Task Specific Tension

I felt my fingers loosely whip in a perfect punctuated follow through with each arm swing. At the time, I was running south on Penmar Avenue. No, I wasn’t evading anyone. I got frustrated and went for a run as training for the day. As someone who isn’t a runner, I realize how unbelievable this story already is. Usually, you’ll find me training Strongman 202 (not running). Almost nothing in strongman happens with a relaxed grip like this, and it got me thinking.

My message for you today is in proper body tension. During a heavy deadlift, my fingers are white knuckled and the rest of my body follows suit, tight, engaged, and orderly. Surely, I couldn’t run that way. You couldn’t either. I’d look like the Tin Man.

Running is loose, right? Lifting heavy is rigid, right?

The reality is that all movement has task specific tension. The lesson to learn here is that our ability to understand tension is critically tethered to the task we are performing. Think back to running. If I jogged down Penmar with the systemic rigidity required of a six hundred pound deadlift, I wouldn’t be very efficient, or fast for that matter. Yet, if we were to race in the forty yard dash the body would require more tension than required of the jogging gait.

Look at a sprinter’s hands. You’ll see splayed fingers (tense), flexed muscles (tense), and a relaxed face (loose). No, it’s not rigid like the task of the six hundred pound deadlift (all tense), but it is appropriately more tension that the whipping fingers I felt in the jog.

The deadlift has the same sliding scale of task specific tension, too. You can imagine the problems, mostly awkward inefficiency, of picking up (or deadlifting) the pen you’ve dropped with the same body rigidity as the one rep max deadlift.

Athletes at the highest level in any discipline understand task specific tension. Boxers throw punches with tension that’s not too much, not too little. A golf swing and a handstand, too, have their own unique requirements for body tension. Too much tension and you’re wasting energy. Too little tension are you’ll likely leaking performance (and safety). The key is finding the least effective dose to accomplish the task masterfully.

For a beginner, understanding this task specific tension is a learning process. How the process goes is we over deliver on tension and dial it back as we approach mastery. After all, it’s better that you pick up the pen with heavy deadlift-type tension than pick up the heavy deadlift with dropped pen-type tension, isn’t it?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach