Primitive Reflexes

Hey Folks!

Recently had a conversation with Trevor Montgomery, a medical professional from Auckland, NZ, about primitive reflexes. Trevor has been doing some interesting stuff with retained primitive reflexes as they relate to physical performance - specifically golf performance.

First off, so we're speaking the same language: PRIMITIVE REFLEXES are actions that originate in the central nervous system and are displayed by healthy infants - but not in neurologically-intact adults - in response to certain stimuli. These reflexes dissipate through the normal maturation process, giving way to higher functioning reflexes. Primitive reflexes never leave us. Painful episodes typically bring them back, enabling us to cope with whatever the physical ailment may be.

Trevor is a multifaceted practitioner, well versed in physical therapy, dry needling, acupuncture and manual manipulation to mention a few.  Trevor is a knowledge hound – which is why we love the guy! He’s always looking for something that will help him improve his ability to help his clients reach amazing results.

“I saw your post on primitive reflexes. I have been testing for primitive reflex retention and sensory processing problems with my golfers (and my other chronic patients) and getting some stunning results when they are properly overlaid with conscious movement!”

Folks, words like that are akin to porn right there.

We were hooked! Then the questions began. How old were they? Were they all healthy? Conceived by artificial insemination? Did you just get rid of chronic issues? Which were the more prevalent reflexes? Did you get any of this on video? 

Babinski

Trevor said he was tested, finding remnants of 11 of 14 reflexes tested.

“Strongest for me was a right ATNR, left abdominal, bilateral Babinski, bilateral tendon guard, left spinal Galant and a Landau,” he said.

Right ATNR

In other words folks, if you ever play basketball with Trevor – if these haven’t been taken care of – you, fake a drive to hole, back up and fake again to hit the Babinski, cross him over right-to-left to hit that ATNR and the Galant and give him a belly button poke, hoping Landau jumps out, as you drive to the hole!

Galant

“Yep - you would have pretty much burnt me to the hoop with that!! By the way, I have spent 12 years trying to make my left scap sit in neutral without conscious thought (despite some serious scap control work) and abolishing 4 of the reflexes that were driving it down achieved it in a little under 10 minutes.”

Crazy interesting stuff.

As trainers and teachers and facilitators of proper movement, we’re all about obtaining results. Because in the end, results – regardless if they are with a 5-year-old or a 65-year-old, are what matter most. Trevor’s success with his golfers shows pretty sweet results.

“If you address the right reflex, the golfer reports a change after the 30 sec reset,” he said. “Here's an example. One of my top amateur 17-year-old female golfers couldn't keep the ulnar aspect of her right hand on the club through to finish. She also writes like a toddler with her thumb across her fingers (not the adult frogs legs).

“Reset her grip reflex, and she immediately held the pen and wrote like an adult and couldn't remember or repeat how she wrote for the last 12 years! When we put a club in her hand, she found it easy to keep her whole right hand on the club. Will take her 12 weeks of doing the corrective exercise to make it stick in its entirety but you should get an immediate change if it is the primary driver for the movement dysfunction.”

The next day, after a lesson between the 17-year-old and her coach, Trevor received props from the coach.

Sweet stuff there. We’re interested to see what happens from here. Hopefully, Trevor starts putting of this on video! Hint! Hint! Hint!

Until next time - keep moving the future!

The Biggest Loser - Failing Kids

Stepping up.

Coach Milo playing mirror games.

There have been more than a few folks who have asked about The Biggest Loser and the new “kids” addition to it. That sinking, pit-of-the-stomach, feeling socked me as soon as I heard they’d have kids on the show. 

The biggest problem with the show is that it's on television, and commercial television is largely about one thing, making $$$$$. Shows need ratings to make money. So they will do what they need to do to get those ratings.

Sorry folks, the health of our future isn't a game show; it's not about getting ratings.

No dodgeball? Yeah right!

