements at Mike's Gym.

A functional movement

(1) Is a ground based exercise where you are standing up

(2) Is performed with free weights

(3) Works multiple muscle groups and surround multiple joints

(4) Is performed is an explosive manner

Mike Burgener goes on to state that if you can satisfy these requirements 75% of the time, then your program and movements are functional.

Why would these four movement traits help you become a better athlete?

(1) athletics is ground based and performed while standing

Seated leg extensions, seated overhead press, seated anything, will not improve your athleticism to the same rate that standing varieties of those same movements will. Sure you might be able to overhead press more weight in a seated position that in a standing one but who care about that when you're overhead pressing capacity only matter when using it standing.

(2) You do not have the benefit of additional stability while playing sports

The biggest difference between free weights and machines is stability. Machines provide lots of stability and free weights provide little to no stability. All the support you are going to get on a sports field comes from your two feet in contact with the ground and maybe your hands as well. You have to be able to control your own body/external bodies and machines will not help you do that to the degree that free weights will.

(3) Athletics involves the coordinated movement of multiple muscle grounds and multiple joints in concert and not in isolation.

You are not going to see a leg extension, bicep curl or lateral raise on any sports field anywhere ever so why on earth would you perform them to become better at sports? Additionally, these movements have a much greater tendency to strain connective tissues. Why is this? Because you're body is not designed to move like that. These is an exception to this rule, The Functional Paradox, which we will discuss at a later date.

(4) Sports are played quickly

Sports of explosive, fast, and violent. Performing explosive movements in the gym can be risky and an athlete needs to master the slow and controlled versions of explosive movements first. However, explosive movements will get you to the next level faster than any other single type of athletic training. For example, kettle bell work, plyometics, medicine ball work, and Olympic lifting.

Plyometrics

Plyometrics exercise refers to those activities that enable a muscle to reach maximal force in the shortest possible time.

To develop power and quickness, an athlete should use a program that incorporates Plyometrics. This post discusses some of the does and don't with Plyo work.

Plyo work must be introduced to an athlete is a progressive manner. For example, jumping onto a box is widely considered the most basic of all jumping drills and a great place to start plyo work. In contrast, jumping down from a box, a "depth jump", is widely considered one of the most advanced and intense forms of Plyo work.

I have seen coaches start their athletes doing Plyo work with box jump where the athlete returns to the ground by jumping down from the box backward. That is not teaching Plyometrics in a progressive manner and it is seriously irresponsible.

A beginner should have 80 to 100 contacts per week. That means if you have no jumping experience or you are deconditioned, you should not do 200 jump ropes on day one (200 contacts). You should build up to 100-120 contacts per week and end up with 120-140 contacts if you have considerable experience. Generally, even advanced athletes should not exceed 150 foot contacts per week. Prepubescent children should never perform depth jumps or other high-intensity lower-body plyo drills.

You need to have sufficient Strength, Speed and Balance to begin plyo training.
The following are conservative prerequisites of lower body strength, speed, and balance that would clear an athlete for beginning plyo training.

Strength: Perform one repetition of the squat at 1.25x to 1.5x your bodyweight
Speed: Perform five repetitions of the squat with 50% to 60% body weight in 5 seconds or less
Balance: Stand on one leg for 30 seconds without falling

I feel the need to discuss box jumps here because chances are, this is the form of plyo work you will start with and there are some guidelines that will keep your knees healthy. For beginners, box height should range from 4 to 24 inch depending on skill level. Do three to five sets of 5 jumps, up to 25 jumps total (25 foot contacts). There are two things to watch for.

1) Can you land quietly?
2) Do you land in the same position that you took off in?

If you are making a lot of noise when you land on the box or if the landing squat is deeper than the takeoff squat, the box is too high.

The guidelines in this post have been taken from Mike Boyle (whose resume includes 17 years as the Strength and Conditioning coach at Boston University & the S&C coach for a gold medal U.S. Olympic hockey team), Jim Radcliffe (Strength and Conditioning coach at Oregon), the National Strength and Conditioning Association Plyo guidelines and finally, the USA Weightlifting Plyo guidelines. So basically, follow these rules and you'll be a better athlete. Ignore these rules is risk an ACL tear in your local gym.

This is putting the EGO before the ACL

The Zone: A High Performance Diet

If you want to avoid diet-induced disease, then you should eat "meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar". This advice, which I've taken from Crossfit.com, is a great place to start but a more precise prescription is needed to optimize performance.

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Based on my own personal experience and that of many Crossfit/Athletic coaches, Barry Sears’ “Zone Diet” closely models optimal nutrition. Unfortunately, the full benefit of the Zone Diet requires you to first weigh and measure your food. Once you have done this for a week or two, you will be able to eye the measurements and eliminate the scale.

