The Truth is Not Always What is Practiced

It’s interesting how new ideas emerge. Do new ideas just bubble into consciousness? If that were the case, wouldn’t anyone be able to author a new idea? And by new ideas I’m specifically referring to ideas that are creative, valuable, and push the boundaries of our thinking and comprehension further.

The urge to write about a new idea it is usually a result of careful analyzation of related ideas and experiences. Maybe I saw someone doing something and wanted to know if it worked. Maybe I heard someone say something and I wanted to know if there was any truth to it. Maybe I tacitly understood something but came across some information that breathed life into that dormant thought. Regardless, a new idea usually stems from another idea, experience, information, or some eclectic integration of these things. Everything I just wrote was a product of reading the book, NEW by Winifred Gallagher (1). I remember reading in that book how creativity is influenced through a strong fundamental understanding of whatever it is you are trying to be creative about. After thinking about that, I was inspired to write this blog.

But, old ideas are valuable as well. Ideas that have stood the test of time do so because their essence is engrained with the truth. Like an oak tree that grows thicker and stronger with age, an old idea becomes more accurate because its content faces perpetual criticism and testing but remains unscathed. In the context of strength and conditioning, ideas such as these are the principles that we base our programs off of. Progressive overload, specificity, and recovery are a few examples of this.

Not every new idea is creative and not every old idea is truthful, however. There are old ideas who are only partly true, outdated, or wrong to begin with that have also stood the test of time. There could be multiple reasons for this. For one, an idea is limited by the current knowledge of the society it was born in. Archaic people believed that our spirit was “haunted by ghosts” because of the human tendency to do things we know we shouldn’t do but do anyways (2). As psychology developed, these ghosts are more rightly named as “impulses, emotions…motivational states, or as complexes” (2). It could be that a prominent and well respected figure in a field does things a certain way and to do it any other way would be wrong. This is a deeply embedded issue in strength and conditioning, one that I talked about in my last post. Finally, we as humans can be lazy about updating our knowledge and beliefs. We do things a certain way because that is how it has always been done. To go against the grain, to update your beliefs, that requires effort and the courage to admit you do not know everything. It is much easier to continue as is.

Ideas of this nature are Pathway Dependencies, a term that I became aware of through reading John Kiely’s Work (3). A pathway dependency is ‘‘something that seems normal today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, and survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice’’ (3). Pathway dependent ideas and ideologies are progress inhibitors. Anything built solely off of a pathway dependency is fundamentally wrong. They are also tenacious, like weeds in a garden. The only way to permanently get rid of them is by cutting the root out.

If you are a coach you have experienced this before. Try thinking back to things your coaches used to always say or have you do. Maybe you had an intuition that some of the things you were doing were not productive or even right but you participated because coach said so. Are any bells ringing?

I am going to go through three personal experiences I consider pathway dependent, and there is a strong chance if you have played sports or lifted weights you have heard these as well. I am going to attempt to explain their origin and provide some information you can use to assess their validity. But before that, keep in mind my intention is to hopefully reveal the truth instead of what I believe the truth to be. If that wasn’t the case, this entire post would be incredibly ironic. The point is to show with some digging you can get closer to the truth, and the truth will move you forward.

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1. Using Aerobic Activity to “Clear” Lactic Acid

It was a beautiful spring day, and instead of playing baseball I was running like a cross county athlete. The day before I had pitched 7 innings, accumulating over 100 pitches. A large workload in baseball standards, and it is all too common to run after such an outing. Pitching coaches might say something like, “You built up a lot of lactic acid yesterday, you need to run today to clear all of that out”. So you would go run…a lot.

The perspective of this pathway dependency is the specific sporting task of pitching a baseball for large workloads causes a substantial increase in lactic acid, and lactic acid will sit and fester until it is removed by aerobic activity. To get to the bottom of this all you need to do is spend 5 to 10 minutes in an exercise physiology textbook.

