Forget Visual Ques

"Your eyes deceive you, do not trust them" -Obi-Wan Kenobi

A brief story on how the mirror can lie. (Or better yet, how our understanding is faulty)

I want to touch on the deceptiveness of the mirror and how our eyes can trick us ultimately leading to visual ques being detrimental.  I have fallen victim to the lack of perception when trying to analyze movement in a reflection.  After this mistake, I now see countless others trying in vain to retrain an inherent function into an unnatural function (but the latter looks better in the mirror (or on camera)). 

When I was deep into my bodybuilding phase, I started to notice that my left hip appeared to sag when I squatted.  Additionally, my right knee often had pain during the movement.  Obsessed with perfection, I mistakenly convinced myself that my left hip was weak which is why it was sagging, and my right knee was taking all the weight which explained the pain.  Although the right knee taking the weight may have been right to a certain extent, the left hip being weak couldn’t be more wrong.  In reality, my right hip was the weak hip, and I relied more heavily on the left hip to stabilize the motion and create movement.  But not knowing the truth, I continuously tried to force my weight and movement over to the left.  Convinced that I wasn’t using my left side.  What’s worse is that my right side was always super tight after lifting.  This further confirmed (falsely) that my right side was doing all of the work because I equated “tightness” to “muscle activation.”  Again, this couldn’t be more backwards. 

In reality my right side was tight because it was weak, I would compensate with more weight on my left hip, and my right knee would hurt because it was taking weight that my right hip wasn't. 

There are countless ques and aphorisms I've heard over the years and introspected on all of them. Most of them shaped a part of who I am as an athlete. But a lot of the time, my perception was off. The mechanics could be correct visually, but how those mechanics are obtained make all the difference.

The Body As A Complex System and Why Visual Ques Don't Work

The body is a complex system. That means there is an interdependence among elements. All three interdependencies below exist in a complex system:

1. Temporal: Variable A depends on its past changes

2. Horizontal: Variable A depends on other variables

3. Diagonal: Variable A depends on the past history of variable B

Body movement is a complex system which causes movement patterns to compound over time. There's no inherent counterbalance effect unless we consciously work at it. Said another way, our injuries are more commonly caused by repeated flaws compounded over time than by one single event. Our injuries are chronic, not acute.

Our body as a complex system implies that bench pressing affects squatting or other lifts, and past habits formed on bench press affects today's bench press and will build further on future bench press evolutions. Not only that, but our past bench press affects today's squat and today's bench will affect tomorrow's squat (or other lift). Our mistakes (or improvements) compound over time in a complex system.

Watching other people lift is detrimental over time because we can't understand all the nuances of a movement from an observation. We are getting the wrong information. We want to que in on certain things we think are important like the hip hinge in squatting. We look at the hip hinge and think it's the source of movement instead of just the effects from proper core stabilization and the gravity pulling the bar down. We gather the wrong information from watching others lift. With this wrong information, we start treating the hip hinge as the source of good form, program this feeling into our brains, and then start taking this faulty programmed feeling into other lifts to try and "strengthen" our weak hip hinge. We never stop to consider that perhaps the reason our hip hinge feels weak is because we're treating it as a source of strength or baseline movement based on observations while it's simply a biproduct of a fully functioning system. There may not even be a reason your feel one way or the other. Some days may just be off days, but even these random bad days can compound into years (or a lifetime) of poor movement.

The hip hinge, keep your chest up during squat, retract scapula in and down during bench press, and straight spine on deadlift are all related because they're misrepresented from simple observations. This is because these "ques" can all be accomplished by hyperextending the lower back. The lower back is largely connective tissue with connections from the lats, core, and hip muscles. The lower back/tailbone is not a power producer, it's simply a destination where all movement *transfers* through. Like an axel in a car. There's no power derived from these components, but all power transfers through it from the engines to the wheels. Some components are relatively dainty and aren't load bearing but are transfer agents. The lower back is the same thing. The lower back provides minimal load bearing (under normal conditions) while maximum power transfer between the large lower body (for those without chicken legs) and the large upper body.

It's easy to leverage the lower spine because this area is weak muscular wise but strong in the short run from the bone structure. (We leverage our bones for stabilization instead of our muscle structure, and we wonder why we have arthritis and back pain.) Our large movement muscles are commonly tight from the daily grind of life or our recent past lifts, so it's just easier to generate the proper lifting angles by hyper extending the lower back. Our tight upper body caused by last week's bench leads to exaggerated lower back flexion to resolve our current day knee pain from squats. It's almost impossible for us to understand that our knee pain could likely be caused from a tight upper body (occurring during past lifts) compounded through time.

We aren't designed to think in complex systems or non-linearities. Our mental inadequacies are made worse by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. We are losing our inherent ability to move our bodies. This inherent ability we are born with. It's one of our most basic subconscious constructs.

Shall we go deeper into the interdependency issue? The issue is so complex that our own past lifts are not the only thing that affect us. Other people's past movements that we observe, and other people's past opinions affect our past lifts and current lifts. We all have certain characteristics that we identify as part of our ego. Perhaps a woman and her butt or a man and his chest or arms. Perhaps abs are your main image. Either way, we tend to drift towards things we are good at or want to be good at or that feel good. Other people's compliments feel good, so these external validations cause our future selves to drift towards trying to satisfy that image. We can then create our own breakdown by causing further imbalances.

Summary

The Z-plane was built as a mental model to bypass all this noise in the environment. Further understanding the high-level concepts of body movement will increase awareness to the readers individual imbalances. We all have imbalances, and they're represented differently in our own mind, so building a proper mental model and introspection will improve these imbalances over time.