TENSEGRITY & FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT

As an athlete our number one priority should always be the capability to move functionally. This is the backbone of strength & conditioning! Moving functional means that the joints are capable of moving with strength and control through all the necessary ranges that our specific sport demands. It also means that the base movement patterns, such as running, lifting, rotating/pivoting, throwing, jumping, and more are done so using efficient biomechanics that effectively integrate the entire body into each movement. Each of our muscles must play their part in a balanced way! And to top it all of this, we need this to be habitual or second nature.

When movement becomes dysfunctional, or simply if range of motion displays differences between sides, then any time spent developing strength & conditioning as well as simply playing/training your sport has a risk of locking in dysfunction further, leading to aches, pains, and injuries that could have been preventable. Sound movement is the precursor for all further advancements to strength and skill.



What in the heck exactly is functional movement?

Breaking down functional movement can often seem quite complex. Like most things, on the surface it can appear quite simple and straightforward. Yet as we delve into the practice and develop our ability to move functionally, the focus and understanding gains more and more complexity. These pieces get broken down into further and further little nuances. However with all that said, eventually in the highest levels this attention to fine detail eventually must be abandoned for true functional movement to integrate itself in an automated and natural way. Everything returns full circle back to simplicity.

One key aspect to functional movement is described using the technical principle known as 'tensegrity'. Tensegrity is our focus for this article. The term was coined by American architect and systems theorist, Buckminster Fuller. It's is a structural principle that describes tensional-integrity (tensegrity) and is sometimes also described as floating compression. Keep reading to learn more and see how this concept applies to your success as an athlete.

 ~ Tensegrity

To briefly get down to the nitty-gritty, tensegrity displays as a system whereby 'isolated components under compression' maintain stability inside of network of continuous tension. Tensegrity is the principle at work that holds the human body together. The isolated members under compression are our bones. They often do not touch each other but prestressed tension members, aka connective tissue (collagen), delineate the system spatially giving us our human form.

What is most interesting about tensegrity is not that it holds the body statically but rather how it communicates and distributes forces dynamically throughout the entire system. Tensegrity plays a huge role in the way we move! This knowledge can be used to both prevent and address injuries by recognizing the root of our wide variety of pains and dysfunctions, no only those located locally at the site of our pain but sometimes at the complete opposite end of the body/kinetic chain. Connective tissue issues from the hip can affect the shoulder, and believe it or not the ankle can affect the neck! When a force or stimulus is applied to one part of the system it distributes responses throughout the entirety. It is this that is being cultivated when practicing the Chinese internal arts such as taijiquan and qigong. Many classical eastern medical treatments such as acupuncture and cupping will also work with this concept of tensegrity. 

 ~Hard bones suspended within the tension of soft connective tissue chains

Well calibrated tensegrity in the human kinetic system means that our body is able to work with forces as one grand integrated unit. Force does not leak, but rather it trickles through achieving the greatest degree of force conservation and kinetic output. This ultimately means greater power, greater versatility, greater adaptiveness, and greater injury prevention, all at the physical level.

For this to happen the connective tissue needs to be stressed in an open, aligned and free stretching way. Free in the way that when things are let be, balance follows and things settle in an even manner. Dysfunction to tensegrity arises from either a hyper-rigidity or hyper-flaccidity within this tension. When this happens, muscles must adopt holding or guarding tendencies as a reply to correct the imbalance. This is where the tendino-muscular meridians used in Eastern medicine gain their use. The tendino-musucular meridians expand to include all the signals and communications that exist within the myofascia whether that be mechanical or neurological.

If the triceps become the muscle that takes on holding in order to correct a myofascial tensional imbalance, then even after that muscle has been released there's a pretty good chance that another muscle in that chain will take on that holding role so long as the tensional imbalance communicated throughout the connective tissue has not also been addressed. It doesn't necessarily fix the root. This explains why pains can shift and move over time, both as condition worsen and as they improve. This is where conventional treatment may have its shortcomings. Our western understanding of biomechanics gives the muscles far too much importance.

