Cultivating Your Original Strength: Part 1
Jul 13, 2013
In this two part series I want to explore the difference between reflexive stability and feed forward tension strategies. In part one we’ll look at how each one is incorporated into overall human movement, then in part two we’ll go over some strategies to purposefully integrate both for a more optimal training regimen.
Reflexive Stability/Strength (RS) – your body’s subconscious ability to anticipate movement before it actually moves and prepare the joints and muscles involved in a particular movement to execute the movement.
Examples: avoiding slipping on ice, posture, diaphragmatic breath, crawling, reactive motor control, reflexes
Ways to train it: developmental patterns, reactive postural drills, stimulating the vestibular system.
Feed Forward Tension (FF) – voluntary motor control to prepare muscles and joints for anticipation of a movement , or create purposeful tension for a movement.
Examples: voluntary tension used in bracing, heavy lifting, certain explosive movements such as Olympic weight lifting and finished positions of kettlebell ballistic movements. Certain postural holds in martial arts and gymnastics.
Ways to train it: bracing and using other voluntary high tension techniques.
It should be noted that their are more ways to train the two types of stability than what I listed. These just happen to be simple to conceptualize and implement.
Stability and ultimately effort can be seen as gears in a manual transmission of a car. The lower end gears are used most often. These are the base gears and represent reflexive strength; the higher gears represent feed forward tension strategies. Just like reflexive stability you need to go through the lower gears before you can reach the higher gears. Without a good reflexive base, it’s like trying to start a car in 2nd or 3rd gear. It can be done, however, it takes much more gas/effort and is ultimately worse for the engine, drive train and transmission. Conversely, it’s not sustainable if you have to brace your abdominals every time to keep out of pain when getting out of a chair or is it evident of well functioned system.
So how does this relate to performance and strength? Well, let’s continue with the gears analogy. Every engine has a redline; the max number of revolutions per minute (rpm). Each gear has a ceiling for how fast it can go at that red line. For example, if 2nd gear redlines at 40 mph, then a shift to 3rd gear is needed if one wants to continue to go faster or to lower RPMs at the same speed. However, if you could make your 2nd gear longer, you could top it out at 50 miles per hour at red line.
In my experience, reflexive stability and feed forward tension work the same way. There is only a certain amount of stability you can generate subconsciously before the task or load becomes too much that you need to voluntarily add more tension for strength. In a sense these are your “gears of tension” .
So if we can expand our base of reflexive strength we can essentially extend our gears of tension and hold off feed forward strategies for the higher end tasks. Why is this important? Because it raises our potential strength expression, that is to say it allows us to be stronger in everything. More importantly, it decreases the dependency on FF for postural stabilization or less than maximal effort tasks. Life is dynamic and doesn’t always provide you a chance to voluntarily react. This is where reflexive strength comes in.
The more reflexive strength you have the more you can be authentically strong. I define authentic strength as the ability to use the right amount of strength to accomplish the task with the least amount of effort required. Authentic strength is the base of the pyramid and with it everything else in life requires less effort. The more of it you have, the stronger you will be when you really need to go all out.
Now, there is place for feed forward strategies. It’s not going to be when you need to open your car door because you have a fear of pain in your shoulder from a past injury. Nor should it be during basic developmental tasks like Original Strength resets. It might be a band aid for temporary protection, but the end term goal is to move away from that fragility. FF strategies can be a great tool for teaching a beginner or novice the concept of total body tension. They can also be used to excite and potentiate the nervous system for a specific movement, which we will cover in the second part of this article. However, they should not become a crutch when it comes to practicing remedial patterns.
I’ve see a lot of people power breathing and using FF strategies while hip rocking, crawling , rolling and other reflexive stability drills. There may be legitimate reasons for doing this, but optimally integrating our intrinsic stabilizers and resetting the nervous system isn’t one of them. I’m sure I’ll get a link in the comments of a 5 year old hardstyle breathing during bird dogs, but that would be an outlier for our species.
There is a lot of lip service to facilitating reflexive stabilization and the trend is to pay homage to it in the beginning of the training sessions. Usually in the warm up then the rest of the session is all high tension strategies. Unfortunately, reflexive based strategies are what we need more of. They are what build true resilience which allows us to fully explore movement without fear, hesitation and more importantly, injury. Reflexive stability has the power to make you instantly better for the next set. It allows you to express all forms on the strength continuum; absolute, relative, speed-strength , strength-speed, starting strength, endurance and all other variations. Train it, brace less, reflex more.
This article is the first of two parts. The second part will cover concepts and examples of what has worked in my athlete’s training when it comes to incorporating a harmony of both RS and FF strategies in a single session.
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