Interview with ADAPT: Prevent Pain and Injury with Pre- and Post-Workout Activities

My name is Nicole Birch, Communications Director here at LifeBalance, and we are joined today by Brian Cassidy, Founder of ADAPT Training Systems here in Beaverton, Oregon. Brian was kind enough to give us his time today to talk about some training tips when it comes to our workouts and particularly when it comes to the importance of doing proper warm ups and cool downs. Brian is also going to be sharing some exercises with us, and we’ll post some visuals in our blog, as well.

Nicole Birch (NB): Brian, so welcome, and thank you again for joining us.

Brian Cassidy (BC): Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Why Warming Up Is Critical

NB: Awesome. So we’ll get right into it. Now, we always hear about the importance of warming up before we work out, but I think many of us skip out on warming up and go straight into our walks or runs or bike rides.

Can you help us understand why it’s so important to warm up before exercising, and what benefits people can expect to enjoy if they’re able to take a few minutes to warm up before they get started.

BC: Yeah, I’d love to. One of the areas of training that I think is the most neglected, mainly because people don’t understand the benefits — they think it’s kind of, not a luxury, but it’s something that’s not really going to impact the results of what they’re trying to do from a training component.

So we try to change the wording for it, because the old mindset of warming up was literally circulation — getting movement in the muscles, getting your body temperature higher. And that’s more about efficiency, like you’re going to be faster at a certain point when you maximize circulation.

But today’s world is different because our bodies aren’t actually ready to move because we live such a sedentary lifestyle, or because if we’re not sitting, we’re doing a specific movement over and over again so we’re only using a small percentage of our muscle groups throughout the day. So we look at it as “pre” — like preparing your body for movement.

So it’s not just the fact that my muscles will be warm so I’ll be able to walk easier or at a faster pace. But I use this analogy: If you were in a car for four hours and when you first got out of the car, I don’t care how conditioned you are as an athlete, would you be ready to go for a run after getting out of that car?

NB: Definitely not. At least as someone who likes to run, I know that I would pretty difficult. You’d be pretty tight.

BC: Yeah, everyone understands it. You can even see the grimace on peoples face when I say, “If I ask you to sprint right after you got out of that car”, no one, no matter the age group, no matter the fitness level, they know that their bodies would not be prepared to go into that running motion.

So, think of that warming up as you “pre” routine, as getting the body moving and getting dormant muscles to be activated and engage, or getting certain muscles to be elongated that have been shortened for a while, so that your mechanics are sound before you start moving.

Because if you try to move before your mechanics are sound, the chances of your body cheating or compensating or putting overdue stress on certain connective tissues — knees, tendons, and other things — it’s easier to see that.

So we treat every athlete and every training client as if they’ve been in a car for four hours before we start training them.

Benefits to Warming Up

NB: Gotcha! That definitely makes a lot of sense. So as far as the benefits people can enjoy, do you think we’ll notice differences in our workouts? It kinda sounds like there may be less stress on your joints, is what you’re saying, if we warm up properly?

BC: Yeah, a lot less stress on your joints. A lot of times, you know, if you’re a runner, sometimes that first mile doesn’t feel so good. It takes a while for your body to get into that groove.

If you’re working out to lose weight, it’s been proven over and over again, scientifically, that if your body is under a stress situation — so if there’s aggravation or inflammation on your tendons — that the cortisol build up in your body will kind of turn your metabolism off. So there are so many benefits of getting your body efficient before you do your workout.

The goal of the workout is to have a positive stress reaction in your body. Positive stress, in terms of loading the muscles, getting your heart rate up, is beneficial. Negative stress, in terms of aggravation on the joints, the tendons, the heart having to work a little harder because your muscles haven’t been engaged yet, that negative stress can have counterproductive effects to what your goals are and why you’re working out to begin with.

