When I go to a conference or workshop I hear two types of feedback from people. Either they’ve implemented biofeedback in their training and gotten the best results (whether that be pain resolution, or performance) of their life, or they can’t figure out how to get started. Jen, too, hears the same thing often.

Here’s the deal: This is not something you can think your way through. You have to take action, and you have to implement. In nearly every conversation I have with someone who reports that they haven’t been able to figure out how to get started they have tried to think their way through how it might go instead of simply trying it and going from there. What you need to understand is that this is a paradigm shift in how you train and you can have no idea how to wrap your head around it because you’re coming from an existing, and incompatible paradigm.

The vast majority of exercise programming is based on you following the program. You just do what it says. Biofeedback or intuitive training involves completely flipping the operating system and following where your body leads.

What do you need to implement biofeedback training? Three things:

1. Stimulus
2. Response
3. Test

That’s it, at it’s core. You need a stimulus, a response, and a way to test or measure what the response is. Of course in any exercise protocol you have a stimulus (the exercise) and a response (the recovery, regeneration, gainz, etc.) The piece that is lacking is the test.

Is this good for me to do?

Exercise isn’t automatically and universally good. This is too complex a topic to hash out here, but if you’re struggling with this concept consider this: is it good to do deadlifts if they cause you pain?

Response to exercise can take weeks and months to be able to quantify. At the very shortest, you don’t know if it “worked” until you do the movement again and do better than before. The response is so far out into the future you could be doing the “wrong” things. So the question you want to be asking is, what would be good for me to do? Is this good for me to do right now?

Enter biofeedback testing:

We use range of motion testing as our test. Click the link for a walk-through video. Other methods can be useful, but in the interest of keeping it simple let’s just stick with ROM. The idea being that we can test to determine, on a very short time scale, what the response is right now. Based on the response of the stimulus, you can decide to continue it or not. Do things that garner a positive response in the short term, and over the long term you have an accumulation of positive responses.

One source of confusion is the baseline testing before the movements or exercises. Testing your baseline is like calibrating your measuring stick. If you don’t figure out where you’re starting, all the measurements that follow it are useless because you have no basis for comparison.

How to put this into practice:

1. Test your baseline.
2. Perform a movement.
3. Test again.
4. Based on the result of the test, continue or do something else.

As I mentioned before this must be put into practice. Stop thinking it through and do it. Here’s how you can implement it in your own training immediately: Take your existing program, and test everything before you do it. Test the movement; Do it if it tests well, and don’t do it if it doesn’t. Either skip it or test a similar variation. Test your weights. After each set test to see if you should continue to increase the weight. If you’re at your working weight then stop doing that exercise when you get a negative range of motion test.

While this does represent a major shift in how you approach your training sessions it is absolutely elementary in application practice. Try it – then review your training progress for four to six weeks. Applied correctly, this will make a profound difference.

 

 

 

It’s time we take back function, and not just in terms of the bastardized word everyone loves to hate. When it comes to the word “function” and “functional training,” most intelligent trainers roll their eyes and imagine someone standing on a BOSU ball shaking some heavy ropes. They know that just because it’s difficult to remain stable while doing something ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s developing core strength, stability, balance, upper body strength, etc. To the uninitiated it may seem like a good idea but in reality, it doesn’t do any of those things. Many of my peers have spilled words (1, 2, 3, 4) on this topic, so I’m not going to rehash them here.

The impetus behind functional training — the idea that you should train movements that make you more able to complete tasks in sport and life — is sound and commendable, even if it may have risen in popularity only in response to the weight-machine-driven bodybuilding trends of the 70s. The devil is, as they say, in the details.

I’m not going to speculate as to what went wrong with functional training — it’s water under the bridge, as far as I’m concerned. What I’d like to do is take back the word function and tell you why it’s the single most important word as it relates to your training.

If you’ll forgive me for dragging out the old dictionary definition trope, I think it will be instructive:

 

 

 

 

 

A function is essentially an ability or  capability to do something. You are a collection of cooperative functions at any level of magnification from which you care to look. Starting at a high level with a few examples: You are able to integrate socially at work or in school, you’re able to procure sustenance and necessities like food, water, and shelter to keep you alive, you’re (hopefully) able to provide some sort of value to the rest of the world with the work you do, and you are able to maintain yourself physically with exercise. Within each one of these enormous categories, you have functions that make up the higher-level function. Socially, you may have functions for meeting new people and functions for maintaining existing relationships. In terms of physical maintenance, you have this whole subset of functions we spend so much time talking about.

Knowing how and being able to lift weights in general is a function. The ability to deadlift is a function. The ability to extend the hips (hip extension) is a function, as is the ability to maintain spinal alignment against resistance. Along with the function of knee extension, shoulder retraction, finger flexion, thumb flexion and adduction. And further to that the ability to produce muscular force is a function consisting of a series of chemical reactions and processes inside the muscle.

Guess what happens when you lack a function? Let’s say, for example, you lack the function of insulin secretion to moderate an influx of sugar. That’s a disease called diabetes, and it causes lots of problems.

Sometimes a lack or failure of a function causes serious repercussions and a cascade of failures or hyperactivity in other systems that rely on the missing function. In other cases, a lack of function can go completely unnoticed.

As I said earlier, you are a collection of cooperative functions. Some of them are incomprehensibly specific (operating at a cellular level, for example) and others are so high-level and obvious that they don’t seem to even bear mentioning, such as breathing.

Everything you do or need to do is a function.

