Body Armor
I recently attended a movement immersion with a movement coach in Houston, Texas. For four days we climbed, vaulted, balanced, juggled, and used our bodies for 3 1/2-5 hours a day.
As I boarded the plane to come home at some unfathomably early hour, I took stock of how I was feeling. Physically, I was a little sore, but nothing unbearable (unlike the day after we worked climb-ups, when I woke up with ridiculously sore triceps, hopeful I wouldn’t be asked to do anything resembling a tricep dip. Fortunately, I wasn’t). I felt good, both mentally and physically, rejuvenated from focusing on nothing but learning and movement in an environment away from my regular life.
I landed and went straight to work to train three clients back-to-back. I had time to move around a bit before my first client, and by the time my second client arrived, I was in my groove, focused and attentive to my work and what my clients needed.
And then it happened. A poorly placed twenty pound dumbbell fell on my unshod foot. “F*&%^,” I thought to myself, “I made it through 4 days of intense physical training, only to injure myself back at work because I’m not paying attention.”
I shrugged it off, went back to focusing on my client, and waited for what I was pretty sure was going to be in the very least swelling and bruising and what could, possibly, be a lot worse. I was able to bear weight on it, and it didn’t feel bad, but I knew the extent of the damage wouldn’t reveal itself until later.
In what felt like a miraculous turn of events, later never happened. Sure, the top of my foot where the weight struck me was a little bit sore, but I was able to hike and run over the next two days with nary a niggle. There was no swelling, and other than a little bit of stiffness in the big toe, my foot felt fine.
Building up Your Armor, i.e. the “functional” reason for getting strong
Over the course of the intensive, we learned about the Yamakasi, the group that is often credited with influencing the modern parkour movement. The Yamakasi spends time developing their foundation of strength, and believes crawling is builds them a physical armor.
The benefits of crawling on physical strength and resilience are widely accepted amongst people in the movement community. Entire systems feature crawling and its variations as their key movements for getting comfortable on the ground, getting strong, and reducing pain.
It’s undeniable that crawling develops strength and mobility. It also lends itself to variable loading. A study performed by Ma et al. found adult crawling results in several different ways of coordinating the limbs. Higher speeds cause adult crawlers to change how they utilize the hands and the feet, possibly to maintain trunk stability and safety. Crawling is a relatively complex movement, one that people don’t often “get” right away, but when they do, it can be used to develop fitness in a broad way.
If you aren’t sold on crawling as a way to challenge strength, mobility, and endurance, try this: set a timer for three minutes. Come on to your hands and knees. Float your knees an inch off the ground. Crawl until the timer goes off, changing directions periodically and setting your knees down as needed. At the end of the three minutes, take stock. How do you feel?
You might feel like you worked your legs, your shoulders, the balls of your feet, or your wrists, depending on where your restrictions and weaknesses are. If it felt impossible, don’t worry. It used to feel impossible for me, too. One way to build up to it is to use different types of crawls, and set your knees down regularly. Gradually, the endurance will come.
This is an example of an exercise that isn’t necessarily fun, but builds resilience in the tissues. Because of the load on the feet and hands, they become strong in positions that we aren’t often exposed to in daily life. The ability to extend the forefoot requires strength and mobility in the foot, and supporting yourself on one arm with the wrist extended while you move your torso forward requires a significant amount of strength and mobility in the wrist and upper extremity. Strengthening the tissues leads to stronger bones, and this is where your body armor begins to develop—from the inside out.
Strong Bones
According to the National Council on Aging, one in four Americans over the age of 65 falls every year. They result in more than 2.8 million injuries treated in emergency departments annually, with over 800,000 hospitalizations and more than 27,000 deaths.
Falls aren’t limited to seniors; a survey of 1497 people in 2005 found 18% of people between the ages of 20-45 and 21% of people age 46-65 fell in the past 24 months. Falling poses a serious risk of injury in individuals of all ages if they haven’t developed a body armor.
When you load your tissues at a variety of angles, in a variety of ways, your muscles adapt to the load by triggering a cellular response that causes protein synthesis. This can happen through various pathways depending on the type of load employed, but the end result is stronger tissues—how the muscles are stronger depends on the type of contraction and loading that occurs.
Bone can be thought of as a rigid lever muscles pull against. When muscles pull harder or more frequently on bone, it, too, adapts, as long as the load is dynamic, not static. The bone cells, like the muscle cells, detect the increase in mechanical loading, stimulating a cellular response that results in new bone formation.
Disuse, or being sedentary, can be thought of as de-loading the physical structure. Muscles and bones don’t have anything to adapt to, and as a result, they become weaker. If a fall takes place, the physical structure lacks the resiliency needed to protect the body, so muscles strain and bones break.
If someone has been regularly loading their tissues, chances are lower that the fall will be as injurious. Their armor will be stronger, their tissues less fragile.
In the crawling example, it’s probably pretty easy to see how the nature of the movement challenges the entire body, loading muscle, bones, and ligaments and creating more strength throughout the body. Dynamic loading can and should be done in a variety of ways, depending on your goals. I have never specifically trained my feet to handle the impact of a twenty pound dumbbell; however, I load my feet regularly, in a variety of ways. I load the inside of my feet, the outside of my feet, the bottom of my feet, and, you guessed it, the top of my feet in a variety of positions, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes with external load, sometimes with just my body. My ability to withstand higher load and different positions has happened gradually, over the course of a decade.
(Random fact: I got really into feet in 2009, after I read “Born to Run.” I used to have a serious imbalance between my sympathetic nervous system and my parasympathetic nervous system; getting in touch with my feet was the beginning of a journey that radically changed my entire being. Those of you who follow my work know that when I get into something, I really get into it, so I have spent a lot of time over the course of the last ten years researching and studying the foot during movement and embracing my feet, how they interact with the ground, and how they support the rest of me.)
Developing tissue resilience means doing things that are sometimes uncomfortable, exposing yourself to new positions in a controlled manner, touching discomfort and moving away from it. It means using external resistance and, depending on your goals, possibly using more dynamic movements that use elasticity, like jumping and bounding. Exposure to anything new should be done in a gradual, progressive way. It’s when you try to challenge your body to movements that you haven’t properly progressed up to that injury occurs.
The benefit of progressing slowly and giving yourself time to adapt to the newly imposed load is you will become stronger. Your armor will develop and you will feel more secure as you navigate the physical world. I sincerely hope you don’t ever need your armor, but if you do, I can guarantee you will be immensely grateful for what you have built through your actions. I will never know if the weight landing on the top of my socked foot would have caused more damage if I were less trained; however, I feel fortunate that I am physically strong enough to withstand an acute trauma without needing a boot or crutches. Hopefully, I learned something bigger from the entire experience, like the value in slowing down, paying attention to my surroundings, and not setting weights on top of plyo boxes.
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P.S.—We will load our feet and do falling drills in April in Belize. (We will also play partner games, breathe, roll around on the floor, and do all kinds of other fun, movement related explorations. There are limited spots available.)