The Three Gs

Patrick Mudge

The Three Gs is an easy way to help you turn on strength and support in your body.

It’s a simple cue to get your brain plugged in to key areas whenever you’re adding load to a posture or a movement. Think picking up a bag, a basket of washing, pumping iron at the gym, or pushing yourself up and out of a chair. We can use this a hundred times a day!

So, what are the Three Gs?

Grip, Guts, & Ground.

Why these three?

Grip

Grip means hands. The hands are an often neglected and underappreciated bit of kit in our body. But, they are a super power. The brain reserves an enormous amount of real estate for the motor and sensory functions of the hand. So dextrous, and so sensitive, there are about 100,000 nerve endings in the palm and fingers of each side. When we tune into our hands, raise our awareness of their contact, and switch on every bit of muscle in there when using them, our hands send a stream of organised signals all the way through the upper limb and shoulder and back into the cervical spine, where the limb originates from. In turn, these signals light up the cervical spine, which cleverly translates this supplied information to create precise real-time patterns and programs to perfectly match the demands that the hand, and subsequently the limb, are encountering. So, when we’re doing a push up, or lifting a set of dumbbells, the neck and shoulders can stabilise and power themselves better if the hands are well engaged. The hand is the most highly innervated part of everything that comes out of the cervical spine. More hand signals, equals more information, better function and better protection for all.

And how’s this: Did you know that grip strength is a better indicator of longevity than blood pressure? Good hand function can lengthen our life. Grip strength is a fundamental metric that contributes to overall physical strength and capability, and is highly predictive of functional limitations and disability when we are older. Using our hands well does great things for our whole body and our health. How amazing!

Guts

Guts means the middle – the muscles around our waist, hips and pelvis. These middle muscles give important support to our lower back and pelvic girdle. Think of the pelvis as an upside-down triangle, with three levers attaching to it – the left lower limb on one side, the right lower limb on the other, and the spine sits on the flat top. In order to move one of these levers, we must sufficiently brace the other two levers through the pelvis. The complex muscular bracing system around this pelvic intersection, between the upper and lower parts of the body, helps efficiently transfer and deliver force from one lever to the next, without losing energy (meaning, without losing strength). Not enough brace, and energy gets lost in this area. The area collapses under the force, rather than carrying strength and power from one lever to the next. Gravity compresses the spine into the pelvis, rather than the muscles holding it up. Our pelvis sinks into our hips when we shift weight from one foot the next, instead of keeping us upright in our postures. Compression and sinking in these areas equals strain, and too much strain leads to injury in one or more parts.

Ground

Ground means feet. Feel them spread out and lengthen inside your shoes, or get them wriggling and planted if you’re barefoot. Feel as much of the sole of your foot in contact with the ground, or through your shoes, as possible. Wake up the muscles, get every tiny fibre firing. Feel the muscles supporting your bodyweight.

Like our hands, each foot is a neurological powerhouse that feeds raw data directly into our spine – this time though, it’s our lower back. Data like what’s underfoot, what lump or bump our foot and body might need to know about or adapt to, and important information that keeps us balanced and protected whilst upright and moving across the ground. The nerves at these lower lumbar spine levels send this information straight into the spinal cord, which then loops automatic reactions and adaptations directly back out to the working muscles, before the signals even make it up to the brain. The feet act like sense organs, crucial to our evolved upright and movement-based human design.

In our modern landscapes, however, concrete, tiles, bitumen and other flat surfaces cover the earth, replacing the dirt, sticks and rocks we once walked on, and our modern footwear dulls down our connection with our environment even more, with an inch of rubber or Air Max between us and the ground. Our feet become starved of interest and stimulation, and the clarity and liveliness of this information superhighway starts to fade. 98% of low back pain occurs at those exact same levels of our lumbar spine that our feet are supposed to be talking to. Turning down the signals in our feet blinds our back and leaves it vulnerable to mechanical injury. Turning up the signals in our feet wakes up our back and helps protect it.

Step 1

The First step of The Three Gs is to connect your brain to each area. Awareness, maximum engagement, fine calibration of every square millimetre of muscle. The aim is to up your percentage of muscle fibre recruitment. Typically, most of us get around accessing only about 50-60% of our muscle fibres. When we increase this percentage, to 70 or 80 or even 90%, then our strength, function and protection improve. Awareness and connection are the deliberate ingredients required. Purposefully sending lots of brain power to increase these ingredients of course takes practice, but given time and lots of reinforcement, our bodies get better at it!

Step 2

With awareness and max engagement of The Three Gs, we can then connect the dots. And this is where the magic happens.

When you feel strength go through your feet, down into the ground, and feel that strength come back up through your legs and brace around your hips and your waist, and when you can synchronise that strength with full engagement of the hand, power through the shoulder and a galvanised ribcage, and seamlessly tie that strength back down into the middle of the body as you move, carry, lift or push, then you know your body is better supported. You feel like it is stronger. You can feel the body working as one. This is protection, this is good biomechanical function. This saves us from injury, this lights up the health of our nervous system, lengthens our life, squeezes and pumps vitality through our connective tissues, and strengthens our muscles and bones.

Easy to remember: Grip, Guts, & Ground. The Three Gs.