When people are first introduced to biofeedback training it can be easy to get overwhelmed and have it seem like something that would be nice to implement in their training but feel like it’s too complicated. It’s not, and I’ll lay out exactly how you can use it.

There are three major ways that you can implement biofeedback testing in your own training:

The first is to use it as a way to supplement your intuition and confirm a hunch. This would work best for people who already have a high sense of intuition about what they’re feeling in their body. You know when you feel that something is “off” and maybe even you have a good sense for what to change to make it feel right. In this case you can use biofeedback testing as a way to confirm or deny your hunch. Maybe you’re feeling a little off but you don’t know if it’s “in your head” or if it’s a real sensation – biofeedback can objectify that sensation for you and tell you if it’s accurate.

The second and most common way to use biofeedback training is to test out your major exercises and components of your program. This is a super flexible approach and lets you use an existing program for guidance without the downsides of sticking to a rigid prescriptive program – namely doing things that your body doesn’t react well to. This is the approach I advise most people to use when they first get started with biofeedback training. To implement this, simply test the movements in your program before performing them. If your first exercise of your program is a conventional deadlift then you would perform that movement and test it with biofeedback. If it tests well, then you go ahead with your program as usual. Believe it or not, in most cases this is exactly what happens. In the even that it does NOT test well you would then try some alternatives and make some tweaks to the program that day. The next day you very well may go right back to the program as written. Of course beyond testing exercises in the program it would be best if you also tested the weights or loads you were using, but each individual is free to adjust how much testing they want to do based on their own needs. I’ll circle back on the topic of how much testing to do at the end of this article.

Finally, the most thorough and intensive way to use biofeedback is to test everything. I call this going down the rabbit hole. In my experience this is most appropriate for people have a significant number of movement issues and or are dealing with chronic pain issues. These people can handle the least amount of distress from training, so they have to find that narrow slice of eustress that the right movement, with the right tool, the right load, and the right volume will engender. Naturally this is more time consuming to test so many more variations but it’s really necessary for people who can’t follow an inherently more stressful pre-written program.

Which Is Right For Me?

In my experience and opinion the best way to get started with biofeedback training is to start in the middle and move in the direction that makes sense for you. Most people with experience strength training are already accustomed to using or following a program. Applying biofeedback to a program is really simple, I went into this in detail in this article, and is not a big stretch from what you’re used to. Plus, if you’re using a well-designed program you are going to be able to reap the benefits that it’s designed to provide but calling audibles whenever necessary to keep things moving in the right direction gives you the best of both worlds. If I had a dollar for every time I heard of someone rigidly following a program getting hurt I would have a sad retirement on a private island of broken training dreams.

From there, you can move in one of two directions. If you’re super healthy, functional, and pain free and you have developed a good sense of intuition you can get away with a lot of training without actually testing – just paying attention to that intuitive sense of how things feel. When necessary you can use biofeedback to confirm your intuition.

For some people however, those who are experiencing ongoing pain issues, testing more and more becomes critically important. In these cases you sometimes have to get very creative in thinking of new things to test and finding exactly what works for your body so you can move where you can today.

 

Getting hurt in training is the pits. Besides the obvious discomfort of getting injured itself and experiencing pain, those of us who train because we love seeing the progress are doubly insulted by the halt a training injury puts to our progress for a while. It’s frustrating, and most of us will do anything we can to avoid it, especially once we’ve been there and realized we’re not invincible.

One of the big promises made to us in Fitness™ is that if you do things with proper form and you do them correctly you won’t get hurt. Well, I think anyone who has been around this game for any length of time knows that it just isn’t true. In theory doing things correctly might reduce your chances of injury, but in reality it just doesn’t seem to play out that way. Sure sometimes someone is doing something horrendously wrong and it leads directly to injury but more often than not we see cases of someone doing something “sorta wrong” and causing no problems at all even over a long period, or someone doing things perfectly right and getting hurt anyway.

