"The Body Is Complex!" — Okay, Then Why Are You Still Programming Like it's a Cabbage Patch Doll?
Why most athletic training programs ignore movement complexity and what elite coaches get wrong about exercise selection
You can't say the body is complex and then assign three sets of birddogs and a hip CAR. That's like saying "the brain is a mystery" and handing someone a tic-tac-toe board.
I'm frustrated by a breed of irony and hypocrisy that's infecting our entire profession. Maybe you recognize it too. Or maybe you're the one doing it. Either way, buckle up.
I hear people preach that the body is complex. Passionate speeches about biomechanical intricacy. Beautiful Instagram captions about respecting the organism. Then I watch them design training programs that treat it and train it as if it's a plastic figurine with three available poses.
"The body is complex! Here's a squat."
"The shoulder is complex! Pinch your shoulder blades together. Yes, all the time. Forever. Until death."
"The spine is complex! Do deadbugs and birddogs. No, just those. That's it. That's the curriculum."
If you've said any version of this, congratulations. You've discovered the problem and then immediately ignored your own discovery. That's impressive in the worst possible way.
What They Say vs. What They Program (A Love Story)
Let's play a fun game. Well, "fun" might be generous. Let's play a revealing game that will make you uncomfortable.
Here are three lower body and core strength workouts from elite athletic programs. One is from an MLB team, another is from an NFL team, and one is for uphill athletes (ultra runners, skiers, mountaineers who voluntarily suffer at altitude).
WORKOUT #1
Hip CARs
Prone Supermans (yes, really)
Box Step-ups
Reverse Lunge
Nordic Hamstring Curl
Pallof Press
WORKOUT #2
Monster Walks
Transverse Abdominis Activation (because apparently it falls asleep)
Deadbugs & Birddogs
Supine Shoulder Flexion
Glute Bridge
Adductor Squeezes
Pallof Press (again!)
Balance (just... balance)
WORKOUT #3
Squats with a band around knees
Glute med activation (in case it was napping with the transverse abdominis)
Box Step-Ups
Box Step Downs (revolutionary!)
Lunges
Planks with Transverse Abdominis Activation
Windshield Wipers
Russian Ab Twists
Can you tell which workout belongs to which sport? Take your time. Really think about it.
Oh, you can't tell? Of course you can't. Nobody can. These workouts are so interchangeable that you could swap them between populations and nobody would notice until someone asked "wait, why are we doing ultra runner warmups before batting practice?"
The pairings are so ambiguous that these workouts could be exchanged between their populations without anyone being the wiser. Baseball players doing ultra runner programming. NFL athletes doing baseball warmups. This is a problem.
We can't expect bodies to preserve innate complexities when training and rehab is so simple and generic that it could be found in any fitness magazine from 2003. You know, back when we all thought low-fat diets were the answer and Crocs were just a terrible mistake, not an entire lifestyle choice.
We've reduced athletic training to a handful of generic exercises that could work for anyone, which means they're optimized for no one.
The Environment We've Created (Spoiler: It's Terrible)
We actively reduce normal human variability. Nothing in our training promotes its retention, and few coaches are comfortable enough with complexity because it looks like chaos. And chaos doesn't get you likes on Instagram or make clients feel like they're "working hard."
Look at the environments in which we train and rehabilitate the body. Look at what's asked of people. Listen to the fear behind the cues of coaches and therapists. They might as well be saying, "Move this one way or else you'll get hurt, sued, fired, and your dog will stop loving you."
Of course we lose complexity. We are complicit in its reduction. No bystanders, us—we're active participants in the systematic dumbing-down of human movement.
I once brought a group of professional athletes to a shitty grass field with undulations and imperfections everywhere. Mounds and divots all over the place, like the groundskeeper had quit mid-shift and said "figure it out." Holy shit, you should've heard the complaints. "This field is dangerous." "Someone's going to get hurt." "Where's the pristine surface I was promised?"
I almost always used that field for that exact reason. Not for the complaints—though I did enjoy them, I'm not going to lie—but for the variable terrain. You know, like the environment humans evolved to move in.
Meanwhile, soccer fields are meticulously primped to exactly 22 millimeters of height. We've created perfectly flat, predictable surfaces and then act shocked—shocked—when ankles can't handle anything uneven.
The Missing Link: Degeneracy
(No, Not That Kind)
Here's what nobody talks about when they preach complexity: movement degeneracy.
And before your mind goes somewhere unfortunate, this is a technical term. Stay with me.
Movement degeneracy describes two phenomena in human movement patterns, and understanding the difference is crucial for programming effective training
Well-moving, complex humans use different structures to achieve the same outcome. Big toolbox. Multiple solutions. Like having a Swiss Army knife instead of just a really confident butter knife.
In poor-moving, simple humans: They have one solution for the job and they don't even use the right structure for it. They're using pliers to tighten screws because they lost the screwdriver three years ago and never replaced it
Let me hit you with some uncomfy truths:
If glute work were the answer everyone makes it out to be, the world's injury and performance problems would have been solved by now. But here we are, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, still doing banded clamshells like they're going to save us.
If core stability were the answer to low back pain, back pain would be in remission by now. Instead, it's at epidemic levels and planks are still the default answer.
If stretching were the solution to tightness, wouldn't tightness disappear for more than thirty minutes? And yet here you are, tight again, surprising absolutely nobody.
The problem isn't that we don't know enough exercises. Lord knows we have enough exercises. We have SO many exercises. We're drowning in exercises. The problem is that we don't understand how complexity actually works in the human body.
What Complexity Actually Means
(A Brief Evolutionary Interlude)
The more evolved a creature is, the more complex it is. This isn't opinion—this is just how evolution works, and evolution has been working on optimizing human movement for a while now.
Aquatic species like dolphins and tunas have a spine and pectoral fins for movement. Simple. Effective. Limited.
Once life came on land and sprouted four limbs with three primary joints each, that was a 500 percent increase in movement options. Suddenly, you could do a lot more shit. Progress!
Then about 500 million years passed (give or take a Tuesday), and humans freed their forelimbs from the ground. Another 100 percent increase in movement options. We don't need to constrain our arms to the earth to move. We can throw things, climb things, gesture wildly during arguments.
In terms of movement patterns: a shark—ancient, simple—can only swim by wiggling its tail. One trick. That's it. That's the shark's entire movement portfolio.
A horse has four natural gaits: walk, trot, canter, and gallop. Four! Fancy!
Humans? We can walk, run, skip, hop, juke, spin, dance, triple jump, pole vault, and attend the Ministry of Silly Walks. We're basically movement Swiss Army knives, except we've decided to only use two of the tools.
This increase in movement options is an increase in complexity. Our high number of movement options and patterns allows us to use different structures to achieve the same outcome. It's why no two quarterbacks throw the ball the same way. It's why your squat doesn't look like my squat and neither of them look like that guy's squat. But—and this is critical—there are better and worse ways to throw a ball. Worse ways often involve substitutions: using structurally different elements when you've lost access to the ones that evolved for the job. Your body starts improvising, and not in a cool jazz way.
The Reductionist Training Problem
(Or: How We Fuck This Up)
Here's the pattern I see everywhere, and I mean everywhere:
What coaches say:
"Movement is complex"
"Everyone's different"
"Individualized programming"
"Respect the organism"
[Insert other things that sound good on social media]
What coaches actually do:
Cores must always be stabilized (always, forever, truly, madly, deeply)
Pelvises must have the perfect amount of tilt—not too anterior, not too posterior. Goldilocks pelvis.
Knee valgus always means weak glutes (it doesn't, but we're committed to this story)
Glutes must be re-awakened, turned on, strengthened, and given a pep talk
Hamstrings and ankles must be stretched forever (and they'll be tight again tomorrow)
Posterior chain is good, anterior chain is bad (we've decided this arbitrarily)
Scapulas must always be stabilized, back and down (always! never not!)
When in doubt, get your Theragun out (percussion therapy solves everything, apparently)
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Use reductionist training, get reductionist results. Use the same three exercises for every human body, act surprised when it doesn't work for most of them.
We can't honor complexity by reducing everything to a handful of exercises that make us feel productive. Sounds like cosplay to me, but without the ingenuity and sex appeal.
Why Simple Training on Complex Bodies Causes Problems
(The Science-y Part)
When you ignore complexity, specific things break down in predictable ways:
Muscle function degenerates. People stop using the muscles that evolved for specific tasks and start substituting with whatever's available. Not unlike using your phone to hammer in a nail—technically possible, not at all advisable.
Energy systems get inefficient. When you slip calf day—and everyone skips calf day—you must use your bigger more metabolically expensive muscles to run. And you’re wondering why you’re cramping, tired, and out of breath? You’re working harder to accomplish less, which is the opposite of adaptation. But probably gets you into the David Goggins club.
Movement variability disappears. People develop one way to move, and that one way usually involves substitution. They become movement one-trick ponies, except the trick doesn't even work that well.
The task in sports is to avoid the defender, throw the ball, jump high. The body will use whatever it has available to accomplish the task. And if we're being real, people are coached into playing their sport like robots—attempting to do the same thing the same way every time, as opposed to developing multiple solutions to the same problem.
The majority of sports coaches have a lot to learn.
The Brain Is A Prediction-Making Machine
(And It's Really Good At Its Job)
Your athlete's brain predicts what patterns lead to successful outcomes based on past experience. It will use what has worked before, even if what worked before isn't optimal. Even if it's slowly destroying their shoulder.
Restoring normal human movement is about doing something new—something the brain has no way to predict because it hasn't happened yet.
Instead of moving the weight from here to there (low bar), the task must be:
Accurate pronation (not just "rotating the weight")
Accurate plantarflexion (not just "lifting the heel")
Accurate segmental spine motion (not just "bending")
Accurate shoulder motion during a pull-up (not just "getting your chin over the bar")
The goal must be restoring movements that were lost and abstaining from substitutions that have become normal. This is precision work, not tonnage accumulation.
This is how you restore complexity.
This is how you solve unsolved injuries and overcome performance plateaus. This is how you re-teach people to move how humans evolved to move, instead of how a plastic action figure moves.
It's the job of the Evolved Coach to spot reductions in variability—these movement substitutions, these degeneracies—and restore them to evolution's factory settings. Reset to default, except the default is millions of years of evolutionary refinement. But you can't do that with three sets of birddogs and a hip CAR. You just can't. I don't care how intentional you are about it.
Every Good Rant Needs a Bottom Line, and Here's Mine:
If you're going to preach complexity, you need to program complexity. Full stop.
If you're going to talk about individual differences, you need to actually look at individuals and see what they're doing versus what you think they're doing. You know, observation.
If you're going to say the body is a complex system, you need to understand what makes it complex—and what makes that complexity disappear when you treat it like a simple machine with an on/off switch.
Stop saying one thing and doing another. Your athletes deserve better than the cognitive dissonance. They deserve a coach who actually understands what complexity means and how to train it.
The body is complex. Start treating it that way, or stop talking about it.