Lactic acid is a byproduct of anaerobic glycolysis. Anaerobic glycolysis is the metabolic engine that takes place in the absence of oxygen. It predominantly fuels high intensity activity that lasts for 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Once lactic acid is produced in the muscle it immediately dissociates to lactate. If the body is unable to clear lactate in response to the rate of its production, lactate begins to accumulate. Lactate is not a waste product and serves a useful purpose by mobilizing glycogen reserves which spares blood glucose. Finally, the body has built-in mechanisms that clear lactate, and lactate levels return to near normal within 30 to 60 minutes.

Firstly, pitching is an intense activity. Generally, every pitch is thrown with maximum effort. However the duration of a pitch only lasts one to two seconds and then another pitch isn’t thrown for another twenty to thirty seconds. And if a pitcher goes back out to pitch the next half inning, they have at least six minutes of rest there. Lactate accumulates above normal levels under intense activity that lasts from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. For these reasons, there are no physiological differences in lactate levels from resting or a bout of pitching (4).

Peeling back another layer of incorrect thinking, even if lactate did accumulate it would be innately cleared by the body within an hour. It doesn’t just stay stagnant like this pathway dependency implies, and certainly not for 24 hours.

How is this pathway dependency hurtful?

Subscribing to this idea is a blatant mismanagement of training load. Regardless if a coach is tactical & technical or sport performance, the concept of stress should be familiar. Specifically, different stressors cause different adaptations and stressors of a large magnitude that have not been prepared for are contraindicted and potentially injurious.

The training target of a bout of endurance running is not specific to the act of pitching. A pitcher’s task specific work capacity is not limited by their aerobic fitness. Bartolo Colon and CC Sabathia are two pitchers that immediately demonstrate this just by looking at them (and both won Cy Youngs). There is also a high probability this stressor is not going to be tolerated well. Baseball is a sport of low mileage, and the intermittent interpolation of endurance runs is a stressor that baseball athletes will not be prepared for through only playing their sport. This is especially true in-season, when practices and training sessions tend to be shorter and lower in volume.

Time is valuable. Do not waste your practice time by doing something that doesn’t help you or potentially hurts you simply because you don’t know the whole reason behind doing it. There are so many valuable tasks you could have a pitcher do the day after a game. To allude to a pet peeve of mine, you could just let them practice and not classify them as a pitcher only (at least at the high school level).

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2. Predominantly Using Other Exercises As a Means of Improving a Specific Exercise

I get asked this question a lot.

"What exercises are best to improve my squat max?”

On the surface level, this question is well intended. It is useful information to know what exercises will have a positive impact on your squat performance. But, it is only useful insofar this information is applied correctly in a program. Generally this question is asked with the wrong intention. Instead of wanting to know what exercises can assist squat performance, the perspective is what exercises can I use to replace the squat but improve squat performance more than what squatting can. Such a perspective is evidently incongruous, but very much alive in gyms across America. And I am only using the squat as a convenient example. This pathway dependency has been applied to all compound exercises. I was once talking to a friend struggling with his bench press. He said he was going to remove the bench completely and just do overhead work with dumbbells for a few months to blow his bench up because that’s what a guy said at the gym.

I can try to identify a few rationales for the existence of this pathway dependency. The first might be the inherent difficulty that comes with compound exercises. These exercises are hard and can take a toll on you. So, if there was a less difficult exercise that could improve your squat to the same degree or more, why not use it? Or perhaps you have been squatting, a lot, and reached a plateau. You might think, if squatting isn’t improving my squat, something else surely will. Or you could extend the rationale out to the degree you believe other exercises will work the same muscles but more intensely, and combining them will produce superior results. I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure but I would love to be a fly on the wall when these sorts of discussions take place.

A few tried and true principles can deconstruct this one.

The first is the distinction between skills and capacities. The act of squatting (or any other compound exercise) is a skill. A skill can be defined as, “the ability to control the body accurately, effectively, and in a timely manner” (5). A skill is disparate from a capacity (disparate in that it allows us to theoretically classify these two categories but in reality there is some crossover). A capacity is defined as “the ability to express a quality” (5). A quality, in this context, meaning the body’s capability of expressing movement (power, strength, endurance).

