“What if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along?”

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself returning to that question more than any other.

It wasn’t prompted by a new research paper, nor was it sparked by the latest technique or certification making its way through our profession. Instead, it emerged from a conversation that reminded me just how easily we divide ourselves into camps.

Strength and conditioning.

Rehabilitation.

Performance.

Pain science.

Biomechanics.

Psychology.

Neuroscience.

Each discipline develops its own language, its own methods, its own community, and, if we’re not careful, its own belief that it possesses the most important piece of the puzzle.

After nearly forty years working with athletes, Olympians, professional teams, therapists, coaches, and now artists at Cirque du Soleil, I’ve come to believe that these divisions exist far more in our professions than they do in the human body itself.

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, Which approach is correct?

Maybe we should be asking,

What is the human nervous system trying to accomplish?

That question has quietly guided the evolution of my own thinking for much of my career.

When I first entered strength and conditioning, like many coaches of my generation, everything revolved around outputs. Bigger. Faster. Stronger. We chased force production, power, speed, and every measurable quality we believed would improve performance. The prescription seemed straightforward: apply stress, build capacity, improve performance.

I still believe those qualities matter. They always will.

But over time I came to realize they represented only part of the story.

As my career unfolded, I found myself working with athletes who challenged many of my assumptions. Olympic athletes. Female athletes. Figure skaters. Divers. Freestyle skiers. Artists. Individuals whose relationship with movement looked nothing like the football culture in which I had been educated.

Many of them didn’t love lifting weights.

They loved expressing themselves through movement.

The gym wasn’t their identity. It was simply one tool that allowed them to continue doing what they truly loved.

That realization forced me to ask a question I hadn’t considered before.

Why are we lifting weights in the first place?

At first, the answer seemed obvious.

To get stronger.

Eventually I realized that strength was never really the objective. It was one possible outcome. The deeper objective was resilience. Adaptability. Confidence. Robustness. The ability to solve increasingly complex movement problems under increasingly demanding conditions.

That subtle shift changed the trajectory of my career.

Around the same time, another observation kept resurfacing.

As both a therapist and a strength coach, I found myself moving back and forth between two professional worlds that rarely seemed to speak the same language.

Rehabilitation focused on protecting people.

Performance focused on pushing them.

One valued caution.

The other celebrated overload.

Yet both were working with exactly the same human being.

That contradiction fascinated me.

It still does.

I remember standing in a treatment room early in my career after performing what, on the surface, seemed like a relatively simple manual therapy intervention. Within minutes, the athlete moved differently. Their range of motion improved. Their pain diminished. They walked away feeling better than when they had arrived.

I remember standing there thinking,

“What just happened?”

I hadn’t changed the structure of their tissues in five minutes.

I certainly hadn’t rebuilt muscle.

Something else had changed.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to explain it. Today, I think I do.

What changed wasn’t simply tissue.

It was information.

That question “What just happened?” has quietly shaped the last three decades of my professional life.

Over the years I immersed myself in the work of people whose ideas challenged my own. Janda, Kolář, and the Prague School. Cook and Burton. PRI. Spina and FRC. Motor learning. Ecological dynamics. Pain science. Neuroscience. 

There have been so many factors that have shaped my current beliefs.

At first, they appeared to occupy entirely different worlds. They used different terminology, different assessments, different exercises, and often attracted different tribes of practitioners.

The deeper I studied them, however, the harder it became to ignore what they shared.

Each was asking essentially the same question.

How does the nervous system organize human movement?

Some approached that question through developmental patterns.

Others through respiration.

Some through joint control.

Others through perception, sensory information, or threat.

Different maps.

The same territory.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned through all of those experiences can be summarized in one sentence.

The body will not access what it doesn’t know, or what it perceives as unsafe.

When I first arrived at that conclusion, I believed it applied primarily to rehabilitation.

I no longer think that.

It influences strength.

Power.

Speed.

Motor learning.

Skill acquisition.

Confidence.

Decision making.

Movement variability.

Performance under pressure.

Every movement we produce is ultimately a solution generated by the nervous system.

Muscles don’t make decisions.

The brain does.

Which brings me to pain science.

