Functional training destroyed my gains. Here's how I got them back.

In 2019, I was in the best shape of my life. I’d gained more muscle than ever before.

I was lifting more than ever, and had never had a major lifting injury. Below is me squatting 170kg.

Then I found the functional training part of the internet.

Being a coach and someone that wanted to optimise things, this seemed like great info.

The 'experts' in this area said I would get hurt and harm my performance if I didn’t address certain asymmetries.

...Like my crooked bar position when I squatted. 

So I started deliberately trying to 'move better'.

Then in a powerlifting meet that year, I hurt my knee during a squat.

It wasn't a debilitating injury, but it stuck around for months.

My knee was sore all the time and I was unable to do things as simple as ride my bike without knee pain, let alone train hard.

Then while trying to fix my knee, I encountered functional training rehab ideas.

I was told that the asymmetry was what caused the injury, and that I needed to strengthen my glutes.

I also was also told to avoid anything painful like they said.

One year into the functional approach, I was much weaker, and still in pain. 

Well, the good news is I eventually found out about the real science of pain and injury.

The key for me was figuring out the THREE LIES that most of us are told about pain and injury.

I promise I’m going to tell you EXACTLY what these are, but first I want to show you what learning about them did for me. 

1. I put on even more muscle than I had before. 

2. I overcame my knee injury and went on to squat a lifetime goal of 200 kilos, while running twice a week!

3. I didn’t want to keep all of this newfound knowledge to myself, so I began teaching clients and other coaches what I had learned. They also saw huge improvements in their pain and performance.

Now I want to teach it to you guys. 

Lie #1 : 'You must be symmetrical'

I started down the functional rabbit hole because I saw what seemed like a problem with my squat.

But I quickly learned that this was never a problem, it was just the way I squat, and it was working! If anything, changing it may have been what got me hurt in the first place.

It’s normal to assume symmetrical movement is the safest and most efficient. But I did some research and realised that doesn’t really make sense.

Our bodies are not symmetrical.

It’s estimated that anywhere from 30-50% of the population have an arm or leg significantly longer than the other.

We also have many examples of athletes that reached the pinnacle of their sport with asymmetrical movement.

Pyrros Dimas (above) is a gold medal winner and regarded as one of the greatest weightlifters of all time.

You can see his crooked bar position and hips shifted to one side, not unlike my own squat pattern. 

Lamar Gant had scoliosis, a condition that meant his spine was literally crooked.

Lamar is one of the strongest pound for pound deadlifters of all time, with a 5x bodyweight deadlift (634lbs at a bodyweight of 123lbs). 

If he'd listened to the functional gurus, he would have never picked up the empty barbell. Instead his body did what all of ours can - it adapted!

So I stopped worrying about being perfectly symmetrical, and embraced my natural squat pattern that I'd already gotten strong with.

Lie #2 'You are fragile'

I was told that I had to be very careful of how I moved or else I could permanently damage myself.

I was also told that there were certain movements that were never safe to do (like deep squats).

What I learned was that movements are not usually a problem, but the loads we use when doing them can be.

Nobody would think jumping off a roof is a good idea for knee health.

But jumping on and off some low steps? That's often touted as a great way of building bone density and joint health.

So what's the difference? The load.

If you do the low steps for long enough, they become too easy. So you increase the height. Do that long and progressively enough, and you could become a parkour athlete who jumps off roofs for fun.

This is because our bodies can adapt when the load is appropriate.

I realised that there had to be somewhere between bodyweight squats and my 1RM, that I could use to heal myself.

But to do this, I had to find out about and conquer the final lie..

Lie #3 "Pain = damage"

Even knowing all the above, I was being kept in a vicious loop of making progress, and then pulling all the weights back again.

The reason why was that I was still occasionally getting knee pain.

I'd been told pain was bad, and a sign I was doing something wrong.

I eventually learned that pain is actually just a signal, and that signal can become faulty - espescially when we have had pain for a long time, and have developed certain beliefs about it.

Pain is a bit like a fire alarm. When I hurt my knee initially, a fire had occured and the alarm did its job. But then when I consumed functional content, that alarm became highly sensitised. It started going off when I felt anything around my knee, or if I did something I had been told was dangerous.

I'm aware this is the part people find hardest to believe, so I'm going to give some real life proof that pain is complex, and not as tightly associated with damage as you think.

Paper-cuts are very painful. However the amount of damage they do is very minimal.

Conversely, the vast majority of adults over the age of 30 have visible spinal degeneration on MRI scans. This includes significant damage to spinal discs. And a large percentage of them have zero back pain.

Not convinced? One more.

Phantom limb pain is a common condition amongst amputees, where they experience intense pain. In a limb that literally is no longer attached to their body.

I also discovered several studies that showed training through some pain could not only be safe, but actually allow people to rehab with no negative effects, and in some cases even better results.

So, I started carefully poking into my pain more and more.

I squatted and made small increases.

I respected my body's alarms when they really freaked out, but I didn't go back to bodyweight and start a new 'glute activation' regime.

For me, all the proof I needed was that I finally started making progress when I adopted what I call the 'dysfunctional' approach.

Not only did I get back to where I was and overcome my injury, I got even better gains than before by embracing the adaptive ability of my body.

Next time

In my next article, I'm going to give you a case study of how I helped a client to get out of pain and hit PRs with dysfunctional training.

In Strength, Cill