Why Post Workout Activities Are Important

NB: Wow that’s a really great way to look at it! Where my head goes then is I think there’s the same mentality about cooling down. I know if I’m pressed for time, I’m not always the best about doing my cool down and sometimes it’s hard to find a few minutes to do that, but we certainly hear that it’s important. So I’m wondering why is it so important to take the time to kind of do those stretches or whatever those cool down activities may be.

BC: Well the cool-down like I said and you know 30 years ago it was all about getting the heart rate back down to a normal resting zone. In today’s world, it’s about the muscles that might have fatigued unevenly being restored to a neutral position so that the opposing muscles are now relaxed.

So another analogy: If you think about it, if you’ve ever watched a marathon and how people run at the beginning of a marathon — everyone kind of looks the same, they’re running with a natural gait.

Then you see how people look at the end of the marathon — they’re not running with the same form. They’re swinging their arms more, their legs might be rotating like an egg beater to get them through it because their body has fatigued unevenly.

If your body fatigued unevenly, you have to reset those muscles so that you’re in a more balanced state.

Another huge thing that most people don’t consider: If you’ve ever woken up and gotten out of bed and went to turn your head, and all of a sudden got a big kink in your neck, most people assume “Oh I slept wrong,” or “Oh, I slept in the wrong position,” where in actuality, you went to bed with with uneven tension in your body.

So when you lie down, the muscles that have been used unevenly during whatever activity you did during the day solidified themselves when you were lying down. And when you went to stand up and move, those muscles were dormant. And when you went to move, they wouldn’t allow you to move, so you over-strained something and got a kink in your neck.

The sports that are easy to see this in: a golfer that’s rotating a lot one direction. If you go right to the 19th hole and have a couple drinks and you sit down after twisting your spine for three hours, your spine might still be in that twisted position.

And you might not feel the negative results for two or three days. A lot of people will say, “I didn’t hurt right after I did the exercise, but I woke up three days later with this kink in my back or my shoulder felt off, and that’s because they didn’t cool down properly after the exercise.

Benefits of Post-Workout Cool-Downs

NB: Wow! That’s fascinating. Definitely something I hadn’t necessarily thought of before. So in addition to hopefully avoiding those strains that you’re describing, what other benefits can we see if we can take a few minutes? What would the difference be in our day if you can take the five minutes or however long you have after your workouts to do some of these exercises?

BC: Well people don’t realize the muscular structure…we look at it from a training standpoint of “am I getting stronger” or “Am I increasing endurance”, or is it aesthetics, where I’m just trying to look better or be more toned? But our muscles are responsible fir every possible system in our body. So the alignment of your joints, all the plumbing, your nervous system, your circulatory system; your muscles are in charge of keeping everything in the right place.

So if you’re working out, you want to make sure that those muscles maintain balance. That they’re efficient, so that one side, like your biceps and your triceps, that there’s no imbalance between those opposing muscle groups, so that your joints are in the right position, so everything works easier.

So you’re going to benefit by not only not putting extra stress on your connective tissue and your joints, but it’s going to increase the overall efficiency of every system in your body, and it starts with understanding what muscular efficiency really is.

NB: Gotcha! Well that sounds fantastic and definitely makes it seem like we should all be spending a little more time before we work out! I know you’ve kindly offered to do is to share a couple of pre exercises and post exercises. I know at ADAPT you have amazing routines for this kind of thing, and I think it’s fantastic that you’re willing to share a few of these with us.

How Pre- and Post-Workout Exercises Help You Maximize Your Workouts

BC: When people think of the workout and the effort. My real goal: When someone is motivated to workout, they’re motivated by something. They’re either motivated by weight loss or overall health, or the activity that gives them the positive feedback. We want to make sure that they’re getting the maximum results out of that.

It’s hard for some people to understand that if you did proper “pres” and “posts” (or warm-ups and cool-downs) and you did less of the actual run, you’d see greater results from that exercise than if you eliminated making your muscles efficient.

Think of swinging a dull axe and how hard it is to chop down a tree if you don’t take the time to sharpen it before hand. So that’s the goal for this. I want people to benefit from their motivation to get out and exercise and work out.

