Practical Applications of Physical Stressors
- May 26
- 3 min read
When I initially began the coaching profession one of the difficulties I ran into was that my background was in athletics. The vast majority of my training consisted of sprints, jumps, hurdle hops, gymnastics, lifting heavy weights and doing relatively challenging conditioning work. Unless you somehow magically land yourself right in a perfect S & C or pro sports athletics coaching job the reality is you are most likely going to be working with the general population. This is challenging because the vast majority of the general population doesn't have a training age. Not only that but their joints didn't articulate like they were supposed to in order to do some really meat and potatoes barbell lifts.
Forget ballistic speed and power development work! I had people who couldn't reach their arms above their heads. At the time this was a shocking revelation. I couldn't even suggest push ups as an exercise because their core development was so poor that their lumbar would hurt when they got into position. So forget cleans, forget jerks and any kind of pull up exercise.....those were not options. I remember being at a loss as to what to have people do initially because it seemed like they were so limited with basic functional movement that I didn't know what to tell them.
Planks......nope!
Sit Ups......big nope!
Lunges......not going to happen!
Squats........no way!
Deadlifts.........absolutely not!
What I didn't understand for at least a couple years was that their soft tissues were restricted from not having moved a lot over 20-30+ years and their general joint ROM did not really have any capacity that allowed us to do very stressful things in actual training. However, I was bound and determined to find a path through these enigmatic woods in order to help and not harm anyone. So out came the foam roller, lacrosse ball and any other implement I could get people to work with in conjunction with any exercises they could do without actual impingement.
In a sense I was not wrong. At the very least I was not unintentionally causing harm by throwing people through randomly programmed circuits of exercises that they did not have the capacity for. At the same time I certainly was not creating the smoothest course that I could have. Not because I didn't want people to train hard but because I didn't want to hurt them. The difficulty is that the fitness industry has always functioned under a hammer/nail paradigm. You are either training, exercising or doing some kind of conditioning every session. While this makes sense on a surface level the reality is that there is eventually a big problem brewing when every session your client is the nail and you are supposed to bring the hammer.
How many weeks.......months......years.....is that supposed to work?
What I know now(many years later) is that those joint restrictions and in some cases even the soft tissue restrictions are more often actually reactions from a nervous system that is stuck in fight or flight. If you think about it beyond biceps and abby dabbies the tissue responses are actually pretty appropriate for someone who is starting their journey in becoming physically more robust. Someone who has spent 20-30 years as a desk jockey has adapted to long hours in a non functional position. We know it's not functional because people who spend long periods of time sitting eventually have a shortened life expectancy.
I'm not making that up.
Just the facts.
Because of their long term adaptations to these non functional positions what happens is that the nervous system lacks the necessary rest and digest state in order to elicit full ROM. If you are someone who is in the chair 40-80 hours a week, consider that maybe becoming "the nail" at the gym is not as wise as you think it is. Maybe we need a smoother ramp to engage with full ROM movements as well as highly stressful training programs. This is where the blend of lifestyle factors interface with what is useful at the gym as opposed to just trying to find the highest stress workout plan.
As with many things in life there is the theory of how this all works and then there is the practicality of how it all works. If it was just as simple as rolling out some plyo circuits and eating a super restrictive diet........well......this would not be that challenging to program. However, because that is a road that few can travel successfully then we need to look more deeply into solutions for people depending on how their body arrives at the gym every single day!
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