Advanced Training Concepts of the Lumbar Spine

We recently interviewed an acclaimed expert on training the lumbar spine. We asked him about some of the advanced training techniques. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

Interviewer: I’ve heard you speak several times more recently on the concepts of super stiffness and pulsing. Could you share a little bit of your thoughts on that?

Spine Rehab Expert: Super stiffness, as I joke, it’s not what you think. Well, it comes from our working with some of the great athletes, and I’m really talking world champions, from World’s Strongest Man competition, world champions from the UFC, these cage fighters, medalists in the Olympics for sprinting. Looking at outstanding weightlifters and all the like.

If someone was to ask me what do the great athletes have that people like myself don’t have, what separates them, my answer would probably be different from a lot of people. I tried to distill what distinguishes them into this concept of super stiffness and that’s what they’re so good at.

Let me give you an example. If you take a golfer, and we’ve measured a couple of golfers and these are both long ball champions – one of them hit a golf ball further than anyone else in the world that particular year. Now, I’m just going to back up a bit. A lot of people think they must be pretty strong. Well, yeah, they are strong but that’s not what allows them to hit a golf ball, because can you find an NFL middle linebacker who can hit a golf ball? I would say they don’t exist.

Interviewer: Okay.

Spine Rehab Expert: They don’t exist. And the reason that they don’t exist is in order to hit a golf ball the first element is speed. You’ve got to start the downward swing of the club with enormous speed which means you have to relax because if you use muscle, muscle stiffens when it activates and it slows you down. So, they have to be extremely relaxed, but the instance that the clubface hits the ball, at that point you have to stiffen your body and pulse. Become very, very stiff, and now you’re hitting the ball not with the club head but with your full 200 pounds, or whatever you weigh. At that instance you just turned your body into a stone.

Then the instant the ball leaves the club you now have to relax again to get a very fast swing follow through. So, there is a concept of super stiffness where there’s not an energy leak or a weak link in stiffness throughout the linkage of your body and it’s done so extremely quickly. Even more importantly is the ability to let the muscle relax.

When you measure the great UFC kickers and punchers they’re able to create tremendous stiffness in their body to initiate a kick, and then as the foot leaves the ground they become extremely relaxed, getting enormous closing velocity between their foot and your head, and then when their foot hits your head, the second pulse, they turn their body to stone and that’s the knockout kick. So, again, that foot hits you with their full body weight rather than the weight of their foot. So, that required a double pulse.

So, yeah, this idea of super stiffness is huge. If we get into how they use their abdominal wall, they don’t use transverse abdominis or any other muscle in isolation.

The muscle systems, if I can go back and use the analogy of plywood; the first layer of plywood the grain runs one way, then there’s an adhesive layer, and then the next layer the grain runs in opposite to that. Plywood, if you were to separate all those layers you could measure the strength and stiffness, but when you put those layers together, the plywood forms a composite and that composite has superior strength and stiffness than the sum of the parts. That’s what a composite does.