NB: Thank you. I think that’s a really great point. I think a lot of us think that we need to spend our workouts doing the more intense movements and maximizing caloric burn, when it sounds like in reality if we could take some time doing some more gentle warm ups and cool downs, that might be what maximizes things for us.

BC: Yeah, you’re gonna get more out of 10 minutes of running or walking efficiently than 40 minutes of running or walking in a compensated position. Because that cortisol that builds up under stress, if the body is injured, it slows the metabolism down, so you’re not even benefitting from the hard work that you’re putting in.

Dynamic vs Static Stretching

NB: Ok! Wonderful. So before then we go into some of these stretches that can help us feel better, I just wanted to ask one thing. I know I’ve been exposed to the ADAPT system, and absolutely love it, but I know that sometimes some of the activities are a little different than what people may have seen.

To me it was introduced as more “dynamic” warm-ups and cool-downs as opposed to the “old-fashioned” static stretches. And so I wanted to see if you could take a quick minute to explain the difference between dynamic and static warm-ups and cool-downs.

BC: Yeah, so in the old days when our bodies moved more dynamically on an every-day basis, we walked more, we biked more, we were more active. I’m talkin’ 50 or 60 years ago. When we fatigued, static stretches were very valuable because you were over-stressing certain muscles so you needed to reintroduce length into a muscle that might be fatigued.

Today’s individual or athletes move so specifically that you need to get range of motion in your joints. Rather than thinking of flexibility, think like getting out of the car: I want to get the car out of my hips and back. I want to get range of motion back into that hip socket, I want my leg to be able to move like it’s supposed to, so instead of putting a static stretch on a specific muscle or muscle group, I want to engage opposing muscles to re-establish their relationship, so that the front of my legs and the back of my legs can now work together to allow my hip to move through it’s range of motion.

And that’s why we talk so much more about range of motion of joints, rather than focusing on the word flexibility.

NB: Ok! Well we’d love it if you could share a few of those warm up and cool down exercises. Maybe if you could describe kind of the motion, and again, we’ll post the visuals up with the interview.

Pre-Workout Exercises

BC: Alright, so with the “Pre” exercises that we posted — and once again, we had to come up with the most efficient way of doing it, because people want to be efficient, they want to be fast. You know, three exercises isn’t the ideal, but these three exercises are the fundamental minimum of getting your body prepared for movement.

1. Spreadfoot Reverse Clappers

So the first exercise is called spreadfoot reverse clappers. So the goal is to have your feet out wide to a comfortable level, (You shouldn’t experience any kind of sharp pain in any of your joints, and if you do, you need to get it evaluated by a medical professional). But the two goals in this exercise are:

We want to get your shoulder blades moving. Your shoulder blades are the anchor point of all the muscles of the upper body. Your shoulder blades can get fixed by sitting or being hunched or being asked to do a specific move over and over again. We really want to get those shoulder blades to be able to come together and apart.

So you have your feet apart, thighs tight, and you have your arms out to your sides. You bring them in front of you like you’re clapping, you press your hands together, and then you turn your thumbs down and bring your arms behind you as far as you can, squeezing your shoulder blades together. And then you’re just going back and forth nice and easy a minimum of 20 times.

That does two things: It also awakens the lateral movement of your hips cause a lot of people have probably been sitting, so we want to open up the muscles between your adductors and abductors. Those are like your groin muscles and the muscles on the outside of your leg.

2. Standing Stork Walks

So the next move is a rotational stork walk. So now we want to get the rotation. That hip is a ball and socket. It is absolutely critical that each leg can move independent of itself; that takes all of the pressure off of your back and your knees.

So you stand up and turn your knee out, and lift it up as high as you can — almost like you’re trying to step over a bench or a short fence — and rotate it back down and put it in front of you. And then you do the other leg.

You’re trying to minimize how much the upper body moves because we’re really trying to feel that rotation, that twisting in that ball and socket joint.

