Why machines are stupid, as if we did not already know!

The other day, about three days ago, I observed a trainer at Gold's Gym show someone how to use a leg machine, like a hacksquat machine or something. At any rate, it took the trainer a good 5 minutes to show him how to use the machine. Now, don't under estimate the power of 5 whole minutes. Try this: start a stop watch and read the title of this post, "Why machines are stupid, as if we did not already know!" until the 5 minutes are up. How many times did you say the title? A lot a bet. I hope that impresses upon you the length that 5 minutes actually is. OK, so when it comes to explaining a lift 5 minutes is a good amount of time to describe the essence of the lift. For example, the other day I was training someone and I was teaching her how to squat. It took well over 5 minutes because squatting is not easy, intuitive, and often executed wholly incorrectly.  While giving this explanation of "how to squat" I discussed foot placement, hip extension and flexion, full extension, hand position, lumbar curve, core stability, heels, heels, & more heels. But not once did I say "push that lever, or pull that dial". This is what got me the other day at Gold's. The trainer started off the session like he was selling a used sports car, discussing all of the intricate details of the machine. "Here, see, you have the pin, which goes inside the plates to vary how heavy the lift is. (he didn't use lift, that was my paraphrasing)". "And here is the platform that you stand on." "Now, this is very important", he says. "This lever right here can save your life!" Actually that's the statement that caught my attention. I was sort of eavesdropping prior to that, but that statement captured a full on head turn and gawk. You'd of thought that Vida Guerra had just strutted by me. So I am watching this trainer, and first of all I cannot get over the fact that this trainer does not at all look the part. He is sort of pear shaped, sure he had pretty big arms, but generally I would not have classified him as a "fit" man had I seen him walking through the Kroger. Trainer boy goes on to tell the client (poor sole) which lever to pull, what thing to push, etc, etc. The guy, obvously new to working out, obvious from his rotund physique, looked a little more then befuddled. Imagine holding an intense workout and all of a sudden having to fail and remember what switch to flick to save your life, legs, or  just yourself from sheer embarrassment? I would find that absolutely impossible. Or at the very least absolutely impossible while maintaining any sort of intensity during your lift. 

Let me see if I can relate this to a topic of interest for me. You guessed it CrossFit. Kilgore and his colleagues developed a model a while back called the Fish model (Issue 69 of the CrossFit Journal). It was essentially a means with which to plot progress in multi-mode training. The two essential curves for this discussion are the performance improvement and need for complexity of training. In Kilgore's model you can see that they are inversely related. That is as performance starts to asymptote, the need for complexity in training increases proportionally. This is to challenge the athlete ever more to be able to continue making gains in their performance. The Kilgore model is brilliant, however, it aims to describe changes across broad time and modal domain. Good thing, right. Hell yeah! But let's assume for a minute that we are also interested in plotting performance within a single slice in time; within a single workout, within a single lift. A slice of Kilgore's Fish! And let's also assume that we are interested in two facets that contribute to the complexity of training: physical and psychological. The psychological - and that includes the way that the brain controls motor unit execution (i.e. neurological) - factors of lifting, or any sport for that matter, should never be underestimated. In sports we often "quiet the mind" in order to perform optimally. In fact, one might argue that leaders in any sport are able to quell the distractions of the mind & brain in order to perform optimally under stressful, or psychologically challenging conditions. In the scientific psychological world this process if called attention, or more accurately divided attention. That is, it's your capacity for spreading your attentional attunement between 2 or more things that are going on. When we do this, when the environment forces us to focus on multiple things each of those individual processes loses something; they lose their capacity to perform at optimum levels. Think of it this way. A water tank can provide x pounds for square foot water pressure to a single hose. However, if we split that hose in to two, three, or four outlets, the water tank has to increase power in order to maintain the same pounds per square foot pressure delivered to each hose independently. Well the brain can't simply increase it's power output; there are limits on that because it's a biological organ. So when our brains are multiply tapped to do various things at once, each task tends to suffer decreases in performance. 

