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How Does Blowing a Snot-Rocket Relate to Your Training?
It is a nice, semi-warm, March morning as I write this.
Which means that allergy season is right around the corner. So, I have to ask you a question: do you
have a bit of mucus wan ting to drip out of your nose right now? I am serious. If you do, go to the
bathroom or outside and try to blow a snot rocket with both nostrils unplugged. Then, after you do
that, try to blow a traditional snot rocket with one nostril plugged.
Whether you did or didn’t do this exercise, which version of the snot rocket had more force behind it?
(And if you have never blown a snot rocket, you are missing out on one of life’s simple joys).
The answer is that the version with one nostril plugged allowed you to output much more force. You
see, by plugging one nostril, the force and velocity of air that would have come out of the plugged
nostril now converges with the snotty nostril’s air-velocity to nearly double the output.
Where is this going Kyle?
Well, the way my brain works is that it connects seemingly unrelated functions and connects the dots
between them. Blowing a snot rocket is a very great analogy in my opinion of the way our nervous
system works with training.
I remember when I dislocated my shoulder playing basketball (only a few weeks before getting a very
bad case of pneumonia, followed two weeks later by blowing out my first patellar tendon. And yes, I
finished playing the game since it popped right back in) in 2012.
The next morning, I couldn’t move my arm. The deep, aching pain was bad. I wasn’t worried, because
I knew I would still be able to carry on pretty much as I usually did. I went to work, taught my PE
classes and then yes, I even was able to fit a workout in.
What? How could I work out with a freshly dislocated shoulder?
One of the few class room concepts I remember learning while getting my undergrad at the University
of Delaware was that of the ‘bilateral deficit’. Our nervous system is wired so that one limb can output
more force when something is performed unilaterally than when both limbs are trained at the same
time.
Remember from Mind Map, everything the brain and nervous system does is based around the idea of
survival. Managing force output is critical to us remaining injury free. A ‘governor’ of the nervous
system force output is that when both sides of the body are trained (bilaterally) at the same time, our
force output for each limb is roughly 80% of our true strength potential.
Both limbs working at 100% of strength potential would put us at greater risk of injury or an
overloading of our stress-response system.