When dealing with this "tension" that makes up tensegrity we are not talking about muscle tension. Muscle tension is the response, and in most cases happens to be that which interferes with and inhibits good tensegrity. On a mechanical level tensegrity is how the connective tissue stretches around the muscles. It might help to adopt the view that the muscular system as we know it, although its bulk and power-source are the muscle cells themselves, the system is truly formed by the connective tissue that encapsulate the cells into fibers and bundles which then ultimately connect at the joints as tendons before flowing into the next muscle. With this understanding we gain the recognition that our muscular system is just one big muscle that happens to be packaged up by connective tissue rich in neural innervation giving the illusion that there is 650 individual muscles. There is a benefit to breaking down our focus into the individual muscles in this way, but just as important if not more is our ability to observe the body as the interconnected unit that it truly is.

 ~Rolling in & through itself

Calibrating tension is developed by muscle relaxation not muscle tension! I typically describe this by drawing an analogy to those slippery water snake toys we've all payed with as kids. It is the water inside, analogous to a relaxed muscle, that allows the rubber to slip through our hand in the toroidal fashion. Now imagine this toroidal force being potentiated as a stretch-load at tendinous and ligamentous attachment sites at the bones and articular structures. Back to the water snake toy analogy, its the down-bearing weight of the water that creates a tensioned stretch in the rubber. when the muscles actively take on tension, they are holding the stretch back from happening through the connective tissue, and forces and neurological pathways lose their ability to best distribute and communicate. Things get locked up or blocked in the chain.

My more practical definition of tensegrity in the human body is, "that which gives the body structural integrity, holding it upright and stable while the muscles are relaxed". Here we meet another clash when it comes to our western understanding. Muscular relaxation is often viewed as this on or off sort of thing. My muscles are either engaged, or they're relaxed in a way that the body collapses and goes limp. Developing tensegrity requires us to abandon this understanding and develop what the Chinese call "song" or "sung" relaxation. This sort of relaxation is the relaxation of the mind and muscles without disruption to the posture or form. This plant below shows a beautiful depiction of this. Think of how relaxed the muscles can be when we raise our arms and do a big stretch first thing in the morning.

 ~Upright, supple, alert & calm

It's best to begin developing this skill on relaxation by holding static postures. With this practice the body's expression of "song" relaxation becomes movement within the stillness. It would likely be too difficult at first to dive in and develop this relaxation while moving. For younger practitioners and particularly athletes its important that time is also dedicated to practicing functional movements even in the beginning levels. It's okay if the movement happens to be 70% muscle activation and only 30% "song" relaxation. The relaxation will increase with practice, so long as we continue to also practice deep static posture alongside it.

  The connective tissue tension is both mechanical and neurological and can be compared to sediment settling in water. the posture remains gently upright while the tension, fatigue, stiffness, pain and aches gravitate downward throughout the chain. When they're unable to fully settle they can get stuck in the form of tension and pain. The water must stay calm and relaxed for this phenomenon to take place and over time the down bearing weight increases stretch upon the connective tissue. This has been proven to condition and strengthen the bones, ligaments and tendons. For this reason the practice is often called internal training as opposed to external training which deals with the muscles and external physique. 

The torus-donut diagram above provides a great depiction of how the down bearing movement also perpetuates the uprising. This is newton's third law of motion in practice! A limp one-sided relaxation will not allow this. If the yang and yin aspects of posture both sink then there is no stretch. Song relaxation plays with this delicate and gentle balance between uprising and settling where they mutually enhance the other. A sunken collapsed chest will not relax as strongly as gently expansive one. The same goes for every joint in the body! The open and expansive quality enhances referral sensations and inter-communication along the chain.