Squatting increases our capacity to produce force in our legs. But, so does the deadlift, and the power clean, and the single leg squat, and the leg press. A squat is not the only means we can use to improve this particular capacity. If performance was only dependent on capacities then we could just do all of these other exercises and expect our squat to improve. This is not the case. If you programmed these exercises and not the squat, your capacity to produce force in your legs would increase. But if at the end of the program you tested your squat max your max would not be proportional to the increase in force potential because you haven’t practiced the skill of squatting.

The squat is a technical exercise. It requires practice to master its obvious parts and subtle, intradependent nuances. Squatting heavy is an even more refined extension of this skill. Squatting an extremely heavy weight requires more skill in squatting than squatting a moderate or light weight requires. In order to practice the skill and develop expertise in it, you must squat.

*With this in mind I want to mention an experience I had. You know those conversations you have with other lifters in the gym where you ask, “What’s on the menu today for training?”. Recently I had someone tell me they were going to do some technique squats. I assume what he was referring to as technique squats were lightweight, grease the groove kind of squats. Does this provide any utility or value? Think about this as I move on to the second principle.

The second principal is specificity. Long story short, specificity is “the magnitude of crossover from a training means to a desired outcome or task” (6). There are several systems of categorizing specificity. Dr. Bondarchuk and his system of exercise classification, Dr. Verkhoshansky and Dynamic Correspondence, and Dr. Bosch and his system of motor learning principles are the most notorious ones. Thoroughly diving into each of these is well outside the scope of this article but being aware of them is important for moving this discussion along.

A quick discussion of sport performance training will give specificity the proper context. The concept of specificity cuts right through the heart of the value of sport performance training. There is nothing you can do in the weight room that perfectly represents what happens on the field. You need to practice the skills in your sport to get better at them. However, the weight room can improve an athlete’s performance on the field beyond what is capable through practice alone because it can tremendously improve certain qualities or capacities specific to sport. The qualities or capacities being worked on in the weight room must in some sense be specific to the sport, otherwise training could provide little or no value or potentially be detrimental to sport performance. This is where specificity can become blurry in the realm of sport performance training. What exercises and training methods are specific to the sport and how specific do you need to be at what times during the year?

Back to the discussion of the squat. Specificity is not so blurry here. The squat training you do to improve your squat is also the practice you need to refine your skill of squatting. In sport performance training the development of skills and the capacity to express that skill are more disparate than squat performance where practice and training are very much the same thing. It’s a sort of killing two birds with one stone situation. Exercises like the leg press will satisfy some of the tenants of specificity for squat performance, but squatting satisfies every single tenant of specificity. A feat that is impossible for most other training circumstances.

How is this pathway dependency hurtful?

Athletes become very good at sport partly because of practice. They amass thousands upon thousands of repetitions. This practice depresses the conscious effort needed to complete the skill until the act of that skill becomes second nature. Combine this with proper training and you have a basic formula for improving performance.

The same goes for squatting. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and requires certain physical qualities for elite performance. Predominantly relying on other than the squat but similar to the squat is a flawed an inefficient concept. You may satisfy some specificity and improve force production in your lower half, but you will not have done this to the degree that squatting does nor will you have practiced the skill of squatting.

Subscribing to this pathway dependency will waste precious training time and leave gains on the table.

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3. Lifting makes you tight and unathletic

“Yeah I just don’t want to get so big I can’t move well.”

“Lifting heavy makes me feel so tight.”

“Can you even scratch your back?”

These are sentiments I often hear about lifting weights. There is this belief that lifting weights will make you big, bulky, tight, and unathletic. I have heard many people rationalize their avoidance of weight lifting through believing this pathway dependency. If you have ever tried to become big and bulky, or better described as putting on muscle, you know that it is an arduous task that requires years of hard work. Secondarily, achieving that task does not inherently make you tight and unathletic, rather it is the lack of athletic development and dynamic movement that makes you feel that way.