TBL is not reality. The only thing good about that show is it's getting folks talking about fitness. But, even within the fitness community, Jillian, the show's biggest star, is a one-trick-pony. "Let’s tear ‘em down and build ‘em back up!!!"  Berating and belittling go a long way toward creating tears, angst and anger. That’s the perfect recipe for ratings. Jillian is a good-looking, in shape marketing machine. She may be a great person - seriously. I wouldn't know because I don't know her. But the character she plays on TBL stinks. In her first show back, she pushed five people until they collapsed, and one quit. They had 5-mile walks. They, trainers, laughed at the effort. She kicked people out the gym, too. Give me a break. There are many who roll their eyes at me when I talk about fitness tasks. But if I were more like Jillian, would that be better? That's not great training, not even close. Actually, that's pretty pathetic. But in this country, if you're marketed right, you're the expert. Trainers throughout the country have to fight that stigma all the time.

Coach Ivan: Flag football
 with the young athletes.

I wish it were just my being jealous of a trainer who is in the limelight and is making a grip off every show and every product. But I'm confident and content yet still driven in my career path. This just irritates me. Now they’ve taken it up a notch. Screwing with adults is one thing. Many adults are psychologically and biologically prepared to deal with the ramifications of TBL’s information. Our teens are not (that's another thing, if the goal was to address our alarming childhood obesity rates, why did they start teens. They should've started with even younger children).

What ever happened to free play?

The first problem TBL has with the obesity problem is premise that they believe they are going to raise awareness of childhood obesity in the US.  File that one under, “Holy Self-Indulgent Bovine Excrement Batman!” Really? Does this show believe that it has uncovered a secret or that the nation fails to see the problem we have with our inactive, overweight and obese youth? Awareness isn’t the issue. It hasn’t been for a long time. Proper action is the issue.  Adults are acting too much on logic while dealing with obesity – an emotional issue. We have to use emotion to deal with emotion.

Moms, sons, daughters. Nothing
wrong with this picture!

The second problem TBL has with the children is they’re letting the regular trainers work with the kids. TBL, if it were looking to actually create a positive change within the culture surrounding our young folks and their health, could have gotten a person more adept at interacting with kids. They should have found the biggest  “kid” around to play with the three that they chose. OH AND WHAT’S WITH ONLY THREE KIDS?!?! Seriously, there are games you can play with three, but there are many more you can play with eight to 10. And with eight to 10 kids, there is a higher chance that there will be a wider cross-section of the nation's obese young.

Instead TBL is using the same trainers who are simply showing their softer side. But nobody is playing. Kids, even teenagers, want to play. Hell, even when NFL Play 60 did its two pennies worth, the kids still didn’t play! They cheered on the NFL Players hoping to get a player at their school.

Really, I love the thought behind the NFL’s Play 60 campaign. They want to do good stuff. They want to – at least it appears – be an agent for action with youth fitness. But the program falls well short of what it could be.

Want kids moving? Adults
have to move, too!

Our kids are going to get the biggest loser's message either directly by watching the show or indirectly by their parent's friend's ex-father in-law who heard it from that part-time crossfit instructor outside of Taco Bell. And the message they’re going to get is that it’s okay to tell everybody the social problems you have so we can all feel sorry for you and shed some tears.

It's sad. We understand. But it's not melodramatic and shouldn't be sensationalized.

We know the problem! We see it every damn day. What the nation needs to see is how to solve the problem. Telling the teens to try dancing and kickboxing?  C’mon, stop passing the buck! Get in there, and play games with the kids. Make them feel as if they are an integral part of something that’s bigger than them.

Stepping down. 

Hydration Time

Hey folks!

Eight glasses a day may or may not be enough.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of water in our diet. By not drinking as much as we should, we're allowing a host of issues to potentially affect us. Generally speaking, 2/3rds of the body is water. Getting a little more specific: 



- Muscle consists of 75% water
- Brain consists of 90% of water
- Bone consists of 22% of water
- Blood consists of 83% water
From a functional standpoint, water:

- Gets nutrients and oxygen into our cells
- Helps protect vital organs by helping them absorb nutrients more efficiently.
- Regulates body temperature
- Helps get rid of toxins
- Helps our metabolism
Lack of water leads to:
- Sluggishness
- Headaches
- Muscle cramping
- Kidney stones
- Constipation
We need to take in at least half of our body weight in ounces of water each day.