From time to time I hear pain science dismissed because it is viewed as something that belongs exclusively in rehabilitation or in the management of persistent pain. While I understand why that perception exists, I think it misses the greatest contribution pain science has made to our profession.

Pain science isn’t valuable simply because it changed how we think about pain.

It is valuable because it changed how we think about the brain.

It helped many of us appreciate that pain is an output rather than an input. That the brain is constantly gathering information, making predictions, assessing threat, and selecting responses that it believes will best protect the organism.

But here’s the important part.

The brain doesn’t suddenly stop doing those things because an athlete walks into a weight room.

Or onto a football field.

Or onto a balance beam.

Or under the lights of a Cirque du Soleil performance.

Those same predictive processes influence confidence, coordination, muscle tone, breathing, movement variability, attention, decision making, and ultimately performance itself.

Understanding how the brain processes information isn’t simply a rehabilitation skill.

It’s a human performance skill.

One of the reasons I’m so excited about my new role at Cirque du Soleil is that it continues to challenge my assumptions every single day.

These performers didn’t develop extraordinary movement capacity by chasing bigger squat numbers alone.

They developed remarkable abilities through exploration, repetition, creativity, and by solving increasingly complex movement problems over thousands of hours.

Their nervous systems became extraordinarily adaptable, curious, creative, and remarkably robust.

That observation doesn’t diminish the importance of strength training.

Far from it.

It simply reminds me that strength is one ingredient within a much larger recipe.

The gym remains one of the most powerful environments we have available.

I simply see its purpose differently today than I did thirty years ago.

To me, the gym has become a laboratory.

A place to experiment.

To expose the nervous system to meaningful challenges.

To build options rather than limitations.

To improve organization before expression.

To develop capability before capacity.

Perhaps that’s what has changed most over four decades.

The longer I work in this profession, the less interested I become in defending disciplines.

I’ve changed my mind too many times.

Every decade has dismantled another certainty I once held.

Today, I find myself far more interested in understanding the remarkable complexity of the human being than proving that any one methodology is superior.

Because the brain doesn’t separate physiology from psychology.

It doesn’t separate biomechanics from neuroscience.

It doesn’t separate rehabilitation from performance.

Those are distinctions we’ve created.

Not biology.

Perhaps the future of our profession isn’t choosing between strength science and pain science.

Or rehabilitation and performance.

Or movement quality and force production.

Perhaps the future lies in recognizing that they’re all describing different aspects of the same beautifully integrated system.

The human body has never recognized the boundaries we’ve drawn between our professions.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped separating the human being?

 “Nothing happens to you, everything happens for you.”

― Scott Livingston

It is difficult to absorb an outcome you never expected.

Losing a job. Breaking a leg. Missing out on a promotion. The end of a marriage. The loss of someone you love.

None of these are experiences we seek. None of them arrive with an invitation.

Yet these moments often become the very experiences that shape us most.

That doesn’t mean there should be no pain.

Pain is real. Grief is real. Disappointment is real.

We are meant to feel them.

Our brains are constantly interpreting the world around us, trying to determine what is safe, what is dangerous, and what those experiences mean. Much of our early understanding comes from our parents, our family, our teachers, and our coaches. Over time, our own experiences begin to shape that lens.

The challenge is that we often confuse the experience with the story we create about the experience.

When something difficult happens, we naturally begin building a narrative.

Why did this happen?

Who is responsible?

What does this say about me?

If we lose a job, for example, there may be factors within our control and factors outside of it. The work is not to deny either reality. The work is to understand both.

What could I have done differently?

What was beyond my influence?

What can I learn moving forward?

Growth lives inside those questions.

But if we define the event itself as purely damaging or negative, we often create something else: a threat response.

Future situations that resemble the original experience begin to feel dangerous. We become more protective. More cautious. More guarded.

We stop exploring and start defending.

We protect rather than expand.

Over time, fear mitigation can become a way of life. It influences our decisions, our relationships, and our willingness to take risks. It narrows our world.

Growth does the opposite.

Every challenge contains an opportunity to better understand ourselves. To recognize where we contributed, what we avoided, what we overlooked, and what we might do differently next time.

Even in the loss of someone we love, there is something to learn.

We grieve because the relationship mattered.