I want to share an anecdote. I stopped playing baseball after my college career ended in 2017. Since then, the overwhelming majority of my training has been powerlifting and hypertrophy oriented; two styles of training that should conjure up this pathway dependency more than any other style of training. During the end of 2020, I implemented Olympic lifts. An Olympic lift or a derivative of an Olympic lift are exercises that require more mobility and athleticism than all exercises done with a barbell.

I am no expert in Olympic lifts, but I was able to do this the first week.

I was also fortunate enough to play baseball again at a high level for a few games. A (good) baseball swing is about as fluid and athletic as you can get, and I was still able to do this after not picking up a bat for four years.

For almost four years I focused primarily on putting on as much muscle and lifting as much weight as possible. I could still achieve good positions in the Olympic lifts and was able to hit a baseball further than I ever could before. I didn’t do anything special other than train with a full range of motion and do a dynamic warmup before every training session.

Here is why I think this pathway dependency exists.

Those who are exoteric towards lifting weights use bodybuilders as their poster boy for self-comparison. Understandably so, bodybuilders attract attention because of their massive physiques and bodybuilding training is usually how people initially enter weight training. Good bodybuilders have a large amount of muscle mass. The more muscle you add, the less range of motion available for a given joint (we will return to this point later). Secondarily, bodybuilding is not an athletic endeavor relative to other sports. The most athletic thing a bodybuilder can do that would be considered bodybuilding training is squatting. And although I talked about squatting skill and how it needs to be practiced, read here to find out more about the nature of the skill of squatting. Outside of multi-joint exercises like squats and presses, bodybuilding training consists of a lot of single-joint exercises like curls and knee extensions. Many of these exercises take place on a machine that literally guides that movement for you. Bodybuilding training does not do a good job of directly improving athletic performance, but it does not hinder it.

Weightlifting does not cause a tight and unathletic feeling. Rather, it is the absence of athletic development and dynamic movement that causes that sensation. I know many people who do not lift weights who I would describe as tight and unathletic. And I know many people who lift weights who are extremely fluid and athletic.

Finally, returning to the first half of the pathway dependency, the fear of looking big and bulky and adding so much muscle that you limit range of motion is foolish. Adding muscle is not an easy task especially if you want to do it to the degree that it becomes immediately noticeable. It is not something that just happens because you trained for a few weeks. As I said it is a process that takes years of dedication. Furthermore, you can manipulate your training and diet in such a way to attenuate further muscle gain if you so choose. That big and bulky look you are thinking of is a big, hairy dude that only trains chest and arms and is on the seafood diet. Its not a disciplined lifter who limits the amount of fat they put on as they try to gain muscle to maintain a healthy body composition.

How is this pathway dependency hurtful?

For athletes, subscribing to this pathway dependency means leaving your full potential locked. As I mentioned previously, proper weight training can improve your performance in sport beyond what just practicing in your sport can.

However, this pathway dependency is more likely to exist in the general population who are thinking about lifting weights. As simply as I can state it, weight training is good for you. It is easily accessible and provides an enormous host of benefits. In fact, just weight training alone can improve movement quality in sedentary populations (7). So, in the case of the population who is most prone to believe this pathway dependency, lifting weights produces the opposite effect. Avoiding lifting weights because of this pathway dependency is not only believing in false information but harmful to your health because of the benefits you are missing out on.

“Accept the Facts and Question the Opinions”

I can’t remember where I read that quote from, but it is the perfect way to conclude this post. In order to remain as close to the truth as possible, we need be able to discern between fact and opinion. A fact is objectively true. An opinion is a paradigm created through the integration of fact, experience, and emotion. A properly integrated opinion is one that has these qualities balanced harmoniously. An opinion such as this can be truthful and extremely valuable. A poorly integrated opinion can not only be false but detrimental as well. Some of these stick around. They are stubborn and tenacious enough (or we are stubborn and tenacious enough) that eventually they become the “truth”.

These were just some of the pathway dependencies I have experienced. They were all related to coaching and strength and conditioning. Considering the number of disciplines and information in existence today, the possibility for the perpetuation of pathway dependencies is as high as ever.

Be relentlessly curious. Ask why. Find the truth. Maybe it is what someone told you. Or maybe its not. The only way to know for sure is to dig.