05/11/2025
When you look at these body rehab exercises, it’s not that they’re wrong, but they’re more so incomplete. What happens in these motions doesn’t simulate what happens in life when you stand, walk, run or throw.
In the training world there’s something called the SAID principle. It stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. What does it mean? It means that a body will adapt to any stimulus you place on it in a specific way.
Your body adapts to any exercise you do, and whether or not that adaptation is good can be complicated, although the idea is that your training and rehab should simulate what you do in reality as closely as possible.
From weight distribution, to cadence, to understanding the distributions of motions that are all supposed to take place when we do something as “simple” as taking a step. The truth is that it’s not that simple, and it’s really easy to screw yourself up. When you take a look at the runners in this post, look at all the joint motions involved.
You have spinal motions, cranial motions and an assortment of motions in the limbs.
Now, take a look at these rehab exercises and ask yourself whether you think they’re actually preparing you for something like a sprint? If you think they are, believe it or not, they aren’t. They aren’t accounting for the specificity involved when you’re moving. Essentially, these motions are broken because they don’t account for the bigger picture in movement.
Again, it’s not to say that these exercises are completely useless, but they are adapting you to become more disjointed with your movements, not because of what they are doing for you, but more so because of what they’re leaving out.
Humans have prerequisite movement needs and those needs have to be catered to in very specific ways if you want to help them. At FP, our training orients around understanding the first 4 functions of humans. If you look at the results we constantly get, they all come from mastering these functions. When we think about the SAID principle and rehab programming, it all orients around the FP First 4: Standing, Walking, Running and Throwing.
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