One of our friends stopped over the other day to pick up a load of bread.

Exhausted from a long week of coaching and digging deep into professional book learnings she sat down at our counter and said:

“David, the more I learn about more systems the more intrigued I am about biofeedback.”

It’s an evolution I’ve seen lots of trainers and coaches go through, so I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

There are dozens and dozes of three-letter systems out there all purporting to give you the last piece of the puzzle you’ve been missing all along. Some people think they’ll get out of pain if they learn the next system. Others think they’ll be able to unlock the missing potential and hit that next big PR.

Maybe they will.

Probably they won’t. At most it becomes another tool in the crowded toolbox.

The problem is that none of the systems connect. You can’t reconcile what you learn in one with what you learn in another, which leaves you trying to deduce which is the correct answer using the only overarching system you have – logic – which is ill suited to the task. Someone smarter than I has said “just because it’s logical doesn’t mean it’s physiological.”

Which is why you inevitably end up circling back to biofeedback, that thing you heard about briefly but thought was a little too weird or a little too improbable to follow-up on.

Biofeedback isn’t about giving you more tools, it’s about discerning which tool you should use, and which tools you should put in the trash.

I’ll give a quick example. A couple years ago Jen and I were at a big fitness seminar, and one of the presenters who is very smart and a great presenter was doing his thing and was trying to prove that more stability and rigidity would give greater range of motion. That was his whole thesis and all of the application was built around that idea. Well he had everybody following along and when the great “reveal” came almost everyone in the room had greater range of motion except Jen, right next to me, whose range of motion got worse. I whispered “try closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, and shake out the tension.” She did, and immediately had greater range of motion.

Why?

Because Jen was powerlifting heavily at that time, and tends to run pretty high-strung and tense and rigid as it is. The last thing her body needs is more rigidity. She needed to relax, and let tension go.

But you’d never get there if you predicated your whole pursuit on the idea that stability = range of motion.

Remember last week when I talked about association vs causation? Stability is associated with range of motion, but if you start thinking of it in terms of causes or equals, you’re going to have a bad time.

Anyway, this is the mental model and framework that biofeedback provides you. But of course you have to learn how to apply it and then actually do so.

I’m going to be scheduling some dates for workshops over the summer and fall coming up here, let me know if you’re interested. Of course I also teach this in my programs, like Off The Floor and Get Stronger Faster.

And if you need to learn some more three-letter systems before you’re ready? That’s ok too, I’ll be here.

You can learn an astonishing amount from dogs. You could do worse than to learn your social cues from dogs – be really excited to see the people you love, take a hint and bug off if someone growls or snaps at you, don’t hold grudges and act just as excited to see the same people every single day even if they just left five minutes ago.

One of the interesting things about dogs is that they are pure association machines. If you spend any amount of time observing your dogs you will notice this. Even people with a rudimentary understanding of dogs know that they learn by association. It’s not that they have been shown sufficient epistemological evidence that if they sit in a certain position they will be rewarded with a treat, but they’ve intuited the association between sitting a certain way and getting rewarded by your happiness and a treat.

But this association magic and calculation goes much deeper than that. For example, one of my dogs, Zoey, is as food motivated as you’ll ever find a dog. You can hardly be in the kitchen doing anything without her coming to investigate and see if there is any potential for spillage. Unless – and this is key – you are doing a certain combination of things that she has associated with no potential for reward. She now knows, for example, that the specific set of sounds of me getting out the kitchen scale, opening the cupboard and getting flour, and clinking glass on the counter means I am working on something (feeding sourdough starter) that never results in snacks for her. So she stays in whatever comfortable nook she’s in. This calculation and matching with previous associations is constant, and if I do something out of the norm you’ll hear her little feet hit the wood floors.

Humans, too, are association machines although I would argue that our association is much more clouded by cognitive burden – how we think about what we think.

One of the big drivers of motor learning is association.

What is the cause of hitting a baseball with a baseball bat?

Well it’s virtually impossible to determine and denote a causal link. Without even looking too closely you can see a massive variety of ways to hit a baseball.

So the body learns by association. “When this, this, and this sort of happen in a similar way we connect. Got it.”

This is, in a nutshell, why specificity is important to sports training and to a lesser degree fitness training in general. If the associations didn’t matter at all, you could train a deadlift to get better at hitting a baseball. But if motor learning were not based on association, there would only be one precise way to hit a baseball and you’d have to train that exactly.