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The food pyramid below looks similar to the one the U.S. government used to recommend. However, instead of grains being at the bottom and the largest component, they are at the top as the least component.

Meals on the Zone are broken down into blocks.

1 block of protein = 7 grams of protein

1 block of carbs = 9 grams of carbs

1 block of fat = 1.5 grams of fat

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However, there is an assumption that there are about 1.5 grams of fat in each block of protein. So the total amount of fat needed for a 1 block meal is 3 grams. 1.5 grams of fat from your 7 grams of protein and 1.5 grams of fat from your single fat block. I won’t get into the blocks in detail here b/c that would take a long time.

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When a meal is composed of equal blocks of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, it is 40% carbohydrate, 30% protein and 30% fat. Typically, once I bring an athlete to the Zone parameters, they start to drop body fat FAST.

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As the men fall below 10% toward 5% body fat, that is time to kick up the FAT consumption. Yes that’s right, the fat. Many of the best Crossfit Athletes are at X blocks of protein, X blocks of carbs, and 3X or 4X blocks of fat.

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So what does one day on the Zone look like for an athletic well muscled male who works out 6 to 5 days a week with crossfit?

Breakfast 5 eggs 1 ½ apple 10 macadamia nuts	Snack 3oz sliced roast beef 3 cups sliced cucumber and tomato 30 olives 1 orange	Dinner 5oz chicken breast 24 asparagus spears 1 artichoke 2 ½ cups broccoli 30 almonds
Lunch 5oz tuna 1 large salad 5 Tbsp avocado 2 cups grapes		Snack 3oz salmon 2 cups green beans 24 peanuts

The above diet consists of 5 blocks of protein, 5 blocks of carbohydrates, and 10 blocks of fat and breakfast lunch and dinner. Twice a day this athlete eats a snack of 2 blocks of protein, 2 blocks of carbohydrates, and 4 blocks of fat. This athlete does crossfit 5 to 6 days a week, is around 10% body fat, incredibly strong/powerful and has excellent blood work.

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For individual guidance on how many blocks you should be eating and a comprehensive list of block card/meal plan, just shoot me an email and I would be more than happy to help you out.

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Much of the information on the post was taken from Barry Sears’ “Zone Diet” as well as 21^st issue of the Crossfit Journal, an amazing resource for any athlete interested in learning about Crossfit and becoming an animal.

The Running Shoe Conspiracy

"Runners wearing top-of-the-line trainers are 123 per cent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap ones. This was discovered as far back as 1989, according to a study led by Dr Bernard Marti, the leading preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern."

"Follow-up studies found similar results, like the 1991 report in Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise that found that 'wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (eg, more cushioning, 'pronation correction') are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes."

HOW THE HECK CAN THIS BE TRUE????

If I were reading this post, I would need more proof than some research. I would need the opinion of a serious running coach to actually believe this bullshit.

Well, Stanford University track and field coach Vin Lananna is here to teach us how the $20 billion running shoe industry is full of shit. "I can't prove this but I believe that when my runners train barefoot they run faster and suffer fewer injuries". The respected coach, who has kept Stanford track and field in the top 15, went on to say that he "once ordered highend shoes for the team and within two weeks we had more plantar faciitis and Achilles problems then I'd even seen."

HOW THE HECK CAN THIS BE TRUE????

Sneakers are designed to have you strike the ground with your heal, well in front of your center of mass.


Unfortunately, this is not how anyone should run. For those of you who have heard of POSE running or Chi Running, you already know this. If I had you run barefoot, without instruction or coaching, you would naturally strike the ground with the balls of your feet, close to directly under your center of mass.



However, you should not start to run barefoot tomorrow. You have most likely been wearing shoes for your entire running life that have caused the musculature of your feet to atrophy.

My advice is to visit crossfitendurance and watch some video on POSE running and learn how to run correctly. Look at the image of Jesse Owens above and check out those shoes. Not much to them and that is how it should be.

INTRO TO POSE RUNNING

The majority of the information in this post was taken from Christopher McDougall's new book 'Born to Run'. A great read and especially important if you're interested in running any kind of distance injury free.

The Rower: Best Cardio Machine

"Marathon runners talk about hitting 'the wall' at the twenty-third mile of the race. What rowers confront isn't a wall; it's a hole - an abyss of pain, which opens up in the second minute of the race. Large needles are being driven into your thigh muscles, while your forearms seem to be splitting. Then the pain becomes confused and disorganized, not like the windedness of the runner or the leg burn of the biker but an all-over, savage unpleasantness. As you pass the five-hundred-meter mark, with three-quarters of the race still to row, you realize with dread that you are not going to make it to the finish, but at the same time the idea of letting your teammates down by not rowing your hardest is unthinkable...Therefore, you are going to die. Welcome to this life."

