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| Name: |
DAVID KYLE |
- 2007 PC (impaired) triathlon National Champion
- 2007 St. Anthony's Triathlon, overall PC champion
- 2006 Nautica Malibu Triathlon, overall PC champion
- 2006 Triathlon World Championships, Bronze medal
- 2006 PC (impaired) triathlon National Champion
- 2006 Sprint distance triathlon, PC national champion
- 2002-2006 Long Distance Duathlon, PC national champion
- 2005-2007 USA Triathlon PC National Team Member
- 2005 Team USA Member for ITU World Championships (PC Category)
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| DOB: |
08/26/1972 |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Sport: |
Triathlon |
| Coach: |
Connie Sol, Nicholas Romanov |
| Nationality: |
United States |
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AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID KYLE by Lynn McFadden
Lynn McFadden: David, you are the 2006, and 2007 PC (impaired) Triathlon National Champion, a Gold Medalist at this year's Worlds, and the Bronze Medalist at the 2006 World Championships. You also grabbed the top spot last year at the Long Distance Duathlon, PC National Championships. You have a wife and three children, and hold a full time position at the University of Alabama as the Associate Director of Health and Physical Education. Does your busy schedule leave you time for coaching and teaching Pose?
David Kyle: I've done several mini-clinics here in Huntsville with Connie, and I've done some one-on-one lessons with people who contact me from the Pose website - I actually have one booked for next week. I also work with another athlete who has MS who went to World's with me in Germany, and won her category there. She is running Pose and doing these training protocols as well.
LM: How did you first learn about Pose?
DK: I think I read an article about it somewhere. It was about 4 years ago. I have a health and physical education background, but I really wanted to let someone else do my coaching. Self-coaching is so subjective and I wanted somebody that could be objective. I found the Pose website, (I was living in South Florida at the time), so I contacted Connie, and the rest is history.
LM: You were diagnosed with MS in 2002. That must have been a very rough time for you.
DK: Yes. I was very sick - essentially paralyzed from the chest down. I spent a year on the couch, with a lot of fatigue, walking with a cane - just a very "sick" kind of life, physically emotionally and mentally. I started drug therapy with a medication called "Copaxone", which is a daily injection. It is designed to help prevent future relapses.
LM: Could you explain how the relapses work?
DK: MS is "relapse-remitting" so you may have a relapse where you have some active brain lesions going on, or brain damage going on and most people average one or two a year and the medication is designed to prevent or delay the progression of the disease - kind of to slow it down or stop it. It doesn't necessarily treat disease symptoms - it is actually trying to get to the heart of the disease and slow down the progression of it.
LM: MS is a disease of the nervous system where the myelin sheaths around the nerves are eaten away causing loss of coordination and strength. Is that correct?
DK: Exactly. It's like a wire where the coating is burned off, whatever part of the body that wire controls, is going to be affected. It can affect motor skills, speech. It can affect anything. You may have someone with MS who could look like they have cerebral palsy because that part of the brain has the damage in it. There are lots of other symptoms. Fatigue is the most disabling symptom of MS. It's just kind of a general overall…. just kind of like, you want to roll over and die "tired". I struggled with that and it is something I have really been kind of up on a tightrope with, with Connie, - dealing with that, just getting stronger and better and not overtraining, because with overtraining, you can fall into this big pit of fatigue.
LM: Right. Dr. Romanov told me that one of the biggest factors in planning your schedule was managing the fatigue. So it becomes a question of distinguishing whether the fatigue is coming from overtraining or from MS?
DK: Exactly. Acutely, exercise causes you to be tired, but chronically it causes you to be less tired. So you have to really get to know what is really going on. Connie has really got a grasp of how I have responded and can pick things up pretty good as far as that goes - like, is this "tired" from a training session or is it a build-up from a couple of weeks of training.
LM: So, I imagine that working with Pose coach, Connie Sol, and the Pose programs she develops for you, have helped you monitor the fatigue and adjust accordingly?
DK: Exactly. It is so much more crucial for me than it would be working with an able- bodied athlete, because you can over-train them a little bit and not be so worried about it, whereas with me, the balance is almost a day to day thing monitoring resting-heart-rates and recovery-heart-rates and making sure those were all in range. Once those got out of range, I knew to pull back. Most coaches aren't really monitoring things that closely.
LM: Would you say the methodology of the training program has been almost as indispensable as the technique itself?
