Category: Functional Movement Systems

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Every Day Movement

One of the best movements to practice every day is transferring from a squat into a plank.

This movement involves:

>>> Squat
>>> Upper body Crawl
>>> Plank / & or / Push Up
>>> Reverse movement – stay low – squat back up to standing & repeat.

This movement takes a bit more effort to perform, but your rate of perceived exertion should not exceed 6 / 10.

Including this movement into your routine will do wonders for maintaining your hip, knee and ankle health / mobility – as well as strengthening and coordinating the shoulders and core.

If you lack the necessary mobility to perform this movement that means this is not the place for you to start. Consider ‘Glute-Bridges’ & ‘Pullovers’ combined with squat practice. Or maybe you have body composition issues OR maybe you lack core strength – each has an appropriate training protocol to strengthen your weakness. Unless you use the help of a movement coach, you will have to figure out what training protocol is best for you.

Let me know how it goes.


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Pro – Programming Tips

Training too often forces you to train with a medium intensity, and so to does not training enough.

“if you fail to plan then plan to fail”: you must schedule alternating ‘heavy’ ‘medium’ & ‘light’ days into your training protocol in order to maximize progress.

Heavy – means high intensity day : what ever that means to you / depending on requirements of your sport.

Medium – middle intensity day : 20% less work or intensity than Heavy day.

Light – low intensity day : 20% less than medium day

Heavy and Light are more important that Medium – but unfortunately most people are constantly training in this intensity zone.

You may be doing High Intensity Interval Training – but your performance is plateauing or even diminishing.

The human body need stimulus from both ends of the spectrum – it needs light, long and easy work outs & short, hard and heavy ones too. Furthermore the body also needs long, challenging “grind” sessions as well as short and brief light sessions. This is because many people forget that duration and intensity are independent variables.

Programming variables:

  • sets
  • reps
  • load
  • volume
  • duration
  • intensity

All of these need to be considered in a good workout program.

First You have to decided to start somewhere…

When you go to alter your program by the recommended 20% choose 1 variable. As you get more proficient at programming you can alter more than one variable at a time to make up that 20%.

You also need to learn how to alter variables on the fly during a workout when needed. This skill is important for both coaches and athletes. Determining your readiness for exercises is important for progress (and not overreaching / over training). Readiness can mean your too fatigued for a planned workout, or alternatively – you feel great and can perform more then expected. But for those on an upward trend however be warned, it won’t last forever. so instead of waiting to hit a plateau, plan ahead and schedule in Light days, so that your Heavy days can be really, really heavy 🙂

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Every Day Movement

Downward Dog to Cobra

One of the best movements to practice every day is transferring from Downward Dog into Cobra and back.

It Involves:

  • Hip flexion & extension
  • Shoulder flexion & extension
  • Spinal flexion & extension
  • Trunk (core, lats, glutes) engagement
  • Inhale with Cobra
  • Exhale with Downward Dog

Performance of this movement should be a 2 / 10 in effort – so that it is easy to match your movement with your breathing.

Doing this every day will go a long way in keeping your shoulders, hips and spine health, mobile and strong! However you should switch up your exercises every couple weeks to continue receiving benefits for your workouts.

Stay Strong.

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Better Movement Series : Vestibular Health

When using a movement approach to vestibular health one must exercise caution. The majority of us will be fine, but there are people with conditions that would not benefit from this type of training. If you haven’t done anything like this before start slow, small and easy.

The Vestibular Labyrinth

  • the vestibular labyrinth partly consists of 3 semi circular canals
  • each canal detects a type of head motion, information from all 3 canals allow the brain to figure out direction of motion.

The 3 Semicircular Canals detect 3 motions :

  • up and down as in ‘yes’
  • side to side as in ‘no’
  • lateral tilts – like pouring water out of your ears

Practicing these 3 head motions is also great for neck mobility!

The Vestibular System plays a major role in Balance. However there are 2 other players in what makes up Human Balance; Vision and Proprioception. (Underlying all this is the efficiency of your nervous system to send and receive information, and your brain or spinal chords ability to interpret and react to that info. But this is outside the scope of this post.)

Here are some things to consider when using a movement approach to Vision and Proprioception

VISION – actions of the eyes and head

  • eyes focus on one spot with no movement
  • eyes focus on one spot but the head moves
  • eyes track moving spot without moving head
  • eyes and head track a moving spot

PROPRIOCEPTION

  • focus on ankles and hips and getting stability from the core
  • close your eyes while practicing to enhance the effect
  • practice ‘Re-Balancing’ – that is, almost falling over but catching yourself and bringing yourself back into balance. (shout out to Ido Portal)
  • practice at an 8 / 10 intensity – that is, if you do 10 reps only 2 reps should actually make you fall. 80% of your efforts should be successful, if not then what you are doing is too challenging!

My Top 3 Balance Drills

>>> 1/2 kneeling 3 way neck mobility

>>> Single Leg Standing Eye Tracking

>>> Eyes Close Toe touches : x 1 set heels elevated, x 1 set toes elevated.

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Better Movement Series : Shoulder Health

Using a movement approach to muscle and joint health involves exploring the ranges of motion, not going past 2/10 in discomfort and matching your breathing with your movement.

here are my Top 3 Shoulder mobility movements:

>>> Hang from something

>>> Arm Circles – simple circulation works wonders

>>> Supine Trunk Twist – use tension to keep your shoulders on the floor as you rotate your hips

The shoulder is a very complicated part of your body. There are multiple joints, bones and muscles that all connect to more or less the same area on your skeleton. The coordination of all these working parts is called a Rhythm – the Glenohumeral Rhythm or Scapulohumeral Rhythm.

The muscle that gets a lot of attention is the Serratus Anterior – a very sexy muscle that assists in scapular rotation. Getting this muscle working properly is critical for the Glenohumeral rhythm.

>General practice of this scapular rotation and getting the arm to move in coordination with your shoulder blade is also needed.

>The Muscles of your neck – your ‘Traps’ – often need to be DE-activated because they work too much.

>The muscles between the shoulder blades – your Rhomboids – need to be Activated and strengthened because they often are stretched out and weak.

If you practice these things your shoulder range of motion will be pain free. If you include push up, pull ups, overhead presses and the like – your shoulder range of motion will be strong and resilient. When training Overhead exercises there is no need to go to absolute failure: Safety First!