How to be more coordinated?

As a professional stuntman, breakdancer, and martial artists, I’ve spent my life trying to learn how to do weird things with my body. Wether it’s a backflip, spinning on my head, or fighting someone who is 100lbs heavier than me, it’s definitely been years of practice. So how do we get better at skills?

The answer which you can guess is practice. You hear it all the time. “Practice makes perfect”. It’s true except there is a subtle difference that I want to explore more. The challenge is not just practicing, it’s practicing well. What does that mean? I have two important criteria for good practice: First, is the task perfectly hard enough? Second, are you getting feedback?

Let’s break down the first one. I think this is the most challenging aspect of practicing, finding the perfect difficulty. We hear all these motivational speeches about getting outside your comfort zone, failing, get back up and get after it again. Yes that does hold merit but the problem is, if you’re picking up a challenge you’re not ready for, you may be making bad habits, you may get frustrated and give up, or you may even get hurt attempting. Instead we want to find the right level of difficulty. When I was learning how to flip, my coach use to say we want to train in the zone of  “Difficult but possible”. That’s because it requires our attention to focus and sync everything up but it’s not so unreasonable we’re not going to make progress. In my opinion, if you’re attempting something and your success rate is less than 50% per trial, you should make it slightly easier so you can work on building good habits and eventually move onto something harder. Once your success rate is higher, on that task close to 90%, that’s where I would make it a little harder to add more challenge. I think this is a very important nuance that allows us to get more out of each session. If you want to get better at something that seems impossible, try to break the task down to something easier to start, master that fundamental than add a little bit more. I wish someone show’d me this while I was breakdancing and I probably could have avoided a few surgeries and have had a better career.

Once we get the right difficulty, we want to address the second problem. Are we getting feedback? If we want to get better at some skill, we need feedback to tell us if we’re doing it right. At the beginning specially we need lots of external feedback to tell us, but as we get better we can switch to internal feedback (Does this feel good or bad?). If you don’t have a coach to give you that feedback that’s where watching footage of yourself and analyzing it is very helpful. Often times you don’t realize your making mistakes till you see it in third person. However I highly recommend getting a coach or physical therapist to watch you instead. 

I hope this helps you accomplish some skill you’ve been wanting to learn, or maybe something that even hurts and you’re trying to adjust. As always go see a physical therapist to help breakdown any barriers so you can better results, faster.

How to get stronger?

There is a study that shows when you compare people with high strength to low strength there is a decrease in call cause mortality by 3-fold. It might be because being strong means you can hold onto things easier, get up and off the ground easier, and just do more. Well you might be saying, I can already do those things so why do I need to get even stronger? The issue is that no matter what, we will all lose strength as we get older. It is the nature of life. However if we can get our baselines really high, then even though as time takes it toll on us, we can end at higher percentage and enjoy our life more. I certainly want to try to be independent and able to do as much as I can as long as I can so I can enjoy life and my family does not have to help me. 

So how do we get stronger? The first answer is simple: Exercise? However the nuance is in how we do that. If our goal is to simply get stronger then what we want to do is challenge our body just under our 1-rep max (1RM). 1-rep max means, how much can you perform a certain lift and not be able to do a second time without resting. There are ways of calculating that without having to fully test it but many people will get a coach or a physical therapist to help them test that. Once you figure out your 1 rep max number you want to be doing 3-5 reps of that exercise but only 70-85% of that 1 rep max. Essentially you are going below the level of your maximum but doing more reps of that.

 Then the follow up questions are: How many times? How often? Rest? How many days a week? Dr. Andy Galpin is a famous exercise science research and on an episode of the Huberman lab explained the 3-5 principle. It goes: 3-5 reps (70-85% your 1RM), 3-5 sets, 3-5 minutes of rest between sets, 3-5 days a week. So when in doubt…3-5 is the answer. 

How long till we see results? In general, strength changes take 6-8 weeks. That’s because our body wants to prove that we’re going to be doing this a lot in order to make changes. Consistency is key.

Let’s get strong so we can enjoy our lives and be independent. Remember, always consult with a physical therapist or healthcare professional to get better results and be safer.

García-Hermoso A, Cavero-Redondo I, Ramírez-Vélez R, Ruiz JR, Ortega FB, Lee DC, Martínez-Vizcaíno V. Muscular Strength as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in an Apparently Healthy Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Data From Approximately 2 Million Men and Women. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2018 Oct;99(10):2100-2113.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.apmr.2018.01.008. Epub 2018 Feb 7. PMID: 29425700.

How to activate muscles?

Certain muscles are notorious for being quiet. It may sound silly but that is actually one of the biggest challenges in rehab. What happens is that being sedentary, injured, or doing the same thing over and over again changes the activation pattern of your muscles. This can cause pain, bad movement leading to injury, or just not letting you progress forward. So how do we fix that? 