DK: Yes, definitely. Keeping track of resting heart rates and recovery heart rates after effort. I'm in the field so I speak to other coaches and discuss training protocol, training theory, and training concepts. I have asked, 'How do you monitor your athletes on a daily basis? How do you know if they are responding to the training positively, negatively or not at all?' Really, nobody has ever given me an answer. The only answer I have ever gotten was, 'Well you measure their performance.' Or, 'You judge by whether they raced better this year than last'. If so, they did good, if not, they did bad. That is such a poor way to judge in coaching.
LM: It is certainly more arbitrary and does not take advantage of any of the feedback one could be using from a HR monitor.
DK: Well it's not so much that they don't use feed-back, it's more the idea that they don't even have the concept that there is feed back. It's like they are not measuring anything, and that's the whole thing. How do you put a work load on something and then not measure it. Connie has chewed me out two or three times and it's always been about not tracking resting heart rates and not tracking recovery heart rates. She would say, 'If I don't have these results, then I am basically just giving you a workout. I have no idea what is going on - I'm blind.' So it taught me a lot, and was good for me, and pleasing to me to see, hey, you know, she is actually measuring and trying to ascertain how my body is responding to this.
LM: Right. Without results, there isn't much to work with. It becomes more like moral support and not science anymore without the numbers.
DK: Yeah, and anybody can give a workout. Anybody with any basic knowledge of triathlon can give workouts. You don't need to be a genius or a coach to give a workout. People do it all the time. (Laughs)
LM: How has the knowledge that you have gained from Pose helped you with your clients?
DK: That is such a big question. Early on in Pose, my first year was such an eye opening thing, not so much physically as to the skills, but as they (the skills) encompassed who I was with everything. You talk about perception! I was very type A, and I was very controlling in my running and my training. I even looked that way, I looked tight, I looked stiff because I was trying to control it, force it, and so it was a huge eye-opener for me to realize how much the psychology of it all plays into it. We start out talking about perception and how we learn how to interact with the ground, and about shoes and not being able to perceive the ground as well with them. It starts out as simple as that, and yet that is only a drop in the bucket to what that is getting into.
Another good thing that Pose engenders is believing. A lot of the battle is just believing you can do it, and realizing that if you get tired at three miles, that may not be physical fatigue, it may be that you have just convinced yourself you can only go three miles, and you need to change that thought.
LM: You mean through the skills and confidence that you develop in Pose?
DK: Sure. Once you start hitting certain times, for example, it used to be 9-10 minute miles for me and now it's 6-7 minute miles. I say to myself, 'Why can't I just go and do 6 minute miles?' Because it's easy. I have convinced myself that I can do that, so I actually do it now. Which is funny, because I was reading about Bannister the other day and that is how he tricked himself into running the sub-four minute mile. He just did 45 second laps on the track. He knew in his mind he could do 45 second laps.
LM: Has learning Pose helped you apply the same kind of thinking to other areas of your life as far as realizing that so many limitations are self-imposed?
DK: Oh, definitely. You can only compartmentalize to a certain extent. If you learn something in running or in sport, it is going to carry over into other aspects of your life, whether you want it to or not and you start realizing that through changing your perception, and believing - getting your mind around the fact that you can do this - it's possible to get this done.
LM: Believing you can do it, gets the desired results, and continuous skill development feeds you beliefs.
DK: Right. Realizing how important the mental component is, and then reading some other thinkers in the field and how they realized it. Like Bannister's four minute mile is widely publicized to have been a mental thing. Once you break that barrier, everyone starts breaking it. It was kind of the beginning of sports psychology. The thing about Pose is it's hidden in there. We're not saying, 'Hey, this is sports psychology.', but it's hidden in there - it's all part of the whole pie. It just grows into understanding the value of developing better perception for everything.
LM: Are your colleagues in the health and physical education department at the university aware of your successes and that you train with Pose methodology?
DK: Well they know I do triathlons and that I've won Nationals and World's. But I don't broadcast it or go into details, because here at work we are doing work, but then again, part of who I am is expanding the department and doing different things and new things.
So I have actually given some Pose lectures and debated "extensor paradox". We teach classes here like "Walk/Jog/Run" and I go and give a little Pose lesson to the students. Each semester I go and give a 20 minute lecture about the physics of it and then we do 20 minutes of drills. It is nothing real thorough, but it is kind of letting our students know about its existence. I give them handouts off the website just to expose them to it. Usually people take this course and it becomes just training as opposed to teaching the skill of running. They might walk 3 miles or run a mile with a view to 'getting fit'. I go in and say this is a skill - let me TEACH you the SKILL of running, as opposed to just trying to get you fit.
