Daily Maestroism

DM #377

Sunday, June 4th, 2017

DM #377: 6-packs are sexy, but they by no means ensure or indicate proper movement patterns.
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For anyone who’s tried to get a 6-pack, if you haven’t learned that abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym, puhlease allow me to be first person to clue you in. There are quite a number of factors that play in to whether or not someone has a visible 6-pack, and just because you have it, doesn’t mean you know how to use it.
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Take for example the ripped athlete with low back pain, or the 6-pack superstar with chronic knee pain and dysfunction. Both cases are things that I see regularly and can speak to the concept of strength vs motor control. You can have all the muscle in the world, but if you don’t know how to use it, it ain’t gonna do jack for you.
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Now we know that the core should fire reflexively (and at the appropriate amount) prior to us initiating movement. Just because you’ve got definition doesn’t mean that your body knows how to do this. Having the ability to do something and actually doing it are two very different thing. Often times these athletes clearly have the strength, but not the motor control/patterning which causes them to default to using other muscles such as the low back or even the quads as a substitute. If you don’t have things firing when they’re supposed to (be it because of underlying positional faults or poor breathing strategies, etc), your nervous system is going to simply default to what’s safe and call on the muscles that do fire best/easiest, even if they don’t produce the most ideal movement pattern.
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So, take-home message: don’t judge a book by it’s cover 😉
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