Is Lower Back Pain Tying a Knot in Your Movement - Joint Mobility vs Stability vs Power

It's been a while since I've had a chance to blog about little more than letting you know that I'm in or out of town or announcing some other random developments in the RKC or FMS worlds.

While those two things are always happening (and as I head out of town tomorrow for Danville, VA to see my mentor - Gray Cook), ideal training ISN'T always happening.

For some reason, there's a whole slew of people that think that as long as they buy the next cool tool or shiny, new toy, they'll get better performance out of their bodies....as if simply having the new kettlebell or TRX technology under your roof will osmotically make you a better athlete or decrease your pain or help you lose the stubborn fat around your midsection... as if simply buying the highest quality nutritional supplements like Shakeology without regularly using them will dramatically transform your state of health.

WHO ARE YOU KIDDING OTHER THAN YOURSELF?

Higher reps with heavier weight DOES NOT necessarily mean that you're moving better.

And now for the smasher...

Moving without pain DOES NOT necesssarily mean that you're moving better either!

Moving WELL, with biomechanically advantageous patterns REFLEXIVELY and without pain, means that you're moving better. Once you've established that as your BASELINE, then adding sets & reps makes for a better, stronger, more sound body.

That said, what's one of the easiest ways for you to trash your body (aside from picking a fight with an angry Beast)?

Let's make it an even easier question. Suppose the human body's like a car (not that I know jack$h!t about cars). Let's think of what we might do to destroy a car without actually crashing it into something deliberately. There are 2 main ways of destroying a car in a non-contact fashion:

1. operating the car when the fluid levels are far too low, or
2. driving the car too rough when there is some mechanical impediment.

Operating the car when the fluid levels are too low is an obvious one. Start driving in a car without brake fluid, with a leaking radiator, or without sufficient motor oil. Breakdown is imminent. It's not a question of if, but when the car will seize up either in rush hour traffic, or while you're speeding down the interstate.

No, that ain't my car!

Driving the car with a mechanical impediment goes back to what Pavel calls "driving with the parking brake on". I think we've all done it at some point or another, but the hard part is to realize BEFORE we put the car into drive that the brake is still on. For some of us, that takes a long time. We fumble about with recurrent injuries that seem to get better and then get reaggravated.

The lower back is a common site of pain, injury, reinjury, and eventually debility for some. Now while it's easy to focus on alleviating the pain at its most painful location, the "brakes" might still be locked down elsewhere in the vehicle.

Studies have shown a high correlation between hip movement dysfunction and lower back pain. So let's think about this by defining 3 terms and seeing how they might apply in lower back rehab:
- Mobility is the unfettered ability to move a joint through an optimal range of motion without pain.
- Stability is the ability to hold a joint in a given position or shortened range of motion.
- Power is the ability to recruit muscular contraction for the purpose of bearing or moving a load through a given range of motion.

There are many ways of approaching the hip dysfunction, which is paining the lower back.
1. You can stretch or treat the living hell out of the lower back in an attempt to "decompress" and restore range of motion. This is focusing on mobility at the site of pain.
2. You can do crunches and ab exercises until the cows come home in order to create more stability for the lumbar spine.
3. Or you can try to power your way through to hip extension by clenching your glutes so hard that even Jean-Claude Van Damme would be jealous.

Looks like pretty mobile hips to me, but what are we missing?

Gray Cook's mantra has always been to focus on mobility FIRST. But sometimes, trying to pry movement out of a stuck joint without taking the brakes off first is easier said than done.

The trick is sometimes to encourage the reflexive action of the weakened "accelerator" muscles while simultaneously training the hyperactive "parking brake" muscles to turn off. In this case, that would mean strengthening hip extensors, such as the glutes, while stretching hip flexors, such as the psoas, iliacus, and rectus femoris.

Pavel's long been too kind in complementing me publicly on my form with the Front Squat, and it's something I never really paid attention to until after he had me demonstrating some sort of horse stance drill at the Feb 2010 RKC II. I couldn't appreciate the drill at the time, and I'm still investigating its worth from a movement quality standpoint, but the Boss's comments still made me question what I'd been missing.

