No World Records Required

Training to peak human performance is many things.
Along with doing it at 10/10 and earning that gold, it’s getting to grips with the subtleties and working at 1/10, slow teaches things fast just doesn’t. Rest is important, so in fact 0/10 is also training. If you don’t rest well, you can’t perform well. Without doing 1/10 well, how will you 10/10 well.
Anyone looking to perform seriously, will rest well, they’ll eat well, they’ll train well. They’ll start into any training session at a low intensity, getting the most out of it as a result, because just piling on into ‘race pace’ isn’t effective for their goals. Or any goals for that matter!

The same applies to getting from being a bit stuck, with pain or movement restriction or both, to less stuck, less pain, and less restriction. When we’re not trying to get from silver medal to gold medal performance, we probably have little need to do anything at all at 10/10. Yet one thing I find so many people seem to struggle with is just doing things gently.
To get to just plain ol’ normal, run of the mill, average 5/10, if you haven’t been there in a while, rather than pushing hard on limits, you’re probably better to start under 4/10. And, like anyone who is serious about the goal, also work at 1/10, because that’s good training technique. Even to move towards the simple aim of life without nagging headaches, or a shoulder you can’t sleep on, that worrying knee…

It’s interesting because you can’t substitute doing something harder for doing it better very often. So if we consider that getting from silver medals to gold medals aside, there are really not many things in life tend to go well at 10/10, and harder isn’t better…..
More is most certainly not always better!
Especially when it comes to your body, and your nervous system. Stretching at a level I found relatively comfortable was something I’ve always found more productive, despite the common approach of trying to go deeper, harder, and tough it out. Like many other therapists seemed to enjoy doing themselves, and enjoy inflicting upon their clients.
Turns out, more pain equals more gain isn’t really the equation the nervous system likes. At all.

“We don’t need gold medals here,” is something I find myself saying to patients, particularly when their eagerness is obvious- what we are aiming for is slow, progressive improvement.

Which isn’t what many people want. I’ll have the quick fix please!
Don’t get me wrong, I do see near miraculous changes in practice occasionally, it definitely happens, as does substantial progress fairly regularly, but there are aspects of many problems that are essentially the fruit of some longer term issues. It’s boring to hear and boring to say, but sedentary life just isn’t good. For lots of reasons, affecting many bodily systems.

Whether from injury, misuse or disuse, if it’s taken time to get like it is, it’s not going to appreciate you going gangbusters on it. We can’t flick a switch, if we are trying to encourage tissue into change, especially if things are already a struggle, it’s probably not going to thank us for a thrashing! This is particularly true of the nervous system, which like all tissues, needs training if you want it to work and to move like it should ideally.
Nerves move. They lengthen, they shorten, and they have limits. They also lose their full abilities when they aren’t trained and maintained to move towards those limits. A lot of the problems I work on clinically, are literally nerves that don’t move. Even in very, very fit people sometimes!
Moving out of a sedentary stuckness, or a compensatory movement pattern, are things to approach gently. Get the body on side with the progress first, change isn’t only about pushing limits, and it’s certainly not about getting near red-line.
Obviously change can be about getting a better red-line. Considering the nervous system as requiring specific help and general ‘training’ as a concept, has only been around for the last 25 years, and considering the skin and cutaneous nerves and their input and involvement is a concept from the last 10 years, so most often when people who are looking for more performance, to complement their many and varied efforts to better results in their chosen field, they are grateful to have a more up to date understanding of what the limitation was, and how to change that. The more you understand what to train, the better you train.

So there are no switches in the nervous system! Or anywhere else in the body. We can’t just unplug or reset anything. We are fleshy machines, with no instruction manual and a slightly complicated maintenance schedule where it’s easy to miss servicing intervals.
No switches, fleshy wiring and mechanics, that requires a different approach. Getting stronger or faster or stretchier or even just not in pain, is about training the relevant tissues and requiring out physiology to change. Our physiology, our bodily processes, are very closely related to the tissues they take place in. Structure and function, are intertwined. Muscles are good at things, bones and joints are good at others. We can certainly train all those tissues, and indeed our nervous systems, to perform at olympic levels

If that’s what you want. Me, I’m ok without that level of effort.
For normal people, though, with normal people problems, with no world records required, the same concepts remain relevant.

Even with the funkiest problems I get to see in practice, the good, sustainable improvements happen when there’s no push, no rush to some finish line, it is very often slow and steady that wins the race, not least of all because it feels nice, and that makes it much easier to do the things that we all struggle to commit to doing for ourselves. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just needs to happen
I get the frustration that comes with a body that does weird stuff, a lot of the things I’m good at in practice have frustrated me personally, and I guess that’s why I’ve arrived at this understanding, because it’s been my own experience that it’s easiest, and best, to move, stretch, strengthen, lengthen, gently.
Be nice to your tissues.
Because you’re worth it.
That will set you up for both the ability to just perform normally, to get out of bed without a grumbly lower back, or to get as high or fast or strong as you set your mind to. Even then, nobody stands around on the podium all day, there’s a lot of time down on ground level, getting the basics done, and knowing that’s how to keep moving towards your goal.