Many of my clients will ask my opinion about whether a particular sport or activity promotes movement health. Yoga, running, swimming, weight training, ballet, soccer, gymnastics, crossfit. (People are especially interested in whether these activities will be healthy for their kids.)
It’s an interesting question because almost any physical activity you can think of has costs as well as benefits. Of course, I usually answer that everyone is different so it depends on the individual and the sport and yada yada yada. But I also offer my Grand Unified Theory of Specialization, which, because it is Grand and Unified, applies to almost any activity, and goes something like this:
In general, as you progress in any sport or activity from novice to intermediate, you will probably benefit your overall movement health by improving some previously underdeveloped fitness quality, such as strength or aerobic fitness. You will also likely improve on your basic movement skill set by developing body control, or balance, or hand eye coordination. These fitness qualities and skills are likely to be transferrable to other domains. And, you will probably be performing at a low enough level of intensity and frequency to minimize injuries and excessive stress. So this is good.
However, as you progress from intermediate to expert, it becomes far more likely that this will negatively affect your movement health. The movement skills and fitness qualities you develop will become more and more specific and less useful in other domains. And, more importantly, these adaptations can only be bought at the great expense of putting the body under extreme levels of physical stress, which increases the risks of injury and overtraining.
In short, the very general rule, to which there are obviously many exceptions, is that most sports and activities are good for you to the intermediate level, and bad for you after that. Here’s how this rule might play out in the context of different sports or activities.
Aesthetic movement disciplines
Gymnastics and dance (especially ballet) are excellent examples of activities that I think are quite healthy at moderate doses and then an absolute disaster at elite levels of performance. The good news is that they provide a great general education in body control. The highly successful Soviet sport development program considered gymnastics to be a key ingredient in general physical preparation (GPP) for athletes in any sport. My own experience in working with dancers or gymnasts is that they have a very good body sense that makes it relatively easy for them to modify their movement behaviors.
But the bad news is that at some level of accomplishment, these sports create massive stress on the body. This is particularly obvious in the case of ballet, where walking on the toes and turning the feet out wreak havoc with the lower hips and feet. I also think that excessive focus on the appearance of the body as it moves, as opposed to how it feels or what it does, can be an unhealthy way to form your self image.
Team sports
Soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, etc. develop a wide range of fitness qualities such as strength, speed, endurance and power. At the same time, they teach many basic movement skills such as hand eye coordination, spatial awareness, agility, single leg balance, and fundamental movement patterns like kicking, throwing, swinging, and lunging. (By the way, when I dictated that last line into my Dragon Dictate program, it transcribed “swinging and lunging” as “swinging in London.” Oh behave!)
One of the drawbacks of team sports is that they can involve so much external focus on events outside the body (such as the ball, or the opponent, or the goal line) that you can miss out on the benefits of the internal focus that is present in gymnastics or the locomotive sports. And, as we all know from simply watching popular sports, these games take a huge physical toll when played at the highest level. Few people can remain elite competitors after the age of thirty, and even recreational athletes find competition tough after forty five.
Fitness sports
Running, swimming, cycling, walking, cross country skiing and rowing all involve full-body basic primal movements in a cyclical, rhythmic, repetitive fashion. This type of exercise seems to uniquely beneficial in developing aerobic fitness, maintaining metabolic health, and creating the beneficial mental state of focused and meditative discipline.
Resistance training has been shown to have tremendous benefits for metabolic, structural and mental health, and it appears that as we age the importance of resistance training increases.
But whatever type of fitness quality you are trying to develop, elite accomplishment in that area will always come at the expense of other types of fitness or health. The more you lift, the less you can run and vice versa. Some top powerlifters can barely waddle a mile. Some top marathoners can barely do a push-up. They should both be admired for their amazing accomplishments, but not envied for their health. In some sense, your body really does not want you to be able to run a mile in under four minutes, or deadlift a thousand pounds. These abilities imply an allocation of limited health resources that is skewed so far in one particular direction as to be unhealthy.
Internal discplines
Certain martial arts and slow meditative movement practices such as tai chi, yoga, and Feldenkrais have huge potential benefits and I write about them on this blog quite a bit. They can reduce the threat value of movement, help with chronic pain, build new movement patterns, and develop a greater self awareness that extends beyond mere movement.
As much as I love this stuff I have to imagine that at some point the degree of internal focus in these disciplines can go too far. Surely it should be balanced by the occasional reference to the hard edges of the real world provided by an opponent or an objective measurement. This keeps us grounded in reality, and not off on some weird tangent of self indulgent internal exploration.
