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"The Chalk Box!"
With Feline Agility and no Wobble Boards
By Israel A. Sanchez
Strength & Conditioning Coach
As most of you are aware, my wife and I moved from Clifton, New Jersey to our new home in Bainbridge Island, Washington on March 25th, 2008. Quite a change, but very welcome and we love our new home.
Our two cats Michi (Mee-Chee) and Mani (Mah-nee) along with Gracie the bird, are also adjusting to their new surroundings and having a great time. Ok, so at this point you are probably thinking "What does this have to do with strength and conditioning?" Please bear with me as I elaborate more and share what the upcoming situation revealed.
Our new home has two levels. There's a banister/balcony in front of the rooms of the second floor making it for an entirely new set up for all of us. Our home in New Jersey was quite spacey, but had only one level.
Our cat Mani was rescued from the streets before we adopted her, so we do not know much of her past other than she was about eight months old when she came to our home. Michi on the other hand, we know all about his past. He was part of a litter of five kittens and was about four months when we adopted him. In the nearly two and a half years the cats have been part of our lives, we know for sure that Michi has ALWAYS lived in a one-level home.
"What the heck is the point?" I know, I know… We are almost there.
The first morning we woke up in our new home, I saw Michi casually leap into the banister, run its length, lie down on it and relax, as if he had been doing it ALL his life. Here we have a cat that has NEVER been exposed to stairs, let alone any environment that demands such a high level of equilibrium (a surface narrower than he is). Yet here he was, easily walking along the banister as if he were casually ambulating from one room to another.
This may have escaped the attention of many as just another mundane, Aww! Cat thing. However, it got me thinking quite a bit about the constant battles always taking place in the fitness industry. Battles that should not exist but are brought and fueled up by heavily biased and poorly analyzed points of view.
Recently many Gurus and Experts have made it their mission to bash, bad-mouth, and condescend any piece of equipment or exercise that does not resemble "real life" and attribute it all sorts of evil traits. And this is where we start uncoiling what this article is all about. "Do any of these evil attributes showered upon the equipment or techniques have any base of reality or common sense? Or are they simply products of emotions and biased conclusions?
The experts have their rabid hordes repeating their credos. "Machines are not real life" "Specific Physical Skill development is not real life" "Stable environments are not real life" among many more colorful statements. This "Real Life" belief is so misused, misunderstood, and so self-contradictory, it will get its own series of articles in the future, but let's return to the main point.
One of the preferred arguments the Gurus use to trash any equipment that does not meet their specific modality is that "They create faulty motor patterns". Another one is that "The body does not learn to recruit all the muscles". Yet another one is that "The body does not learn to balance and stabilize" You will also hear most of those statements preceded of followed by the also overused phrase "The nervous system…" as if the interactions of our complex nervous system could easily collapse by the introduction or addition of one of those evil pieces of equipment or training modality.
Granted, the nervous system governs every action of the body, but this statement is a gross oversimplification that has been used to justify every act of inanity taking place in the training floor, including the unfounded bashing of equipment.
Seriously, "Create a faulty motor pattern?" Really? Considering that a healthy human nervous system has a tremendous capacity for generating from the simplest to the most complex motor patterns, the only time a faulty motor pattern is generated is when one tries to execute a specific motor pattern under circumstances completely different to those that made said pattern efficient.
Take for instance the current trend of what is called "Sports Specific Training" which has turned into nothing more than sports mimicking. For example, throwing a punch to a moving opponent requires a motor pattern that is completely different to that of throwing a punch with resistance coming from opposing directions (as in punching holding dumbbells, kettlebells, cables, bands, etc) Will this interfere with the performance of the athlete? You bet! Yet it is common to see people engaging in this "Sports Specific, Real Life Training" to improve their punching power.
I'm sure that at this point you can see that there's a lot more to generating a faulty motor pattern than simply the choice of equipment. Ditto for the balance and motor unit recruitment issues. The mimicking training folly is just the tip of the iceberg of many factors that can generate faulty motor patterns, or affect balance, or neuromuscular recruitment. This is another HUGE topic, and best served by future articles.
Going back to Michi the cat, and considering that this is a subject with a complex nervous system (bearing in mind brain size in relation to body size) the wisdom of the experts and gurus would have predicted that this cat never exposed to the demands of balancing its center of gravity over a narrow surface, would have an underdeveloped neural system, and thus, would fail miserably at the attempt of conquering the banister.
Yet quite the opposite was observed. Michi did not need to be placed on physioballs, or wobble boards, or other "functional" elements to "recruit his nervous system". In the two and half years of his life (what would that be in cat years?) and never getting exposure to anything that demanded the balancing finesse that would protect his nine lives, Michi needed nothing more than the desire to explore to put him on that banister.
And yes, I understand that Michi is a cat. A feline, a quadruped mammal with a structure very different from us, humans. That is not the point of the topic though.
What I try to emphasize is that it takes a whole lot more than just a training modality, or a period under certain training conditions to mess up a healthy nervous system, which is what many experts and gurus are trying to have their worshiping devotees believe.
Can the human nervous system deteriorate in certain abilities and functions? Absolutely! But from observation, it takes quite a bit of time to get there, usually a lifetime or many, many generations, or excessive, determined abuse.
Take for instance our ability to sense through our feet. Our feet are our main sensors of the forces entering our bodies and how to fine tune for them. After many generations wearing shoes and with the ever expanding flattening and hardening of our paths through concrete and paving, our feet have decreased their once heightened sense to detect subtle variations of terrain and the ability to adjust the joints of the feet to accommodate them.
It is the price we pay for our adaptation to our modern concrete jungle and one that has magnified the issues brought by different shapes of foot arches, and leg-length discrepancies. Take also into account the increased life span of humans into the deterioration process and things start to fall into place. This is another subject worthy of thorough exploration in different articles.
Trying to extrapolate these observations to Michi the cat, had Michi been the 30th generation in a generation of cats never exposed to conditions that demanded a heightened sense of balance, I would speculate that his physical ability to climb the banister and walk it with casual ease would be compromised but not lost. There is this instinct embed in our genetic code that brings this ability back through necessity and cannot be taken lightly.
So go ahead, don't be discouraged to try newer things or simpler approaches just because some radical guru told you that you would turn into a useless lump of meat, incapable of recruiting "the nervous system". More often than not, those observations come from just repeating what another equally fanatical guru said, or poor understanding of the interactions of the demands of the environment and the human body.
The popular sad excuse of "I tried using this stupid (insert hated piece of equipment or exercise here) and got nothing out of it" simply means "I have no understanding whatsoever of the mechanics or how to apply them, and when I winged it I failed"
Your structure, its health, along with the current state of your physical conditioning, goals and mental readiness are what dictate what would be beneficial for you at the moment, not a preachy, self-righteous expert trying to convert you into yet another band-wagon jumping fanatic.
Next Step Conditioning Systems, LLC
9929 NE. Lafayette Avenue
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110
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