Daily Mobility Exercises by Dr. Kelly Starrett › Forums › General › Transversal Plane › Re: Transversal Plane

09/10/2015 at 3:49 pm #76185
AvatarNathan Richer
Participant

I’m a fan of Stuart McGill’s work. I believe he would say the safest would be neutral spine all the time.  However, it is evident that some people do some amazing things outside the neutral spine position. a great recent example was in a MWOD episode with Matt Vincent where he snatches with a rounded upper back. he maintains the shape of the rounded upper back which protects it (movement during loaded situations is bad for the spine, but static seems ok in certain conditions) but as he throws the bar up, he unloads his spine and then reshapes it to be neutral/extended for the overhead where it is braced again. so he escapes injury because he changes shape when his spine is unloaded but not when it is.

I believe Stu McGill would also say that the lumbar spine should always be braced and there should be little or no movement there. the t-spine is much more able to move and rotate and thus most of any spine motion should come from there.  
and there is the concept of global flexion/extension and as well as global twisting, where each segment takes part of the load and thus the whole system is more resilient to loads. it’s when there is lack of mobility somewhere and the flexion/extension/twisting is happening at only one disc. this will wreck the disc for sure.
i think 1 arm KB swings are a good example. in order to “toss” the KB between the legs between the back swing with one arm, you will have a little bit of rotation in the spine to do so. hopefully it is more global than local and happening with braced lumbar spine and most of it happening in the t-spine. the GS KB folks even take that more to extreme with lots of spinal twisting to enable use of the fascial loading to aid in their movements and help them with snatch endurance.
i do not know if there are many longitudinal studies on KB swingers has been done, but certainly many have survived decades of good 1 arm swinging without major spinal problems…
so i think that if you can aid in spinal mobility and make sure movements aren’t confined to only one disc, and aren’t really doing extreme twisting motions (1 arm swing spinal rotation isn’t all that much, just enough to toss the KB between the legs properly- training in GS style i would highly recommend with a competent instructor for sure), there are conditions where it would seem that some t-spine rotation is OK.