Keep It Simple, Silly

 

Photo by John Pratt on Unsplash

When you think about a "functional training," what picture do you get in your mind? Perhaps this term makes you think about things like doing squats on a BOSU platform in order to work on your balance. For a specific sport, such as baseball, you might think of putting weighted rings on the bat and swinging the heavier bat so that, without the rings, the "normally weighted" bat is easier to swing. It seems like it makes a lot of sense.

In fact, for the well-educated fitness guru, you can even "prove" that this is the case using well-known and widely accepted concepts such as the Principle of Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID). This principle holds that when your body adapts to a stressor, it does so in a very specific way. Perhaps a good example of this comes from one of my very favorite movies where the protagonist indicates to his interlocutor that he has "spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder." While the Dread Pirate Roberts has become immune to iocane, this adaptation does not cover other things, such as arsenic. The adaptation was specific to the precise thing imposed upon his body.

When you understand the SAID principle, it seems that swinging a heavier bat is a very specific movement that would increase your efficiency for swinging a less heavy bat. After all, it's the same movement, right? It is very easy to go down the road of thinking that this seems very scientific and obviously effective. Except it's not.

There are actually two reasons why this method does not work. While we are using this particular example of swinging a baseball bat, the ideas apply to many applications. To understand the problem with this, we have to understand the second part of the SAID principle...Adaptation.

The first issue with using a heavier bat is the fact that the weighted bat, while heavier than the non-weighted bat, does not create enough of a metabolic disruption to actually provoke an adaptation. When we talk about adaptation, what we mean is that some stimulus or stress has been imposed upon the body to the degree that it actually disrupts homeostasis, which is the body's "goal" of maintaining a steady state of being. 

Your body does what it currently does and is capable of handling the things you normally expose it to during the course of the normal day. You have the strength to do the regular things you do every day. Your lung capacity can handle what you ask of it during a normal day. It is when you demand more of it that you disrupt it's homeostasis and the body is stressed beyond it's normal capacity. In response to this stress, if applied correctly and consistently, the body will adapt by learning to handle that particular stress so that it becomes the "new normal."

With our bat swinging example, a weighted ring on the bat does not stress the body enough to actually disrupt homeostasis, therefore no adaptation takes place. What does happen in this scenario is something called a "motor program" which is basically a way to train your body to perform a specific movement (or combination of movements) more efficiently so that it can be performed automatically and without conscious thought. Many athletes focus on this sort of thing so that they don't have to "think" about what they need to do, but these motor programs get triggered automatically in order to improve their performance. We'll touch on this a bit more in a bit.

Getting back to our example, since swinging a weighted bat does not produce an adaptation in strength, it does not server its intended purpose of being able to swing the bat with more force. For this reason, it is, at best, not productive to perform this as a "functional training" exercise. It may seem to fit the requirement of being more Specific (the first element of SAID), there is no Adaptation and therefore, the SAID principle cannot be invoked in order to justify this training method.

Now, onto the next issue. We go back a step to that Specific part of the SAID principle. At first blush, this seems to be more specific than, say, your typical barbell exercises, because you are actually swinging a bat. This is obviously a motion that seems far more similar to what the batter does when standing at the plate and would lead us to believe that it satisfies the Specific aspect of SAID. 

However, by weighting the bat, you change (even if only slightly) the mechanics of the movement. A heavier bat will move more slowly than a lighter bat. I couldn't say for certain, but I imagine that the path of the bat would differ as well, even if only very slightly. Where this becomes a problem is with respect to the aforementioned "motor program." 

When you swing the heavier bat more slowly, it changes the time it takes to get the bat into the correct position at the correct time to make contact with the ball coming from the pitcher. Therefore, you are developing a motor program that works at a different speed than the motor program required to effectively hit the ball. By practicing with a heavy bat, the lighter bat will now swing more quickly than the heavy one. This sounds like it would be a good thing, right? A faster bat seems like it would make the ball go further. The problem is, the faster bat speed results in the bat being too far forward when the ball arrives which will cause the batter to either miss the ball entirely or foul it off rather than hitting it in-play and getting on base.

These issues illustrate the difference that strength trainer Mark Rippetoe often refers to as "training" vs "practice." With training, the purpose is to build strength. Strength is developed throughout the entire system of the body, using the largest number of muscle groups over the greatest range of motion. It is a very generalize, rather than specific, target. Practice is the art and science of taking the increased strength and using it for the specific motor activities required for the athlete's particular sport. In our example, this would be swinging a bat. Not a weighted bat. The normal bat that the batter will be taking to the plate during a game.

You have probably heard it said that practice makes perfect. That is not actually true. Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. That is why practicing with a weighted bat and then going into the batter's box with an un-weighted bat will end up causing issues with your swing. If you are practicing differently than you play, you will play incorrectly. The more closely your practice duplicates what you will do on game day, the better you will play.

Now, I'm not much of a sports coach as far as improving the facets of practice and perfecting performance. However, my focus is on building strength so that you can take that strength and use it for athletics or just staying active and independent. While our examples have focused on athletics, the concept remains true for things such as standing up from a chair, getting down on the floor to play with small children and getting back up again, lifting groceries into the back of the car and lots of other standard things that we do every day. That is where I can help. Just keeping it simple...silly.