Which is impossible, because the amount of variability required in even the most basic movement is almost incalculable.

Generally speaking, the more refined you are at performing a movement the less variability there is in it – you’re able to reproduce ​almost ​the same movement every single time. Unwanted or uncontrolled variability is seen in unhealthy population such as in the walking gait of people with MS. On the other hand, being able to withstand greater variability and maintain the desired movement pattern with fewer errors is a hallmark of someone who has highly refined movement. Tiger Woods could shoot a better golf game from a moving ship than I ever could under perfect conditions.

The rub is – if we want to reduce variability as much as possible – why would we ever do anything other than the exact movements we want to get better at?

The short answer is – because you have to. The longer answer is that you have to, and it’ll make you better at doing the movements you care about – through the associations it builds.

Why do you have to? Without getting deep into what is a substantially more complex topic than I can do justice to here, but there seems to be a pretty clear association between overspecializing in sport or athletic movement patterns and resulting pain or injury. You might think of it as overuse, I think of it more in terms of what isn’t used. If you’re ​always ​doing one thing, it means you’re hardly ever doing a lot of other things. It’s good to know that pull-ups hurt and you’ve overused them, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what you can do to resolve it. Knowing that you may have underused the pushing and extension functions of the upper arms gives you a lot more to work with. So increasing movement variability is a way to move where you can – when you can’t move where you want to.

The other big reason is that all of those variable associations are used as information that can be recalled later to accomplish the movement you want with less error. Think back to Zoey and her basket of associations that result in kitchen snacks. She knows that the cupboard, glass clink, plastic scale noise on the counter doesn’t result in tasty spillage – but if she hears the crinkle of a popcorn or chip bag she will come running, because she knows from previous unrelated situations that it usually means snacks! Suffice to say you have to move very, very carefully in the kitchen if you don’t want to disturb Zozo.

There may be no straight causal line you can draw from stand-up paddleboarding to hitting a baseball, but there may be some useful association information in that task. Does it mean it should be a big part of a baseball player’s training? Absolutely not I just made that up and it’s way too non-specific – but it might not hurt if they enjoy doing it as a recovery mode.

I told you that you can learn a lot from dogs.

You may have noticed I had to take a couple weeks off from sending emails. The week before last I went back to Minneapolis to help out with a slight remodel of my gym. I knew I was going to be helping out all weekend, but I didn’t know I’d be working on it from 6am to 9pm every day.

On the plus side we went from this:

 to this 

to this:

Obviously it’s not totally finished but we moved the big rocks and now Mark is in charge of putting the finishing touches on it.

The whole project was a great example of how it pays off to develop a wide variety of skills and competencies like I talk about a lot. I did a ton of electrical wiring (adding new outlets, moving switches to different walls, re-routing circuits, etc), some drywall installation, basic carpentry, and cut and welded a big box store shelf into a perfect custom fit for our space. Besides the costs these things would have incurred, the delays in getting them done would have been in the days or weeks.

Anyway, it was a lot of work in a very short amount of time and it gave me a hangover for a few days last week.

I thought I could sneak in an email in the morning or evening, but there just wasn’t any extra bandwidth, and that’s ok. If I’m good at anything, it’s drawing the line where I know I’d be paying too great a cost in terms of stress to do more. I could have stayed up an extra hour, or gotten up an hour earlier, but sleep is something I never sacrifice because the cost is too great.

If you’re just clocking in a regular 8 hour work day, exercising to maintain health and not do some big transformation or competing, don’t have super young kids who keep you up all night, and so on you can probably get away with “doing it all.”

But as soon as your work becomes a high-stakes project with tight deadlines, or you’re gunning for a major body transformation or competitive sport, or you’ve got a screaming baby, or any other number of things that up the stress quotient, you can not do it all.

Something has to be dialed down. Maybe it’s exercise (dial it down, don’t quit it completely.) Maybe it’s work. Maybe it’s friends. Don’t be an idiot, sleep isn’t an option unless you’re into taking out debts you can’t repay.

The key thing to remember though, is that it has to be temporary. It’s fine that I didn’t send some emails for a couple weeks. It’s not fine if I just stop completely and it takes me two years to get going again.

It’s fine if you take a few weeks off from hanging out with friends, or exercising at the level you normally want to.

It’s not fine if you never cycle out of that and get back to a balance.

You are not a machine, everything has a cost, and you can’t do everything.