Endure the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret!

This started out as a blogpost that I began over a month ago, but as one of my business consultants said to me this morning, "Lots of good stuff you have gets lost when you're one of those guys who has to keep too many plates spinning."

But this is an important topic that I didn't want to let slide. There are so many thoughts that pop into my head for blogging & writing & recording & podcasting that I really need to have a dedicated multimedia assistant working with me on a regular basis to get more of this $h!# out to you on a more regular basis. I understand that this is an issue for me, and I'm working as best I can on creating a change in processes that will streamline the flow of what will hopefully be useful information out to you. And I really need to thank each & every one of you that's been dropping me messages of encouragement, offering your expertise & help, and sharing my posts all over Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the web.

You inspire me..... and because of that, I want to leave you with this bit of inspiration as we head into the Holiday season. [EDIT: Yes, I started writing this well before the holidays.]

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More than a month ago, one of my dear friends, Jason Ferruggia posted an awesome tweet that I hold VERY close to my heart.

“Endure the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret.” You choose.
— Jason Ferruggia (@JasonFerruggia) November 2, 2014

To me, this is one of the most powerful sentences in training, in sport, and in life... and it is also one of the most grossly misunderstood.

For far too many who read that sentence, the words "pain", "discipline", and "regret", are the ones that stand out, so the reflexive interpretation in American society is that even if you have pain, you need to show discipline by not quitting. Otherwise, you'll regret it. Unfortunately, I think there's been a myopic view of that sentence that has damned countless athletes and injured no shortage of children.

Some folks have adopted the mindset that 'not quitting" means not changing anything and just putting more effort in, even when it's causing you pain or hampering your performance. In those situations, people have mistaken stubbornness for discipline, and I've seen that well-meaning but critical error victimize everyone from youth athletes to rehab patients.

As my big bro, Mark Reifkind (former Master SFG, ultra-marathoner, powerlifter, gymnast, & probably Mossad operative trainer) has said, "Consistency trumps intensity every time."

Let's define "consistency" as "dedication to a pursuit". 

Your pursuit can be an athletic goal, such as placing in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) championship, winning a team trophy like the Stanley Cup in hockey, or even something as simple as being able to make it through your wife's salsa class without fatigue or physical pain... because the mental anguish is out of my field of expertise ;-). 

Your pursuit could be a medical one, such as surviving cancer, reintegrating smoothly into civilian society after a particularly harrowing deployment, or getting back on the mat after ACL reconstruction. 

Your pursuit could be a social one, such as learning how to take criticism without getting defensive, overcoming paralyzing shyness, or becoming comfortable with public speaking. 

Regardless of the pursuit itself, we need to be clear about 3 things:

1. Being clear on our short and long term goals
2. Being honest with our performance
3. Being open to guidance

Once we're clear on those, let me just pick one goal in particular in the interest of time... say, conquering a strength training goal, like a PR (personal record) military press.

This was a bottoms-up press that the photographer liked better at an angle. Nothing helps you appreciate rest more than when your photographer is taking multiple shots of you in mid-lift, changing lenses & angles! ;-)

So perhaps it goes something like this...

1) You work hard & consistently every day to increase your press training volume (number of reps). You don't miss days on your program and don't give excuses. You're the ideal athlete and you steadily increase your loads and your performance.... OR you skip days every now & then and decide that you'll just pile on more reps and "go harder" the next time you train to "make up" for your inconsistency. 

2) As you work on improving your press, you plateau out at a weight that's less than your goal regardless of your level of consistency (or inconsistency). 

HERE, where the honesty counts, is where lots of people are made or broken. In this case, you can either, seek out where your form was suboptimal, forcing you to struggle harder than you needed to and likely steering you towards injury, OR you could just stubbornly drive through even harder with more mental dedication in spite of physical deterioration. 

The second of the 2 choices MAY get you to your result, but it won't be sustainable. Your pursuit of that PR press may have forced your rotator cuff, scalenes, and other structures into such profound compensation that you injured yourself badly enough to need a surgical intervention for the numbness, weakness, and/or pain that your arm is now experiencing.

3) When you realize that your performance has plateaued and you can't improve any further on your own, seeking out the guidance of a true expert (and actually taking their advice) can make all the difference in the world. 

