Unveiling the Impact of Movement Substitutions Through Skiing

Brian descends snowy mountain steeps at mercurial speeds. Strapped to skis with edges as sharp as knives, he scrapes across cold, hard-packed H20. It’s his passion. It’s his profession. In an ideal world, he’s first and fastest, and he came to me to help create that world.

In a sport like alpine skiing, each skier fights several times their body’s weight in each turn—more if things get hairy. No one makes it down with chicken legs.

Each turn also requires unique contortions; no two turns, even on the same course, are experienced the same way. The fewer contortions you have available, the fewer options you have to adapt to each turn and keep your speed. 

So, skiers need access and strength through each millimeter their joints offer, especially their spines, if they’re to adapt to the variations that come with every corner and overcome the immense inertia of the slalom.

Brian chases weight room and force place stats, and he should, but there’s so much more to greatness than what’s on a barbell and how much sweat is on the floor. Brian won’t podium because he lifted more than the next guy. All sports require a blend of physiological and psychological dominance and good movement.

Some sports reward weight room heroism more than others. Shotput, a tape measure sport, rewards mass moved with meters thrown. (It requires loads of skill, too.) But when your sport is sixty to seventy speedy turns, movement quality is essential to preserving mph.

Brian’s already got most of the strength, power, elastic, and endurance adaptations he needs because he’s a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of the sport. Even if he adds ten pounds to his back squat, or grinds for months for a slightly higher VO2 max, neither promises leaps and bounds in world rankings.

To get a result he’s never had, we’d have to find something he hadn’t done and promises exponential growth. That something is discovering movement substitutions—when one joint habitually does the job of another. All Apiros athletes wind up referring to them as “unlocks.” As in something that unlocks the next stage in their evolution.

Brian’s complaints clued me in. He never said he was getting overpowered by the inertia of every turn, something that would require time under iron. He asked for help turning left. 

A barbell can’t fix that. 

He gets closer to glory by figuring out why his positioning slowed his left turns. If he could access better movement, he’d maintain his momentum and shave hundredths of seconds (or more) off his time.

In each race, skiers must side-bend, round, and rotate their spines. To turn left, they must bend right and vice versa. Spinal mobility and strength are so important that even small limitations can have significant consequences. If you can’t bend your neck to the right, it’s harder to turn left. Brian didn’t bend his neck right, which partially explained his left-turn issues. 

He couldn’t bring his chin to his right collarbone. Nor his right ear to his right shoulder. Not because of any physical impediment or “tight” muscle, but because he broke his clavicle in 2020, got surgery, and no one rehabbed his neck muscles. Why would they? He broke a bone and kept his muscles intact. It’s not an obvious decision.

(Here’s that image again. Notice the kink in his oblique? He substituted his neck motion into his lumbar spine and his right hip.)

Without rehab, and with a focus on traditional exercises, Brian lost the ability to bend his neck to the right—a coordination problem. He learned to move other joints in substitution, and his left turns slowed. This substitution went unnoticed for three years. Hell, I didn’t even find it until our fourth session. It’s only obvious in retrospect. 

Adding cervical motion to his routine hasn’t made him a medalist. It does give him a better chance, however. A lot better. He can access more contortions to apex red and blue. 

The point of this post isn’t neck stuff. It’s that there’s an entirely different focal point than the spreadsheet. Everyone is so focused on the quantitative aspects of sports when one qualitative improvement of movement often results in exponential growth. So we spend our sessions searching for these nuggets instead of rejiggering Brian’s periodization scheme. Athletes and their practitioners need to prioritize how they move to solve the problems of their sports in addition to what we know and love about iron. 

Finding these substitutions is a tenet of Evolved Coaching. The fewer substitutions athletes have, the better they perform and the lower injury risk they harbor. How ‘bout that. Fewer joints do the jobs of others, and athletes and their staff do their jobs better.