Fat loss via corrective exercise.

If you're going to use exercise time doing a cyclic exercise, could you be using the same time to better use?

The main reason for many exercises to do cyclic exercise (like walking, running, rowing, cycling, swimming) is for improved fitness. Another reason is for the soothing effect it has on their state of mind (endorphin release, meditative and repetitive practice). Another reason is to burn calories. It's at this point that it's absolutely worth mentioning that the aerobic system can burn fat or glycogen - fat at the lower end of the heart rate, eg. around 120-135, and glycogen at a higher rate, eg. 135-150bpm (obviously this range is a general statement and will change according to age, state of training and many other metabolic variants). The burning of glycogen in the higher end of the aerobic range is not a preferred option. Glycogen doesn't provide as much energy as fat does. Glycogen has to be replaced through food. Rarely does anyone have too much glycogen they need to burn. Burning glycogen makes you hungry for sugars.

The burning of glycogen becomes required when exercise intensity goes up, but for the main reasons of doing aerobic exercise, burning fat predominantly is a preferred option, which means exercising at a lower heart rate for longer.

This kind of training does NOT induce post-exercise oxygen consumption to the same extent as higher intensity (the afterburn that is sought after by high intensity exercise enthusiasts). It does however stimulate your metabolism to improve it's ability to burn fat and reduce your body's cravings for sugar. Which brings me to my main point.

If you're going to spend time in a lower heart rate zone (approximately 120-135bpm), is there a better way to use your time? There is. Combining cyclic, repetitive movements with challenging movements that allow you to manage your movement mistakes on the edge of your ability. This has been called the essence of corrective exercise and implies that an evaluation has highlighted limitations and asymmetries in mobility and motor control (two of the two four modifiable risk factors for getting injured and not being able to continue exercising as planned).

We know that the core looks great when there’s proportion. Mini-waists have had their turn. Bloated mid-sections appeal to the hedonists who love their food and drink a little (or a lot) more than their exploration of the “moving arts”. The current appeal is right on the money – thick, powerful cores built for show and go. That means development of muscle and reduction of body fat. Nothing covers those two more than combinations that include cardio, or aerobic training, and workouts that include exercises driven by both arms and legs. 

Here's some examples.

1. Groundwork on hands and feet. Eminent clinicians and strength coaches Dr. Mark Cheng, with Dr. Jimmy Yuan, recently produced groundwork progressions for prehab and rehab  that dial the right numbers when it comes to safely bringing arms and legs into specific injury-prevention core exercises. Combining these great exercises with other ground workouts like Animal Flow ticks injury prevention, dynamic strength, mobility with stability and aerobic conditioning. Doc Cheng says, “If you don’t own it, you’re correcting. If you own the movement, you can condition.” The combination of these programs is game changing – think pushups meets crawling meets wrestling with the earth. Here's a look at a front plank to knee-drive to opposite elbow – so many benefits! When the Chinese Women Volleyball Team wanted an abdominal workout, to supplement their performance training, this was at the heart of a brutal 12 minutes workout – this stoic group of highly trained athletes who never complained in their gruelling 7 hour training days let out all sorts of groans, huffs and puffs, patting their stomachs like a tap out.
2. Weighted carries +/- overhead carry for more precise stimulation. The weight perturbs the postural alignment of segments, forcing motor control of said alignment, whilst moving. Small adjustments to posture are required constantly, with alignment errors magnified at the hand, creating instant feedback to balance. Constant movement via walking ensures global stabilisers, ie prime movers, can not play a part in joint alignment integrity, leaving segmental stabilisers to reflexively control posture from the foot through the lower leg, pelvis, spine and to the upper limb.
   
3. Reactive neuromuscular training of split squats. Correcting split squat drills is best done at a subconscious level, since stability is reflex driven, not conscious driven. 
   
   The use of a FMT (Functional Movement Tubing) or kettlebell, introduces destabilising force in planes of movement (coronal and transverse) that is perturbing the main plane of movement - sagittal. 
   
   In the presence of minimum, or improved, mobility, to get into the start and finish position, the FMT creates reactive neuromuscular training to the pattern, improving the pattern for other training events that require power in a split squat, like the Bulgarian Split Squat.
   
4. Linear and lateral movement drills for foot, knee, hip and core rehab, as well as movement prep for field and court sports. Based on eight essential mobility drills by Coach Mike Boyle, this sequence is a go-to.
   

Best performance behaviours are high quality movements, with high force for a long time. 
Improved performance doesn’t happen until behaviour changes and it is the nervous system that permits behaviour to change.  The process of changing behaviour starts with getting the attention of the individual – whether they know it or not. Conscious and subconscious attention getting are the domains of coaching, or programming of training. Each (conscious and subconscious) has a place. 

Getting the attention of the individual requires a nervous system with healthy receptors that respond to stimuli.

The mechanoreceptors that we aim to improve attention of exist in the skin, muscles, tendons and ligaments/capsules. Enhancing the sensory environment by improving mechanoreceptor attention creates a prime environment to use the art of coaching and cueing to enhance movement skills. 

A prime opportunity exists for enhancing mechanoreceptors through the treatment of pain and improvement in mobility. Here is a digitally interactive manual that provides a video library and vast explanatory library of key mobility drills. 

For clinicians who've reduced or abolished pain, and for clinicians and coaches who've improved mobility, improving central nervous system processing is the next step - it starts with breaking patterns - a key element is auditory cueing. 
​
When you talk to an athlete to provide a cue, it requires healthy hearing. ​The role of audition and how it is used in motor performance is a largely understudied area, with some exceptions. The goal of auditory cueing is to gain attention, to break patterns, and to improve learning retention. Since auditory information is processed faster than visual information (but visual information seems to provide more useful information than auditory), it remains a pivotal tool for breaking patterns by gaining attention of the nervous system. 