Let's say that you seek out a world-class physical therapist (like Dr. Ann Wendell or Dr. Charlie Weingroff) to help you clear up what's causing you the pain, and let's say that they advise you that there are some neck and thoracic spine issues, along with some trigger points, that need clearing up. You're told to stay off loaded overhead lifts (get-ups, presses, snatches, jerks, and even pull-ups) until you've demonstrated an effortless, pain-free range of motion unloaded.

You can either adhere to their advice, put your favorite lift on the sideline for now, go through their prescribed treatment protocols, and troubleshoot all of the dysfunctional movement patterns that were sabotaging your lift in the first place and move past your plateau... OR, since you second guess the experts you sought out, you can still continue to train your press because you might be 3 months away from something like your StrongFirst SFG Level 1 certification, and you're afraid that not pressing will make you weak.

In the latter case, you're being dishonest with yourself and with the person you sought out for guidance and help. And as a result, you just might manage to make it through whatever athletic event you're training for, but you'll be injured for a long time afterwards. Instead of being the picture of strength and embodiment of the ideals you're trying to teach your fitness clients, you'll be the picture of a dumb jock or jock-ette who didn't listen to the professionals who were trying to teach you how to avoid that injury in the first place. What's worse is that you'll likely turn into one of those washed up athletes-turned-coaches who does nothing but sell dreams of his/her glory days to unsuspecting clients who'll likely be injured trying to follow the same methods you used.

See, what most people fail to understand in the over-glorified worlds of sports, athleticism, fitness, and even work is that oftentimes less is more if you have the right priorities. So when Jason Ferruggia posts that you need to endure the pain of discipline, that discipline, when you're not getting the results you want, sometimes takes the form of having the self-control of pulling yourself back enough to take a different approach to the same goal. 

Gray Cook often shares his vignette about taking professional football players off of the squat rack and having them focus on individualized corrective exercise progressions until their Functional Movement Screen scores are "2s on everything with no asymmetries or pain" for months. When these world-class athletes return to their usual strength and conditioning workouts, they're often shocked to see that they not only didn't lose strength, but oftentimes increase their max lifts. The key here is that they had the discipline to follow directions and not just do more of the same. 

Einstein has been well-quoted as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result. Now while that term has been used to brand a workout routine, let's not get it twisted. If you're not getting past the plateaus or the pain that's in your way, it's time to reassess your strategy, your honesty, and your discipline. Regret is a poison that never leaves your soul, so make sure you deal with the factors that contribute to it!

Shoulder Dynamics - Observation & Mimicry: Part III in the Shoulder Series

Still here in NZ and taking a quick moment to try to append the blog and finish this discourse on the shoulder. Since I'm trying to do this in between running out & doing touristy stuff, teaching, and God-knows-what-else, I'm doing this sorta piecemeal, so please forgive the briefness of these posts.

Human beings learn through one or more of 4 basic routes of input - visual, audio, tactile, or conceptual. Let's define each of these as they apply to functional movement, strength, and potential dysfunction.

Visual means that you see a movement, and you mimic it based on what you saw. This is perhaps the primary means of learning for the vast majority of people... Thus the phrase, "monkey see, monkey do". I don't say that disparagingly, however. Sight offers us perhaps the quickest means of making a "rough copy" of someone else's movement pattern.

Unfortunately, sight relies on our brains to take the information we saw and comprehend it as completely as possible almost instantaneously. Once it's comprehended, then the actual motor neurons and muscles have to interact properly for the observed movement to be reproduced correctly and effectively. If it wasn't this way, everyone would be Bruce Lee after watching Enter the Dragon.

However, I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone try to reproduce a motor pattern after seeing it and managing only the crudest sort of facsimile. In my own experience, I must've tried countless times to imitate Agassi's forehand, Becker's canon-like serve, Sifu James Lin's unstoppable throws, Grandmaster Arthur Lee's thunderous hand speed, Prof. Roy Harris's BJJ positional controls, or Kenneth Jay's pressing technique. Yet more often than not, even after repeated practice, I fall well short.

It's in falling short yet trying stubbornly to achieve the same results that I've often found myself afterwards dealing with some sort of injury, usually due to strain.

