Priority in Hip Extension Firing Patterns

When we see someone sprint incredibly fast, jump very high or lift heavy weights what you don't often see is the detail behind the performance. Often what gets missed is the firing pattern, the rate coding and the overall precision by which the performance occurs. Which, in the moment, it's easy to just be completely overwhelmed by the visual spectacle that is unfolding before your eyes. However, when learning how to emulate such feats it pays to be intentional about learning the fundamentals.

Learning about what makes a fast sprinter, jumper, lifter or overall athlete can be pretty fascinating. It's a unique blend of specific capacities that an elite level athlete possesses that allows them to function at that high of a level. Getting down to brass tacks though the basics are still the basics whether you are running a 4.4-40 yard dash or an 8.4-40 yard dash. At some point you are pushing the earth away, at some point you are "floating" and at some point you are preparing to push away again. It's a cycle that repeats and repeats and repeats over and over. So with all that said the repeats need to have some rigor and motor consistency otherwise there will be strains to the system.

Here is the priority list for that extension pattern to function at a high level

1-Glutes

2-Hamstrings

3-Adductors

4-Calves

5-Low Back

When this order gets disturbed because of injury or just fundamentally poor training what occurs eventually is hitches in the GIDDIYUP!! This is the firing pattern that I usually see when I start working with people though.

1-Quads

2-Adductors

3-Calves

4-Low Back

5-Glutes

You can imagine with this firing pattern that there are going to be knee problems and low back issues. The big problem becomes the repetitions. If your quads fire first in every pattern then the reality is that everytime you move you create compressive stress on your patella that could be off loaded by using other muscles earlier in the pattern. If you are someone that feels your quads a lot in squatting/deadlifting patterns and don't really feel your glutes or hip muscles contributing a lot to the pattern then this is going to be a big problem eventually. Maybe not today maybe not next week but soon enough this will be a complication that will become most necessary to correct.

How do we fix this?

Training. Pure and simple. Training.

If you are moving around like example #2 then your body has adapted to moving this way because it hasn't been trained to function optimally. More than likely it has been trained to sit in chairs at work, cars to commute and on the couch for entertainment. So what needs to happen long term is to create stress patterns around your joints that don't leave their mark on them. If you are more like the first example you have a pretty good chance of training many exercises that way for a long time. However, if you are like #2 and your body responds to stress by stiffening your lower body musculature in that order then we can eventually gurantee the whole body will need to be retrained.

Whatever you load in training you magnify from a neuromuscular perspective. If the patterning is off early on in progression then eventually what exists is greater amounts of motor dysfunction instead of higher qualitative amounts of functional movement. The greater the amount of dysfunction in your patterning the greater the amount of compensation. As compensatory movements compile through increased exposure to more stress what then occurs is a greater injury risk to reward ratio in unfavorable distributions.

Over the long course of time what we need to be considering is how does my movement impact my lifting, my conditioning and more than anything my ability to stay healthy. If movement suffers and the patterning becomes refined in a less than complimentary fashion what eventually disappears are the opportunities to train at all. Your ability to train firmly depends on how reliable your patterning is and how resilient you are to stress. If you lack capacity on either front then great care should be taken in order to help you move better so that you can do more as the decades pass.