LM: Have you seen people's faces change as they listen to you - as though they are hearing something they had never heard or considered before?
DK: Oh definitely. I have two good examples. One was a middle aged guy and he was taking the class for fun - an older student. He caught me in the fitness center a week later and said, "Hey that was the most amazing thing. I have never, ever heard anything like that about running. I've always struggled with injuries and that was just phenomenal what I heard." And he actually grasped it. Another student, is on the cross country team here at the university, and so they are in the class (the cross country team), and I kind of tease them the most because they think they know running and I put some of them into some of these positions and drills and I kind of proved the point about how gravity is responsible. This kid took it to heart and he comes back two or three weeks later and goes, "You know, I want to thank you for that lecture. I just broke my PR at 10K." He did like a 32 minute 10K - somewhere in the low thirties. He learned about falling. He said, "You know I just try to think about falling all the time now."
LM: Excellent! So little by little you have been able to enlighten people and help them improve their running just through exposing them to this body of knowledge?
DK: Yeah, 100%. You still have what I call the "sacred cows" of the fitness industry. They are still out there. There are things that have never been proven by science or research, but they are still "sacred cows". I teach a class called "Exercise Physiology Internship" and we "fitness-test" people and measure body fat and VO2 max and those things .And I tell them at the beginning: 'My job is to 'un-teach' you everything we've taught you; how to think out of the box and how to question things.' Because really when I first learned Pose, here I was, this educated guy with a master's degree and it made me question everything I'd ever learned. I had to really not unlearn stuff, but re-learn things. Like I thought, 'That wasn't thought out right', you know, the truth about things. So I see the same thing. We are teaching people specifically that speed in sports is from muscular strength and has nothing to do with gravity and I tell them, 'Look,
You are never going to keep up with gravity.'
LM: Keeping up with gravity is a great way of putting it.
DK: We are teaching people that speed in sports is our own physical strength, and when you debate that, they get upset. In Pose we teach that our strength is in keeping up with gravity and working in conjunction with gravity. We will never out-run gravity. We'll never have the strength to outrun gravity. But it is flipped. It is backward from what everybody thinks, which is that with strength, you will get faster, as opposed to, you get stronger in order to keep up with gravity, which is how we work in Pose.
LM: Right in Pose our strength training is geared to being able to work with gravity, rather than try to do battle with it and emerge the victor. The concept of working with gravity to gain an advantage hasn't been explored or taught in traditional endurance sports.
DK: Right. We teach several martial arts classes and I was talking to an Aikido teacher and we started talking about running and about gravity and he understood everything I said, and it's so funny that Dr. Romanov starts his book talking about dance and martial arts. You have educated people, who you would expect to grasp what you are saying and don't. But martial artists and dancers, they all grasp what it means to function in gravity. You mess with a guy, who knows aikido, and he is going to use gravity and put you on the ground, (laughs) and he is not going to put a lot of effort into it. It's funny.
LM: Right, dancers and martial artists accept and work with gravity.
DK: Yeah, in martial arts they are using gravity against their opponent. They're using the opponent's body weight to fight them, so they are playing the person against themselves, just by their understanding of the physics of how the body interacts with gravity. And it seems like in sport we have just missed that. We are so focused on getting bigger/stronger, bigger/stronger, that we have missed the part of, 'hey gravity is everywhere'.
LM: It is truly amazing that we have come this far and totally over-looked it.
DK: Yeah, we talk about training, training, training, and just totally forget skill, skill, skill. In cycling, the whole body-weight concept and gravitational effects on cycling - that stuff is insane.
LM: Isn't it? It is so powerful in cycling as well.
DK: It's so beyond what people can understand. I've kind of got most of my brain wrapped around it and I've tried to discuss it with people and this is funny - very smart people don't grasp it sometimes, but I live in Huntsville which is "Rocket City". Some of my friends at church are aerospace engineers and they understand it exactly. They understand advanced physics, and I don't understand advanced physics, but I start explaining body weight and these concepts of gravity and they are like: "Oh yeah, yeah!" And they are not even cyclists and they would say, "Well at this point, when your pedal is bottom-dead-center you would have absolutely zero ability to push anymore." And I was thinking, "Wow, you've actually grasped this."