We ache because their presence shaped us.

Their absence leaves a space that cannot be replaced, but that space can be filled with gratitude, memory, and love. We carry forward what they gave us.

None of this is easy.

The emotions matter.

The feelings matter.

But the meaning we assign to the event remains ours to choose.

The experience is real.

The circumstance is real.

What is not fixed is the story.

Every experience, no matter how difficult, offers perspective. It provides an opportunity to become more resilient, more compassionate, more self-aware, and more capable than we were before.

That is part of why we are here.

Not to avoid life.

Not to protect ourselves from every possibility of discomfort.

But to experience, to learn, and to grow.

Can life hurt us?

Absolutely.

There are real constraints and genuine hardships.

But they are not meant to become our compass.

Our compass must come from our relationship with what we experience and our willingness to learn from it.

Experience is a gift.

Don’t give it up.

Nothing happens to you.

Everything happens for you.

How might you revisit an experience that once felt like a setback and see it through a different lens?

 “Pivot….pivot…..pivot……PIVOT!”

― Ross Geller

Anyone who lived through the golden age of Thursday night television, before PVRs and long before streaming, remembers the scene.

Ross and Chandler are trying to move a couch up a narrow staircase. The couch gets stuck. Ross, convinced there must be a solution, keeps yelling:

“Pivot! Pivot! Pivot!”

As if sheer optimism and a slight adjustment will somehow make the impossible possible.

Meanwhile, Chandler has reached his limit.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

He knows exactly what’s happening. The couch isn’t going any farther.

It’s one of the most memorable scenes in television history because it’s funny, but also because it’s relatable.

Most of us have been there.

Maybe not with a couch, although many of us have carried one up a staircase while praying our friend actually measured the doorway before buying it. But we’ve all experienced that moment when something we thought would work suddenly doesn’t. The plan falls apart. The path forward disappears. The solution we were counting on no longer exists.

And then we’re left with one option.

Pivot.

The ability to adapt may be one of the defining characteristics of being human.

Think about it.

We arrive in this world with no shelter, no clothing, no tools, and a remarkably long journey before we can survive independently. Yet somehow we have become the dominant species on the planet.

Not because we’re the strongest.

Not because we’re the fastest.

Because we adapt.

We create solutions to problems that didn’t exist yesterday. We invent new tools. We revise old ideas. We change course when conditions change. We learn. We evolve. We pivot.

For our family, the past several years have been an exercise in exactly that.

The pandemic changed nearly everything about our business and our daily lives. One day we were teaching courses and hosting events in person. The next day we were doing everything online.

The constraints changed, so the solution had to change.

One day I was struggling to find guests for my podcast. The next, because everyone was sitting at home and looking for connection, I was hosting conversations with some of the biggest names in performance, rehabilitation, and coaching. Opportunities that seemed impossible suddenly became possible.

Then, just as quickly, the world shifted again.

Pivot.

The pandemic eventually faded into the background, but the lessons remained. It was perhaps the only truly global event of our lifetime. Every person on the planet experienced it in some form. Nobody escaped untouched.

Yet humanity adapted.

As we always do.

More recently, our family has found ourselves navigating another season of change.

The community has changed.

Business has changed.

Marketing has changed.

Communication has changed.

First came the explosion of social media platforms, each creating its own audience, language, and culture. Then, came artificial intelligence, introducing possibilities and challenges we are only beginning to understand.

Like every technological shift before it, there are advantages and disadvantages.

The question isn’t whether change is coming.

The question is whether we are willing to adapt to it.

Whether we can embrace the opportunities while managing the risks.

Whether we can remain curious instead of resistant.

Whether we can pivot.

That idea has become increasingly important to me this year.

A new role.

A move back to Montreal.

New challenges.

New opportunities.

A new chapter.

Not because I was searching for change for the sake of change, but because life has a way of presenting us with moments where standing still is no longer an option.

Sometimes change is chosen.

Sometimes it is imposed.

Sometimes it arrives quietly, and sometimes it crashes through the front door without warning.

Either way, we eventually find ourselves standing on the staircase, holding the couch, realizing the original plan isn’t going to work.

And that’s okay.

Because adaptation is not failure.

Changing direction is not a weakness.

