Mindset
“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?