LM: If we can talk to an aerospace engineer and get them to understand right away, what could we learn from that as far as getting athletes and people in sports education to grasp and use this knowledge more easily? I have friends who are elite cyclists who won't listen to the first three sentences concerning gravity and technique in cycling.
DK: I don't really have that answer, but my initial thought, (and I have thought about, 'why aren't we getting through to people?'), is that people think we are taking it away from the person and we're putting it on the physics.
LM: So it becomes personal, like an ego issue, as though somehow their strength or talent is being diminished?
DK: Exactly. They think you are taking away from the athlete, when what you are really doing is opening the door to the athlete. They think you are saying you are not strong enough, and are still attached to the idea of, "push-off makes me stronger". We're saying you'll never be strong enough to ever keep up with gravity. Now people are taking these "speed and agility" classes - like training-camp type classes .They are kind of doing old-time-y football things where they are dragging the weight-plates behind them and doing agility drills, and I'm friends with all these people and they have asked me, "Do you do this with Pose?" And I say 'yeah, but you are trying to drag this weight behind you with your muscular power and I just fall and my body weight pulls it and I don't do any effort. It's two different concepts. We may look like we are doing the same thing, but my energy expenditure is about half or less.
LM: So it is like muscular power vs. using other forces as well, that are infinitely more powerful than we could ever be?
DK: Right. They are trying to pull this thing, like they are pulling a train, whereas I am keeping my body straight and as I fall forward, my body weight literally pulls this thing with no, or very little, muscular effort by me.
LM: How is the battle with MS going now? Do you feel like you have more control over it?
DK: Control is not actually a word you use when you talk about MS. It is so unpredictable, but I will say it has gone well and I've gotten more fit each year I've worked with Pose. So each year I get a little faster, a little stronger.
LM: If you had not learned Pose, if we were still living in the sixties for example before Pose came onto the scene, and you were just training the conventional way, what do you think your prospects would have been?
DK: Oh, I don't think they would have been good. I think I would have been demoralized and just quit. For one, from the get-go, I had running injuries, so basically I would never have been running. I would never be able to run enough to finish a race and what's funny is that now my running is the strongest part of my race. I would never have been able to do the triathlons that I am doing. As far as MS, I have done well, but it is very unpredictable and it has its days. The heat is still rough and I have to really watch myself.
LM: I find Pose to be invaluable in the race itself. It's like having a tool-box of skills that allows you to control the outcome of your races much better. Do you find that to be true as well?
DK: Absolutely, once I get running, it is like, 'Game's on!' Last year I won two races where I caught first place on the run, one of them was in the shoots.
LM: That is a confidence builder. So once again, the focus on skill development has played a huge role in your success.
DK: Absolutely. One of my favorite things about Pose is that fact that you've taken off the limits. We are so used to thinking, 'well this is my limit, I can't go any faster'. But with Pose there are no parameters. You keep going back to skill. You say okay, this skill needs to be improved, or this skill needs to be improved and then it goes back to things you can actually work on, and they translate to speed. In the old days we used to think: "TRAIN, TRAIN, TRAIN" to get faster, and we (pose-runners) don't necessarily believe that. We believe in "SKILL, SKILL, SKILL". It gives the athlete the opportunity to be able to work on those things and see them turn into speed.
LM: Exactly.
DK: In the old days you'd think, 'Well, I'm not fast enough - let's go do a 500 mile week on the bike. You'd end up slower, thinking, 'Oh my-gosh, it still wasn't enough - let's do a 600 mile week!', and you'd be slower yet, and it never quite computes!
LM: Right. Well you're too tired at that point to have any revelations.
DK: Well you wouldn't because you don't know. I used to be that way early on when I did a lot of bike riding before I got MS. I never realized how chronically over-trained I was, and that was why I never got faster. I would take few weeks off and just be worried about being so slow and then being fast and it never really computed that I had recovered, and that was what it was.
LM: So in sense, WORRY is being replaced with KNOWLEDGE. Rather than worry, we just go back to the drawing board over and over and assess where the skills need refinement and then get to work. Doing the work replaces worry. You are working on it, not putting it in the back of your mind and thinking 'Somehow, -I don't know how - I will overcome this'. Now we have the "How".
DK: Yeah. It just seems like there are no limits anymore. Like swimming, I've been struggling. But once I learned a little bit about the Pose Method of Swimming - not a lot, not enough, I realized how much more is there - you know, how much more Speed is there, once I learned the skills. You realize there is still more to be had.