While teaching the RKC Squat back here in Los Angeles, I felt like my own form wasn't the same as what it was when I first started training with kettlebells. Keeping in mind the most common mistakes in the Front Squat (i.e., lumbar flexion, valgus collapse, etc.), I started looking at ways of optimizing necessary attributes for this particular movement pattern.

What I came up with revolved around this...

Yup... old-school Shaolin & Tai-Chi stance training. Just as with any field of endeavor, there are tons of ways to execute/perform anything. Sure, there are plenty of different versions of the horse stance floating around, and in my own martial arts studies, I've seen, learned, and taught more than one variation myself. But this isn't the time or place to get dogmatic, especially if you're not clear on context.

The earliest version of the horse stance that my father taught me revolved around achieving vertical alignment from the midfoot, the hip, the shoulder, and the center of the head when viewed from the side. When viewed from the front, this stance was referred to in Cantonese as "sei ping ma bo", meaning "four levels horse stance". The four levels referred to 4 perpendicular lines, as formed by the two lines from the knees to feet, and the lines from knee-to-knee & foot-to-foot.

To perform this stance correctly, the aforementioned alignments of leg and of spine must be achieved and maintained. But to achieve these alignments requires simultaneous mobility of the anterior portion of the hip joint with stability coming from the drive of the glutes in the posterior chain. Instead of doing the movement in strict Shaolin format, I took a modified version of it and drilled my students on it one Sunday morning.

Without exception, each one of them was shaking, sweating, and swearing while I had them perform very subtle movements, adjusting them slowly, yet thoroughly into the essential points of the stance. But at the finish of the exercise, everyone reported not only better hip mobility, but also a marked decrease in lower back stiffness.

Just as a knot is only as useful as it is secure under pressure and moveable enough to untie when offloading, the lumbar spine and hips must also be able to reflexively stabilize under load while able to move under load to create powerful movement. With the hip flexors and quads unbound enough to take the parking brakes off while the posterior chain keeps driving the pelvis forward, the entire spine can remain in neutral under a relaxed neck and a tall chest.

Wanna see & experience more of this and other correctives in high-detail? Get to Hard Style Ventura in November! In the meantime, read & re-read this post for the little details that can make or break your hips & back!

Optimization - the Ancient Chinese Secret?

Tell me what this sounds like to you....

A system of training that progresses from very thoroughly developing systemic mobility, to spinal alignment, to breathing, to foot/leg/hip power, to leg-waist-spine-arm coordination, to foot-leg-waist-spine-arm sensitivity & responsiveness.

It is a system that both prehabilitates and rehabilitates. There are no shortage of populations (from the feeble to the fighters) worldwide that have benefitted from its practice, its study, its total application.

Sound like Hardstyle with the FMS fusion? It is.

Know what else it is? Yang style Tai-Chi.

Just like Fast & Loose, there's a heavy emphasis on not just creating muscle relaxation, but maximizing it! Just like Super Joints and Relax Into Stretch, there's a fundamental emphasis on maximizing powerful, effortless range of motion. Just like the RKC principles, there's a solid dedication to developing a strong, powerful base from the waist down in order to be able to most efficiently utilize the upper body to issue power.

My father first introduced me to Tai-Chi when I was 10 years old. He studied a Yang style Tai-Chi derivative from one of Prof. Cheng Man-Ching's students, named Master Chao. [For those of you who are unfamiliar with Prof. Cheng Man-Ching, his writings on Tai-Chi, Chinese culture, martial arts, and human development are extraordinary. I've included a link to a compilation of his writings below.]


I remember watching the slow-motion movements one morning and trying in vain to stifle my laughter. As a youth, I was more visually familiar with the hard-fast, bone crunching power that karate or "external" kung-fu systems demonstrated. So seeing him move in what seemed like ridiculously slow motion was utter hilarity to me at the time.

Knowing the mind of his son, my father stopped training and confidently asked me to punch him in the face as hard as I could. With a challenge like that, almost no boy will back down, and I shot a fist out with all I had. What happened next blew my mind.

