Apparently it’s complex physiology week over here, because today instead of discussing neuroendocrinology we’re going to take a quick look at neurophysiology.

The brain is complex far beyond our understanding or comprehension, and any firm declarations about how it works should be met with a pound of skepticism. That said, it can be fun and interesting to look at associations and look at generalities that might be interesting. We do know, in broad strokes, that if you damage or stimulate specific parts of the brain there are pretty clear assocations about what happens. For example, a person with a missing pre-frontal cortex demonstrates completely disinhibited behavior. Basically, they act totally inapproiately and without context to their actions.

The frontal lobe, and specifically the prefrontal cortex, could be described as the area of the brain where we consider our actions, integrate things we’ve learned about the world around us, as well as where much of our empathy stems from. If you’re familiar with the story of Phineas Gage, who took an iron rod through the front of his head, he was not so fun to be around afterwards even though he survived.

Which is interesting, because guess which region of the brain is most active during new skill acquisiton and learning?

You probably guessed it. The prefrontal cortex.

Studies of skill learning have shown that during early stages of learning most of the activity occurs towards the front of the brain.

You can literallly stimulate and develop the empathy part of your brain by learning new skills.

What’s even more interesting is that as you approach later stages of skill learning, the activity in the brain actually moves more towards the back of the brain into the parietal lobes.

This one might be a little more difficult to guess what other functions are associated to that area of the brain so I’ll just tell you: joy and happiness.

Which makes sense. The better you are at a skill, the more joy you are able to derive from it because you don’t have to think so hard in the concscious competence stage, you can just unconciously partake in the activity and enjoy the process.

Learning new skills proves, again, to be damn good for you.

What are you working on?

Last week I discussed a simple training framework for which direction to go in when you can’t go where you want to. I suggested that there might be yet another route to take, and of course lots of people wanted to hear more about that.

The long and short of it in case you didn’t read that one, you can read it here if you like though, is that when you can’t do the actual movement you want to train, because it hurts or doesn’t test well via biofeedback, you can pursue pieces of the whole. Eventually, when the problem that is stopping you from doing the specific is resolved, having trained the pieces will benefit the whole.

Sometimes, however, you can’t train components either. Typically you’d see this when you’re paying close attention to biofeedback, you have a pain issue you’re working through, and/or you’re training heavily for a sport which leads to a tendency to over-do certain movements.

In that case, the next step is to work on opposition movements. Literally, training the opposite. To use our example from last week, if you can’t squat (hip extension, knee extension, and so on) you would look at training hip flexion, and knee flexion.

An example of this that seems to be coming up lately is that everyone suddenly realized that all the hip external rotation and abduction (legs moving away from centerline of the body) you get from squatting and deadlifting heavy might be overdone and cause some problems.

The solution? Working on hip ADDUCTION (moving the legs toward the centerline). By this logic, probably won’t hurt to do some extra internal rotation as well.

Most of the time training opposition movements aren’t as fun or sexy as doing the things you want to do to get you to your goals. But, it’s a simple, quick, and super effective framework for figuring out how to get BACK to doing those things you want to do when you can’t because you’re hurt or trying to heed your biofeedback so that you don’t get hurt.

By the way, this is the kind of training philosophy and structure that I go over in great detail in my biofeedback training workshops. I’ve got two dates coming up in October, in Toronto and Manila. I’m not ashamed or too humble to say that previous attendees have said that the workshop completely changed how they approach their training (and coaching). I’d love to see you there.

Last night we had a totally age-appropriate birthday party for my wife, Jen. We went to one of those giant trampoline places, which if you have never gone are a total blast not to mention a great way to get your heart rate up for 30-60 minutes. You can just jump around on the trampolines, leap into the foam pit without breaking your neck (crawling out from which is exhausting), or try your hand at dunking a basketball on 3 different height hoops.

It was this last challenge that had everyone’s attention by the end of our time. Everyone could dunk on the two shorter ones, but I was the only one who had gotten the dunk on the highest hoop.

Jen, her friend Kim, and jumping Julie Read all had the bounce height, but try as they might they couldn’t connect it with a dunk.

One of the principles that guides my training philosophy is that of specificity. Put simply, you should train as close to the thing you want to be able to do as possible. For something like powerlifting that’s simple, you train the barbell back squat, bench press, etc. For a rugby player it’s not as simple but you’ll still sprint, push, lift, carry, etc. because there’s enough transfer to carry over to the sport.

The issue becomes, when you can’t apply specifity, what do you do? Let’s say you can’t back squat but you also can’t front squat (due to pain, or whatever). That’s when you break the movement down into components, and train the component parts. You may not be able to squat, but you may well be able to train hip extension, knee extension, anterior core stabilization, and so on. All important parts of squatting as a specific activity.

So when I saw failure after failure (at least a dozen) of the specific movement, I knew exactly what the intervention was. I told Jen to drop the ball, and go just focus on touching and grabbing the rim. In other words, a component. So she did that once.

The very next try with the ball? Nothin but net.

Sometimes we get so focused on practicing and practicing an activity, thinking that we’ll get it on the very next try, that we forget to break it down. It wasn’t even really a pregression because she was still jumping to full height, we just took a piece of it out.

Training components is a valuable way to work around issues, increase volume without compromising recovery, and speed up learning.

If you like, maybe next week I’ll talk about the next step down the training continuum for when you can’t do the specific.