Your Body Is A Good Crook
The primary and quite possibly the only reason you have a nervous system is to move. Therefore, your body will always try to create whatever movement you ask of it but what you need to know is that your body is a crook. Let me explain what I mean, as I said your nervous system is designed to create movement for such things as building shelter, gathering food, protecting your children, recreation etc… Unfortunately, our brains don’t have eyes or friends to explain what or why you are doing something so whether you are trying to climb a tree to get an apple or if you are trying to squat in a gym your brain knows no difference and it will simply do its job and try to create the movement you ask it to create. Now here’s where the crook part kicks in, since movement is required for survival your body has become great at compensating to get things done.
If you don’t have what’s required to get it done properly the crook that is compensation will help you find a way to get it done. That compensation will lead to the creation of bad pathways and if you keep using bad pathways long enough they are going to break down. That breakdown will lead to discomfort, pain, injury, and the inability to create those movements. This is the reason why I always assess joint capacity and prescribe training based around that. This is also the reason why I prioritize improving and increasing joint mobility.
You can get bigger, stronger, faster, and improve other skills by continuously training outside of your capacities as evolution designed us to adapt but what you are doing is teaching your body to compensate to do those things. Which in turn is ingraining those compensatory pathways in your brain and as I mentioned continuous use of compensatory pathways will lead to some sort of problem. Think about those pathways like bridges and think about getting stronger, bigger, faster or whatever skill you are trying to develop like trucks. If you are building bridges through compensation you are building two lane wooden bridges with no shoulders which means you can only handle so many trucks at a time, you are screwed if one of those trucks breakdown, and your bridge will collapse if too many trucks try to use it at once. On the other hand if you build bridges without compensating you will build four lane steel and concrete bridges with shoulders which can handle way more trucks, can handle accidents, and are less likely to breakdown if a lot of trucks try to use the bridge at once.
Learn your capacities and work within them. If you want to do more then work on increasing your capacities to keep that crook compensation and all the problems that come with it at bay.