So, if I weigh 100 pounds, I need to take in at least 50 ounces of water. Fruit drinks, coffees, sodas and sports drinks do not count. Good ol' water. You can drink the other stuff, too. But that doesn't count toward the water intake.

Now if you'd like to take it further, drink at least 25% of that total within the first 30 minutes of waking up in the morning. That, mixed with a protein-laden breakfast does an amazing job of helping us stay even-keeled throughout the day. We'll get into water a lot more later. But for now, here are few websites you can visit if you want to learn a bit more about water and its importance. http://www.thefactsaboutwater.org/health/the-functions-of-water-in-the-body/ .......... http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/jenheath4.htm ..........http://www.active-water.com/en/regulation_water_body.html .......... (Water is crazy important to our economy, too!) http://water.epa.gov/action/importanceofwater/index.cfm

If it's important, don't demean it.

In response to this article titled: Yay for Recess: Pediatricians Say It’s as Important as Math or Reading

Love that the medical profession is starting to raise a voice to this issue. The only problem is the understated demeaning of recess – otherwise known as freedom of movement without the restriction of direct adult influence.

Sure the headline says the pediatricians believe recess is as important as math and science. Then the quotes and statements in the article support the headline. But then the doctors don’t treat recess as an equal.

In the article, Murray says, “Children need to have downtime between complex cognitive challenges. They tend to be less able to process information the longer they are held to a task. It’s not enough to just switch from math to English. You actually have to take a break.”

The statement appears innocuous on is surface. But it’s wrong to infer that recess fails to involve complex cognitive challenges.

Moving muscles stimulate axonal growth. Axons carry messages between neurons. We have more than a 100 billion neurons at birth, and every movement we make helps fire those neurons, creating more thought pathways – helping us learn more. In one particular 1997 study, completed by Paris’ Pasteur Institute and the Developmental Biology Institute in Marseilles (Changeux and Henderson), it was found that the number of axons is directly related to intelligence. Folks, who move more, benefit from that development.

That study was buttressed by a 2002 study involving 500 school children that was completed at UC Irvine. That study (Quartz and Sejnowski) found that children who spent an hour each day in physical education class scored better on intelligence test than those who were inactive. These studies have been replicated numerous times.

The movements during recess aren’t mental downtime. That movement is learning. Running, jumping, kicking, hitting, throwing, catching, squatting, bending, extending, twisting, dribbling and tumbling are all complex cognitive challenge. The difference is the movements during recess are perceived as fun activities for the children. Fun is an emotional construct. At that age, we only have the ability to truly enjoy was we perceive as pleasurable to us.

Mother Nature didn’t screw up anything. Our brains were made to enjoy movement so we would want to move a lot. Sitting around reading and looking at numbers and letters isn’t fun. But for those who move more, sitting around is easier to tolerate.

This may seem like huffiness and puffiness from a movement maven. But we must understand the power our pediatricians possess. Recess IS NOT a break from learning, but they’re inferring that it is.

How did we get into this educational mess anyway? We got here because somebody incorrectly deemed physical education and recess as less important aspects of the academic structure.

--MFB

SPEED WINDOWS

As a short recap to the last blog:

There are certain times during the body’s maturation that the biological sciences have shown that we can help enhance certain aspects of a child’s physical nature.

We call these “windows of opportunity” or “gates” that open and are prepared to be optimized. From the physical standpoint, there are speed, mobility, kinesthetic and vestibular awareness, endurance, strength and power windows. Mentally, there are times where we can best help a child improve ability to rationalize and process what happens each day.

We’ll discuss speed windows today.

For boys, the first speed window happens between a biological 6 to 9 years old, give or take a few months. Researchers, Wilmore and Costill, showed there is a slight rise in testosterone during that time.  In separate studies, several researchers showed an increase both strength and power in boys.  From a handgrip to shoulder, elbow, hip and knee flexion, Shephard and Lavallee as well as Malina and Roche showed that boys strength improved in that 6-9 age range.