With practice the skill of relaxation is developed, and it is from this relaxation that we increase functionality of movement and enhance athletic performance by increasing explosive power, force integration & adaptation, and range of motion all contributing to injury and risk mitigation. The practice is not just used to address pain but its also used to strengthen and enhance ourselves. Having well calibrated tensegrity puts the body into the most effective state to gain leverage and maximize muscular output - muscles gain their effectiveness not by how tight they are but the difference between their resting and active state. This is calibration is partly structural (role of posture, muscle tone, myofascial state) but primarily neurological.

The neurological connection to tensegrity is where the notion of 'qi' or 'chi' comes into the equation. This is the next hurdle needed to be reconciled by the modern western paradigm. To oversimplify this notion of qi particularly in a way that pertains particularly to tensegrity in movement via the connective tissue (aka tendinomuscular meridians, fascial nets or kinetic chains), we will draw on parallels with the nervous system as well as some aspects of the immune system.

Our collagen formed connective tissue is rich in neurological innervation. It receives and sends an incredible array of signals, including pain inhibition (nociception), where the body is in space (proprioception), emotional and internal organ relays (enteroception), and much more. Think of the connective tissue as bubble wrap plastic and the muscle cells themselves as the air which fills the bubbles. The plastic is wired by six times as much nervous circuitry when compared to that which enters the air filled space. These nerve endings respond predominantly to stretch and do display a back-and-forth overlap in classical eastern medicine with the internal organ systems. This describes the way in which posture and movement reflect the state of our psycho-emotional health and also our internal organ health via enteroception and immune response. Classical eastern medicine does not draw any division between the the nervous system and the immune system - they're one and the same!



When referring to qi in movement, for the sake of this article, we are primarily referring to physical sensation and sense of relaxation. We carry with us an immaterial sensation of posture and self which reflects in the how we move and the tensions we feel. It is highly entwined with our psycho-emotional state. Emotions display postural tendencies that have their root in the connective tissues mechano-nervous tension. This is why when we are angry, irritated or stressed we can display tension in the jaw, neck, upper shoulders and ribs. It is also why a conscious change in posture to be more upright and open can increase confidence and raise energy levels.

When the body is well postured and relaxed it becomes capable of experiencing referral sensations. On athletic side of things this referral phenomenon is the alertness and sensitivity to forces (external and internal) on the body and the ability for stiffness to not sit but be free to transfer throughout the channel. When there is stiffness or blockages in the chain, when a new force is applied it can get trapped there as well. This disconnect can show in the form of mechanical force dispersal and impact directly putting increased wear on structures, and it can also show up as a disconnect of force transmission, inhibiting the body's ability to flow with movement and play with what flows through it without it landing anywhere (aka conservation of force)

Biomechanical forces challenge the body in a very similar way to pre-existing tension, fatigue, pains and aches that we experience. It is believed that they share the same source. That which allows forces to transmit freely shares the same root with that which allows tension to be released and allows pain to be eliminated. By developing good tensegrity in the body we train our body to process, handle and work with these stresses in as free and adaptive of a way as possible. This is the ultimate feat in the field of conditioning - a field where priming the body's condition to handle the greatest degree of stress through good range of motion, strong flex-loading tissues, sound full-body integration and patterning, the greatest capacity for coordination, all habituated unconsciously without focus. This is what conditioning is for!

Now there is great work being done in the field of conditioning. We have specialists who deal with physical preparation by increasing and balancing the functional range of motion (ROM) about our joints. This field deals with how much of our joint do we actually own and closing the gaps that exist between flexibility and mobility. These specialists pay special attention to the connective tissues role and its influence over reciprocal inhibition signals. Developing full and balanced functional range is not developing functional movement, but it is developing the body's capacity to be capable of moving functionally. If acceptable ROM is not there, then there's a good chance we will develop dysfunctional movement instead.