Without using rigid force, he deflected my fist without blocking, keeping the muscles of his arm and shoulder very relaxed. When I thought I was sure to make contact with his face, I instead fell forward off balance into an upward armbar and then was launched across the room.

"COOL!"
That was almost 30 years ago.
After that, I was hooked. I learned all that my father had to teach me about Tai-Chi until I headed out to LA for college. Shortly after arriving in Pasadena, I was fortunate enough to meet and train under Prof. Daniel K. Lee, a former Bruce Lee student who was also one of North America's preeminent Yang style instructors. I've had a few other influences since then, but my father & Prof. Lee were my two main teachers in that system of martial arts.

Fast forward to the present....


Working on rehabilitative issues & strength challenges that I've been trying to overcome, I keep coming back to the ideas of "best training methods" and optimization. My mentor, Gray Cook, speaks volumes about "authentic movement", and the more I research his teachings, the more I keep getting drawn back to my original martial arts training with my father and my earliest Sifus (masters).

The countless hours of Shaolin & Tai-Chi training that I'd received in my teens and twenties set the stage for my body to be able to achieve what it did in more recent years. However, I'd lost sight of that. I'd lost sight of the deep relaxation practices that had kept me healthier, the incredible joint mobility routines that had kept me agile & flexible, and the incredible movement patterning drills that had made me function, flow, fight, and feel like an animal.

Don't get me wrong.

RKC style training did a LOT to improve my functionality, but I've been beating my head against a brick wall lately. The FMS principles kept pointing me towards something different than what I was doing (which was trying to improve my Press by just working my Press MORE), but I wasn't completely sure about what I was looking for or how to achieve a change in my state of being & performance. I did know that emotionally & spiritually, I sorely missed martial arts training.

So a few weeks back into more focused martial arts training, I went back to revisit the kettlebells. For the first time in months, the right shoulder didn't hurt with a 24kg kettlebell strict military press. I didn't do many reps or push the load past the 24kg mark, but simply being able to move that weight without having to wince or grit my teeth was a major improvement.

Additionally, I'd been spending more time on getting treatment (soft tissue & joint mobilization) as well as working on corrective exercise patterns. The areas that seemed to need the greatest focus and yielded the greatest improvements were those that seemed to point me straight back to traditional martial arts stance & flexibility training.

One of the biggest insights I've had lately revolved around the Yang style "front stance". The proper hip positioning for this fundamental stance, in conjunction with the proper weight distribution & spinal alignment, is essentially the same as the FMS half-kneeling corrective position.

The Tai-Chi & Chi Kung breathing progressions I learned from my father almost 30 years ago are essentially the same as those that I'm learning from Gray Cook, Brett Jones, & Dr. Lee Burton as far as crocodile breath patterns for neurological resets.

What does this all mean? Is the old-school Chinese martial arts training better than the FMS or the RKC methods?

To quote one of my most beloved mentors, Prof. Roy Harris, the real answer is "It depends"...... depends on your goals, depends on what you're coming to the table with, and depends on the timeline and means you favor to achieve your goals.

For me, the traditional martial arts of ancient times & the modern RKC-FMS marriage that is the CK-FMS system fit together like a hand in a glove. It's not a question of which one is better than the other. It's knowing how to use approaches from both that will give me (or my clients) the best possible results at any given moment, depending on the pre-existing conditions. At this juncture in time, restoring my combat skills abilities while simultaneously improving my functional/fundamental movement patterns is at the top of my list. And traditional martial arts training is what's helping me get there fastest.

Would it be easy to go back to focusing my training on strength with kettlebells?  Absolutely. But the better question would be, "Would it be intelligent for me to focus on weight training of ANY sort at this time with my movement screens looking the way they are now?"

Remember that ANY tool is good or bad only in the sense that it's either appropriate or inappropriate for use in a particular context. And sometimes, we already have the tools we need right in front of us. We just need the occasional reminder from something "new" to teach us how to appreciate something "familiar" in a new light!