Are you acquiring skills vs movements?

I was recently reading about how people were struggling with maintaining ‘ideal form’ or ‘ideal posture’ during certain exercises. Recommendations were obviously thrown around from everyone who was involved in the discussion. I couldn’t help but think… if you don’t know how the individual persons body moves/functions then there will be an inevitable limit to how much you can help them.

People are often results oriented. Bench Pressing 225lbs, doing 10 chin ups, etc. So naturally people create systems, lists, checkmarks, etc. showing how to get from steps A-Z. It shouldn’t end there however.

Let’s look at one example. Let’s say you’re trying to do pull ups. You have the strength to pull yourself up using your arms almost exclusively. However when asked, you were really struggling to maintain any tension in your scapula. When cued to retract your scapula, your brain thought you were doing it but it was clear you weren’t.

So what does this have to do with skill vs movement acquisition? It’s in the way you attempt to solve this issue.

The interventions people often use are aimed at making you better at the skill. What is often overlooked is that performance of the skill or exercise is largely tied the available movement at each joint.

If you can’t retract your scapula during a pull up, you need to look at each joint involved to find the weak point. If we’re trying to improve range of motion at the scapula we could use isometric training. It’s the safest and least neurologically confusing contraction. It helps communicate to those tissues more often.

Skill and movement acquisition can be trained simultaneiously. The important thing is the intent. If you’re trying to move from exercise to exercise based on some checklist the results may be uncertain. However if you’re aiming to improve the health of multiple joints so that they can more effectively be used in your skill, that’s the way to go. They compliment one another.

if you are dealing with a limitiation in a joint that is involved in the exercise, issues could arrise.