It’s rarely, if ever, when we are trying to think that we get our best insights. Beta state (12 to 38hz brain waves) is typical waking consciousness and rarely the source of truly great ideas and inspiration. Alpha state (8-12hz) is a set of brainwaves that reflects FLOW, and is when we tend to get “downloads” to our conscious thoughts that reflect a greater connectedness of our mind.
There is a reason the Clemson football program uses Headspace once a week.
Alpha state is the reason why we tend to get our best ideas while in the shower or driving, or right before we drift off to sleep as our brainwaves slow down and head towards Delta state (sleep state at .5 to 3hz).
This being said, my best ideas undoubtedly come to me during my workout times. I’ve long had a habit of writing down these ideas during my workout and collecting them later in the form of workout writing, exercises, articles, or book writing. My latest book “Speed Strength” was very much the product of a skeleton of ideas that were continually ruminated on, the output being FLOW state intuition that ended up on paper. Each chapter was a product of a continual train of thoughts that came to me during workouts, in the shower or right before bed… probably the reason it took 3 years to complete!
Great practical ideas are a result of the process of intuition. Research often confirms this intuition later, and it can also serve as a baseline to inspire our ideas that turn into practice, so long as it is good research (good design) and taken in the right context.
This being said, this post marks the start of a new weekly practice of mine, where I’ll spit out some of the main thoughts that popped in my head during my workout process. Have any ideas or comments on this series? Leave them at the bottom of the article.
Without further adieu, here we go!
Workout Thought-Melee: January 28 – Feb 1
- Fixing a Broken Squat, Bench or Pullup
What is the most common instruction to athletes whose hips shift or twist while squatting? Put more weight on the “weak leg” or shift back to the other side. I was just talking about this with legend strength coach Buddy Morris last weekend at the 1st American Global Hamstring Project.
Shifting in this situation is just taking one compensation fed by the thorax and breathing apparatus and feeding it with a muscular-strategy compensation that is going to give the athlete a ton of co-contractions and a movement pattern that now fights the direction the ribs and pelvic are taking the body. The body is going to have to wire in a lot of extra muscles that probably shouldn’t be acting in that movement.
The solution to “shifting”, in my opinion, is to go to the source, which is thorax and pelvic alignment, and my remedy here is PRI protocols. You shouldn’t have to actively “fight” where your body wants to go in any movement, but rather get to the source of why your body wants to go there.
“It’s counterproductive to “fight” where your air-canisters, thorax and pelvis are naturally taking you”
I’ve actually found, in myself at least (will be testing this on athletes soon) that some hip circle and kickback work on the physioball with an ankle or foot weight seems to also deliver the same results with alignment. There is a lot more out there than PRI that has the possibility of solving this problem, one’s where you may not need to take away from the flow of the workout.
At the end of the day though, don’t disregard the importance of air flow.
- Your Phone is Kryptonite to a Fulfilling Workout
Do something…. anything in your workout aside from looking at your phone.
Phones are leashes that keep us from fulfilling our true potential. There is a reason that high-ranking Apple employees don’t let their kids have smart phones.
Constantly looking at your phone, aside from killing dopamine output also destroys creativity because it takes you away from your intuition. I was recently listening to a “Living 4D” podcast with Paul Chek where he talks about “working in” as a means to super-set between main training exercises.
“Working-in” movements in Paul’s system seem to be Tai-Chi based and used to restore the balance of the body in between more difficult work-sets. I like them because it helps maintain more of a para-sympathetic state during workout, as well as one that increases our body awareness. It also makes working out even more of a “meditation” and I feel that if you can’t seem to find time to meditate, you can make your workout function as such.
Without a phone in the weight room or during a work out you hone:
- Better sympathetic management/dopamine management
- Better room for insights and creativity
- More room for “working in”
- You make the workout more of a meditation
- More have more room to intuitively make the decision when your CNS is tapped out, you are good on the day from a neural perspective (it can be a fine line) and further work will be a detriment to tomorrow. As Tony Holler has said “Nothing we do today can take away from tomorrow”. You’ll be in a better place here without your phone.
- Selecting the Right Training Exercises
If the guys who are the best in your sport are doing the best in your training exercises, then you have selected the right exercises and have the right criteria in coaching them. A simple example of where I have found this to be very true is in working with men’s tennis and doing the ball work popularized by Marv Marinovich.
https://youtu.be/wNM7L6mM0vI
A fighter trains with work inspired by Marv Marinovich; the ball work in the first 10 seconds particularly can be highly variable and volatile when combined with commands of a coach or partner.
Ball work is basically a cross between strength and general sport skill abilities. What is found in sport skill?
- Tension management
- Dynamic mobility and body awareness
- Breathing and power production
- Patterning as fatigue and cognitive challenge creeps in
I’ve found tremendous value in improving my observational skill with good athletes and then the finer points of work in a more complex environment. My goal is always to make what I do more of a craft each day, and not a rote memorization of “evidence based” sports performance.
