Gray Cook and deadlift

An innovator and creative genius in the arena of performance enhancement and sports rehab is Gray Cook, PT, CSCS.  He has several you tube videos that are brilliant. His philosophy and definition of core stability is "spot on". I have adopted his methods and concepts with my own training and use it daily with my patients in the PT clinic.  Gray Cook talks about core stability and the deadlift on you tube.  In his video discussion, Gray mentions a toddler and his or her movement patterns.  I often take de-conditioned adults and have them perform tasks on their backs or on all-fours.  These tasks are things infants and toddlers do daily, and they excel at these tasks before crawling, walking, running, and jumping, etc.  I am often surprised at the results when I ask high level athletes to perform some of these toddler-like activities.  They often fail miserably.  Returning to the basics of human movement to begin an exercise program is essential.  Some fitness professionals argue that all exercise should be functional and sports training should look like the sport.  However, if an athlete is performing a skill with poor form or demonstrating poor core stability with sport-specific tasks then why would I practice that pattern over and over again with external resistance.  Someone once said, "You can add fitness to dysfunction, but that does not make it right."