What’s not known is how much neuromuscular facilitation, or the ability of the brain to make the muscles do what it actually wants them to do, is involved with the strength gains during this age range. However, given that more testosterone is actually added to the body at that point, it is not a huge leap to ascertain that doing activities that promote strength and speed will help form muscle fiber designed to, in fact, facilitate strength and speed.

Five different studies (Jones – 1949 (2 different studies), Beunen – 1988, Loko – 1977, Kemper and Verschuur – 1985), determined that the second window for strength and speed happens to boys from about 13 to 16.5-17 years old. That time frame is consistent with the pubertal growth spurt. Testosterone begins to increase during puberty. And at that peak of a boy’s growth (PHV or peak height velocity) testosterone comes in a huge way. (A quick side: research shows that the optimal time to introduce boys to external load strength training is roughly 18 months post PHV. However, we’ve found nothing biologically wrong with starting the athletes on external-load resistance training at PHV. If the athlete has been training since before puberty and has an excellent grasp of the exercise he is supposed to do, then there is nothing wrong with adding resistance to the movements he has been doing.)

Research shows that girls do not have the same dramatic growth as boys. However, the strength and speed gains are no less than that of the boys. In fact, a 1994 study by Shephard and Lavallee showed a more expansive increase in muscular strength in girls than in boys. Malina and Roche (1983) showed that the onset of those gains in girls was started earlier than boys, especially in the muscle groups used for pulling motions – forearm flexors, biceps, latissimus dorsi, posterior deltoids, trapezius, teres minor and makor and rhomboids.

As earlier stated, the second speed window happens during the pubertal growth spurt for boys and a little earlier for girls, who do not have as pronounced a growth spurt as boys.

From roughly 13 to about 16.5-17 years old, boys typically go through that radical growth according to studies including: Espenschade (1960), Clarke (1971), Guzalovski (1977), Shephard (1982), Saavedra (1991) and Froberg and Lammert (1996). As mentioned earlier testosterone hits boys in a huge way in the middle of that growth. That hormonal increase spurs a strength increase, too. More muscle fiber means the boy has a better chance of recruiting the muscle mass needed to perform movement at higher speeds.

Many of the same individuals and research teams studied girls, too, finding that the average onset of the second big strength improvement came about a year to 1.5 years before the boys. Girls grow more steadily than boys after the initial rapid growth that happens after birth. Their strength gains tend to progress more steadily, too, typically reaching full maturity before boys. Again, just as in the first speed window, the girls’ steady rate of strength improvement proved to equal to that of the boys’ rapid growth. The big difference is the testosterone – which makes the boys much stronger.

Windows of Opportunity ... Gates to Freedom

What's up folks!?!

We hope this day is treating you well! Gonna jump right into something important to the folks at C.L.A.Y. - principles behind certain aspects of Long-Term Athletic Development or LTAD.

There are no long-term, double-blind, peer-reviewed scientific studies performed on humans, rats, bovine or cardboard boxes on LTAD and the "windows of opportunity" that exist within the human developmental process.

Let us know if you do find one.

Until then, believe that there is scientific evidence that backs up the claims many proponents of LTAD have for the aforementioned windows. We will explore these windows and their scientific origins over the next few blogs.

5-year-old boy jumping.

These windows are akin to gates. They are periods during our physical and mental maturation where, with guidance and encouragement, we are able to best capitalize on that growth. To our knowledge the windows do not close. However, the effectiveness with which we can use them diminishes over time. Fail to take advantage of these opportunities, and we will lose the chance to help our children achieve the most physically fit bodies they could possibly have - if that is their choosing. 

Physically, there are moments we can help enhance speed, mobility, kinesthetic and vestibular awareness, endurance, strength and power. Mentally and psychologically there are also times we can help improve our children's ability to rationalize, cope and process life's complexities.

14-year-old girl sprinting and jumping.

