Why Different is Different

One of the more catchy things I’ve said, that has been quoted and attributed to me is this phrase, “Different shit is different.” Had I known how often I would be cited on that, I probably would have chosen something a little more elegant to be my legacy, but so it goes.

But, I want to formally clear up what the true intention behind this statement is, because it’s not exactly what some people have taken from it. What a lot of people take from this quip is that “Well, back squats and front squats are different but they’re both good so you should do them.” Sure, yes, but that’s not what I meant.

To understand where I’m coming from with this statement, you have to understand a certain mentality that some coaches have. It is often expressed in statements like “If you can’t squat below parallel with your body weight, you shouldn’t ever barbell back squat.”

Well, see, here’s the problem with that:

Different shit is different.

Truly, we have only began to understand the complexity of the human body. Not only does changing a single joint angle change ALL of the joint angles in the body as well as all associated muscular and connective tissue levers, but there is a nervous system change as well. These certainly well-intentioned coaches subscribe to a flawed philosophy of movement, that there is right and wrong, and moving “wrong” is a sure path to pain and injury.

Movements of the body don’t fall on a nice tidy spectrum where one leads to another which leads to another. It’s not a chain that relies on each link before it, where if one link is missing nothing can be done beyond that point.

Every movement is simultaneously discrete and connected.

Every movement either potentiates or inhibits another movement, but at the same time has it’s own independent effect on the body.

It’s for this reason that any assessment system that is predicated on the idea that the ability to do or not do one movement is predictive of another is inherently flawed.

It may well be that if you can’t do a bodyweight squat, you also can’t do a back squat. It also may not be true.

It definitely isn’t true that if you can’t do a bodyweight squat you’re guaranteed to get hurt doing a barbell back squat.

Because, different shit is different.

I take it with a grain of salt when someone says to me: “I can’t deadlift.” I refuse to believe that there isn’t some way, shape, or form in which you can pick up a weight from off the ground. There are truly very few people who actually can’t pick something up off the ground. If you bend over and pick up a pencil, you are doing a deadlift. It may not be a lot of weight, and it may not follow the conventional form of a deadlift, but make no mistake that you are lifting up a dead weight. That’s where we’ll start, and where we go from there only your body knows.

Sometimes the smallest tweak to one thing such as hand or foot position  is all that is needed to significantly change a movement, from something you can’t do without pain to something you can do completely pain free.

In fact, there is evidence that chronic low back pain is associated to reduced variability in movement. Of course, it’s hard to know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I would offer that in my experience, the more variability in function you introduce to a person who is in pain, the more quickly they find themselves out of pain.

While I’d like to pretend to be all Eric Cressey up in this b and tell you exactly which nerves are innervating which muscles and explain exactly why one change causes a specific result the reality is that I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. In the end, my less-than-couth quip is about as good an explanation as any, and it doesn’t matter why because it doesn’t change the outcome.

Being able to move pain free in more ways begets moving pain free in more ways.

Once I had a client who couldn’t do a pain-free squat with any implement I handed her. Barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, it didn’t matter – pain. Until I swapped the kettlebells in a front rack for a sandbag. Pain free squat. Was it the slightly different shape of the sandbag? Maybe. Or was it the fact that the sandbag was the only non-conductive implement she tried and this had an effect on the electrical impulses in her body? I don’t have a clue, but I know she could squat pain free.

Because, again and again we see, different shit is different.

So the next time that someone, or your own ideology, places an artificial limitation on you based on the idea that everything is the same stop and ask more questions. With better questions comes more progress and better results.