So... the easiest way to change the likelihood of injury is to change the focus or redefine the goal. We can see an example of this very clearly with the kettlebell swing. Instead of trying however to get the kettlebell to swing up high and to keep it moving in "Malcolm X" style (i.e., "by any means necessary"), the goal gets redefined to create a swing with a Hard Style Lock at the apex, a symmetrical and pain-free Deep Squat pattern at the bottom, and a well-timed backswing that loads the hips and unlocks the hips and knees only at the last possible millisecond.

That combination of attributes, especially when focused on one bit at a time, creates a process through which we can learn more effectively and safely. The audio cues we get from more advanced movement experts, such as our coaches, masters, and instructors, help us more completely comprehend the facets of movement that need to come together to create ideal technique. Tactile feedback, whether as simple as a smack on the head to remind a fighter to keep his hands up or as subtle as Gray Cook's Reactive Neuromuscular Training methods, help further reinforce the total learning process. With input from the visual, audio, and tactile routes, the conceptual "fermentation" process becomes more rich, and the actual applied skill improves dramatically.

With shoulder specifics, this deals a lot with awareness. At the outset of learning, there's no real depth of awareness that's going on... just crude mimicry.

For example, a pitcher might wind up his arm too far, a tennis player may over-relax the stabilizing muscles needed during a powerful serve or overhead, a martial arts student may lift his shoulder up towards his ear before throwing a punch, and a kettlebeller might swing the kettlebell up so high that his or her neck becomes the core instead of the midsection.

The awareness and understanding of what constitutes proper form (in this case, when stabilizing the shoulder via the lats while in motion) is a HIGHLY necessary step in the process of learning movement that should be emphasized more than upping the number of reps, adding weight, or increasing measurable output. The last thing we should be doing is "adding strength to dysfunction" as Gray Cook would say.

What do I get if...?

For some reason, it seems like for the past 2 or 3 weeks, I've been repeatedly answering questions like "What do I get if I want to strengthen my back?", "What do I get if I need to keep my knees from collapsing in when I squat down?", or "What can I use to make my rotator cuff stronger since my shoulder hurts all the time?"

I guess it's been a while since I've posted answers to these things, so here's your abbreviated Back-To-School shopping list for items & resources that'll take your training, your treating, and your personal evolution into overdrive.

If you don't have some of these items, that's understandable. We're not made out of money. On the other hand, if you train your brain to stay in poverty mode, you'll never make some of the best investments possible for your professional development and your freedom from pain. I can confess to you publically that every hard-earned dollar I've spent on these items has been worth TEN TIMES as much in returns to me with patients and clients, nevermind my own physical performance.

You blow tons of money every week on bull$h!# like a double mocha venti primo frappolatte'chino that you're just going to slam down, p!$$ out, and get fat from. Why not spend that on resources that will increase your understanding of your field, improve your ability to give your people real lasting results, and take your earning potential to the next level???

I'll try to categorize these as best I can, so here goes...

Functional Movement Screen Technologies
Most all of you know I'm a huge proponent of Gray Cook's Functional Movement Screen Technologies. The FMS has changed the face of physical culture and orthopedic medicine, so there's NO reason at all why a trainer, physical therapist, or any sort of primary care physician worth his or her salt wouldn't be versed in any of these screening methods.

If you're an RKC reading this, stop procrastinating! Register for the next CK-FMS workshop. It's Thursday, May 28 - May 31, 2009 in St. Paul... 4 DAYS of the highest quality and most information-packed time of your life! It's September 6th as I'm writing this, so don't use the "I don't have enough lead time" excuse. Gray Cook, Brett Jones, Danielle Cook, and I will be on hand to teach you the ins and outs of what is perhaps the most brain-numbing & revolutionary stuff you'll ever come across. Not one single person that I spoke to during the inaugural CK-FMS workshop this past August came away feeling like they didn't get enough highly applicable information. No fluff here, Baby!

In fact, as of today, I'm going to make the CK-FMS a requirement for any RKC in the KBLA family who's running a satellite group. Within 2 years of you earning your RKC, you're required to attend the CK-FMS, where you can re-cert your RKC with your Snatch Test numbers. Nobody should be training someone else if they don't know how to identify movement problems and can't provide some sort of solution. That's why the old-time Chinese martial arts masters all knew some degree of Chinese traumatology. If it got injured under their roof, they had the responsibility to fix it. KBLA's all about skill & responsibility.

Now, if you're not an RKC, you're allowed a little more room to procrastinate.

TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC: If you don't want to be "bothered" by getting to learn the Functional Movement Screen, buying the FMS Screening kit, and all of that, no problem. Unless you're a fitness, athletic, or medical professional, there's really no need for you to buy the toys and take the courses.

However, you DO need to know how to move from your "core". How do we address that? - The DEADLIFT!

Wait.... not crunches??? Not rolling around on my Swiss Ball??? Not using the electro-stim Bruce Lee ab-shocker thing??? No, Dude.... the DEADLIFT!

The Deadlift is one of the MOST OVERLOOKED weight-training exercises and fundamental movement patterns. It serves as both a screen and a correction for many individuals with a plethora of pain syndromes and movement problems. If you're a kettlebeller, then the Deadlift should have been the FIRST movement you learned to execute properly with a kettlebell in your hand. If you didn't, go back to your trainer and ask for your money back. The hot, sexy, showy lifts are nothing (and in most cases, dangerous) if you don't have ROCK-SOLID mastery of the Deadlift.



Secrets of Core Training: The Backside by Gray Cook & Master RKC Brett Jones deals with all of the stuff I just discussed, but in crystal clear detail. You get not only the best explanations of what the core is all about, but also a clear cut progression of how to find your weaknesses, discover their component parts, and shore them up into an ironclad body.

Once you've mastered the info on Secrets of Core Training: The Backside and you're moving with more power, ease, and posture, you're ready to move on to Secrets of the Hip & Knee. Here, you'll get even more corrective exercises to shore up even the tiniest issues with your lower body movement patterns.



TIME OUT:
- "Why are you talking about movement patterns so much? I don't have problems with movement. It's just that my knee hurts when I squat down!"
- "The problem's not my core! My abs are strong and I do hundreds of crunches a day! My lower back hurts!"

Yup, I heard you the first time, and you'd be damn shocked how many of you out there with these sorts of aches and pains actually have those aches and pains because of allowing your body to employ $h!##y movement patterns. You think you know how to sit, stand, walk, run & all that, but your body's been compensating for heinous habits by piling on one cover-up after another. And that pain that you're feeling now? It's your body's way of telling you that your cover-ups aren't going to cut it any more and you've gotta deal with the underlying neurological issues. (Wow, sounds like something that you could extrapolate easily into a psychotherapy session, don't it?) Now let's get back to the discussion at hand.

After you've addressed the "root" of your body by learning and applying all of the information in the first 2 DVDs that I discussed, the next thing you're going to need is command, control, and comfort in your upper body. That's where Secrets of the Shoulder comes in. Brett & Gray pulled the door right off the hinges with this 2-DVD set.

Got shoulder, neck, or mid-to-upper back pain? Get Secrets of the Shoulder, study it like a nerd on speed, apply it like a mad scientist, and then resurface feeling like a new person!



What's so great about this stuff and why the sales pitch? Simple... The quality of information that Gray & Brett are doling out for you is SOOOOO good that most of your doctors won't have a damn clue about this, and they're the people you're going to see for solutions when you have an ache or pain! The problem is that the prescription meds and most of the rehab exercises you're being given are USELESS. So you're wasting money and time and NOT getting any real relief for your rotator cuff tendonitis, your achy shoulders, your tight neck, or the numbness and tingling that's going down your arm.

Now if you've handled all of that with panache and poise, gone through each DVD at least 3 times to pick up all the details you missed during your 2 previous viewings, and you're pushing into the real essence of functional movement, then you're ready for the last installment in the Secrets of series.... Secrets of Primitive Patterns.


Now while there's a ton of other stuff I could recommend to you, any of the info on even the first 3 DVDs is MORE than enough to keep you occupied for a LONG time. Get it, open it, watch it, study it, apply it, and BENEFIT from it! Once you've done all that, share the benefit with others!

Gray Cook & the Functional Movement Screen technologies

In case, I haven't already given you that impression, Gray Cook is a freakin' genius.

In my medical education, only Pavel Tsatsouline himself has impressed me to the same degree as Gray Cook, MSPT, OCS, CSCS. I've been fortunate to study with some of the most sizzling brains in my field, but when you talk to Gray Cook, you realize he's on a totally different level.

Here are the circumstances under which I had the chance to meet him. Pavel called me and asked if I'd like to meet with him and Gray to see Gray's Functional Movement Screen. As part of my medical training and clinical practice, I'd seen or done the standard orthopedics & neurological tests that are part & parcel of western medicine. I'd also seen plenty of stuff like Applied Kinesiology's muscle testing. So I thought I wasn't going into this completely blind.

