Tissue Acquisition

Your brain is locked in the deep dark cave known as your skull. The only access it has to the outside world is both your eyes and your ears. The combination of those 2 senses take up a majority of your brain's processing power. The only knowledge that your brain has of your body is from the signals being sent to the brain based on how the body is moving. 

Fun fact about running, it was "invented" by some random guy named Thomas Running in 1612 who performed an experiment where he was trying to walk twice at the same time. Now, we all know that this guy didn't invent running. It's a natural human movement that has been done since the beginning of time. But I digress.

Walking gives the brain a lot more information than running does. I'm sure that you can surmise from Thomas Runnings experiment, that running is far more aggressive. As it pertains to the hip, the brain is only getting momentary bits of information on what the hip is doing and how its supposed to moving while we are running. If you think about a map of the body and everytime the foot hits the ground, the hip is lighting up within the brain map for milliseconds at a time. And, depending on the terrain, each step is completely different.

Now we're going to add stress to the equation. The nervous system only has 2 states of being. Threat and safety. As an example, you can imagine getting chased by a tiger and depending on how good your imagination is, your brain will assume you're being chased by a tiger. Typically, pain is a request for change. So, when you are in the middle of a workout, which is painful, and a muscle group fails, the body will send a pain signal to the brain informing it that this muscle has failed and it's time to stop running. But you don't stop running. The brain then assumes that you're being chased by something, and if you stop you'll die.

At that point, it will recruit a different muscle to complete the task so that you can continue running for your life. Yet another example that I have seen in my manual therapy practice is, the glute fails, and the brain chooses the calve as an acceptable option for hip extension. The brain will pay attention to this compensation only long enough to determine this is an acceptable substitute to get us out of the potentially dangerous situation we're in, then it will go back to using a majority of it's processing power to deciphering sights and sounds. The problem then becomes when this temporary compensation becomes permanent. 

In the traditional strength training world, we place a lot of emphasis on specific movements to build strength. The squat, the deadlift, or the bench press. Are these compound movements bad? No. Do they translate to running? Not really. Can these movements make you a stronger runner? Sure. All that being said, what's less important is the name of the movement assigned to the body. What's more important is the effort of the movement assigned to the body. And what's more important than that is the movements assigned to the body should directly correlate to the demands that the chosen sport requires that body to do. 

Our hip generates force from the inside out. And it absorbs force from the outside in. We need to first develop the ability to generate force. So we start with the white stuff within the hip capsule. Then we strengthen the rotational muscles surrounding the hip capsule. Then we start to strengthen the linear tissues that do a majority of the work. The glutes, hamstrings, quads, calves etc. Once we have addressed these tissues individually, then Compound movements become more appropriate. 

In conclusion, in the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. We need to choose movements that mean something to the body. And we need to place less emphasis on the movements that mean something to that movement. Meaning, the brain only knows what running is. It's a natural human movement. It's primary purpose as it pertains to humans is acquisition. We needed to be able to outrun animals so we could kill them and eat them. Running as a sport came about when we no longer depended on running for the survival of the species. The strength training for the sport of running should be focused on giving the brain a more complete map of the body so that it has more movement solutions and a more efficient path to failure.