Doing More With Less

I've been reading a very good biography about my favorite musical composer, Johannes Brahms (if you don't know, I was raised and trained a classical music geek in my relative youth). (FYI, I don't have any "affiliate" relationship with Amazon, in case you're clicking the link.)

It seems Brahms was embarrassed by his high voice, and so set out to "improve" it by means of exercises he'd thought up himself. Some of it simply involved shouting a lot. The end result of his effort was that he permanently ruined his voice. 

In a way he had simply continued a tradition of sorts among 19th-century composers. Years before, his mentor Robert Schumann had permanently injured one of his fingers by trying to strengthen it with a homemade "finger weight" machine. 

You couldn't exactly blame their thinking: physical rehabilitation as a field barely existed back then, so good advice would have been hard to come by. Schumann would never get away with that finger workout now. 

But what hasn't changed, right up to today, is the temptation to exert maximal effort to reach performance goals that don't rely on maximum strength or maximum flexibility. 

And just as it was 150 years ago, the result may be the reverse of what was intended. I'm regularly consulted for injuries caused by excessive effort of this kind – trying to stretch as far as the person on the neighboring yoga mat, "blasting core" muscles, and so on. 

And in fact, this "max-is-better" approach is especially problematic if applied to spine healing. The spine is not a brute-force engine. Instead, it's full of intricate structures that glide and bend. It's not meant to generate great amounts of force – it's much better at shunting force to more powerful levers like arms and legs. 

So when it comes to back exercises, it's usually not how hard you're working, but whether your effort is correct – whether you execute the maneuvers skillfully – that makes the most difference to recovery and improved performance.

This applies even to some very common exercises. Take, for example, the most basic pelvic tilt (look it up if you need to). If you do a PT forcefully, or as far as you can, in my view you don't get more benefit than if you use just 50-60% of your maximum effort. If you have done pelvic tilts before, try one where, as you lie on your back, you roll your tailbone backward just 50% as far as you think you could – enough to make your low back flatten a little and draw down toward the floor, but not enough to tense your gluteal muscles or your shoulders. The 50% effort is where you get the benefit, because you're developing the skill of moving your lower spine into a suitable posture to transfer force between the upper and lower body. Beyond that, clenching other muscles doesn't add more to the well-being or conditioning of your spine. 

If you really want to or need to strengthen your gluteal or pectoral muscles, or develop lifting power, there are other exercises better suited to do that. But for everyday life and fitness, make sure to spend time in that 50% zone. You may be surprised how much you get from it.