You may recall a post on the value of belts in lifting which requested that I
review a series of articles which Paul Chek, a regular speaker on the fitness
circuit, recently wrote on the subject in Testosterone emag (see the archives
of the Supertraining eGroup). Relying on some rather dubious biomechanics
and clinical anecdotes, he deduced that all belt usage is detrimental to
lifting. Well, he posted some rather unhappy reactions to my review on
another weights user group. In one of these letters, he stated:

<<In summary, it is not a case of believing in the belly button “going in, or
going out”, it is a case of the order of events. If the body functions
correctly, segmental stabilization via the inner unit will prepare the system
for force generation. This is why I often say in my lectures, “in order for
the musculoskeletal system to stay healthy, stabilization must always precede
force generation”. >>

My response may be of interest to some of you:

*** “It is totally incorrect to state that stabilisation precedes
mobilisation. Neither is this taught or applied clinically in physical
therapy (e.g. in the application of PNF, Bobath etc), nor is it supported by
scientific research into the mechanisms of motor control. The annual
series of Bernstein memorial lectures on motor control offer just one source
of an extensive body of information which shows that stability is established
via ongoing feedback or error-correction processes acting on a foundation of
ongoing, varying levels of movement. If you have information to the
contrary, then you would be able to revolutionise the entire world of control
theory, not only in biology, but also in aeronautics, space exploration and
many other fields of human endeavour. And you would become an enormously
wealthy man in industry! ”

It is important to note that a system that is completely stable or following
a precisely described regular pattern (e.g. an unmodulated sine wave) carries
no information, so that it becomes very daunting to try to control a system
that tells you nothing about its current state. It is also fairly well known
that systems which are very close to equilibrium can display catastrophic
changes of state in response to very small perturbations (e.g. see work on
non-equilibrium systems by Nobel Prize winning scientist, Ilya Prigogine).

The process of stabilisation is by no means as simple and clearcut as Chek
seems to imply. Once again,this stresses how important it is for public
lecturers and authors in the fitness and training world to understand the
science behind the ideas and methods that they are trying to teach, sell or
apply.

Mel Siff
Denver, USA
Mel Siff Dot Com
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