I want to say that what I’m capable of from a skill of coaching/movement perspective is well beyond what a new college grad can say, and well beyond where I was even 5 years ago.
Some interesting possibilities here are things like:
- Pairing up traditional strength work with skill work (or special strength work) in the weightroom, and knowing what you are looking for and how the fatigue/potentiation combo impacts the skill
- Super-setting strength work and “perception-reaction” based work and tag/ball based games
- To Grip or Not to Grip
For vertical jump training, toe gripping is a good thing; you can’t really jump without the final foot in contact with the ground gripping down to act as a brake for the inherent horizontal velocity conversion (or even in a standing jump). For sprinting, it’s totally the opposite, since you don’t want to brake. Toe flexion exercises has been shown to tack on inches on someone’s standing broad jump… I wonder what would have happened to the athlete’s 40-yard dash in the same study. Research is nice but it’s often done in a relative vacuum and implications are very context driven.
Try this experiment: Get in a 2 point stance with one foot a little in front of the other, like you are going to take off in a sprint. Instead of sprinting though, you’ll do a broad jump forward (such as in the errant idea that a block start is a maximal forward jump for maximal projection off of 2 legs). First, perform a jump as far as you can. Now, come back to the line and wiggle your front foot, twisting on the ball of the foot and now instantly take that wiggle into a jump. You should find that your body only wants to sprint in this situation… you aren’t toe gripping.
- Know What to Test and When
Be wary of putting an athlete in a situation where they are going to test something significant to them where they either “get beat” if they are competing against someone, or they are going to do a KPI test and you have a reasonably strong instinct that they will fall pretty well short of their PR. There is a lot of power in PR’s as mentioned on my recent podcast with Tony Holler, and what we’ve seen with the high-school Bigger Faster Stronger strength system.
I’ve found this to be true myself when my junior year of college, I had accidentally set the standards to make me think I was jumping 1-2″ higher every day then I really was, and therefore I was happy with what I thought was a practice PR, ended practice earlier, and then walked away from practice happy. I jumped 7′ that year, and only 6’10 the next year in a situation where I had discovered the bar was not set correctly, and then was in continual “beat where I was last year at this time in practice mode”. That mode doesn’t work all that well.
Great coaches can and do “lie” to their athletes on particular times that they go in a various sprint on occasion to preserve confidence and dopamine when needed. My old track coach, the late Coach Scott was the ultimate master of exaggerating your performance, such as when you had a big foul in long jump, but the exaggeration had a huge effect on confidence and dopamine release.
In a weightlifting situation, the late Charles Poliquin was known to mix pound and kilo plates so athletes wouldn’t know what they were lifting. This could be extremely useful in a situation where a driven athlete walked in who was clearly below baseline as measured by things like a grip test, CMJ test, tap test, etc. or obviously observation by a skilled coach.
- Learning to Measure Things That Don’t Matter That Much at The Expense of Coaching Skill
Our educational system has set us up to be great at periodization, planning and measuring a lot of things that probably don’t matter (i.e. the flood of training data that we don’t know what to do with, or our obsessions with gathering a ton of barbell movement related data but desensitizing ourselves to actual athletic movement. (see point 7).
I believe an over-emphasis on numbers results in diminishing the practice of intimately watching movement and the related skill of coaching athletic patterns regardless of the environment. I believe Brett Bartholomew spearheaded this qualitative idea in a way that was non-threatening and imminent in the minds of many coaches with the vital art of relational coaching via his excellent book “Conscious Coaching”.
For now, it seems the importance of “movement coaching” is still put in the same realm as those who would have athletes stand on a physioball and do arm curls (this exercise would actually tend to demonstrate a lack of ability in qualitative thinking); people just tend to brand movement coaching as the realm of weirdos or those who “don’t know the science” and it’s generally disregarded by the masses. As I’ve found though, “When the student is ready, the master will appear” as it did with me finding Adarian Barr a few years ago and the subsequent cascade of movement teachers thereafter.
- Qualitative and Quantitative Thinking
Those who slant their vision of the world to a very quantitative manner, may not see distinguishing qualitative points of movement. The weight room can be traditionally be thought of as “point A to point B” bilateral movement in the sagittal plane. The fine points of this that distinguishes who is good at athletic movement and who isn’t is breathing patterns, tension patterns, and ability to utilize the passing of force through the transverse plane (and how this all changes in fatigue states or states of cognitive or emotional demand).
Finding ways to make gym or sport movements better, not by “trying harder” but by using joint movement and elastic energy better is something I believe elite athletes do and figure out on their own, either consciously or subconsciously. Strength is important, but the pattern is king!
I’m not saying I’m perfect here either, since not having any quantitative data to back up intuition will also limit one’s highest abilities of coaching, or anything else in life, and this tends to be an area that I work to improve to be more well rounded.
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Thought-Melee Week 2 or Week 3
Free Training Guides!
Sign up for the newsletter, get your FREE eBooks, and receive weekly updates on cutting edge training information that will help take your knowledge of athletic performance to a new level.