Some people will have a tremendous amount of range of motion, and some people will barely be able to do the exercise. Just don’t force it. We don’t want you to cheat into your knees or your back to get the motion. (14:20)

Don’t try to break it loose all in one session. It’s cumulative, so if you try to do this on a semi- regular basis throughout the week, you know like 5 times a week where even if you go for a short walk or have been sitting a while, standing and doing these pre-exercises will almost be like taking your arm out of a cast and getting those muscles to move so they don’t freeze in one place.

3. Overhead Extension Static Lunge

So the last exercise is an overhead extension static lunge. We’re trying to get the upper-body to engage separate from the lower body.

So you interlace your fingers, straighten your arms, bringing your hands over your head as far as comfortable. Don’t strain — you shouldn’t feel any pressure in the back of your neck or upper back.

Put your right foot out in front of you, and your left foot behind you, and as we do a lunge, the goal is to have your weight on your back leg, and bend down so that your back knee comes close to the floor, and then you straighten both legs [to stand] up at the same time.

The exercise before was concentrating on the rotation, this exercise is concentrating on the flexion and extension. One hip should flex while the other extends.

When we’re sitting, our hips are in the same position. So we lose the ability for each hip to move by themselves. That’s why when you first start to run, you might really feel it in your lower back, shoulders, or your knees, because your hips aren’t moving front to back like they should.

NB: Ok

BC: So those are the three exercises for the pre. And you can do those three times in a row as a little bit of a workout. If you’ve been doing those exercises on a regular basis, going through it one time your muscles will respond very quickly.

When you first start doing this, you can almost do them three times through as a mini workout because your muscles will feel the soreness from the new movement. So you want to build that strength and endurance in these moves.

Post-Exercises

NB: Got it! Ok well I think we can move into the post exercises next.

BC: So the goal of the post is to undo any negative impact from the workout. So if your body has fatigued unevenly or cheated on one side or used your upper body to help your lower body, we want to engage those muscles correctly so that they’re back to a relaxed state before you lay down and get those kinks in your neck the next morning. Or before you develop a cheating or compensative pattern.

1. Arm Circles

So the first exercises are just arm circles. Your feet are straight ahead, your arms are out to your side. You want to slightly squeeze the shoulder blades together and make small (probably like 6-inch) circles going forward. You’re really feeling the shoulders where the shoulder meets the shoulder blade moving and rotating as your shoulder blades are being held together. Make sure your shoulders aren’t up by your ears, and that you relax that neck nice and long. Breathe and don’t hold your breath.

Rotate forward 20 times, and then turn your thumbs backwards and rotate 20 times in the reverse direction.

This just gets those muscles that might have gotten tight or stabilized in your upper-body to engage and start to relax.

NB: Got it.

2. Spreadfoot Glides

Now the next one is a more aggressive version of that rotation that we talked about. So you want to get your feet out as wide as you can comfortably. If you don’t have the range of motion to be able to get your hands to the floor, you can do it in front of a chair or a bench where you put your hands a little higher off the ground.

You want to keep your weight on both feet evenly. Bend your right knee and straighten your left leg, and hold that position for about a count or a breath.

Then you want to glide your body weight over to the other side, keeping your hips and back at the same height — so you shouldn’t be going up and down, but maintaining that same parallel position with the floor — and bend your left knee and straighten your right leg, so you’re gliding from side-to-side.

One of the key points that I use is pretend like your hips are staying straight, so if you’re taking a picture behind you, the focus would be straight behind you. You shouldn’t be twisting, or feeling like your hips are going like a windshield wiper and rotating. It’s a glide side-to-side./

And this will vary depending on your range of motion. Some people will barely be moving, but it’s better to do that than to overuse your spine and knees and ankles, because then you’re not getting the movement in your hip socket itself.

NB: So the important thing is to focus on the hips and kind of keeping your upper body parallel with the ground?

BC: Yep, and have your spine and your hips and your pelvis stay aligned. So as you’re moving side-to-side, your head, your spine, and your pelvis should all move together at the same time.

NB: Gotcha so you’re not reaching or grabbing and twisting?