Furthermore if it were enough to do things “right” then my colleagues and friends who are the absolute best of the best coaches in the space should be immune to getting hurt. These guys and gals are experts at coaxing great form out of people, they certainly can apply it to themselves.

This lack of the golden promise of good form curing all has led to an entire sub-niche of fitness products being sold – products that are primarily promoted as injury prevention toolkits. It seems like every two or three years a new certification or course or philosophy comes around that promises to make injuries a thing of the past for yourself and for your clients. FMS, Clubbells, Z-Health, PRI, FRC and so on and on and on and on.

Every single one of these systems is predicated on the same idea:

“If you do this, this, and this you won’t get hurt.”

Obviously there are varying levels of complexity to the process, and each one has a unique way of laying out their system of heuristics for what to do and what not to do but the idea is always the same. Do these things to prevent injury.

Yet…….. folks are getting hurt anyway.

What gives?

I’m not saying these systems are entirely worthless, but they fail to deliver on the big promise and people are spending a ton of time and money chasing the next big thing.

It’s my contention that it’s not A) with what form or how you perform movements that leads to injury nor B) what preventive or pre-hab drills or hoops you jump through that prevent injury.

We get hurt because we apply a stress that the body – in that moment – wasn’t able to handle.

In other words, it doesn’t matter prehab or rehab you did before and it doesn’t matter how good or bad, relative to a textbook, your form was. No matter what you did or didn’t do before if you did that movement on that day you were going to get hurt.

Disheartening right? It’s totally out of your control and avoiding injury is hopeless, it’s the (bad) luck of the draw, right?

Well, no, and that’s where I think everyone has been missing the forest for the trees.

What’s missing is a feedback loop that can help you determine which stresses the body is perfectly ready to take on, resolve, and adapt to and which stresses are too far out of the range of limits in that moment. Of course this changes day to day and minute to minute based on all the various stressors that are applied in training or in life.

To date I have not found a more effective strategy than using biofeedback testing to determine what is in or out on a particular day.

Look, the premise is really simple, and it’s not unlike going to the physical therapist after an injury and having them check out your range of motion and strength and adjusting what you’re recommended to do or not do. This is just much, much faster and can happen in real-time with your training.

You simply take an assessment of where the body’s state is right now using range of motion. As I’ve explained before, toe touch works really well for this for most people. Then you do an unloaded version of the exact movement that you’re testing – let’s say a squat. Finally you check your range of motion again to see if it’s better, the same, or worse.

If it’s better, then carry on with your training, adding more weight and testing along the way.

If it’s worse – it’s my experience that you are at a much, much higher risk of injury and it would behoove you not to do that movement that day.

It’s hard to convey how incredibly effective this protocol has been for myself, my clients, and the now thousands of people I’ve taught it to. Here’s something I have heard in the past five or six years, but astonishingly rarely: “I don’t know what happened, everything was testing well and I got hurt.” Here’s something I have heard more times than I would like:

“It didn’t test well, but I really wanted to do it anyway, and on the fourth rep I got hurt.”

Damnit. Your body tried to tell you that it wasn’t a good idea, it gave you a measurable form of feedback that what you just did made your state discernibly worse, and you ignored it pushed forward anyway and paid the price.

Even if you’re not biofeedback testing, you’ve probably experienced a situation where something felt “off” or not quite right and sure enough you end up with an injury, or you just feel like crap after a workout – instead of feeling better like you should!

It shouldn’t happen, and it doesn’t have to happen. I believe you can leave the gym better every single time you train, if you just add this one extra step into your training.

You don’t have to change your program wholesale, and you don’t have to make major changes to how you train. Just add testing in, and when something doesn’t test well make some tweaks to it until you find something that does. It’s that simple.

In case biofeedback testing is new to you, here’s a video walkthrough that will be helpful:

It’s not the movement. It’s not how you do the movement. It’s not what you did before the movement. Good and bad, it’s how we respond to the movement that matters.

That training the core is important is sort of one of those “everyone knows” facts of our existence. No is going to dispute the importance of the core, although some will postulate that training the core directly is unnecessary because big and heavy compound movements like the squat and deadlift already train it sufficiently.