We also see specialists in the field of functional movement who deal with patterning. Patterning means putting the pieces together and carefully calibrating the amount and sequence by which the body's individual parts are working. This deals with the tendinomuscular meridian yin-yang, or what is now better known in the west as the "joint-by-joint" approach. Professional in this field work on the integration of the entire fascial chain, focusing on the alternating balance of stability and mobility from joint to joint. These types of exercises work with fundamental movement patterns that stress the full kinetic chain (ex. rotating, throwing, jumping, swinging) in the attempt to rewire and strengthen the correct pathways.

To over-simply this field of functional patterns, it ultimately means two things: 1. ensuring the mobility dominant joints are the prime movers and primary action in the sequnce, and that stability-dominant joints (aka flexibility-dominant joints - they're one and the same!) are always secondary to that! and 2. that mobility-dominant joints are achieving their acceptable functional-range so that neighboring joints are not compelled to act in place. Issues always arise when shoulder blades start acting like shoulders, or low backs start acting like hips!

There is still one area that the field of functional movement typically leaves out, or at least it does not directly address it, and that is unconscious integration and a good chunk of neural optimization. This is where the topic of this article comes into play: relaxation and tensegrity! The mainstream approach to prehab and rehab is using activation exercises - in other words putting our focus on activating muscles or kinetic chains while we perform a movement or isometric posture. This is not at all wrong, but it is impartial!

In order to truly dive in and regulate tensegrity, especially at the unconscious level, we need to develop proper relaxation! I often call this defaulting tensegrity. Activation exercises are to some extent unnatural. What I mean by this is that they mostly work when we are focusing on actively "doing". It is not sustainable and this can be the reason why as athletes what we do in our prehab exercises might not fully transfer into playing our sport. The moment we focus on something else, get lost in the game or even our everyday life outside of training, our body bounces back into its original default habits. Not addressing the role of 'song' relaxation in our prehab/rehab maintains the gap between our old tendencies and the changes we want in our connective tissue programming.

To address this tensegrity (connective tissue mechano-neurological tension) we must consolidate the desired changes as a passive "new normal" rather than an active capability. If we need to work and push to achieve the desired result then it is not sustainable. When you love something you must set it free. Pushing in this sense, will only encourage the separation between what we ultimately want to be come a part of us. To provide an example, if our core does not have the tensegrity to remain relaxed and upright, sure we can activate and tire our muscles that make us sit upright, but as long as we fail to discover the relaxation and separation yin and yang (recall the settling sediment and torus analogies above) we will not have a true balance and rewiring at the tensegrity level.

I hope this article has helped to shed some light on the field of relaxation, breathing and intent in the field of conditioning and functional movement. Remember, especially if you're an athlete this is not meant to replace the other focuses but to accompany them. In the chinese language there is a differentiation between exercise (waigong) and innercise (neigong). Innercise deals with what we talked about here today. Not developing the muscles and external physique, but rather tempering the connective tissue, bones and neurological state that permeates the entire human system supporting internal organ health.

Acupoint therapy can assist in developing this ability by releasing blockages and "waking up" nervous signaling. A structural approach using dry needling, cupping, scraping, traction and adjusting can also restore the tissue to a state where it can again take off on it's own in achieving sound function. At Hero Performance Health we like to make it clear that these therapies are boosters to get the body into a functional, adaptive and healthy balanced state, but they are not the means! If our lifestyles are aligned properly meaning we have a good regular movement practice (exercise and innercise!), healthy diet and nutrition, sound mind and emotional state, and a good balance between rest and work, work and play, then we should rarely require booster treatments like surgery, medication, acupuncture, adjustments and other aggressive manual manipulation.

At the same time though, life is hard on us, it throws stresses our way like accidents, trauma, loss, infection, general wear & tear with aging, and it also continually pressures us into lifestyle imbalances such as over-working, lofty sport and fitness goals, relationship burdens, and the list goes on... For this reason regularly scheduled booster treatments are key whether this means regularly schedule treatments every couple months, or getting in quickly when hard to clear imbalances arrive.

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