What's this got to do with sports and fitness. A whole heckuva lot! If you are thinking about what lever to pull, push, dial to spin, etc then you are not focusing on the lift mechanics itself. Or at the very least you are not thinking about those essential mechanics in a way that would optimize both your performance and safety. Eventually, after training and practice, the mechanics become second nature. This is a fairly simple process, but to really simplify the neuroscience it happens like this. When we need to actively think about something (e.g., how to place your feet for a squat, focus on lumbar curve, tight core, etc) you recruit an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex; it's located right behind and above your forehead and eyes. There are regions of this area of the brain that are involved in myriad cool functions: self-awareness, social cognition, personality, and attention. So when we need to pay attention to something we call this part of the brain into action. If we are calling this part of the brain into action it means that energy is being drawn from other processes. Other brain areas. Through practice we can change this effect. Through practice what happens is your brain learns the movement, exercise, or whatever you are doing, at the level of the prefrontal cortex and then after you have started to master it you no longer have to pay attention to the mechanics, it becomes automatic. At that point it gets processed or executed via a subcortical system called the striatum. (Mind you, I am simplifying this greatly here). The striatum is intricately involved in Parkison's disease so hopefully you can see how it's related to motor function execution. Additionally, the striatum is a very efficient processor; because you no longer have to pay attention to the movement you don't need to utilize as much energy. Cool eh?  

OK, enough neuroscience right? Back to lifting. In the heat of a lift, psychological attention to the mechanics is going to draw from the automaticity of execution of the movement. This is what happens in beginners, like myself. I focus and practice on form so that it becomes automatic. Why? So that when I go to increase load, speed, power, that form comes through loud and clear helping me to achieve new personal records! (I can only hope). However, what happens when we increase loads, time, and power? Our form often goes to shit! The reason is partly do to the musculature mechanics being unsure about the execution and that is partly related to frontal cortex attention to the movement and the corresponding load, speed, or task. Coach Greg Glassman recently did a CrossFit Journal on a topic related to this called threshold training.   He explains that threshold training entails an athlete (or driver, or typer, etc) to do something intensely. They typically do poorly. But if forced to maintain that level of intensity and change one thing - performance, then they learn to effectively execute their task at the higher level of intensity. Then you up the intensity again, and repeat. This is how elite athleticism is built. Let me provide another personal example. The other day I was doing 3 rep max shoulder presses. The first three rounds were executed will sheer brilliance of technique (probably not, but bear with me). However, as the weight increased, what happened. In order to move the load my brain had to do more stuff. It was faced with a new challenge and had to rapidly adapt and try to overcome. When I hit the fail place my brain was at full attention: DO SOMETHING SO YOU DON'T DROP 155# ON YOUR HEAD MORON!!!!! Thank goodness my brain does this, right!? Thank goodness your brain does this! What happens when you hit the fail spot - energy is transferred (neurologically) from representing the efficient, efficacious, and proficient movements to energy dedicated to living. You drop the weight. In CrossFit and O -ifting the answer is an easy fix: Drop the weight and do it fast. 

When else do we lose our automaticity of movement execution. Under high intensity. When you are doing Fran, you are killing yourself. And as your METCON increases rapidly, again your brain's attentional systems turn to self-preservation attention mechanisms. You might drop the weight, bend over and catch your breath, meet pukie, or any various combination of outcomes that draw your attention from the task at hand: moving a weight from low to high, and pulling yourself up, as fast as you can without dying.

Back to why machines suck. How can you maintain focus on exercise mechanics and intensity when paying attention to what lever to pull, push or dial to turn? Especially when it means saving your life! It's nearly impossible. And this is why I think machines suck at creating fitness (& there are probably a plethora of other reasons as well). It is virtually impossible to transfer neurological processing from attentional systems to automaticity, which begets intensity, which produces results! One might argue that you could learn to be automatic on a machine - very easily learn what buttons to press, pull, or turn in a flash in order to save your life. But that's just not true. Through evolution our bodies have been designed to move large loads in ways very similar to O-lifting. These are gross body movements over long distances utilizing mutli-motor and joint units. The interaction of gross motor movements and fine motor movements, such as initiating a complex sequence of finger movements to turn your wrist are diametrically opposed, in my humble opinion. Try this. Send me an email, while trying to front squat. Diverted attention at the level of neurocognitive energy (because you'd be thinking about what to write me) and at the level of motor unit integration (you are not supposed to be worrying about utilizing fingers during a front squat except to the extent that they are used to keep the bar from rolling off you. What's interesting, is that fingers take up A LOT of brain space. They are essentially how we find out about the world. We pick stuff up, feel it, roll it around in our hands, etc. We don't experience the world through our quads, hips, glutes, at least not in the tactile sense. So when we activate fine motor units during otherwise large motor unit lifts, we actually draw a lot of neural energy to parts of the brain not involved in the lifting. We are detracting unconscious motor attention from the task at hand to something that is irrelevant. 

