HOW FAMILIARITY AND SIMPLIFICATION IMPROVE RANGE OF MOTION

Back on that 5x5 program. If you have been with us, you are probably familiar with that set & rep protocol. Why are we circling back to a similar set and rep scheme? Familiarity builds confidence and competence, unlocking better results. 

Motor learning is not an easy subject to unpack but I’ll try. One of the most important aspects of motor learning is the presence of pain. Pain during movement will take precedence no matter how much we try to avoid letting it. This is a huge part of our screen “do you have any injuries or pain?” is the first question we ask everyone. The reason why is that you will always compensate during movement to avoid pain if you are in pain.

What we see based on hundreds of people coming into Strength: a lot of people are in pain. Back pain, knee pain, ankle pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, elbow pain, wrist pain… the list is endless. We're not walking around assuming everyone is in pain (this is why we ask) but it is a fairly safe bet that you have something that is or has bothered you. That thing that is bothering you will lead to compensation and then to diminished value from the workouts. 

The first compensation to avoid pain, is to adjust range of motion. In a lot of ways this is natural, reduce what you think is hurting you. However, this leads to a sequence of further reductions in ROM and never really addressing a key issue. Restoring ROM is not going to necessarily cure you, but instead of first reducing ROM, we want to find out how to move pain-free with ROM.

It is a matter of perspective and thinking why we cannot hit a certain ROM and what is the consequence of that? This is the reason we have less variation with exercises and sets and reps in our programming. We want something you're familiar with (like consistent sets-reps) while developing new ROM and applying that to our movement patterns. 

Instead of a ton of variation with programming, we want to focus less on what you are doing and more on how you are doing it. Motor learning – learning to move – is hard. You are often overcoming something that hurts and trying to override a movement that has been an engrained strategy to navigate the world around you. You might move this way for the last few decades. Old habits die hard. One of the best strategies we can employ with improving movement, is to simplify the environment. We call this, “making the main thing the main thing.”

We build off that simplistic approach by applying subtle progressions from block to block. Having familiarity with an exercise and adding a small tweak will also keep focus with the execution in which we do things. By not having a huge amount of variation we can get better reps, then sets, the workouts, then weeks, and ultimately blocks. The term we use internally is rep integrity. It is a fractal relationship to results. The better the rep the more linear the path to your results. We want to build our program around what will allow for rep integrity. The more we can put you in a place to get better reps more consistently, the more we can help. 

There is a distinction between simple and easy. Simple programming done violently well gets amazing results. We are not assuming you are in pain or incapable of doing something. Instead, we put each member in a place where they can be successful with every rep. Instead of triangulating how to execute an exercise and then having to figure out what weight to use for the rep/tempo prescribed, we get right to work. Building off a foundation of understanding that lower reps means heavier weights and vice versa. Establishing movement quality as the foundation of any good program and then working vigorously till we get the result we want.