What Is Balance? (Wrapping Up)

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About a month ago I began a discussion on balance, making an argument that exercises which are traditionally considered "balance exercises" are challenging a skill set more than one specific tissue and therefore questioning their use early on in the rehabilitation process.  Two weeks later I dove into COM and BOS and last week I went into orchestration.  Now it's time to tie it all together.

As I talked about in my COM and BOS post, physics dictates the need to keep your COM over your BOS in order to remain "balanced" or upright.  Then last week the relevant point to this discussion was that orchestration is happening constantly and it is a subconscious response of the brain to a given demand, a process of deciding which muscles not to use to solve a particular problem or complete a particular task based on, among other things, which muscles do not have the mechanical and/or physiological capability to help out, leaving only the ones that do.

So, if keeping your COM over your BOS is the demand that is placed on your system, your brain will find a way to go about solving this.  Which means if this challenge is presented to the system at a time when there is injured tissue or tissue that is not contracting particularly efficiently, the brain will still do its best to figure out a way to keep COM over BOS.  If it is successful in doing so, I don't think it is too far of a leap to question the extent to which the tissue that is injured or not contracting efficiently was used in the process of solving this COM over BOS problem, if it was at all.

Which leads me to question whether these balance exercises, when used in a post-injury setting, are actually training or helping the injured tissue recover and heal or if they are just simply reinforcing a compensatory pattern where you are learning to use all of the other muscles to get the job done.

You can see the potential snowball effect this can create where now, not only is this injured tissue potentially not participating in the recovery process as much as was originally thought, but the body is being trained in a "weak stay weak, strong get stronger" manner, as well.

If an assessment and exercise process was applied that allowed the practitioner to determine which tissue was not participating fully and then prescribe a specific force application to that tissue, that to me seems like a more reasonable way to focus on the tissue that you are trying to heal.

Muscle Activation Techniques™ is one potential way to go about this, but, as always, there needs to be caution used when prescribing force as you may be imposing a demand in an attempt to create a response that the body really doesn't want created at this particular moment in time.  Additionally, being able to understand the principles of exercise design and force application as presented in the RTS™ courses would be highly useful, especially in terms of progressing someone to the point of being able to use that tissue as much as their body will allow.

Looking back on this post as well as the previous three in this series, what information was left out that would have been useful to discuss or present?  Let me know below!

Inter­ested in find­ing out more? Check out the “Mus­cle Acti­va­tion Tech­niques™” page or sign up to take RTS™.

Inter­ested in set­ting up an assess­ment time or dis­cussing this sub­ject fur­ther? E-mail Char­lie at charlie@selfmadefitness.com.

Your body.  Your training.

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