Core Training - Interview with Paul Chek

By Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN

...Continued from Page 3

Paul Chek:         Well, there is a two-pronged approach.   Once you identify an inner-unit muscle or a stabilizer that is not working, you have got to identify whether it's not working because the person does not have the motor skills to turn it on.   I'll give you a simple example.  

A common test used worldwide these days which I was probably one of the pioneers of implementing, is to use a blood pressure cuff laying prone and asking the person to draw their umbilicus inward.   A person with normal TVA (transverse abdominis) function should be able to decrease the pressure on the cuff by 10 millimeters mercury and you will find that many people out there cannot do that.   Sadly, many physical therapists and trainers think there is something wrong with the individual and can spend countless hours playing with blood pressure cuffs, but just to give you an example of how dangerous these types of tests are if you don't understand anatomy, physiology, and psychology, it is completely unnatural for the brain to fire the inner unit while laying on the floor because the body operates on the least energy principle, so if you look at the research of Richard A.

Schmidt in motor learning and performance, he makes it very clear that even leaning against a wall will reduce activity of the stabilizer system significantly, so when you put someone in an environment where they are fully stabilized by gravity, the system has no impetus to activate the core the other problem with a test like that is most people have inflamed guts from eating and living incorrectly, and when you lay on top of a blown up blood pressure cuff, it is like somebody pushing their fist into your stomach.  

Inflamed tissues are pain sensitive and pain causes inhibition of the motor system so even though the test is good, if you don't have enough knowledge about the person's inner state or you don't understand that the body doesn't naturally activate stabilizers when it is stabilized you can spend tons of time trying to teach someone a new skill that goes against the natural flow of muscle joint activation, so with a person like that, even if they fail a prone TVA test, I always test their primal patterns.  

Thousands and thousands of times over the years I have demonstrated to therapists, coaches, doctors, trainers, that many people who you think are dysfunctional when they are laying on the floor are functional when you stand them up.   The critical take home point here is that core recruitment is specific to motor pattern activation.  

I could easily show you in 5 minutes at any gym that there are people out there who have normal core function while pulling, but that completely break down in a pushing pattern or a twisting pattern.   So you have to test all 7 primal patterns to get an authentic assessment of functional core activity.   Once we make those assessments, we then have to look at which patterns their core functions in relative to what their environment demands.   So go back to the golfer.  

If their core does not work with a lunge, but it works with the key patterns associated with golf, I am not going to spend a pile of time trying to fix core recruitment for the lunge pattern unless there is a reason that I believe that is necessary.   If that person lived in an environment like Vancouver or San Francisco, where there are a lot of hills, or they worked in an environment where they had to do a lot of stair-climbing, I would certainly move to correct that lunge dysfunction because they could easily get hurt outside of sports training due to a lack of motor skills.   Essentially we are always looking at 2 things which are what criteria have to be met for normal function as a human being first and then second what criteria have to be met for success in the environment that is related to what we call the dream.

Yuri Elkaim:      So it is really about specificity.   It depends whether you are an athlete or whether you are a regular human being going through daily life.

Paul Chek:         Well we are all human beings before we are athletes.   One of the diseases of the health and exercise industry worldwide is the glorification of athletes.   Everybody is so excited to do the high performance training and things like that but you know you have to crawl before you walk.   It doesn't matter if you're a world champion or not.   You have the same musculoskeletal system as your mother and as the fat guy sitting next to you.   You have to create baseline levels of function.  

You have to have an operational platform just like a computer has an operational platform.   If you use a Windows computer and Windows 2000 crashes, power point doesn't work and excel doesn't work.   No other programs will work because they depend on the operational platform.   All Chek practitioners are highly trained in assessing the operational platform before they go into any of the specific uses of the system because to do so would be backwards.   What happens is people that do it backwards get short term results at best because essentially what they are doing is metaphorically creating a car that goes like hell but can not stop or turn.

Yuri Elkaim:          I guess that is why exercise and training in general is so fascinating because there are so many different approaches and really it is about finding what works best for you and that is why I really appreciate your approach because you are about more than building muscle and getting a six pack .   You dig deeper not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well and you have a great holistic viewpoint.

Paul Chek:               Well if you look at how life is created relative to the way most people approach human beings, most people are caught up in a Newtonian mind-set.   They believe that the physical world is the only think that's real.   There are therapists all over the world that think a hamstring tear is a problem with the hamstring and don't look at any other correlations to it.   The truth of it is first and foremost we are conscious beings.   So the highest principle is consciousness itself and consciousness is a principle that pervades the entire universe.  

Consciousness is synonymous with silence.   If you had a big enough weapon to evaporate the entire universe, the only thing that would be left is pure silence.   Pure silence is what I call first principle creation.   Second principle creation is vibration, movement, or word.   In metaphysics that is called logos which just means word or vibration.   So we look first at what people are conscious of relative to what they should be conscious of.   For example if you are a professional hockey player and you are conscious of Ephedra as a performance enhancer but you are unconscious of food as a performance enhancer, it means that you are disconnected with the true nature of yourself and therefore I have to improve your awareness of what a human being is and we have to get into some of the subtleties.   We have to look at the effects of the mind on behavior and the function of behavior in regards to your current state of health or lack thereof.   I teach my students a very in depth understanding of the metaphysics.  

For example, your arm won't raise by itself.   You have to consciously give your body the command to raise your arm.   So with that simple analogy alone I have showed you that your mind is in charge of your musculoskeletal system.   So if peoples' ideas are such that they are an impediment to the function of a healthy body there is no sense working on your guts or you back until we work with the ideas.   For example, most people think that digestion begins in the stomach.   It doesn't.   The first step of digestion is choosing the foods to put into the human body.   Therefore it is a mental function.  

A top-down approach says that first you have to be aware of what consciousness is because it is the only thing that is enduring.   It is the only thing that exists without a body.   If I cut your arm off you will still be conscious.   If I cut your leg off you will still be conscious.   If I stop your heart then your physicality ceases to be a point of action for consciousness but mind itself is a reflection of movement.   So the second principle is movement itself.   Movement expresses time, space, matter and mind as Einstein taught.   Those things are inextricably one.   There is no such thing as time without movement.   There is no such thing as matter without light which is moot with the principle of movement.   My whole approach is to look at a person's ideology because it governs their physiology and if you understand physiology but don't understand ideology then you are forever treating symptoms and not their causes.  

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