-- Ashleigh Teitel

This post compares the C2 Rower to Running, Biking & the Elliptical

Impact

The C2 is impact free and can be done at very high intensity without concern for articulating cartilage or meniscus damage. When running at high intensity you do not have this same peace of mine. The bike and elliptical are impact free so we have a tie here for this category.

Muscle Mass

The C2 rower requires the recruitment of far more musculature then running, biking, and the elliptical combined. More specifically, while rowing you use your legs, glutes, abdominals, back, shoulders, and arms. You can also increase the resistance on a C2 to help you recruit high threshold muscle fibers in the lower and upper body, something that none of the other cardio modes can argue.

Range of Motion (ROM)

For range of motion, the C2 has got them all beat by a large margin range, with one exception. While rowing, your ankles, knees, hips and shoulders will flex and extend to a larger degree then they would otherwise during biking and elliptical training. During a full sprint your hips might exceed the C2 ROM but that is the only joint which might. Also, the C2 does not define your movement pattern while that is true for the bike and elliptical.

I discussed interval training with my first post and the C2 Rower is the very best way to get those intervals in. It is impact free, incorporates a ton of musculature, and requires those muscles to work through their full range of motion. Biking, Running, and the Elliptical cannot make that claim.

For those three reasons, rowing is exceptionally good at fatiguing the body quickly. Look at the pictures below to get the form down and keep that back flat the entire time even if you lean forward or backward from the hip.

Next time you workout, try rowing 2000 meter as fast as you can.

If you beat my 2000m best, I’ll give you $20 CASH! It is 6:47. I promise. E-mail me a pic of the monitor as proof. Images taken from Crossfit.com

Static Stretching: What's the real deal

So if you have been paying attention, then you know that static stretching inhibits muscular power. If you have not been paying attention then review this NY Times article that summarizes that latest research. (It will tell you that static stretching can weaken your muscles by up to 30%!!!!)

There are many many studies to support this conclusion. However, there was recently a study done to determine if a second warm-up done after a static stretch, would reverse the power-sucking ability of static stretching.

Well they found that a second exercise bout does not reverse the negative effects of static stretching, which was still detrimental to power

However, static stretching is very important because it will help increase the range of motion of a joint and you should stretch when done working out. As we age, we naturally loose range of motion, but stretching can counteract this. Hold your stretch for at least 30 seconds and always warm up fully prior to stretching. Don’t stretch cold.

If you strength train but fail to exercise joints throughout their full range of motion (ROM), then those joints will loose ROM even faster. So if you bench press and don't bring the bar all the way down, you might find yourself unable to bring the bar all the way down without straining a shoulder muscle before long.

Your Stretching Headquarters

USA Weightlifting Sports Performance Coach

I spent the last two days at the USA Weightlifting Sports Performance Coaching Accreditation Course at Hofstra University and I had a blast. I received individual coaching instruction from Mike Gattone CSCS, Senior International Coach, High Performance and Coaching Education Director for USA Weightlifting. Mike has and continues to coach Olympic Gold Medallists and his advice/cues were enlightening to say the least.

So lets talk about Olympic (Oly) lifts and how to change our bodies.

Oly Lifts (Snatch, Clean and Jerk and variations thereof) are especially effective at 1. Increasing bone density and diameter

2. Increasing the girth and strength of tendons, ligaments and fascia

3. Stimulating hormone production as well as muscle cell hormone sensitivity

However, the most significant adaptation from Oly lifts has to do with the Central Nervous system. Neural control affects the maximal force output of a muscle by determining which and how many motor units are involved in a muscular contraction (recruitment) and the rate at which the motor units are fired (rate coding).

As an athlete performs Olympic lifts over time, he or she will begin to recruit higher percentages of their available motor unit pool in shorter periods of time. So when an untrained athlete explodes at the start of a 100 meter dash, she will likely recruit around 60% of her available muscle. If that same athlete power trains, then she will eventually be able to recruit of much higher percentage of available muscle at the start of a sprint within a shorter period of time. This means increased power off the blocks and faster sprinting times.

Olympic lifts are highly technical and require a lot of practice to become proficient at. If you are interested in this type of training, then you need at least some one-on-one expect instruction after you have already developed a solid strength base with the squat, deadlift and standing overhead press. For more information concerning Oly lifts as well as finding a local gym to teach you these movements post a question.