The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [137]
“The Pentagon puts as many millions into someone on the Special Ops as an NFL team puts into a player, but an NFL career might last three years, whereas a Delta Force career should be more than ten.”
Millions. That’s a lot of money.
How on earth do you injury-proof yourself if you don’t have access to someone like Gray?
Revisit beating my favorite dead horse, of course: the 80/20 principle.
80/20 Functional Screening
According to Gray the most likely cause of injury is neither weakness nor tightness, but imbalance. Think doing crunches or isolated ab work is enough to work your core muscles? Think again. “The core, as just one example, often works fine as long as one’s hips aren’t moving. It’s when the hips are moving—a more realistic scenario—that the core starts to compensate for left-right differences.” That’s when you get injured.
Gray’s fundamental tool for identifying imbalances is his brainchild: the Functional Movement Screen (FMS). The FMS is a series of seven movement tests administered by a certified professional. Each test is scored on a three-point scale.
For self-assessment, his professional FMS can be abbreviated to five movements with simple pass-fail evaluation:
1. Deep squat
2. Hurdle step
3. In-line lunge
4. Active straight leg raise
5. Seated rotation
This self-FMS is designed to identify two things: left-right imbalances (asymmetry) and motor control issues (wobbling and shifting).
Even if you can bench-press 600 pounds, it doesn’t mean you won’t dislocate a shoulder five minutes into a game. More weight with more reps does not equal stability.
“Most people can press more weight overhead for a set than they can walk with overhead for the same period of time. Strength [the former] should never exceed stability [the latter],” Gray Cook explains. “It’s a recipe for disaster. The biggest misconception is that you can strengthen stabilizers [like the rotator cuff for the shoulder] alone to prevent injury. Even 10% stronger is like pissing in the ocean.”
Working muscles in isolation will change muscles, but it’s not likely to make movement safer. In contrast, working on basic movement patterns will make muscles stronger and it will also make movement (whether running a 40-yard dash or carrying luggage) safer. To use an analogy of Paul Chek’s, the basic movement patterns are like the 0–9 keys on a calculator. All other numbers, complex movements in this case, are still combinations of the basics.
Does the FMS work?
The Atlanta Falcons professional football team suffered seven season-ending injuries in 2007. In the 2008 season, there was just one minor surgery late in the season. The difference: their new director of athletic performance, Jeff Fish, made the FMS mandatory. Once players are “diagnosed” with the FMS, they receive personalized programs to correct imbalances and improve range of motion.
Then there’s the Colts. The Indianapolis Colts have been the smallest NFL team in the nation for the last nine years. They’ve also had the fewest injuries of any NFL team and the highest total of games won in the last nine years. This is an unusual combination. Jon Torine, their head strength coach, has used the FMS for that entire period of time.
The Critical Four
Initially, this chapter was going to be dedicated to the FMS. That was, until I realized that isolating the problems with the FMS was just the first step. Step two was prescribing the corrective actions for each major mistake in each of the five movements, and that would easily take 50 pages of dense material.
So I e-mailed Gray to reduce the seemingly irreducible:
Assuming people do the screen, what are the 2–4 corrective exercises that you’d suggest to best fix the most common imbalances/weaknesses? If you had a gun to your head and had to pick 2–4 exercises for correction across the board, what would you choose?
Gray’s picks were, without hesitation, the following critical four:
Chop and lift (C&L)
Turkish get-up (TGU)
Two-arm