It may be unintentional, or we’ve been told them so often that we simply accept them as truth these days, but believing these lies will keep you perpetually injured.
Lie #1: Your movement is “dysfunctional”
This can be said in any number of ways – “incorrect technique” and “poor posture” are two other common ways that this untruth is phrased. This lie perpetuates the belief that our bodies are moving badly on purpose and that somehow (usually by doing a bunch of drills) we can make it better.
But what is better? Who said that one particular way was better than any other?
Bodies don’t deal in make-believe. They can only ever deal in reality. It doesn’t matter how hard you wish to move differently, or force your body to work harder to achieve a better looking movement, the reality is, your body is moving the way it is because of it’s joint restrictions.
Why do we have joint restrictions? Because of our disproportionate amount of movement in a given direction, which creates muscle tightness.
The brain is coordinating all of your body, all of the time and is giving you the best movement it can within that framework. If we’re choosing to spend more time moving one way than another, we’ll create more tightnesses in the areas that do most work during that movement, leading to a disproportionate amount of tightness across a joint.
It’s THIS that creates the “movement dysfunction”. It’s not your body’s fault, which leads me to…
Lie #2: Drills will “correct” your technique
There’s a law of nature governing ALL living beings, including us, and that’s the conservation of energy. Your body will always find the easiest way to do anything, anything other than this is extra effort which your body will try to avoid.
Drills are a great example of this extra effort.
We human beings believe lie #1, so we believe that we can “teach” our bodies to move better. To do this, we embark on the process of breaking the movement down into parts and repeating certain elements in a manner that we’ve come to think of as “drills”.
The trouble is, these drills simply don’t help in the long run. Yes, they might make your technique LOOK better, and you might get some small gains from all your efforts, but you’ll fatigue quicker because you’re asking your body to move in a way that takes more effort than your natural way.
That’s why you’ll always resort back to your “bad habits” when you get tired, and over time, this extra effort will lead to injury.
Which leads me nicely to…
Lie #3: Injuries are a result of poor technique
If you believe lies #1 & 2, then it’s most likely that you’ll believe this one too, but actually, injuries occur simply from the muscle tightness created with our disproportionate time spent moving in a handful of ways.
Muscle tightness leads to joint position change, which leads to reduced range of movement, which leads to movement compensations.
The more repetition we have with our movements, the more muscle tightness we create, which then sends us into the vicious cycle of injury.
We might have a period of being injury free, but then we’ll get injured, spend some time doing something slightly different which might improve our symptoms for a while, but then we go back to repeating the same movement again and we head back into injury.
The industry seems completely stuck inside these lies and they’ve been repeated so many times that they’ve been accepted as truths.
But they’re not.
There’s two things I want you to take away from this article today and they are:
- The only way to change your movement reality is to constantly change the way you move
- Once your movement starts to improve, you won’t need drills to “teach” your body anything
It’s a huge shift in thinking for many, but I can promise you, when you do, you’ll move so much better, have far fewer injuries and be much less frustrated with your performance, and the best thing?
It’s really simple. Try this FREE Warm-Up routine to see for yourself