3 EFFORTS FROM ME

1)  I love Band/Cable Pull Down exercise variations to help improve movement restrictions and relieve joint pressure.  These exercises can be performed to unweight us.  This allows us release muscle tension used to hold undesired skeletal positions against gravity.  Moreover, these exercises allow us to alter the angle of pull and our body position to custom fit our needs.  Here is one example that can be easily individualized.

2)  So you know that thing called “time” we all say we need more of… it doesn’t really exist… at least not the way anyone who isn’t studying quantum gravity perceives it.  I just finished Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli.  I love how he connects all the dots throughout the evolution of physics to get to our current understanding.  Anyone that can make such a complex and dense subject so digestible is an extraordinary writer.  This should get your motor runnin’:

“Our knowledge of the elementary grammar of the world continues to grow.  If we try to put together what we have learned about the physical world in the course of the twentieth century, the clues point toward something profoundly different from what we were taught at school.  An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist.”
– Carlo Rovelli

3) I have been thinking about Goodhart’s Law – When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (generalization by Marilyn Strathern). 

During one of my internships many years ago, a friend who had interned at a big time football school told me a story.  Basically, the Head Football Coach, not the Strength and Conditioning Coach, demanded the players increase their max strength numbers on planned monthly schedule.  So the fantasy world of only continuous linear progress and no human complexity.  I don’t remember what happened if a player didn’t show “improvement”, but hopefully you can imagine what a culture of survival when lifting max weight looks like… and how there would be costs.

Now, I do understand how someone can perceive such a demand as keeping a standard of work ethic, toughness or whatever other coaching buzzword.  Moreover, there is society’s predominant belief that continuously adding more weight to a max effort lift must mean someone is a better athlete.  Especially, with the unique breed of individuals that play high level football.  However, incessantly increasing the “max” of an exercise is not a panacea – it helps up to a point depending on the context.  There is always nuance and how exercises are performed matters.  This story is a representation of weight room numbers becoming a goal and individuals optimizing for a result regardless of the consequences; a far too common occurrence in Strength and Conditioning.

Possible solutions:

• Try to remove fixed rules that can be easily gamed (the bar moving from point “A” to point “B” and back is not enough).
• Measure what you actually want, not a rough proxy for it (A max effort lift is not the same thing as athleticism displayed on a field, court, etc.).
• Track multiple criteria, some of which may compete, instead of a single standard (Velocity of force application and increases in relative joint motion compete with adaptations needed for max strength).

Email me if you have any questions or topics you would like me to discuss!

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Best,

Dan