Exploring the MVMT Tree Pt. 3: Durable

A durable Adventurer will not only be resistant to injury, they will also be able avoid it before it happens and recover faster when it does.

The fitness community has had a long standing love affair with performance. Performance, in itself, is not a bad thing. Performance goals like doing your first pullup, deadlifting a certain weight or running at a faster pace are great motivators for and ways to measure fitness progress. It's when performance is sought above all else that issues of fragility arise. Many athletes are very fragile, just one weird twist, trip or landing away from injury. If your injured, it doesn't matter how strong or fast or skilled you are, your performance will suffer, your training will be hindered & your ability to enjoy your sport will decrease.

This fragility almost always results from a one track training program, lacking intentional variety of movement, thus causing biomechanical imbalances. In Pt.2: Mobile, I touched on how these imbalances affect the proper movement of a joint and make it prone to injury.

Lets take the shoulder for example. Many outdoor sports, training programs and life in general utilize the front shoulder muscles more often than the rear. Visually, this results in a slouched posture with the shoulders set forward and the upper back rounded. Functionally, the front shoulder muscles, though strong, become tight & less mobile, while the muscles of the rear are weak & strained. As a result of being pulled forward, the actual bones of the joint move unnaturally, aggravating tendons, ligaments and muscles. These conditions promote both overuse injuries like tendonitis rising from the extra strain added to every movement and impact injuries like dislocation or rotator cuff tears which are heightened by everything already being in a weakened state. Even when not injured these conditions can make properly preforming movements like overhead squats or handstands nigh impossible. This plays out similarly throughout the body.

Durability training is really about proper tissue balance and bone alignment. If a joint has both those qualities, it will be durable. Resistant to overuse injury because everything is aligned and moving as it should without things rubbing, catching or grinding and causing inflammation. Resilient in impact injury because everything is held in place by balanced strong muscles. Sometimes injury is unavoidable, that's just life, but having a strong well balanced durable body will lessen the impact of an injury and help you heal faster. Prehab is always more effective than rehab. Developing durability can mean the difference between a tendon strain and a tendon tear, between surgery and just taking it easy for a few weeks.

Durability training can be slow and tedious, without easily quantifiable results. The concept of durability itself can be nebulous, and just like ones wellness is often not considered until one is sick, durability is often not a training priority until one is injured. The first step to becoming more durable is developing body awareness. Even the most capable body has kinks in the armor, body awareness is how you find these kinks. Your brain is constantly performing triage with the crazy amounts of data it’s receiving 24/7. Often putting non-emergency biomechanical issues on the back burner, allowing small easily correctable issues to grow unnoticed into injury. Building body awareness helps you find and correct these issues while they are still small. Movement exploration practices like yoga are a great way to converse with your body and build awareness of how it moves, reacts, adapts and feels. Once you open up communication, you can assess and correct your body's kinks, stopping injury before it starts. As always, working with a knowledgable movement coach will make this process much more efficient and effective.

Next up we are getting even more nebulous with Adaptable.