LM: That brings up another big concept which is often overlooked in endurance sports which is that once you are working with Skill, there is no limit to the potential for improvement.
DK: Honestly, you never perfect the skill - there's always room for improvement. It's not static. It's not something you learn and then just have. No. You constantly strive to improve it. I always use Shaquille O'neal's freethrow as an example. If skill was static, you'd make a free-throw. (Laughs) He's been a pro player for years and why can't he make every free-throw? He still has room to develop and practice.
LM: "If skill was static, you'd make every free-throw" -that's a good one.
DK: Well, dealing with sports people, when they see basketball, they see the skill involved with basketball, and they don't always see it in running or cycling.
LM: That's a good point. They see it in basketball, and football to a certain extent, and unfortunately we've been conditioned all these years not to see it in running.
DK: Yeah, 'let's do five laps of running and then we'll work on our "skills"'.
(Laughs) (We both share a laugh.)
LM: It is amazing, really, how far off in that direction it went, isn't it?
DK: I'm actually looking out my window and the soccer team is walking out onto the field and they are going to warm-up with a few laps of running and then work on their "skills".
LM: Right. Well little by little. How is your racing and training schedule shaping up for 2008?
DK: I'm doing Miami Man actually in November. I'm just doing it for fun - not really there to break any records. Next year, I'm going to do National's and World's again on the road triathlon, and then I'm going to do some X-terra. So I'm trying to get to X-terra National's and World's.
LM: That sounds like a good lead-in to training for next year's World's. I heard you say before the interview, that you are a "numbers man". You like facts and figures?
DK: Yeah, in general. I'm pretty laid back, but still, definitely things are kind of black and white in my mind.
LM: Would you say Pose suits you well in that sense, because you can work with numbers and figures towards goals that way?
DK: Oh yeah, I definitely bought into Pose because of the SCIENCE of it, that's how I thought and that was actually one of the conflicts I had with it at the beginning, and I went to the clinics and read the science, and I would have people go, "No, No, No." But they didn't have any reason to say "No". I'd come up in "the system", and things you are learning are conflicting with "the system", and so there's some conflict. You have to go, 'Okay, well, was I taught wrong?' I mean I guess you have to accept….maybe they didn't have all the information. That takes some time to accept, the idea that you may not have been taught correctly.
LM: Sure. It's a tough pill to swallow, especially when it involves your profession.
DK: Yeah, Well that's what I try to teach my students, 'Hey you know everything you have been taught here may not be 100% right. You need to learn to question these things, and that is what I try to teach them, objectivity, and being able to "open your eyes"'.
LM: What do you mean by "the system"?
DK: I say "the system" I mean the "Health and Physical Educational System". You are learning from all the basic text books, and a lot of them make assumptions and don't prove them.
LM: What is your reaction to the study by Graham Fletcher and Dr. Romanov that was recently published in, "Sports Biomechanics" concerning gravity as the motive force in running? The issue of the "extensor paradox" is finally discussed and explained.
DK: It's awesome. I sent that to a colleague and he said something about tripled extension, and I emailed him back and said, tripled extension happens when you do a squat, because you're on your body weight, and I said, 'In running, there's no weight to push - you're already gone, your body weight has already moved on.'
LM: Tripled extension is synonymous with extensor paradox?
DK: Right. Because people see a runner doing tripled extension, they think, or make the assumption, that those muscles are actually pushing the runner forward. It's the extensor paradox, - they don't realize that those muscles are silent.
LM: So you got the typical response, having to do with the extensor paradox?
DK: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny because that study is so under-reported. You know if people grasped that study, the whole field would go, "Aha!"
LM: Exactly!
DK: (laughs) It is as though we are the only people saying, 'Hey, did anyone notice this study?'
LM: Yes. Even though "Running Technique" is becoming all the buzz, and is being taught by so many others now, the concepts in this study are not being used. Could you tell me a little about your family? Are they supportive of your triathlon pursuits?
DK: My family is wonderful. I have a wife and three kids ages 5, 8, and 17. The five-year-old is a girl - she's in kindergarten. She's a "tom-boy". My eight-year-old is in third grade and he's in the gifted program, and my oldest son is about to start college. My son said one time, "We don't even know you have MS anymore", because there is such a stark contrast between where I was and where I am now. Like I said, I still have my days where I have to lay down, but the improvements are like night and day.
LM: That's good, but of course I realize the MS is still there. Your story of fighting it and not just "lying down" is truly amazing and inspiring.