BC: Yeah exactly.

NB: Ok. That’ll be a challenging one and we’ll definitely have to try it after this!

BC: We’ve tried to make these as socially-acceptable positions as we can to not draw too much attention to you, but if you’ve ever seen me get off a long flight in an airport, I draw quite a crowd trying to get my body to loosen up before I go on to the next.

NB: That’s a great idea actually.

BC: Yeah long rides, airplane rides, your rest areas — I mean, you might be hiding behind a door doing a couple of these — but how your body will feel at the end of that road, you won’t get that stiffness that you have to break through the next day. You won’t feel that knee or you won’t have to pop that Advil right when you get to your destination because the pressure will have been taken off those tendons because of having held that one position for so long.

NB: Yeah. Ok.

3. Standing Stork Walks

BC: So last exercise: Standing stork walks. And this is just re-establishing the muscles used to walk and move.

So you put your hands behind your head. This is so that you don’t cheat and use your upper-body to help your lower-body.

People don’t realize that if one hip is stronger than the other, you’ll use the opposing shoulder to kind of stabilize, almost like walking with a cane. That’s why when people go for a run, they might complain about neck tightness or shoulder soreness, even though they didn’t run on their hands. It’s because their upper body has been used to help their lower body. So we want to get rid of that.

A lot of the tension headaches and migraines come from excessive tightness in your upper traps. Everyone says they carry their stress there, but it’s like, well actually, you carry your head. And if your spine is not aligned, they tighten up and lock up and don’t allow oxygen to your brain.

NB: Got it.

BC: So hands behind the head, lightly squeeze the shoulder blades together, and then you lift your knees up and down while standing in place.

Now depending on the age group I’m talking to, back in the day I used to refer to this as ‘pretend you’re a marionette doll’, but unfortunately all of our young athletes have no idea what a marionette doll is.

So you want to pretend that there’s a string tied to your knees, like someone is lifting from the top, so you’re lifting your knees using your hip, not using your calves trying to drive up.

Your feet should be super relaxed. (And your calves shouldn’t be the largest muscle in your legs. If they are that means you’re using your lower leg more disproportionately than your upper legs to walk.) So we want to disengage the foot, (you know, the plantar fasciatis and all the other things that happen to your feet when your feet have to do too much work.) Let that foot drop, alternate lifting the knees and getting those hips engaged, and that’s how you should finish to make sure each hip is engaged after the workout.

NB: Awesome. This is absolutely fascinating. It’s amazing how, you know, we don’t always understand where those aches and pains come from so we really appreciate the insight. Definitely interesting stuff.

Aches, Pains, and Your Body’s Check-Engine Lights

BC: Our parts don’t have a thousand mile warranty on them. We don’t just start hurting because we get older. It’s as your muscles are used less efficiently or we don’t use all of them. When you’re younger, you move more dynamically. As we get older, we move very specifically, so our muscles become imbalanced. They over-stress certain connective tissues.

So an “itis” or a “tendinitis” is not something we should just expect to have as we get older. That’s your check engine light in your car going off saying that there are muscle groups that aren’t even and it’s putting too much pressure on one part of your body.

NB: I like that analogy of a check engine light…that’s a really good way to look at it.

BC: Yeah unfortunately, if your check engine light goes on, there are certain people who might grab a towel or a sock and cover the dashboard and pretend that the light didn’t go off. And something will eventually tear and break.

When the check engine light goes off, that’s a warning. It’s not saying something will break right now, and so people kind of procrastinate.

If your knee starts hurting a little bit, we have the ability to take ibuprofen and hide that feeling for a while. So I’ll just ignore it until something bad happens. But they won’t realize that not addressing that knee pain and all of a sudden blowing their back out when they helped their neighbor move a mattress, those two things were absolutely correlated and your body was telling you something was off.

