Imagine if you had to wait for your car’s engine to blow up before you knew to add oil. Absurd right? We’d all be in a new car every year.
Unfortunately, this is the same paradigm we use for sports injuries. We wait for something to go horribly wrong and expect a medical professional to fix it.
You can imagine the doctor’s internal monologue when you walk into their office with a hole in your knee’s cartilage from years of poor movement patterns and seriously tight quads.
When we talk to them, they say, “Damn! They wore out that bone meant to last 110 years in 40! Too bad they didn’t listen.”
Like the ignition in your card is designed for tens of thousands of engine turnovers, our bodies are designed for millions of movement cycles. But every time you squat, bend over, or run in a compromised position, you burn through those cycles at an accelerated rate. So by the time you have worn a hole in your knee, herniated a disc, torn a labrum, chances are good you’ve been through millions of poor movement cycles. In other words, your tissues and joints don’t just “wear out because you are old”; your body tolerates millions of wrong movements or positions and eventually breaks.
Sure, everyone is different – genetics, training volumes, and other lifestyle factors have a massive impact. But if you learn to move the way your body was designed to, you will put less stress on the system, reducing the cycles you burn through, and get to use more of the 110 years your body was born to exist.
Over the next seven weeks, we will be talking about the seven fundamental movement patterns, common flaws, and how to fix them. Stay tuned, and you will learn to become a flexible piece of steel that can adapt to any physical demand you put on yourself.