DK: The cool thing about my kids is that one time when I was really struggling, (because I've always been active) I went out and played basket-ball for maybe four or five minutes with my son, out in the street, we just shot basket-ball, and that put me on the couch for a week. I mean I was basically on the couch sick for a week after that.
LM: Wow!
DK: So now, I can go outside and throw the baseball or football, or play some basketball, for ten, fifteen minutes or longer if I wanted to.
LM: Now you can spend quality, recreational time with your kids when you want to.
DK: Yeah, and that was my motivating force for doing this. I was worried, you know, after that happened, I had trouble even going to the grocery store, and I was like, 'Am I even going to be able to walk? In five years, I want to be able to walk. Am I going to be in a wheel-chair? What's going to happen?'
LM: Your motivating force was to be there for your family?
DK: Yes. That was the initial thing that spurred me on. I was just scared to death of 'if I don't do something, how much worse is it going to get?' That's when I took action. I didn't want to try that out.
LM: That's when you looked into things and found Pose?
DK: Right.
LM: So do they come with you, sometimes, to your races?
DK: Oh yeah. My wife likes to go. In the challenge category, we get a "handler" - they can help you through the transition and help you get your wetsuit off. Or, some of the amputees change legs, so their handler will hand them their leg, but my wife has actually become like the "lead handler" for USA Triathlon. Well, she has become one of the "lead handlers" and she is on the "handler committee" of USA Triathlon, and is going to help start training people to become handlers. So, she has really gotten involved.
LM: That's great! Have your sponsors been supportive of you racing as well?
DK: Oh yes, extremely so. They've really allowed me to reach my goals as far as helping me get to races and helping with the cost of training. If it weren't for them and for the medication itself, there is no way I could have shown up to World's or shown up to National's, so they have been such a big part of all this too. I give them a lot of credit for helping to make this happen. They are a great group of people and their hearts….. - you never think, with medication, of 'their hearts being in the right place', but they really are. They bend over backwards not just for us, but for their patients.
LM: Sounds like they are dedicated to trying to discover what is going on with this disease, and to helping people have a better quality of life while they search for a cure.
DK: Yes. They are very much focused on educating people and working with people.
They even work with people on competing medications. So it is great to be part of the group.
LM: Have other MS triathletes approached you and asked you about Pose?
DK: Oh, yeah. It's funny because every month or so, somebody will find my email either on Pose or on the Copaxone website and just say, 'Hey, I've got MS, do you think I can still run?' I've had people from Europe contact me, and say, 'Hey, my family doesn't want me to run, but I think I can, what do you think?' Of course you have to have them be cautious and be careful. But just because you have a disability, doesn't mean you shouldn't. I tell them about safety and injury prevention and let them know about Pose from that angle. Because most people go running and say, 'Oh, you know there is just so much impact with running.' I am not familiar with that because of Pose.
LM: Right. And you tell them it does not have to be that way. Could you elaborate on how MS impedes coordination and how Pose helps counteract that?
DK: Sure. Well you can have difficulty balancing with MS. I get off balance easily, and things along those lines. But in Pose, we talk a lot about relaxation and not forcing and not straining. And that is a big part of MS. Another thing with MS is "spasticity", which is just a tight muscle. So the fact is that with Pose, you are not in a state of what I call a "Grunt", where you are grunting and forcing the thing to happen. You are not grunting through this effort like it's going to kill you any second. It's a completely different feel. It allows the muscles to remain relaxed, and there's no tension. I find myself, if I get stressed out or tense about something, I'll get a lot of spasticity. You may think it was like a leg cramp or something. I've had races where I was really tense and my legs just cramp really bad. But in Pose, you just try and think: 'Relax-Relax, Fall-Fall'. And this helps with MS, - just the relaxation. And the repetitive movement too is helpful, you are thinking, 'Pull, Pull, Pull' and it is just a brief, quick, short, muscular contraction and once you get it going it's just a (makes the sound of quick, rhythmic steps) . It's not like the, "Arrrrgggghhhhh!!" of the grunting concept.
LM: Right. The rhythm that results when the commands are executed properly helps keep you landing in Pose and perpetuates this minimal-effort cycle. By reducing muscular efforts you help avoid the muscle spasms and tenseness.
DK: Right.
LM: I imagine that your sponsors are proud of you.
DK: Well, I think so. I occasionally get to go and speak to groups of other people with MS and tell my story.
LM: Well, I want to thank you for telling us your story.
DK: Thank you.
Read more about David Kyle
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