Conclusion
There is nothing wrong with reaching for the highest level in whatever you do. It is very rewarding, and in fact I have devoted and continue to devote a lot of time and effort to reach my potential at one sport or another. But I don’t imagine this has made me healthier! Health is always about balance. Extreme performance or optimum health, pick one!
Great post, Todd. I would also argue that “health” is largely subjective to the individual. One must define what health looks and feels like to them. This also will likely change as one ages or progresses in their physical (and mental) pursuits. The goal then, might consider defining what optimal health should look like and then matching a movement profile to enhance or maintain that personalized definition.
And health professionals should serve as a guide to ask questions like “how is that working for you?”
Quite often pain arises from inner conflict, or perhaps a previously established physical practice that doesn’t serve them in the present. As an example, an ex-collegiate distance runner who now has a family of four and is a busy entrepreneur may find that running 50+ miles a week doesn’t serve his current lifestyle (time away from family and work obligations, etc).
Hi Charlie,
Thanks for commenting. Yeah it is hard to define health and I suppose I won’t attempt that. Maybe that new Nassim Tale book would help me. I do think that certain physiological states are more robust and less fragile than others in a systems theory kind of sense, maybe that is a clue to how we should define health. But then again, like a good joke, health is easier to see than define. Its pretty obvious who is healthy and who is not. Good point about defining your fitness goals, I have been meaning to write a post about that.
Nice post. My main question is if many people (ranging from middle/high school athletes all they way up to forty plus year olds)have the goal of becoming the best (or at the very least, the best they personally can become) how do we work towards this while limiting the likelihood of injury? Obviously they will need hours upon hours of repetition to get that good, so how do we combat that overuse/specialization that may come about and lead to injury? I’m guessing it’s a combination of quality nutrition, sleep, and limited amounts of other stressors (physical and emotional), as well as a solid background of GPP, with a planned off season to allow the body time to recover (I feel that a lack of an off season is one of the huge problems with dancers and gymnast, they seem to go non stop all year). But is there anything else you would add to this? I know you are (or at least I think you are) a huge fan on developing coordination with ones chosen sport, and allowing the body to be placed under the stressors of that sport to allow for the specific adaptations to occur, but are you for the idea of “correcting” some of these adaptations which occurs from hundreds of thousands of repetitions? Obviously there are strength coaches and PTs and such who are for that, but do you view that as counter intuitive and not having much of a role with injury prevention, overuse, and/or overspecialization? A bunch of questions mixed in there!! But any thoughts or input would be much appreciated.
Hi Derek,
There are many strategies to limit injury when trying to be the best and these comprise the whole of sports science. You mentioned some of them here. Pat Ward’s blog has some good info on this and Joel Jameison as well.
Not sure what you mean by “correcting”. I guess I would say that if an adaptation has more cost than benefit it should be corrected if possible. How to measure the costs and benefits and create the correction is a different issue.
Nice guidelines–I completely agree.
As a weird aside, a friend of a friend’s brother died from, and I quote, “too much chi gung.” There are also numerous horror stories in old yogic texts about the dangers of overdoing yogic practice.
So in addition to not being grounded in reality, excessive yoga/chi gung/etc. at “elite levels” might also be possibly dangerous.
Thanks Duff. Wow death by chi gung. I was focused more on the risks of extreme sports when I wrote this as opposed to extreme chi gung and I threw in my concerns about that more as afterthought. Moderation in all things I guess.
Great article !
This is a conversation I have with my patients on a daily basis !!
My husband’s granddaughter has played hockey since she was very young. Sadly, by the age of 14, her knees were very painful. She recently had surgery on both knees and the doctors are predicting knee replacement by the time she is 30.
Hatha yoga can be damaging at extreme levels of performance on on its own (see for example this terrifyingly-titled NYT piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html ). I think your prior points on the dangers of mis-emphasis on appearance or performance apply here, too: people want to “do the (most extreme/interesting/prestigious) poses”, rather than actually practice yoga, which is only meant as a tool for greater enlightenment and wellbeing.
In general, I think we as a culture aren’t doing nearly enough moving-becauase-it-feels-good. We move out of obligation or ego or competition, and forget that it can be, and probably should be, simply *fun*.
Hi Arwyn,
Great points. When I used to do yoga I was very conscious of a bad habit of trying to emulate the people who could go very very deep into the harder poses. Bad idea! Even though I knew it was a bad idea I found it hard to resist.
Very nice post. So helpful to look at contextual pros and cons. I think acknowledging the cons means one can be so more effective.
