Human Movement’s Impact on Athletic Performance

Most athletes are off the mark in their belief of what optimal shape is. The majority of athletes believe optimal shape means, lifting as much weight, and as many times as humanly possible. Or being able to run all day without feeling winded. It’s naïve to assume an athlete is in the most advantageous athletic shape just because he or she works and trains hard. If you ask any first rate college or professional coach what is more important, the way an athlete moves or the way an athlete looks, without hesitation, you’ll almost always get the same answer...the way the athlete moves! The reason being, movement is the basis for everything athletic. Who cares if an athlete looks like the Incredible Hulk? Can he or she consistently use those muscles to avoid tackles on the football field, or maneuver around defenders to set up the tying goal in a soccer match? Can a catcher go from being down in a squat position to a mid squat and still throw the runner out at second base in 1.9 seconds? All of these tasks require specific athletic movements. It’s safe to say an athlete may develop muscle and improved endurance through training, and still miss the mark when it comes to true improved performance and refined movements.

One of the quickest ways to increase athletic performance is by improving basic human movement. That is, the better you become at performing more general human movements, the more superior your specific athletic movement will be. Conversely, the more limited your human movement patterns, the more limited your athletic movement patterns, thus rendering your athletic performance less advantageous.

So how do you improve basic human movements? You do it by having a greater understanding of how the human body works. Gray Cook, author of Athletic Body in Balance, and one of the leading forward thinkers in the sports performance arena, compares the human body to a computer. When you think of the body this way, the bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., are thought of as hardware. How the brain stores information about movement is the software. Movements such as, shooting a jump shot, swinging a baseball bat or golf club, or sprinting are stored as motor programs in the brain. These motor programs allow you to perform each movement over and over again without having to relearn all the details of the movement. As the program is called on repeatedly, the more efficient it becomes. This is the birth place of extraordinary athletic performance. Movement patterns become automatic, allowing for consistent excellence despite stressful situations facing the athletes’ performance.

So how exactly does basic motor programming tie into performance? Basic motor programming is responsible for things such as walking gate, running gate, body awareness (proprioception), balance, mobility, and center of gravity. You begin to build this basic program when you’re born and it evolves through life’s experiences. If muscles are tight or weak, or if joints are stiff or unstable, the motor program, whether basic or specific will be distorted, leading to automatic reaction distortion. The result is an increase in fatigue and added stress to the hardware of the body, ultimately leading to a decrease in performance.

Improving Human Movement through Joint Stability

There are 2 types of muscles: muscles that stabilize the joint, and those that move the joint. The stabilizing muscles are typically referred to as postural muscles. They help to keep the body in “neutral” to allow for a successful transfer of force and stress on the body. These muscles also allow for keeping your center of gravity when faced with unstable physical situations such as, snowboarding or skiing, delivering a pitch from the mound, or simply slipping on ice. These muscles squeeze the joint and provide support. Prime mover muscles tend to be larger muscles. These are the muscles that create motion throughout the body. With enhanced balance in the body, through core and joint stability, the involved joints in movement patterns are stable, giving the brain less to safeguard. When this takes place the neurological signals to the prime mover muscles become bigger and stronger. This improved neural function and coordination allows for astonishing strength gains in short periods of time, due to bigger contractions and greater strength of working muscles. This neural component of strength is a huge benefit in having refined basic human movement. Greater neural muscular communication improves coordination among all muscles involved in a movement. Simply put, with more muscles working together, less effort is required to do more work.

To add even more perspective, it helps to have an understanding of the actions of each joint within the body. There is a distinct alternating pattern as you move up the body from mobile joint to stable joint. Take the ankles for instance, they allow a lot of free motion in all different directions making it a mobile joint. The ankle allows for flexion, extension, rotation, and pronation. The knee on the other hand only allows flexion and extension with small levels of rotation. This joint is meant to be stable. The hips also allow a lot of motion, thus making the hips a mobile joint. The lumbar spine is stable, making the thoracic spine a mobile group of joints. Lastly, the gleno-humeral joint is a stable joint. If there happens to be a limitation in any of your mobile joints, causing immobility, that stress of motion is carried out by the next joint either above or below the immobile joint. This means a normally stable joint is now compromised. Poor bio-mechanics, such as these movement mistakes, force the body to compensate and use poor joint alignment, muscle coordination, and posture. The result is soreness or injury to joints, muscles, and ligaments. These types of injuries are better known as non-contact injuries, unnecessary demons to any athlete’s career.

Bio-mechanic mistakes like these don’t immediately impact performance. They often appear as fatigue, which typically causes an athlete to pursue more conditioning training, while never truly getting a handle on the larger problem that lingers on. As a result of over training an imbalanced body, soon the fatigue that is felt will turn into microtrauma in the joints and muscles. These microtraumas will become the chronic pain that many of us attribute to typical athletic wear and tear. This is the type of wear and tear that athletes typically find themselves masking with ice treatments and continuous use of anti-inflammatory medications.

When your body is imbalanced the energy you produce to perform certain athletic tasks becomes more and more dissipated because it no longer has a clear path to the production of that movement. This lost energy referred to as an “energy leak” by Gray Cook, will create stress within the body. Energy leaks are associated with up to 70% of the injuries in sports and life in general. This stress can cause compensation through work or movement in another part of the body, or it can create unnatural motion of the spine and limbs, increasing the stress on joints, tendons, and ligaments.

As an athlete you have to ask yourself if your current strength program is allowing you to reach your true heights of performance. Has your training reached a plateau, and you are now growing more concerned with how defined your muscles look? Do you have unnecessary aches and pains or fatigue when you train or workout? Are you masking your pain with anti-inflammatory medications? As an athlete it is your responsibility to be in tune with your body and the changes that are happening to it from day to day. It is also your responsibility to find a training program that creates efficient movement patterns, conserves energy allowing you to practice and compete with less stress on the body. And even more importantly, you have to ensure your training regimen keeps you healthy and on the field doing what you love.