The ALTIS Apprentice Coach Program: Olympic edition (Part 2 of 8)
The C-Spine, T-Spine, Shoulder Trinity — Dr. Kelly Starrett
In case you didn’t know, MobilityWOD is the ultimate self-guide to resolving pain, preventing injury, and optimizing athletic performance. Kelly Starrett maintains that humans have been evolving for millions of years and the human body is extraordinarily engineered. Nevertheless, while people are born with this incredible machine, they aren’t necessarily born with the right software to run that machine.
What I really admire about Kelly is not only this perspective, but his approach to athletic therapy. He empowers athletes and all people to treat their own bodies. You may have noticed a sudden “big bang of body mashing” via the use props including, foam rollers, lacrosse balls, bands, and even barbells. We can give Kelly credit for taking this mainstream.
I remember his first videos that were recommended to me by my athletic therapist a few years ago. I was instantly engaged by Kelly’s deep knowledge and passion for optimizing body movement. One thing that I took away was that training in general isn’t about making your body stronger, rather it is about doing the work to put your body in a strong position to ensure performance longevity. Accordingly, MobilityWOD is designed to help you “hack your body’s mechanics” and provide the tools to perform basic maintenance on yourself. Awesome.
Everything we do is about improving output. Improve function to improve output @mobilitywod
Kelly’s talk at the Super ACP, The C-Spine, T-Spine, Shoulder Trinity, was brilliant. Kelly did what the best experts do, which is, present their topic just like a fantastic jazz musician would perform. What I mean by this is, if you’ve ever witnessed a truly compelling jazz performer, you’ll notice that the musician has a particular arrangement that is inspired from the original piece. What’s compelling is that he or she knows music theory so well that they can speak freely on it and, in the process, deliver an original performance that is inspired by the audience in that moment.
In the same way, Kelly was inspired by the different techniques he observed among the ALTIS athletes. He emphasized that while coaches may be tempted to correct a particular athlete’s tendency, i.e. arm movement, sometimes it’s better to leave it alone because the body’s coordination is a synergy of different systems.
However, if the movement can manifest a career ending injury, it’s better to find the cause rather than treat the symptom. In the case of shoulder pain for example, we need to consider this trinity that Kelly spoke of.
Why can’t an athlete perform a particular movement? Tissue, joint, coordination? Important questions… @mobilitywod
Accordingly, this holistic approach does require that therapists observe the athlete in their natural environment while they are under pressure to perform. It’s not enough to simply treat a runner’s shoulder injury that is the result of chronic suboptimal movement originating from a restricted t-spine, for instance. Kelly also stressed that we are all different and while certain movements are considered fundamental, coaches need to honour the things that make athletes unique. That is, do not impose certain popular techniques on a body that is just not “compatible with the software.”
Kelly also discussed the limitations of a clinical screen and personally, I would liken such artificial screens to observing pandas in a zoo. What we do in the clinic as patients (or how pandas mate in the zoo) is not necessarily a representative sample of what we might see in free form or, in the wild. There are certain artificial tendencies (behaviours) that an athlete (or panda) might elicit in an artificial setting. This is something that ALTIS addresses so well by integrating performance therapy as part of a training session and it’s difficult to argue with their results!
When first hearing Kelly speak, or seeing ALTIS’ high performance training model in action, it may seem that this approach is difficult to scale… in fact, it is. Genius, authenticity, and hard work are qualities that are difficult to replicate. However, as coaches we should bring this to our athletes every day, that’s the point. That’s what a champion needs to be a champion. Luckily, Kelly did deliver some key points that coaches might consider:
Don’t reinforce patterns in the weight room that don’t transfer to the athletic movement i.e. good technical practice should mimic the natural organization of human movement @mobilitywod
An athlete’s tissue should feel like warm silk sliding over steel strings @mobilitywod
Fix dysfunctional movements with a cool down that addresses specific areas @mobilitywod
These points are seemingly basic but they are essential for high performance. Specifically: make sure you’re instilling functional movement, assess the athlete’s tissue quality constantly, and target specific movement dysfunctions under low strain. High-performance training is an incredible stress on the human body and if this complex biological system is already under stress, or worse, working against itself, we’ll never elicit the adaptation we want for our athletes. Therefore, as coaches, we need to watch, learn, reassess and evolve our approach to high performance training, even if that means bringing things back to the first principles of coordinated movement. Indeed, sometimes it’s not about delivering the right answer as much as it is about asking the right question.