Pavel & I got to the David Beckham Soccer Academy at the Home Depot Center in Carson, where we met up with Gray. He took us through his Functional Movement Screen (FMS), which looked deceptively simple but soon proved itself to be incredibly brilliant. I approached it at first with the same thick "show me something I don't already know" skepticism that I approached Pavel & his Russian kettlebell training methods.

The 7 movement screens are not rocket science when it comes to executing them, but they show where movement dysfunctions and improper patterning and compensation have occurred. A lot of what I was having to do in my clinic instinctively by watching people move and doing different exercises, Gray had reduced to an almost mathematical simplicity. The same conclusions I had come up with through experience and study, he'd come up with, but in a better, far more complete fashion. His FMS made patient diagnosis easier, more efficient, and most importantly... more complete!

And what made it all that & a bag of chips for me was Gray's COMPREHENSIVE knowledge of how to fix the problem once he'd identified it. Pain elicited in any step of the screen requires the screener to refer out for medical intervention (assuming they're not a physician already), and the screens helped me to see where the lynchpins of pain & dysfunction lied in my patients. Instead of chasing one pain after another around the body as the layers of dysfunction are peeled back, the FMS helps orthopedic medical professionals & pain specialists focus in closer to the source of the pain. Combined with the structural manual medicine of Tui-Na and the corrective exercises inherent in Hard Style Russian kettlebell training, the FMS is a crucial gem of knowledge for anyone working in the fields of fitness, athletics, movement sciences, medicine (pain management, orthopedics, physical therapy), or fire/police/military.

His works are at the TOP of my current "to study" list. 'Nuff said! Get some by clicking on the FMS banner above.

When "Later" becomes "Never"

It's amazing how time flies.

Not all that long ago, I can clearly remember my son's birth, him learning to crawl, him learning to walk, him learning his first words... and the first time he showed interest in a kettlebell. :-)

Today is Squealie's 2nd birthday.

And I can't help but reflect on how many times I thought that little milestones passed me by, and that leads me to think back on my dear friend Rannoch Donald RKC's words... "Later has a way of quickly becoming never."

Funny how that works for all aspects of our life, ain't it?

It's all too easy for us to procrastinate and put things off until a more convenient time, a time when we're more rested, a time when we feel more motivated, a time when traffic's not so bad, a time when money's not as tight, a time when it's not so hot or not so chilly, a time when gas prices are a little lower. There's no shortage of excuses that we can use.

The bottom line is that we've got ONE life that's subject to the inexorable march of time. And just like Rannoch said, "later" does have an unsettling way of becoming "never". In other words, "I'll do this later" often becomes "I never did that" regrettably.

The list of things I want/need to do are formidable. Improve my own kettlebell & Naked Warrior (bodyweight training methods) strength, study more of Gray Cook's Functional Movement Screen technologies and travel to his FMS seminars & cert (which I'll write more on in my next post), improve/review/refine my own combative martial arts skills with just the systems I'm already familiar with (nevermind the new stuff out there that I haven't been exposed to yet.... so yeah, I'll blog on this topic of martial arts styles & training in the near future before I roll out to Scotland), and certainly spend more time with my family (as my wife & son spend most of their week an hour away - without traffic - because of my wife's medical residency program).

It's funny that nowhere in that list was "make more money", isn't it?

I've been fortunate enough to love what I'm interested in enough to be able to make a good living through my participation in those fields. I've had the best of the best when it comes to my teachers and mentors. And perhaps most importantly, I got a quote from someone I respect greatly to help distill many of life's decisions down to a crystal clear lens.

One of my big brothers, Chiefmaster Taejoon Lee, the son of Dr. Joo Bang Lee, the founder of Hwa Rang Do, told me that his father once gave him very simple advice when it came to making a living: "Let the money chase the man, not the man chase the money."



When I started to implement that motto in my decision making process, I found out that I had a lot more time to do what I loved and a lot more energy & resources to do those things with. If you live your life in a way such that you are passionate about what you do, you exude the energy to not only do your own work, but also motivate others to do it too. Money follows you. And perhaps most importantly, you find a real balance between having to say "later" and "now"!