Strong isn't the same as stable.
Dr Jeff Almon, chiropractor ·
The velodrome looked like a bunker from the future.
Walls slanted at 45 degrees, almost impossible to walk up. A concrete pit in the middle like a hockey arena with no ice. Lights at half power. Natural light coming through windows in the roof, like a terrarium for a giant.
Up in the stands, the German sport scientists. SRM powermeters on every crank, charting every effort onto a laptop to see where the athlete breaks down. And stopwatches. They keep it low tech too.
I'd finished chiro school in 2008 and went straight into high performance sport. The Chinese speed skating team before the Vancouver Olympics. The German and Barbados national track cycling teams.
Sprinters rest a lot. Twenty minutes or more between efforts. Bikes that cost upwards of $20,000. Heavy weights, hours on the road, and then a few seconds of everything they've got.
Walking up to me is one of the freakiest athletes I have ever worked with. He'd just finished a sprint effort and asked me to look at his back.
Whenever I assess an athlete, or a patient, I check whether their stabilizers are holding their joints stable when something pushes back. I call it reactive stability.
Kinda like two people in an arm wrestle. Sometimes the match stays at a stalemate. Sometimes it's over before it starts.
This giant of a man wilted like butter in the microwave.
His hip flexors couldn't hold the weight of my 40-pound son that day. And this is a guy who leg presses a small car.
So where does the power go?
It doesn't go anywhere. It gets turned down.
The muscle is there. The signal to it gets dialed back.
Rice and McNair at the Auckland University of Technology pulled together the research on this back in 2010 - they were looking at the quadriceps after knee injury. The joint's own sensors start sending different information. Swelling, inflammation, a loose joint, damaged nerves in the joint. That information runs into inhibitory reflex pathways in the spinal cord and the muscle gets switched down. There's evidence the brain gets involved too. They call it arthrogenic muscle inhibition.
A perfectly good muscle, on a dimmer switch.
The brain adds up every yes and every no it's getting from the body before it lets a muscle fire. Enough no, and the strongest muscle in the building sits there quietly.
Now take that into a sprint. Or the last kilometer of a race. Or a sled push when your legs are already on fire. The stabilizers have to fire in the right order, at the right time, against something pushing back. If the input is fritzed, the brain plays it safe.
Strength is what you can produce. Reactive stability is how much of it your brain lets through.
The Chinese skaters taught me the other side of it. Eight hours a day of training, more than I could bear to watch. The ones who made it had minds like diamonds. And they all had the same dysfunctions.
I asked the coach if they'd ever considered skating the other way around the oval.
We can't.
She picked up a skate and showed me. The blade was curved. It only goes counterclockwise.
Every lap, every day, the same direction. You can't balance that out on the ice. So each athlete got a pre-activation sequence based on their assessment, done before strength training. Get the stabilizers online first. Then load them.
That's the order. It still is.
So back to the velodrome.
After a few tweaks - changing the input to his brain - his hip flexors showed their true power.
(It's a story, not a study. One rider, one afternoon. The exact mechanisms are still being worked out.)
Same muscles. Different signals.