When you take your car to the mechanic for routine maintenance, one of the service items they suggest you regularly do is a tire rotation. The alignment of your car will always have some imbalances, which will lead to subtle, but significant uneven wear on your tires. Compound this with uneven roads, minor defects, and repeated driving patterns, and this means that your tires will not last nearly as long if you always leave them on the same corner of your car. Some spots will wear more and some will wear less, and before long, you’ll be dealing with tires that need to be replaced because of uneven wear. Rotating your tires gives you a chance to spread out this uneven wear and make your tires safer, your driving experience better, and your replacement interval longer.

You wouldn’t be too far off if you applied this same idea to your body. Particular movement faults, asymmetries, and repeated positional and movement patterns can lead to uneven wear and tear, unpleasant movement experiences (pain), and, God forbid, a need for early replacement (you’d be shocked, and rightly so, at the rising rates of knee and hip replacements, particularly in younger populations).

Now, you cannot head to your local body-mechanic and rotate your limbs like you can your tires. However, we have our own way of preventing uneven wear and tear and promoting healthy joint function and longevity: variation. It’s so important that it’s one of the three pillars of our model of how we achieve fitness: functional movements, intensity, and variety.

If you want a perfect example of this principle at play, a little game of connect the dots gives us a pretty clear view of why running is, statistically, the exercise/activity with the highest rate of injury. Why? Because a large percentage of people who run mostly or exclusively run (and people tend to run with very poor form), and running is an inherently un-varied and repetitive activity. The typical runner’s fitness protocol is a lot like driving your car on the exact same roads, in the exact same manner, at the exact same speeds, with the exact same alignment, and without ever rotating your tires, day after day after day. Your body is a beautiful and capable adapting machine, but even human physiology has its limits. The same applies to more than just running: cycling, hiking, hockey, bench pressing, swimming, golf, you name it. Do too much of it and not enough other stuff and you’ll find yourself with a cranky shoulder, busted hip, or achy back before long.

Variation in movement is our way of “rotating the tires” on the body. It stresses the muscles and joints that don’t see enough stress, moves the limbs through ranges of motion and at angles that they otherwise miss, strengthens opposing muscle groups and gives overworked muscle groups a break, and, believe it or not, actually increases your capacities in your chosen sport or activity (in other words, things other than running can actually improve your running more than just running).

You’re not an insect evolutionarily evolved for a single function, so stop treating yourself like one.

- PS

9/27/18

• Hang power snatch - work up to a heavy set of 3 in 10 minutes

Then...

• Every 3 mins for 15 mins, complete, for time:

• 10 hang power snatch (115/80)

• 10 cal row

• *record slowest time