Quality of Movement - Where to draw the line?

[Sean J Hunter]

We've been having a bit of a discussion among CF friends and such, regarding where the line might be drawn on the pursuit of quality movement patterns.
There must be a rule of deminishing returns here, surely?

The way I view it is this.
There are three levels of movement priorities

• Priority 1 - Immediate safety. (avoiding acute injuries i.e. learning to set the back during Deadlift)
• Priority 2 - Long-term safety. (mitigating poor movement patterns that may cause chronic injury over time)
• Priority 3 - Economy of movement. (Movement patterns that if not optimal, do not pose any injury risk, but if worked on merely improve economy of movement.)

It goes without saying that Group 1 must be dialled in immediately for any new athlete

Whereas group 2 a coach may have a little time to really dial these correct movement patterns in, but of course it shouldn’t be left too long.

For me the real debate comes to group 3.
If we assume that a specific group of athlete have no, and never will have, and desire to compete, and who's goals are simply health and wellness. At what point is pushing super high quality movement that has no injury / safety aspect a poor return on investment.

CrossFit seems to push a quality of movement that is perhaps higher than necessary, at least for non-competitive-goal types?

What am I missing here? Perhaps I'm looking at this incorrectly?

Thoughts welcome

Sean

[Alex Burden]

Copied my reply from the other thread you had with the same name.

Interesting subject.... i am a firm believer in quality over quantity.

I think you can look at this is 2 ways, 1= limited range of motion/mobility or plain and simple 2= really bad technique.

Being young or old, new at CF or not if you have limited range of motion/mobility the person will and should still perform the movement to the best of their capabilities to the exact point where their technique starts to fail.
Over time that failure point will move and the athlete will become better and better to the point where they will not become any better, this may be due to the fact they have perfected it or they have physical problems/limitations that just do not allow them to do it 100% correctly maybe 80%, but those 80% should be as good, as solid and as correct as possible.

To me these are the people that give everything they have to acheive thier goal and do as best they can. These are the ones that will be around at the final whistle.

Now on the other side of things we have those that have full range of motion but they have really bad techinque or perform movements really badly. Now its not as if they do not know how to perform the movements correctly it comes down to their lack of interest or they are just trying to beat the clock all of the time and this comes at a cost.... everything falls apart.

These are the ones that will get hurt and are more likely to drop off in the end.

I think both of your higest priorities are to give these people a longer healthier life and the only way is to look at quality. It also means explaining to those you instruct what your qualities are and how you work. You need to explain to them that this is a long term thing and quality comes before quality. If you can't perform it to 100% you scale it, if you have mobility issues or other physical issue we will work with what we have but never jeperdize thier safety or the true form of any movement.

As soon as anyone lose the basic fundamentals of movments and how to perform them then other muscles, ligaments, joints, tendens start to take over to make up for that funny looking movment they are trying to perform. In the end this results in injury. If they are injured they are not going to workout, if they do not workout you might be losing income to your box.

If people want to sweat and feel as if they have worked out then stick them on the rower or assault bike, mixed with simple movements at the end of the sessions.

I workout at a globo but we have full Eleiko CF section, both my wife an I see the same thing day in and day out.... a personal trainer not looking at the movments or techinique, just concentrating on the quantity as their clients want to sweat. The trouble is that so many of them have strains, or bad shoulders or something else going on and these people are supposed to help them get fitter, but it should never be at the cost of the client.

Only the wife and I actually train CF at our gym in the morning and so allot people look at us through the windows and sometimes a few of them will try to copy something we have done or a specific movment... then when they try it we can see that they are thinking s%¤t... this is harder than i thought or they are thinking this was not that bad, but their technique is so bad on the verge to horrendus. The wife an I may spend months or up to a year to perfect something but once we have it we will never lose it.

That is probarbly why we are hardly ever have any injuries, a niggle here and there and muscle soreness or one thing but never injured and never any Bro reps.

That is why quality is always your focus.


All that after an egg, protien drink and my morning sandwich , oh and i'm 47 @218lbs and the wife is 48, weight undisclosed