Weekly Recap 12/8 - 12/14
Here’s what we are reading, watching, and liking.
The article of the week is Movement Variability: Should we eliminate it, or embrace it? from Barbell Medicine.
The video of the week is from HealthNut Nutrition about some basic skills to ace your meal prep for the week.
Our first social media post of the week is from Amanda Kohatsu about what body recomposition is and the process and time that is usually required to see results. The second post is from Chrissy King about self-care and the various ways that you can practice self-care that don’t always include bubble baths.
Article of the Week
Movement Variability: Should we eliminate it, or embrace it?
Our attempts to understand and explain complex systems commonly involve reductionist analysis, whereby a system is broken down into its component parts for easier understanding. Theoretically, after analyzing and understanding each of the individual components of the system, we can “add” these understandings back together in a linear fashion and emerge with a complete understanding of the whole. For basic problems and many of our man-made systems, this is often a perfectly adequate approach.
But when it comes to more complex biological systems, like humans, purely reductionist approaches have led us to understandings that have ultimately proven incomplete and, in many cases, incorrect. This is particularly apparent in biomedicine where a number of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches that seem perfectly sensible under traditional reductionist thinking ultimately prove ineffective or even harmful (for more on this, including specific examples, see HERE as well as our podcasts and articles on pain).
In the context of sport and other physical endeavors including strength training, athletes and coaches apply reductionist thinking to the human body as a simple mechanical system in order to deduce conclusions about how humans should move for optimal performance and to reduce the risk of injury. This typically involves modeling humans as machines and applying basic physics and classical mechanics to a given task or athletic scenario. For example, the use of stick-figure free body diagrams are used to deduce conclusions about universal “optimal” movement patterns under load, as well as presumed risk factors for injury such as spinal flexion or knee valgus.