Revising the plan is not giving up.

It’s often the exact thing that allows us to keep moving forward.

The key is remembering that every change creates consequences. Every new solution introduces new challenges. Every opportunity carries some degree of risk.

Upstream change always creates downstream effects.

The goal isn’t to avoid that reality.

The goal is to navigate it thoughtfully.

To make the best decision you can with the information you have.

To stay flexible.

To stay curious.

To stay moving.

So if you’re going through a season of change right now, wondering whether the next step is the right one, take comfort in knowing that adaptation is part of the human story.

It’s how we survive.

It’s how we grow.

It’s how we create better futures for ourselves and for the people around us.

And sometimes, when the couch gets stuck and the original plan falls apart, the answer really is…

Pivot.

 “Sometimes you can feel alone in a crowded room”

― Unknown

This past week, if you are a hockey fan, and perhaps even if you are not, you likely heard about the passing of former NHL star Claude Lemieux.

The hockey world was shocked because only days earlier, Claude had been at the Montreal Canadiens’ Game 3 playoff matchup against the Carolina Hurricanes at the Bell Centre. Thousands of fans watched him carry the ceremonial torch that ignited the Bell Centre and fueled the passion of the Canadiens faithful.

Claude played for several NHL teams and won multiple Stanley Cups, but many Montreal fans remember him first as a young member of the Canadiens’ 1986 Stanley Cup championship team. He was known as an agitator, a player opponents loved to hate and teammates loved to have on their side. After his playing career, he settled in Florida with his family, became involved in business, and remained connected to the game as a player agent.

I was shocked to hear of his passing.

It always hits a little closer to home when someone is near your own age.

I was even more saddened to learn that he had taken his own life.

I did not know Claude personally, nor do I know his family or the circumstances surrounding his death. What I do know is that many people who appear to be doing well on the outside are often carrying burdens that no one else can see.

We all wear masks to some degree. We reserve parts of ourselves for different people, different places, and different moments. Yet there are many who seem perfectly fine from the outside while privately struggling in ways those around them never fully understand.

Life is hard.

Business is hard.

Relationships are hard.

We all experience disappointment, loss, uncertainty, and moments of profound struggle. That has always been true. Yet today, it feels as though the pressure has intensified.

The internet and social media have created a world where appearances are often mistaken for reality. We are surrounded by images of success, achievement, happiness, and perfection. It becomes easy to believe that everyone else is thriving while we alone are struggling.

Too many people find themselves trying to live up to an image rather than a reality. They measure themselves against carefully curated moments instead of meaningful lives. The weight of those expectations can become overwhelming.

For those who have lived in the spotlight, these pressures can be even greater.

Athletes are often celebrated for their toughness, resilience, and ability to endure. They are taught to play through pain, push through adversity, and never show weakness. Those qualities may help someone succeed on the ice, but they can also make it difficult to ask for help when life becomes overwhelming.

Sometimes the strongest people are carrying the heaviest burdens.

Sometimes the people who seem to have everything together are fighting battles no one knows about.

Sometimes you can feel completely alone in a crowded room.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to work with elite athletes, coaches, executives, and high performers from many different walks of life. One thing I have learned is that success does not protect anyone from loneliness, anxiety, depression, self doubt, or despair. In some cases, the very traits that help people achieve extraordinary things can make it harder for them to reach out when they need support.

The human psyche is a fragile thing.

Our minds can be pulled into dark places. Our mental health can be crushed beneath the weight of our own stories, our own expectations, and our own perceptions of what we believe we should be.

Claude’s passing is a powerful reminder that every person we encounter is carrying a story we know nothing about.

The person we speak with.

The person we work beside.

The person we pass in the grocery store.

The person sitting next to us at dinner.

We have no idea what may be happening behind their eyes.

They may not need our opinion.

They may not need our judgment.

They may simply need our kindness.

Our patience.

Our understanding.

Or simply our presence.

We are quick to judge these days.

Quick to assume.

Quick to form opinions without knowing the story.

Perhaps we would all be better served by extending a little more grace.

A little more compassion.

A little more understanding.

Because none of us truly knows what another person is carrying.

Be kind.

Be present.

You never know how much it may matter.