Well the first question is: Are we seeing a problem because a muscle is in fact “quiet” or is it because another muscle is being too “loud”? If a muscle is being too loud, that is where hands on techniques such as massage, stretching, deep trigger point pressure and more can quiet it down. I like to utilize this before my own training. If I’m trying to squat but my back muscles are taking over instead of my glutes, I will get on the foam roller and stretch those back muscles out to calm them down. Now I’m ready to fire those glutes up.

If instead the muscle is too quiet this is where activation exercises are great. The best one generally in my opinion are isometrics. That’s a really good place to start but some people respond better to different things which is why having a physical therapist analyze that for you is key. For instance, often times people have this called “glute amnesia” which means forgetting how to use their glutes. It sounds silly but it can lead to so many injuries and dysfunctions that cause pain. Getting people to turn on their glutes take a little bit of finesse because you’re asking someone to change a habit. We know that is not that easy. So I will make sure I position someone where there other muscles are quiet and have them do some basic glute exercises. All the while I’m monitoring that they’re not compensating with their bad habits. Once we dial it down, I want the person to turn on those glutes for so long that it starts to burn. This is so the brain can remember what that feels like. If it’s their first session and they don’t have any competitions coming up, I want those muscles sore so that when they’re walking around, going up stairs, sitting down and standing up, their brain remembers that feeling and they learn how to fire those glutes on command. There are definitely a few more nuances hard to explain on a blog post but if you feel like you need help getting certain muscles fired up so you can train harder or get out of pain, definitely consulting with a physical therapist is a great idea. 

How to improve your mobility:

First thing first, we need to address, what are the barriers to our mobility: Is it muscle? Is it joint capsule/ligaments? Is it nerve? Is a bony block that won’t improve? In order to get those answers, we need to do a good job testing? That’s where a good physical therapist comes in. They not only cans what your building blocks are but they can document where you at so we can track for improvement. That’s an important step because if we don’t know where we start, we won’t know if we’re getting better, and more specifically what is helping. Often times I see physical therapists just encouraging their patients to stretch without doing two big things: 1) Determining if their mobility is limited by something that needs stretching. 2) Measuring their baseline to know if that stretch is making improvements. Let’s talk about the first problem. 1) Your mobility may not purely be muscular. Often time’s it’s the joint capsule and if you don’t address that first, stretching may make things worse. The second problem 2) If you’re not getting baseline, then you don’t know if you’re making a change, wasting your time, and then inevitably give up. You know what motivates people? Results! If you can measure a baseline, do a treatment and get results, then that gets people excited to keep working harder. 

Once we determine what is the building blocks needed, and what our baseline is. Then it’s time to get into treatment. I always like to do hands on therapy to my patients in the clinic so I can get some dramatic changes in the session and also recheck their levels so I know their home exercise program is going to work instead of guessing. If they have a home exercise stretching program all I ask for is 2 sets of 30 seconds because the research says 1 min a day is sufficient and sometimes you actually plateau afterwards. That’s not a lot of time but what I think is the hard part is the daily discipline to do it everyday. But that’s where solving those two problems I mentioned earlier come in. If you can get down to the root cause of their mobility you will get results faster and that will motivate. If you can prove you’re making improvement that will also motivate to do it everyday. No one wants to waste time. But that means let’s spend the time to get really good answers about what is holding your mobility back so we can make improvements. 

If you want a little extra after a stretching session, I suggest exercising in that new range of motion. An example can look like: You’re working on hamstring flexibility. After your minute of stretching practice some light deadlifts, and leg raises to teach those muscles how to activate in that new range of motion. Remember, before starting an exercise plan I highly recommend you to visit a physical therapist. This is not just a disclaimer, it’s also so you get better results faster. 

Why your rehab should be organized?

In order to get the best results we always need to ask ourselves what barriers are in the way of our success? As a physical therapist when someone comes to me with pain or difficulty doing something the question I ask myself is: What barriers are getting in the way of this person doing that activity or experiencing pain while doing it? Then we need to go into testing to figure it out. I always want to see four main things. Flexibility, activation, strength, and timing. And as a matter of fact I go in that order. Because if you don’t have enough flexibility to do the motion that you want to be better at or experience less pain, then all the things after that don’t matter until we address that. It’s really important we go step by step because if we skip steps than we’re just going to running into road blocks that get us nowhere. Unfortunately, I know this isn’t common practice probably because it takes long. But that’s why I believe longer appointment sessions are necessary. For instance, my initial treatments are 1 hour just with me because I need 30 minutes just to get all the data we need to answer why we’re having pain and what are all the building blocks we need to work on. That may sound like a lot of time in today’s fast paced world but it’s necessary to create results. I personally believe that if we do a good assessment, organize our treatment to address the needs first we can improve more people and get them in less pain. If you want to see more of how I organize my rehab or performance sessions, I have created a YouTube video that breaks it down. 

https://youtu.be/vegnJlSDYgw