About ADAPT

NB: Wow, definitely an eye-opening perspective and an interesting way to look at it. We really appreciate you sharing that with us. It sounds like kind of understanding the whole body is really the ADAPT  philosophy, and I’d like to give you the chance to do kind of a shameless plug and talk a little bit about ADAPT, kind of how you came to be, and the company’s approach to fitness.

BC: The background in terms of the science and how we look at it, the formal statement is “the study of human performance through the understanding of muscular efficiency.”

So every aspect of human performance — whether it’s recovering from an injury in a physical therapy setting, or it’s performance oriented in an athletic setting, or just a general fitness/movement environment — you have to understand the rules of how the human body works in accordance with the muscles themselves.

Most people don’t look at the muscles as one big system. They break it down and look at muscles of the knee or muscles of the arm, whether it’s therapy or training itself. We’ve broken down the science to be able to diagnose how to determine if your muscles are working efficiently or not at every level.

So we have physical therapists on staff, we have trainers, coaches, massage therapists, we’ve had acupuncturists and chiropractors, where the goal is to understand how to test.

So if you came in we would look at your body just like a mechanic looks at a car, and be able to diagnose what muscles are working correctly, which muscles are tight, which muscles are loos. How do we create certain small exercises like the ones I just talked about, to correct the efficiency of your movement to take the pressure off your joints OR allow you to run faster or jump higher.

So our intake system — and it’s been this way for years — is always one in which your initial assessment is always free. Because I want you to be educated on what your body is doing before you decide what type of training program you should look into for your body. So we try to encourage people, even if you’re not going to work with us, come and get your evaluation before you make a decision on having a surgery or getting work done or some of the training programs that you’re doing.

Get checked first to see what your body is already doing.

NB: Yeah I think that’s an amazing service to provide, and I will say having been in the facility before, one thing that amazed me was seeing people of all ages, truly, being there, participating. Of course, there are younger athletes. But seeing people who are well into their sixties and have had surgery and they’re out there doing the classes and are moving great. I think it’s really neat to see and certainly a testament to the effectiveness of the things you guys do there.

BC: Yeah that’s one of the funnest components. Because we work with people all the way from spinal cord injuries who have damage to their spinal column, to people with brain injuries that don’t allow certain parts of their bodies to work. We still introduce effectiveness on ‘how can we get you as efficient as possible?’

We have people that will come in in their sixties that will go through the therapeutic protocol, get their bodies moving, and then go into our fitness classes. Because we want to get everyone to a certain minimum level of moving.

Everyone starts at a different level, but they should all finish being able to do the same minimal types of movements that their bodies are intended to do and have to do to keep the overall health within their system.

NB: Well wonderful! It’s certainly a fascinating topic, and some amazing stuff you guys are doing, and so yeah, we just want to say thank you for sharing this information. We’re really excited to share it with our members. Hopefully these will be some pieces they can take home and try incorporating in their workouts and hopefully keep them feeling good.

BC: My pleasure! Add the only thing I will add is, with these pre and post format that we put on the website for you: If your body is struggling to do it, do NOT be afraid to do the pre and the post together and actually use it as your workout until those exercises become easier. That will let you know that your body is now more efficient and you can start doing more dynamic activities.

NB: Ok. So if it initially feels hard, that’s ok as long as it’s not crazy painful. Keep at it, and your body will get used to it, is kinda what you’re saying?

BC: Yeah and instead of thinking of it as a warm up, for some people, these exercises might be the actual workout. And that’s completely ok. Just like you were talking about the different age groups in the classes. When you first start moving, not everyone can go to a grade school playground and jump around on the equipment without hurting themselves. We have to re-introduce that movement. So if these exercises are difficult, don’t get frustrated. Use them as a workout instead of as a pre and post until they become easier.

NB: Got it! Perfect. Wonderful. Well I think that’s it from our end. Brian thank you so much again for taking the time to share this with us. We really appreciate it. And just a reminder to our members; if anyone is in the area, you do get some savings at ADAPT Training. THe information is on LifeBalanceProgram.com and we’ll share it on our blog as well. So if you can, stop by and check it out and see the great things they have going on there.