Lenses

Models are important for simplifying the overwhelming amount of information present in the world. They reduce the noise and focus on the signal being presented, allowing us to circumvent all of the unnecessary details to make decisions. Many people in history have discovered useful information that has been incorporated into a number of different viewpoints, or lenses, across time. We now have access to an incredible amount of information, utilizing it to develop our own model while remaining open to incoming new information is paramount to gaining a deeper understanding of what it is we see as movement.

All movement models are wrong, all of them. If one were completely right it would explain all that we see and we could solve all of the problems associated with movement. Some models are useful, and give us relevant information or principles that govern aspects of movement. The principles give us a bedrock to always fall back on, they explain the vast majority of what we see and help us find solutions to unique problems. The ability to exchange a variety of lenses at even given time is what separates great coaches from the rest. Clients have real-time problems, and we need to be able to solve those problems in the moment, under specific conditions. Pulling from all available sources, looking through all known lenses, and falling back on first principles is the best way to develop this skillset.

The amount of available information right now is beyond what any human has come into contact with before the modern era. That allows for helpful and unhelpful models to exist.  The difficult part now is deciphering the information and exploring one’s own understanding of how movement occurs. The unfortunate part of massive amounts of data is that dogmatic paradigms are created. We see this with respect to areas of anatomy such as muscles, fascia/connective tissue, or the nervous system. Each claiming to be the primary source of the problem. The reality is that every subsystem of a human being has been labeled as such because of our own lack of understanding. We have so much yet to discover, the classification system was deployed to aid in our current understanding, knowing full well we have so much work to do. The body is not compartmentalized, it is an integrated system that is connected and interacting at all scales and across all time periods. As coaches we cannot influence one system without interacting with every other. The body resembles a lattice-work that behaves like a fluid, interact with one aspect and all others move in response. We cannot afford to presume we are only influencing one element of the system when we intervene.

Models and viewpoints help us make contextual, real-time decisions because they simplify things. No single model explains all we see, but we can pull from all the information we have grown to test and understand at any given time, to make for better outcomes. The number of lenses you can shift your vision through determines how effective you can be. In the world of human movement, realize that with every exercise, conversation, manual therapy, adjustment or modality you apply to a client, affects all tissue types at every scale across all of time.

Austin Ulrich, Physical Therapist