The take home message: distraction is part of any lifting, fitness, and sport program. We tend to call it training and practice. However, anything that enters this equation that is not directly related to the lift at hand would amount to an an drastic decrease in work capacity because of misdirected neural energy. 

This can be modeled mathematically, sort of (I'm not a mathematician!). If we input arbitrary values into the Power equation (F * D / T = P) and divide that by arbitrary units associated with practice, training, and other distractions we can get a modest estimate of the effects each of these have on optimizing work capacity. So let's assume for sake of argument and ease of calculation that each of these three - training, practice, and other distraction - can be placed on a range from 0-1. Where a score of 0.0 means that you no longer are impacted by that variable and a score of 1.0 means that it consumes a lot of your energy, if not all of it. So a score somewhere in between, say 0.5 training, would indicate that about half of your cognitive energy reserves still need to be dedicated to training (e.g., movement mechanics), and so forth. With this in mind we can generate a few plots to show the effects. So the  Power equation gets slightly modified to include an additive denominator term that accounts for training and practice (these two I vary simultaneously because I do feel that they are intricately and intimately linked and co-vary), other distractor (e.g., having to know what dials to press), and a constant of 1. 

Formula 1: 

Where in the numerator F = force, D = distance, T= time; and in the denominator Tr = training, P = practice, O = other distraction, and k is our constant. 

If we enter arbitrary numbers in to our equation we generate a plot of performance. Let's say our Power equation is 45*3/5 (remember these are arbitrary number for purposes of demonstration) then our maximum power output, or work capacity would be 27. (indicated by the purple circle below). However, if we add the variables of training, practice, distraction, and our constant we can generate a plot that looks like: 

 

Here, the purple dot at the top indicates our reference point for maximum work capacity. (27) The three lines represent varying different aspects of the model. The red line represents keeping the need for training (Tr) and practice (P) high (1.0) and systematically decreasing other distraction by 0.1 (going from 1, .9, .8, and so on). The blue line is similar, except in this instance we maintain O at a constant of 1 and systematically decrease Tr & P. You can see that this slightly, but only marginally increases work capacity in this model simulation. The green line represents keeping O at a low constant (here I used 0.1) and then decreasing Tr & P systematically and what you can see is that if other distractions are kept at a minimum then increases in work capacity would come as a consequence of decreasing the demands for cognitive resources/energy being directed toward attention to training and practice. That is, you are getting better!

Now, realistically, I think the detrimental effects of other distraction (O) are greater than that of either Training or Practice. So we can modify the model in several ways to account for this. I provide two examples below. In the model below what I show is the equation when doubling the effect of O and the corresponding plot: 

  

  

Here, it's important to note that by simply doubling the effect of O on work capacity you make it equal to the combined effects of training and practice. Below I show the simulated model/equation when we triple the power of O and the corresponding plot: 

  

  

Here, it's important to note that tripling the effect of O actually results in decreases of work performance above and beyond that associated with the effects of training and practice. 

Thus, I think that the other distractions associated with many machine workouts draw significantly from our ability to increase work capacity and inhibit our quest for health and fitness.  With this in mind an athlete should be prepared to be affected by training and practice, because that is part of the "game". The athlete has little control over this. However, the athlete has great control over the power of other distractions by choosing an effective and efficacious fitness program, and by purposefully and consciously decreasing extraneous distractions.

OK, just my 2¢. Any thoughts?