Understanding these windows will help the youth health and fitness professional construct programming that suits a specific discipline. At C.L.A.Y, we have broken 62 sports into four movement categories (we'll discuss them in a later blog). Each category has a long-term program or periodization model with several macrocycles and even more microcycles that are based on our phases of development, these points of opportunity, our growth and our sex.

This is an exciting time to be in the fitness industry, especially if you possess an interest in training children. Granted, you probably wouldn't be on this blog if you didn't. But training children goes beyond merely crawling, climbing, kicking, hitting, catching and laughing with them. Children model us, constantly following our lead even when we do not think they are. So, we must be prepared to lead them down a path that will enable them to create their own paths when they are physically and mentally ready.

Our next blog will be on the four speed windows. There are two windows for both sexes.

When it comes to speed, think about rockets, jets, cars and 18-wheelers or rocket fuel, jet fuel, gas and diesel. There is potential for human rocket fuel if we help children optimize both periods. Miss one of them, and children are reduced to achieving jet fuel. There are fast jets, but even the fastest jet gets lapped by the slowest rocket. Miss both windows, but get the child before the growth plates close, and we have the chance to help them develop gasoline. There are plenty of fast cars on the world's highways. But, seriously? A jet versus a car? If the child misses both opportunities and has reached full physical maturity, the best we can do is help them get some diesel. Overall diesel holds more energy than gas, but it is not going to be as quick or as powerful as gas. Outside of endurance events, athletic endeavors require quickness, speed and power.

So, come back and check out the research behind the speed windows. 

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Moving the Future

First time...

A young girl comes to our junior golf class for the first time. We were out on the course that day, and were using kick balls and soccer balls as our tee shots.

I grabbed a ball and talked with the girl about places she could kick it. After we decided where, I stepped back and said, "Ok, kick it hard!"

She just looked at the ground in front of me. Shy. Maybe even a little embarrassed. Her hands behind her back, head slightly tilted, not making eye contact. So, I told her again, "Hey, it's all right, just kick it right where we were talking about."

Same shy look.

Her mom, sitting on a cart about 50 yards away called to me, and I ran to her. Meanwhile my coworker took the other children through the kicking.

"Coach Milo," the mom said. "Just wanted you to know that she has never kicked a ball."

I think I was equally floored and irritated. The girl was six, almost seven years old, and had never kicked a ball! Isn't that akin to cruel and unusual punishment? Had she been locked away, put in some desk tucked in the back of a dingy classroom, banned from every child's birthright to put foot on ball only to see it sail through the air? The thought of calling CPS, the FBI and the DOD did cross my mind.

Instead, I simply said, "Cool."

Getting back to the group, I called to Leah.

"All right, this what we're going to do. Are you right footed or left footed?"

Same shy look.

"Well, it doesn't matter," I said. "We're going to do this with both feet. I want you put your left foot right here by the ball. Now step back with your right foot. Then you're going to keep your left foot in place and swing your right foot through the air as fast as you can so this part of the foot right here connects with the ball."

She did it. The ball sailed. The smile that followed would've warmed the meanest IRS agent.

"Wait! Wait! Don't take off yet," I said as Leah began running to the ball. "We gotta do the same thing on the other side."

Kick it!!!

Leah was with us several more times that week. By the end of the week, Leah was running up and kicking from both sides of the ball with equal gusto. Each time she'd give a huge kick then skip off singing a song.

Understand this coaches, we will rarely ever know when we will be an integral part of a young athlete's first attempt at something. The way we react to it is crucial to that athlete's development. Say something wrong, use the wrong tone or give a disparaging glance, and the child could have another hurdle to climb, this one an emotional hurdle - which is much more difficult to surmount.

As coaches of young athletes, we are there to teach, encourage and enhance all in a safe arena that allows for ample exploration. At six years old, personalities and attitudes are still being shaped. When it comes to movement and athletics, let's give the children the knowledge of how to do it and the skills to actually do it.

Knowledge + Skill helps develop confidence in our young athletes.

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Moving the Future