Cast Your Red Sail with Redcord Neural Activation and Move out of the Safe Harbor
It’s a shame that we’re educated in grade school in SECTIONS only.
English. Physics. Math. Art. Gym. It’s all separate.
But once you get out of the system you see how much integration there actually is around us. This sort of integration is still being practiced by modern day Renaissance Men.
These are people whom you’d consider specialists but have a wide variety of experiences and bring a fresh perspective to an industry.
This is no different in the world of physical therapy where movement specialist strive to understand context, culture, and collaboration. In fact, they do this amid the maelstrom of diagnosing, understanding and healing the wide spectrum of people that they serve.
And the innovations that come out of that industry are a testament to that Renaissance-man thinking. In fact, one of the recent innovations that have come out of physical rehab is the integrated use of suspension-based training: the Neurac method.
This method is aimed at restoring functional and pain-free movement patterns through high neural activation. It so happens that suspension-inspired training is being used by a growing company called RedCord to facilitate this.
But before we get into what RedCord has come up with, let’s go back and then look forward through the history of suspension in the world of fitness.
History of Suspension Training
Suspension training isn’t something new. From the mid-1800s gymnastics rings rose in popularity along with the rise of the gymnasium, eventually leading to becoming an olympic event.
Then, former Navy Seal, Randy Hetrick, came up with his invention the TRX, after a need to get a full body or session but without access to regular gym equipment while deployed in South East Asia. His prototype of a jiu-jitsu belt and parachute webbing would become the TRX trainer.
In 2005, TRX Training was founded and Randy’s product has become a staple in gyms across the world. Suspension training in this case allowed more variety to traditional calisthenics.
Now, this same methodology is being used for rehab as well as improving human movement. Over the past twenty years, the research has consistently shown the impact of vibration training as well as the use of suspension to facilitate it.
But this story doesn’t end there.
In the early 90s former Nordic gymnast and carpenter, Kåre Mosberg, had aching back pain. An avid recreational sailor, he used the canvas of one of his sails and with some inspiration from his gymnastics past, he constructed what would later become the prototype for the Redcord suspension system. Just to get some traction for his back.
Lisa Ferguson a veteran, certified massage therapist, talks about RedCord on her blog:
More than a decade ago Redcord was just a sling with a harness made by a carpenter who wanted to give himself traction while he was sailing because he suffered from lower back pain. Having been a gymnast before his injuries, he craftily built his own suspension rigged from ropes off his sailboat. Some people will do anything to get out of pain and he figured suspension helped ease the pain he suffered from his back, so he sold his idea to two wise men from Norway.
Eventually he collaborated with the owners of TriMaster (predecessor of Redcord) Petter, Grete, and Tore Planke who were also heavily interested in the back pain (Petter Planke had long history of back pain). Collaborating with physical therapists in Norway, the group saw the benefits of this product as a tool for rehab specialists and home users to prevent back pain and retroactive ailments.
Over two decades in development, the Neurac-redcord system has gone from helping the founders with their back pain to becoming a hub for further development of suspension-based rehab as well as strength and conditioning.
The Anatomy Trains
If you’ve followed this site, you know that this isn’t the first time you’ve heard about the trains of anatomy. You’ve seen maps of how muscles work in an inter-connective way to impact posture.
Thomas Myers, author of Anatomy Trains, talks about how these trains (muscles) have junctions (boney/connective tissue) stations that work together and allow a practitioner and YOU to understand where a weakness might lie in your muscular railways.
A strong railway through and through helps to ensure efficient movement. At the same time, being able to better pinpoint and strengthen these weak junctions will protect you from marauding stresses that HEIST your physicality:
The Neurac/Redcord system ACTS on strengthening these railways, helping to pinpoint weaknesses and SPECIFICALLY strengthen them. Hopefully prevent something like THIS ↓↓↓↓↓↓↓ from happening.
What is Neurac?
Just a refresher, Neurac is short for neural activation and in the world of muscular physiology, the impact of the nervous system on muscles is the height of study.
From the Neurac/Redcord website:
Neurac is an active treatment approach consisting of four main elements:
- Suspension exercise
- Controlled vibration/perturbation to selected body parts
- Workload, specific and gradual exercise progression
- A pain-free approach
The Impact of Vibration on improving muscle activation
Why? Greater stabilization required through vibration can lead to greater muscle recruitment to create stability.
We observed that training increased maximal voluntary strength likely because of the strong and repeated activation of Ia spindle afferents during vibration training that led to changes in the corticomotoneuronal pathway, as demonstrated by the increase in cortical voluntary activation.(Souron et al, 2017)
Vibration training is much like other instability-centered movement methods. Its trying to create greater activation out of the musculature through unstable surfaces. The difference, however is that suspension training can help isolate the weak points in our movement ‘trains’.
How can Neurac help get your body closer to becoming ‘Heist-Proof’?
Imagine being able to segment a train system and work on it individually. It’s a pain in the butt right? I mean if you’ve ever committed down the Toronto Transit System you’ll know how pain in the butt it is to have part of the railway closed for repairs.
But it’s important for overall efficiency.
That same railway, although a nuisance on the day of construction/repair is only a day. Compare that to the daily (and often multiple) delays that stem from the issues that arise from NOT taking care of business.
That’s daily troubles, over time, lead to a greater waste of YOUR time. As well as deprivation of your effectiveness to reach work and your performance goes down the toilet.
Improving physical literacy, seeing a therapist, and experimenting with NEURAC/REDCORD is the same way.
Take the time to see the impact of only segmentally training your body and what it does to your force generating and offloading capabilities as a whole system. Our body’s muscle chains should be integrated and ignoring this fact means you may be ignoring your efficiency problems and leaving a lot of PERFORMANCE on the table.
And in the realm of physical training and fitness, having both an awareness of what’s important to you and where you stand amid experts of different areas of fitness is damn important to reach the goal that you’ve placed for yourself.
Experiencing a Heist-Proof session
Much like taking on new perspectives and learning new tools like Musashi Miyamoto or Alexander, learning from physical therapists, people who actually know about human movement ,is a humbling learning experience to grow and continue training (whatever that may be) for decades to come.
I had the chance to go to a session with Manni, a physiotherapist who specialize in the Neurac Method, and see the method in action and it really made me realize how weak my weak points are. I’ve got crap core strength, all 360 degrees of crap.
But that’s the thing, because Neurac uses Redcord’s smartly designed suspension system, Manni was able give or take away just enough support for me to challenge the weak links in my movement chain. And when he took away the compensation from my dominant primary movers in the chain, damn, I was dying.
Like a baby.
Just simple Neurac progressions on side planks, front planks, and glute bridges, and I was dying dead. When he tried putting in some instability (perturbations) to further challenge my core while doing glute bridges, I was flopping like a fish.
But I felt good afterwards.
The biggest take away from the experience, as Manni said to think about was:
How much power and strength are you bleeding out because of this weakness and inefficiency in your movement chains?
Unmake what you think you know about training
Understanding neural activation therapy and Redcord should make it clear that exploring integration has always been the way of innovation.
In fact, going to see experts in areas of ‘health and fitness’ will pay for your training longevity.
That’s doing the things that you enjoy doing.
Think of yourself as Indiana Jones, and explore. Otherwise you’ll never know how short your training mortality is.
For more information, check out Manni Wong at Ready Room Health + Performance.