Summary:

Auditory cues primarily remain useful for breaking patterns by getting attention. To be continued....

In: Chapters 5 and 11, Schmidt, R. A., & Lee, T. D. (2011). Motor control and learning : a behavioral emphasis (5th ed. ed.). Champaign, Ill. ; Leeds: Human Kinetics.

The foundation of the best performance training and sports support services have at their roots up to four building blocks that are necessary to build elite athletes and healthy humans. If you consider that performance relates to withstanding, adapting to, absorbing, transmitting, producing and reusing energy, the performance athlete requires:

1. Good energy;
2. Unblocked energy;
3. Flowing, guided energy;
4. Abundant energy.

The challenge of defining these concepts often leads us to consider the opposite. What barriers prevent robustness?

1. The inability to tolerate, manage and overcome pain, toxins, inflammation, poison – this are bad energy.
2. The inability to detect & transmit local energy and forces along the kinetic chain because of limited mobility – this is blocked energy due to limited inputs.
3. The inability to process energy and forces along the kinetic chain because of structural or functional instability or altered motor control – this is leaked energy.
4. The inability to produce enough energy or force to get in the game or stay in the game. This is seen as deficient energy, reduced outputs, for example inhibition, weakness and fatigue.

We must remember that performance matters, to get into the game and stay in the game. Yet, in many sports, it matters not as much as what happens once in the game – the application of sports-specific skill. As such, we must remember that our role, as performance and support staff, is to give athletes back to their coaches. Our role is not to detract from their ability to spend time practicing the game or sport they are in. That is why adaptability to forces, energy and load, ie durability, matters. An athlete who has to miss or modify training is less likely to achieve performance success. This is supported by long term prospective research in elite athletes [1]. It is clear from this research at the Australian Institute of Sport that the inability to be robust enough to complete more than 80% of planned training program negatively affects the likelihood of performance success. It is also clear from data from UEFA, “from an unnamed club which – over a ten-year period in which it employed four coaches – only won silverware with the bosses who had a lower-than-average number of injuries within their squads. "Is this a coincidence? We don't believe it is.", says Jan Ekstrand, vice-chairman of the UEFA Medical Committee. [2]
 
In light of these clear, long-term, links between durability and performance success, we revisit the earlier statement – “Our role is not to detract from their ability to spend time practicing the game or sport they are in.” Thus we have a fine balance between pushing athlete development and catching those elements that indicate an increased likelihood of future injury – that which limits durability and performance success.
 
Our intent to push athlete development is to be balanced by intent to not be part of the problem that limits them.
 
We thus revisit the barriers to function and robustness, redefining them into simpler, more usable terms.

1. Bad energy = pain, inflammation, toxins, disease, poison.
2. Blocked energy = limitations and asymmetry in mobility.
3. Leaked energy = limitations and asymmetry in stability and motor control.
4. Deficient energy = limitations in force production, absorption and reutilization. This includes, strength, speed, rate of force development, power and endurance.

The first point is the domain of medical and allied health professionals with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in dealing with clinical conditions.

The second point is the domain of the allied health or exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with mobility dysfunctions.
 
The third point is the domain of the allied health or exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with stability and motor control dysfunctions.
 
The fourth point is the domain of the exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with deficiencies in force production, absorption and reutilisation.
 
The second and third points, collectively, relate to movement. Mobility + stability & motor control = movement. Let’s review that – adequate range of motion by itself is not movement.
 
The Mobility, Stability and Motor Control for Rehabilitation, Exercise and Sports Performance course ​ thus aims to provide three things:

1. A practical introduction, review or advancement of strategies to develop a sensory rich environment to detect inputs from the internal and external stimuli;
2. A practical introduction, review or advancement of strategies to stimulate improvements in control of body segments, to the end of expressing mobility;
3. A practical understanding of the links between mobility, stability, motor control and performance through the concept of position, patterns and power.

 
The Mobility, Stability and Motor Control for Rehabilitation, Exercise and Sports Performance course fits within a continuum of health, function and performance. It is an education workshop to explore the three P’s - positions and patterns as they support the expression of power. It is an education course to explore systematic strategies to correct inputs and processing of inputs as they relate to movement outputs. It is an education workshop to introduce strategies to coax the nervous system, especially during the heat of in-season, when performance training aims to blast and develop.

The next course can be found here.

I've travelled the world immersing myself in some of the toughest athletic environments, looking for the best organisations and individuals to make the biggest positive difference.

Here's what I've learned, as it relates to athletic performance.

You'll never hear self-empowered people bitch that "life sucks"; they're too focused on finding constructive solutions to temporary issues.

In other words, they self-organise to get a result. This requires certain key "attractors" to be in place.

For example: it's interesting to note that the 2014 FIFA World Cup Winning German National Team included correctives and recovery in every session. That is, they had daily monitoring of elements regarded as super important.

In simplified words - they blasted and caressed. 
They had a system that: 

• Developed movement capacity and energy system capacity;
• Corrected contributing factors and incompetencies, resetting mobility and motor control before reloading again;
• Protected against aggravating factors/activities and complicating factors.

They based their system on: 

• Evaluation to establish baseline measures, direct intervention and inform communication;
• Isolated weak links, contributing factors, faulty/incompetent patterns and minimums to be addressed;
• Innervated specific patterns to practice and refine upcoming movement skills;
• Integrated specific patterns at the speed, force and direction relevant to the sport. 

To simplify the above, they had evaluation, intervention, monitoring and honoured professional scope to account for those areas.