August marks the 20th anniversary of my blog – Functional Path Training. (See first post from August 5, 2005, below). I decided to start writing the blog on my drive from Portland, Oregon to my home in Sarasota, Florida after leaving the Nike Oregon Project (NOP). I decided to write the blog as an exercise to cleanse my mind and soul from the NOP experience. It was a means to express my thoughts about training, coaching and life in general.
My experience with NOP was a traumatic six months. In many ways it was the worst six months of my life. I had never seen so much dysfunction and abuse in my life. Alberto Salazar was a Manson like character with off the books support from Nike. Salazar was scary, a bipolar alcoholic.
You ask and justifiably so why did I go there? The picture that was painted to me was the opposite of what I experienced. It portrayed as an opportunity to innovate, learn and work with high level track and field again.
Thank God I got out with my sanity. The blog helped me to refocus and get back on track. Twenty years later when I think about the NOP experience I break out into a cold sweat. Thank God NOP was disbanded, and Salazar banned from coaching, but Nike continues its unqualified support for drug coaches and athletes. To paraphrase the George Straight song happiness was Nike/NOP/Portland in the rearview mirror.
First Blog post – August 5, 2005
Following the functional path in training and rehabilitation has been a journey of discovery. The more I ventured down the path, the more I realized it was a path that had been traveled many times before but had fallen out of use in favor of smoother paved roads that promised faster and easier results. Seeking to follow and better define the functional path is a continuing journey; fortunately, it is a journey that many have traveled before. Functional training is very much in concert with the need to get back to basics. It is getting back to the basics of movement. It is learning to tune into the body and its inherent wisdom to produce rhythmic flowing movement.
In today’s high-tech world we sometimes forget the basics because faster more measurable results are available through machines and high tech gadgets. The biggest lesson that I have learned is that the farther away from the body we stray the less functional we become. The human body is a beautiful finely tuned machine that far surpasses the most finely tuned high performance machine known to man. The body is the ultimate high-tech machine. Despite all its complexity the body is also incredibly simple. Movement is a beautiful simple flow. The complexity in movement comes from combining simple movements into sophisticated patterns and then applying these patterns to specific sport and life activities. The body has an inherent wisdom; to take advantage of this wisdom we must focus on how the body functions. We must understand the interaction between the body, gravity and the ground to understand function. A thorough understanding of function will allow us to design and implement a very specific training program to meet the individual needs for each athlete we train.
Understanding and training function is a challenging process. It is often contrary to conventional wisdom as represented in current mainstream sport science research. This should not limit you from moving forward. Use conventional wisdom as a starting point and move forward faster, higher and stronger down the functional path. Following the functional path is challenging. The reward is in the results!
Marilyn DeMartini
So true and so wise! I value the time I spent in your seminars as a fitness journalist, Vern. I always remember you saying to train glutes and lower body, “If you want to have power, you have to have a big house!”