” A person who knows and utilises his true weakness, who uses his strength to include it, is a whole person” -Moshe Feldenkrais
Hello, Mr. Hargrove:
I always find your posts thought-provoking, educational and often quite intriguing. Nearing 60 years of age, I have been involved in martial arts for 30 of those years and have run the gamut from Gumby-like flexibility to Bruce Lee-wannabe (that’s rich coming from a 6′ Caucasian with ectomorphic tendencies!) in my efforts to achieve near-perfect physical properties. I have also dabbled in Feldenkrais and, although the neurological reprogramming often stunned me with its marvelousness, I still wanted that chiseled abs and physique model to demonstrate to members of the fairer gender.
Naturally, with the passage of time, I have found that maintaining postural efficiency and a fair degree of muscularity are all that one really needs to continue along life’s road, more particularly as we continue to age. However, we are beset by so many images of the “ideal” body prototype in the media and by our own fantasies built upon our heroes, be they sports, literal or otherwise, that the common sense principle vanishes into the mist. It is generally only after we have suffered injury, deterioration of ability, or degeneration of the overall structure that we slowly realise how foolish it is to pursue every will o’the wisp. The hardest thing for me has been (and continues to be) focussing on what it is that is vitally important to my continued survival as a physical being – it’s wonderful and intellectually stimulating to read and experiment with the many modalities of physical culture that abound, but we still have to come down to earth and select that one (or two, or three) that guarantes us both success and continuity (and all in moderation).
Thanks again for your instructive posts and keep ‘em coming.
Sincerely,
Bradley
As an avid tai chi practitioner, I think that the “hard edges” of the world are brought into awareness during “push hands,” weapons forms, and martial applications practice. In my biased opinion, this makes tai chi one of the best all-around fitness practices, and is really an essential aspect of the practice. The best tai chi players are often the healthiest and longest-lived as well, unless they party too hard, which seems to happen with regularity.
This article was quite worth the read. The whole Russian fitness program thing intrigues me as well. Well done.
Hi Todd,
Thanks for your blog, I’m a recent subscriber and a huge fan! I’ve been a dancer for many years, spent a lot of time doing hiphop/body percussion and almost always came away from a performance sore… used to think I just needed to get stronger and then the pain would disappear.
Eventually I discovered Contact Improvisation, and found that that modality satisfied my trifecta of desire for physical discipline/embodied creativity/authentic human connection.
Just wanted to throw CI into the mix as a contender for that chimera of a physical practice: one that synthesizes elite performance with optimum health.
From my limited experience, (6+ years) this is mainly because the inter-community definition of ‘elite’ performance is explicitly stated as something entirely individual. I also find that the blurring (and sometimes disappearance) of any sort of hierarchy in the midst of a jam is an incredibly effective counter to my own tendency to push push push, harder better faster stronger. I find that regularly sharing space with dancers of all skill levels and abilities, which is an essential part of this practice, quite naturally means that the more I do contact improvisation the more compassionate I become with myself and others… which changes my own relationship to my body in a way that feels (to me) entirely conducive to optimum health.
Just wanted to throw that out there.
Thanks for the blog, so grateful for your wisdom!
-Ryan
Great points! I have had this discussion with many people, and usually start with the Sumo wrestler example as the epitome of highest performance in a domain not being equal to health. The best Sumo wrestler is not very health.
And to lesser degrees that’s true for every competitive athlete. I’d put marathoners as not quite as bad as the Sumo wrestler, but way worse than a less stressful sport.
Having just had my 5 year anniversary of doing CrossFit, I can identify with the desire to be a high performer being at odds with health as I progress.
To add another wrinkle, I think health and longevity are separate issues as well. The guy who is functional till 78, with no drugs and active until that last day is in my opinion healthier than the guy who was strung along on statins, blood pressure medicine, and insulin until he was 80. But the 80 year old beat him at longevity.
I like to picture this as a triangle with Health, Longevity, and Fitness at each vertex. The previously mentioned 80 year old was skewed towards longevity at the cost of health and fitness. The Sumo wrestler is HEAVILY skewed towards fitness (fit for his sport) at the cost of health and longevity.
I always am targeting a SLIGHT bias towards performance, so I’m willing to give up a bit on the other two (but just a bit!) for performance. I enjoy competing in CrossFit, so that’s my focus, but the triangle described helps keep me balanced. I won’t seek performance at all costs, that’s not my goal.
It’s been working well so far, and with my recent reading of Bending The Aging Curve I’m happier than ever that I pursue heavy weights balanced with CrossFit style metcons.