First a clarification of terms. When I’m referring to the “core” which is of course a hotly debated and contested term in and of itself, I’m referring to the general area that connects all of our fleshy stuff from below the chest and above the waist, all the way around. The core provides a stable base to produce, reduce, and redirect force with the limbs of the body. Let’s not argue about what we call it, k?

Besides the idiotic debates about what you should actually call this region, what people generally debate is whether or not you need to specifically train the anterior core and how you should do that. While it’s still part of the core, the posterior core gets enough work from deads and squats.

In other words, do you need to train dem abzzzzz?

I’ve always been a big advocate of training the anterior core specifically. I believe that it’s part of what has made me a strong and healthy deadlifter. In our gym training it’s not at all uncommon to have two full movements dedicated to some sort of anterior or lateral core stability training, in addition to squats and deads etc. It’s a primary, fundamental part of the training.

But a few years ago I wanted to challenge this assumption. What if it were true that you didn’t need to train the anterior core specifically, and you could actually get away with just training squats and deads. If this assumption was wrong, I would be wasting a lot of people’s time and effort with my gym programming – which means I’d be getting them worse results than if they spent that time more productively.

I decided to quietly do an experiment. Removing core training from my own programming wouldn’t be sufficient. It would be an n=1 experiment, which would be great to determine if I personally needed to train anterior core, but it wouldn’t tell me what I really wanted to know: do my clients need this?

So I removed all anterior core training from their programming for the next 5-week block of training. I kept everything else the same, and in place of where they would test anterior core variations, I put in sort of innocuous mobility drills that should have a neutral effect like wall slides and easy movement drills. To state what I think should be obvious, our normal programming consists of a lot of big compound movements like deadlifts, squats, kettlebell work, presses, and pulls.

At the end of each cycle we have “Max Week” where those who have trained consistently can re-test their maxes (from a 5rm for newbies up to 1rm for more experienced or advanced trainees). My plan was to observe the training and measure if there was a discernible difference in strength progress without the anterior core work. While far from a perfect experiment, the sample size was big enough that I would have the power to determine what effect it would really have.

That is if I could have continued the experiment long enough to see it through.

Within two weeks I started to see an undeniable uptick in complaints about back issues. Not major issues, mind you. But more people coming in complaining of little tweaks and niggles.

The effect was so immediate and dramatic that I discontinued the experiment, re-worked the rest of the cycle of programming, and reintroduced the anterior core work. The complaints vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Here are the main types of core movements that we rotate through in our programming at Movement:

• Anterior Core Dynamic – Movements that generate movement through the core, primarily in flexion. Things like crunches, weighted, standing crunches, leg raises, leg lowers. Yes, we do crunches. Believe it or not the spine is designed to flex and it should be trained in ways it can move.
• Anterior Core Static – These are mainly movements that resist motion such as planks, farmers walks, weighted planks, body saws, etc.
• Rotational Core Dynamic – These are movements in which there is a twisting or rotating movement of the spine which is both generating the movement as well as stabilizing. We favor Russian twists, Palloff twists, windshield wipers.
• Rotational Core Static – These movements focus on preventing rotation through the spine. A palloff press is the most classic example, in which you’re alternating between a short lever trying to rotate you and a longer lever trying harder to make you rotate. The goal here is resisting movement. Side planks also align closely with this category as an anti-lateral-flexion movement, as do single-sided carries and deadlifts.

In every training session we will use at least one but more often two of these categories, and over the course of a block of training we will address all four core modalities in roughly equal rotation. Depending on the specific person and what biofeedback tests bests for them some people will do more work from one or two particular categories.

One of the things I hear most often from my 1-1 training clients and online coaching clients is a combination of “My core is the strongest it has ever been” and “Thank you for making me do the core work, normally I skip it on my own.” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this, and you can probably imagine that the two statements are two sides of the same coin.

Eat your spinach, and do your core work kids.