There are two general directions you can take this perspective on function. The first is perhaps the most obvious and that is to acquire new but not necessary functions. For example, strength or the ability to accomplish a particular strength feat. In these cases, it can help to think in terms of the functions that are required. For example, if one wanted to successfully lift the famed Thomas Inch dumbbell, he or she would need all of the associated functions to a 175-pound one-arm deadlift, and in addition they would be wise to train the adduction function of the thumb, given that it is a primary limiting factor when it comes to picking up the ol’ Inch.

It’s not critical to your survival to acquire or gain these functions, but it might make you a more capable or useful human. Personally, I’m a fan of collecting more useful and cooperative functions and I enjoy being a sort of Renaissance man rather than being incredibly specialized in one specific thing. I’m happy to be a jack of all trades, but I digress.

The other, and I believe more interesting and more important path is the resolution of missing functions that are causing problems.

If you think it would be a good idea to deadlift, but you lack the function of hip extension (hypofunction in hip extension) it may not mean you lack the function to perform a deadlift but that you’re going to find some other way to perform the deadlift, probably to your detriment when your spinal muscles (hyperfunction) do all of the heavy lifting instead (pun intended.) If that sounds like a compensation to you, well, sure. I’d refer to it as hypo (under) or hyper (over) function.

Pain, especially chronic pain, is a hot topic and while I won’t claim to have definitive answers, I will tell you this: In my experience, there is no clearer association to pain than loss of function. And, in the vast majority of cases I have worked with, a restoration of missing function comes with a concomitant reduction in pain. Could it be that otherwise unexplained pain is an action signal to restore lost function?

When there is a problem, the first place to start looking is what functions you’re lacking. When looking for missing function it’s important to look no smaller than necessary. For example, if someone is missing hip extension I am not going to go looking for problems impeding myosin and actin at the muscular level until I have ruled out getting the numerous moving parts levels above that moving first.

On some level, you are missing functions. Whether or not they’re critical to your daily pursuits varies, but it’s not a question of whether or not you have hypo-functions. Oftentimes the things you do the most often result in hypofunctions in the things you conversely don’t do often enough. This isn’t a problem until it’s a problem. When it is a problem, I believe you’ve now got the paradigm to fix it.

Let’s take back function. Both the dirty word, and the functions we’re missing in the pursuit of better.

 

 

If there is one monumentally important thing you can do for your health and wellness it’s to get better sleep. That’s right, not eat better or exercise but simply get adequate sleep. Not a minimum of sleep, but adequate sleep. Here is something that will hopefully put into perspective the physiological need for sleep:

It’s certainly a false dilemma to say that just one of diet, exercise, or sleep is more important for your health but it is a reality that people will often trade sleep for one or both of the other. To the best of my knowledge none of my clients have ever skipped a workout so that they could prepare a healthy meal, but I recently turned away a new client because he told me he would “sacrifice sleep to make it in to class.” Nope, nope, nope. Not going to happen.

Problems with sleep generally fall into two categories. There are people who don’t prioritize sleep, treating it as something they can do when they’re dead. Which they will be able to do sooner than later as the cumulative cost of  chronic sleep debt is a shorter lifespan in addition to poor quality of life. The other category is someone who dedicates adequate time to sleep but has problems getting good quality sleep. Allow me to first address the former.

Sleep is such a critical and auto-regulated function of the human body that to the best of our knowledge it is actually impossible to die from sleep depravation. The reason for this is not that it couldn’t kill you if you could actually achieve it, but that the body will begin a process of micro-sleeping within the gaps between whatever stimulus is keeping you from actually sleeping. In other words, you can try to stay awake by any means and you’ll still fall asleep.

If you are:

1. Going to sleep by 10pm, preferably around the time of sunset.
2. Allowing adequate time to sleep, about 8-9 hours.
3. Sleeping in a completely dark and quiet (not necessarily silent, white noise can help) room.
4. Turning off electronics and minimizing light use by 2-hours before sleeping or around sunset.
5. Not more than 50 pounds overweight.
6. Exercising regularly.
7. Avoiding caffeine in the afternoon if you are a slow-metabolizer. You probably know. If you’re a fast-metabolizer, it probably doesn’t matter.
8. Use an app like Sleep Cycle. The accuracy of these apps is debatable, but the fact that it brings focused attention to your sleep is not. They help.

And you still can’t sleep you have a problem akin to not being able to swallow water or breathe air. That is how serious it is and how much attention you should divert to addressing it.

The above 8 keys are by no means an exhaustive list, but a damn fine start and will be comprehensive for the vast majority of people. In fact, doing just 5 or 6 of these seven things will probably remarkably improve your sleep. 

If you’re not covering all of the above bases, start there. If you have a problem with starting there because there just aren’t enough hours in the day and sleeping isn’t a high priority I’m here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. I couldn’t possibly do a better job than former Navy SEAL Dr. Kirk Parsley has done in the following video. After leaving the SEALs (BUD/s class 164), Kirk went to med school and later became the team doctor for the west coast teams.  If you can’t take it from someone who has suffered through orders of magnitude worse sleep deprivation than you will ever even think about enduring then you’re not going to listen to anyone so you can stop here.

TL;DR? While you think you’re pushing forward and trading productivity for sleep you’re actually selling yourself short and operating at a low level of function compared to what you’re capable of. You might as well be drunk all the time.

Either way it’s time to do the work and fix it. Working too hard to just scrape by barely paying your bills? Go read some Ramit Sethi and make more money with less effort. Making plenty of money and still think whatever you’re doing is more important than sleep? It’s not.