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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What Is Balance? (Orchestration)

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This is the third post in a series on balance.  There is a lot of information to cover with this, so if I missed something, it may be covered in a later post.  Otherwise, if you think it would be better-suited for today’s post or if I didn’t discuss something thoroughly enough, drop a comment below!

So I don't want to get too deep into this topic because it is covered pretty extensively in the RTS™ courses so I will just say if you want to really explore this further, take RTS™.

To build off of last week's post where I discussed COM and BOS, I would like to briefly discuss orchestration.To my understanding, orchestration is a subconscious response of the brain to an imposed demand where the brain chooses which muscles to use to perform a task based on the problem that needs to be solved and which tissues are best-suited to perform that task at that given moment.  From what I can gather, it appears to be a process of all available options of tension-generating tissues being presented and the brain choosing not to use specific tissues as opposed to the brain starting with an empty plate and deciding which muscles to bring on to do the task.

There is an extensive neurophysiological discussion that can go along with this point, one that is much too great to have at this moment in time on this forum, but if you are interested in finding out more about this, check out Jacques Taylor's Force and the Nervous System 1 course.

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So this orchestration thing, it is happening constantly.  Every movement you make or every time you try to not move, which tissues do the job is determined through this process of orchestration.  This might go without saying but I feel the need to say it anyways just for clarification purposes, if you are in a scenario where there isn't a demand placed upon you, such as when you are lying down or your entire body is completely supported by another structure, I don't believe this process has to happen in order for you to remain lying down or completely supported.  Reason being, as I stated above, orchestration appears to be a response to a demand, so if there isn't the demand, there isn't the response.  I may be incorrect about this, though.  Feel free to direct me otherwise if I am.

That's all I want to say about that for now.  Next week I will tie today's post with last week's post together and then hopefully be able to present a clearer, stronger argument for what I said in my original post a few weeks back.

Just to reiterate, there is plenty more that could be said on orchestration, but I think for the bigger point I am trying to make in this series of posts, this information will do.

If you want to find out more, take RTS™.

Your body.  Your training.

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Training for Centrification?

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One thing that I have been seeing on other blogs and websites and hearing from various people is that there are certain exercises or parts of their programs that train specifically for the centrification of joints.  To me, this statement falls somewhere between puzzling and just downright misleading, but let's explore it a little.

First, what is centrification?  Paraphrasing the RTS manual, centrification is the "recruitment of all of your muscles around a specific joint in such a way that the axis remains relatively fixed in the same position as the you move throughout a given range of motion" (RTS Science 1).  For example, when looking at the motion of humeral abduction, there appears to be an axis running anterior to posterior through the gleno-humeral joint as you move throughout the range.  There are other axes of motion to consider due to the scapulo-humeral rhythm that ideally occurs throughout humeral abduction, but for the sake of simplicity, I will just look at the gleno-humeral joint in this example.

So during the motion of humeral abduction, you have the six divisions of the deltoids, supraspinatus, and the superior fibers of the infraspinatus all concentrically contracting at some point in the range to help abduct the humerus.  Additionally, there are some muscles that are directly opposing this motion that your brain will have generate tension in varying amounts depending on the position of the humerus.  From the brain's perspective, the goal of this "some muscles generating tension some muscles generating not as much tension" scenario is to hold the joint together as efficiently as possible while still allowing for that motion to occur.  This, in turn, may lead to this relatively fixed axis.  Once again, I'm not taking into consideration everything that has to go with the scapula and the muscles that control its position in this example to keep it a little simpler.

I say relatively fixed axis because depending on the shapes of the contact surfaces of the bones and how they articulate with each other in addition to the tension-generating capabilities of the muscles at any given point in the range, the actual position of the axis may have to shift in order to allow for the most efficient movement to occur that is least detrimental to the joint.  A great example of this can be found in the knee.

So, what centrification seems to boil down to is the ability of the brain to command some muscles to pull harder and some muscles to pull not as hard in order to allow efficient motion to occur while minimizing the degradation of the joint.

I could go into the topics of force couples and co-contraction here, as well as bring up multiple other points about centrification, but I want to get back to the question at hand of whether centrification can actually be trained for in these exercise programs, as is being claimed.

In part, the centrification of a joint is dependent on the ability of the muscles controlling that joint to generate tension, but what is also important is the recruitment of certain muscles to generate tension at specific points throughout the motion in addition to how much tension they are required to generate.  Too much of one, not enough of another, or lag time between when that tension is needed and when it is generated can all lead to unfavorable joint mechanics and degradation of that joint.

While most exercises can certainly provide a stimulus that results in greater tension generation, the orchestration* of "some muscles generate this much tension right now, some muscles generate that much tension right now" seems to fall outside of the ability of most traditional forms of exercise.  In fact, the only form of exercise that I have experienced that appears to provide an opportunity for improved orchestration* is MAT.

It is certainly feasible that most exercise and programs that claim to improve centrification are able to build a bigger engine, but the question that remains is are they improving the ability of the driver to control the vehicle--steering**, accelerating, and braking appropriately.
Your body.  Your training.

*"orchestration" is an RTS term presented throughout the different course manuals as well as during the course lectures.
**"steering" is a term presented in the RTS Science 1 manual when describing the muscles' role in centrification.
The ideas found in this post were first presented to me during the RTS courses.

Want to use this arti­cle in your blog, newslet­ter, or other plat­form?  You can, but be sure to include all of the bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion found in the yel­low box below!