You’ve Already Made the Investment 3: Are You Going to the Gym or to a Chop Shop?

As you read this blog, it would probably be safe to assume that you are sitting down, hunched over, staring intently at your computer screen. As you read the words that are being transmitted from a vast and limitless chaotic web of virtual data, I doubt you are thinking much about the whirlwind of communication and feedback loops that are being initiated via electrical signaling every millisecond. Your computer is pretty smart for being an inanimate object isn’t it? There is some mysterious force instantaneously controlling and managing that endless stream of electrical of activity, signals, directions, and data.

Like any complex system that has a purpose or function your computer has a master control center. So does your IPhone, even your car as an ECU (Electronic Control Unit).  The master control center for your computer is the microprocessor, or the Central Processing Unit (CPU). That being said, it would be fairly silly to attempt to manage, maintain, and increase the operating performance of any such system by ignoring its master control center. Yet when maintaining and attempting to increase the performance of our bodies we have a tendency to do just that. When you go to the gym or workout with your trainer is your focus on the entire system or just on the muscle or muscles you are trying to work at any given moment? Do you ever think about the control center that operates and manages the entire system? Are you even aware of what that control center is? Most general gym goers and weekend warriors are not, most personal trainers are not, and even most western physical therapists and medical doctors seem to be disconnected with this fundamental component of functional anatomical understanding.

This wasn’t always the case. During the advancement of modern medicine in the western hemisphere a scientific culture of reductionist paradigms was bred. These paradigms were not only reductionist in nature but centered almost exclusively on the world of biochemistry. As the greatest western minds got trapped in a singular biochemistry driven perspective the bioelectrical world fell to the way side and we lost connection with a fundamental piece of the functional anatomical puzzle. Our master control center.

Yet the strong men of yesteryear and the physical culture experts and educators of the 19th and early 20th century knew all too well of its critical importance and as such revolved all their training expertise around the control centers of our movement, of our function, of our performance, of our existence. What is it that controls our movement? What is it that dictates the quality, efficiency, resilience and effectiveness of our movement? What is it that dictates our ability to generate, express, and absorb force? What determines our level of physical function and performance? What coordinates our system to move with itself rather than against itself?

 “A certain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hidden in all gross bodies… all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles.” – Sir Isaac Newton 1687. Even 327 years ago science’s greatest minds expressed a strong awareness of how the central role of the mind and the nervous system serves as the basis for all human movement.

The brain and the nervous system is your movement system’s ultimate command center and just like your computer it communicates governing commands via electrical channels of communication. Embracing this concept at the global level will change how you approach fitness, health maintenance and physical performance enhancement. When you train to enhance your function and performance you should not be focused on training your muscular system, but rather be focused on training your neuromuscular system. If you want the bellies of your muscles to grow fat with bulk you can train the nervous system to stimulate that specific response. If you want stronger tendons and ligaments and denser bones you can specifically train the nervous system to elicit those adaptive changes. If you want to increase the quality of your connective and soft tissues you can train these changes through the nervous system. If you want to improve your posture, speed, coordination, react-ability and balance you must do so through specific neurological training.  Whatever physical avenue you want to improve, it is best approached through specific neurological challenges.

The workout machines that litter the floor space of most commercial gyms cannot train these types of adaptations. “Machines cannot create the many variations of force development within a muscle to stimulate all motor units (nervous control)…  isolationist approaches of bodybuilding do not offer a rich proprioceptive (neuro-sensory feedback) environment providing variable motion, balance, force projection, and direction challenges involving the full linkage”, Dr. Stuart McGill PhD, world renowned biomechanist, Waterloo University, Canada. Furthermore, “Strength training on machines which restrict the movements of joints involved in producing a specific functional action can modify the circuitry and programming of the brain and thereby reduce the functional capability of many of the muscles used to execute that movement.”  Dr. Yuri Verkhoshanksy PhD father of plyometrics and one of the most respected experts in the theory and methodology of strength training.  

So if machines not only lack the ability to elicit the adaptive training responses we seek, but are in many ways detrimental to them… why do so many spend so much time sitting down and training on machines? There are a lot of reasons of course, but at the simplest level it comes down to ease. Unfortunately, well executed functional training is not as easy as stepping off the machines and dancing around freely with free weights. When training for function and performance the impetus must be on quality. This takes focus, concentration, discipline, awareness and education. It’s not that easy, in fact it’s not easy at all. Part of what makes machines so sexy is that they are easy. But as we all know, taking the easy route never gets us to where we really want to be.

Regardless of your physical goals the best way to appropriately challenge the nervous system is to work the entire system not just a section or component of that system. Every one of your training sessions should be challenging the entire body at once. The nervous system will never receive the adequate amount of stimulation to stimulate adaptive change if you focus one muscle at a time rather than challenge the entire system. Renowned Olympic weightlifting coach and biomechanist Mark Rippetoe puts it best: “Chopping the body up into its constituent components and then working these components separately lacks the capacity to make things change. The stress that can be applied one piece at a time never adds up to the same stress that can be applied to the whole thing working as a system.”

When we meet again we will expand on neurological training concepts by revisiting the topic of training “smart muscle” v. “show muscle. Thanks for reading and making the effort to further understand the frustrating complexities of maintaining the greatest investment you will ever have. I hope you stop by again for our next installment.

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