Pain Free, Then Performance

Your body doesn't feel quite right. You avoid certain movements. Something in your hip or your knee or your shoulder can get aggravated from something seemingly innocuous. Your back doesn't hurt, exactly -- nothing's torn, nothing's an emergency. You're just managing around it, and you've been managing around it for a while.

I want to give you a way to think about this. It starts with the thing every human, and especially a former athlete, is actually doing, whether they know it or not.

Performance is just transferring power.

When I say power, I mean force moving cleanly through your body -- from the ground, up through your legs and hips and back, and out -- through your hands, your feet, a bat, whatever's doing the work. That's it. It's transferring energy through the kinetic chain.

Every sport is some version of this. Every physical endeavor, every energy system does this in its own way. A golfer and a fighter and a sprinter look nothing alike, but they're all doing the same job: putting force into the ground and moving it through a connected body into something else. The skill and the mind and the years of practice are all in service of transferring that power in a more and more precise or effective way, for a specific purpose.

And it's not just sport. Picking up your kid is power transfer. Carrying all the groceries. Getting off the floor without grunting and making it a 10 step process. That's performance too -- the regular-life kind, the kind that's actually very important as we season with age.

But the key idea is that you can't transfer power well through a body that's fighting itself. Try, and one of two things happens. You leak power -- you're weaker and slower than you should be and you can't figure out why. Or you get hurt.

What makes a body fight itself

What I've seen is imbalance. Something's tight where it should be loose. Something's weak where it should be strong, something is totally switched off where it should be firing. A small muscle quits doing its job, a bigger one picks up the slack, and over time you descend into the abyss of day to day pain -- the big muscle gets bigger, the small one fades out completely. Now you've got a body that moves, but moves like compensatory garbage. Load it up and the force doesn't travel cleanly through the chain. It snags somewhere. Develops compensations somewhere... and that somewhere is usually downstream of the actual problem.

I'm not a doctor, but I can tell you the exact why of pain is more complicated than any single story -- sleep, stress, how much load you put on your body, all of it plays in. If something's acute, go see a professional. But I've lived the pattern I'm describing, and I've watched it play out in a lot of bodies.

My version of it

In 2011 I ruptured my Achilles in the Open after doing over 180 rebound box jumps. It just exploded and took over 4 hours to repair in surgery -- they had a hard time even finding all the pieces to put back together. The whole situation was stupidity embodied. I paid a hefty dumb tax. I did the rehab. And I was able to continue training. I went on to Snatch 280 and achieve a RED I Overall in Level Method -- but a serious injury is a serious injury, and it was never quite the same. What I didn't appreciate then is the future implications and how far the effects travel.

Mine traveled up. It started in my left calf, where I developed serious muscular imbalances over time as a direct result of the rupture. To this day, my left calf is about 2" smaller than my right -- I call it my baby calf.

Over time, that changed how my left knee tracked. About five years later, during BJJ, I had what was likely a left patellar subluxation: my kneecap felt like it slipped partly out of its groove and then had to reduce back into place. My working theory is that this came from years of altered loading and rotational compensation caused by the calf imbalance. I didn't see anyone about it. It wasn't bad enough, and it didn't happen again, so I didn't think about it. Which, given everything I'm telling you, was exactly the mistake.

Over time, that compensation pattern seemed to affect my left hip mechanics, which then showed up on the right side of my back as recurrent strains about ten years post-injury. Eventually the pattern even seemed to travel up into my right shoulder.

Corner to corner, foot to head -- and every bit of it traced back, mechanically, to one underpowered, compensating calf. It was all slow... a slow degradation that got worse the more power I transferred through my body, and the older I got. Welcome to your 40s.

Thankfully, I got smarter too. I haven't had any back problems for over 3 years, but more recently, my left knee has needed more focus.

The part I got wrong is the part I don't want you to also get wrong. After the injury I did the work -- six months of expensive rehab, a year+ of continued balancing work, being diligent about it. Then I got distracted with being strong again, in transferring lots of power, and I let the small stuff slide. The rehab was "done." I'd graduated. The problems stayed hidden for a while -- I was still strong and young enough to power through it. But then the back started feeling off, then the strains came, I started avoiding movements and shutting down physically. I'd treated durability like a project with a finish line. But the secret is there is no finish line.

That's the whole lesson, really

Durability isn't a rehab you complete. It's a practice you never stop. Same as eating well or sleeping enough -- you don't do it for six months and graduate. I've eaten all the salads, mission complete!

You keep doing it, in small amounts, forever, or your body slowly drifts back into compensatory pain.

What turned it around for me was when I read Pain Free by Pete Egoscue. The premise is structural integrity -- getting your body aligned so it can do its job. Egoscue has a full coherent coaching philosophy, system and software. I'm not here to sell you on Egoscue, and you can find PTs who'll argue with his theory. I just know it really worked for me, and I still do postural exercises every day. The usable version of it is simpler than any system: a few specific movements, matched to your particular body, done every single day.

For me, the biggest impact was a five minute slant-board depth stretch for my calves. Out of 365 days in the year, I miss maybe 5 days. A huge amount of my back pain went away fast -- not because the depth stretch is magic, but because it hit the root of my problem. It didn't solve everything by any means, but it had the most immediate leverage. Your high-leverage movement will likely be different.

How to find yours

You probably have a root too, and you can make a decent guess at it: start at your oldest serious injury and work outward. The thing you blew out years ago and stopped thinking about is very often the source of what's bugging you now. Fix the root and the downstream problems tend to settle.

What you should not do is go install my depth stretch into your life. It's mine, ok? Unless, of course, you do it and find it makes a difference... then we can share it. But yours might be hanging from a bar. It might be sitting in the bottom of a deep squat. It might be your hamstrings, hip flexors, or a pigeon stretch, or some specific postural movement that happens to unlock your particular mess. We're all broken a little differently -- different injuries, different mechanics, different sports we used to play -- so we all need different things.

And that single movement will not be all you need. It will be the baseline. The minimum. And the principle is the same for everyone. Find the handful of movements that matter most for your body -- maybe three -- and make them daily. With your ONE, as the daily floor. Think of it as movement nutrition. The same way you don't eat well once and call it done, you don't move well once and call it done. It has to become like brushing your teeth: small, boring, automatic, not up for debate.

Then, performance

Do that, and the order of operations takes care of itself. Get the body transferring power cleanly first -- out of pain, moving square, stacked, firing properly, force traveling the way it's supposed to. Then build on top of it. That's when strength actually sticks, because you're not piling load onto a body that's going to snag and send you back to the start.

Pain free first. Then performance. In that order, as a rule.

The one piece I can't hand you in an article is knowing which movements are actually your top three. Most people can't see their own pattern -- it's too close, and the root isn't always where it hurts. That's the first thing I do with anyone I work with: figure out the few movements that'll do the most for your specific body, and build the practice from there.

Finding your movements is where it starts, not where it ends. The real work is building a strong, durable body -- and a way of training, eating, and living that holds up for decades. I take on a few people at a time.

Start with the free analysis -- it's the first thing I'd do with you anyway.

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