Tag: functional movement

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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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Agency

from wiki:

Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

A goal of mine for 2019 was to be more proactive and to really engage with life. That is how I started thinking about Human Agency, and how it could be applied to the fitness industry.

In my ideal world, the role of a Coach would be to educate their client/athlete to a certain point of understanding where they need the coach less and less. That is the basis of my whole approach. Each of these Posts have had in mind the idea of educating the reader to the point of being able to do it themselves.

It may take time to figure out this intuitive approach to training, but life is long too!

Taking Physical Agency will improve your ability to engage with your environment, maybe not making your life longer, but at least making it easier!

So,

Take Agency of your Health & Fitness!
(is that even grammatically correct?)

Create your own movement routine and figure out what works best for you.

Do what feels good but DON’T forget that you still have to train Strength (with resistance / weights).

Train intuitively but DON’T forget to train functional movements and to balance out your pushing and pulling movements.

The next few posts will help clarify how to adopt this approach to training.

There are certain rules / principles / ‘physiological triggers’ that when understood lead to a better understanding of how you should be training.

Until then,
Stay Strong!

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Corrective Movement Strategy

Analyze + Correct + Retest = Improvement

A Corrective Movement Strategy (CMS) is an exercise/workout/movement program that is specifically designed to improve an individuals weaknesses and asymmetries.

CMS involves testing and retesting the athletes ability to perform certain movement patterns. Testing should be done by some sort of Functional Movement Screen (FMS).

These types of training sessions should be done either separately from, or just prior to harder strength training.

Major Asymmetries should be trained separately from or, or after harder strength training.

Exercise Selection should be careful to follow the Principles of:

i)Specificity
ii)Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (S.A.I.D).

  • Which exercises you choose should be based on analysis of the athletes FMS and the coaches intuition as to what will work best for each individual.
  • Further assessments can be applied depending on the coaches knowledge and skill.

Basically,

> Whatever you suck at – do a few sets of 5 reps before your training session.

> If one side is significantly stronger than the other – do a few sets of 5 reps after your training session.

> If anything lacks mobility, get it moving before your training.

They KEY is balancing out your body through movement. If you are always in one position (aka sitting) then you need to move your body in the opposite direction. If you always move in a specific direction then you need to practice the other direction also.

Makes Sense.

But not as easy in practice!

This is because improvement is sometimes slow. Patience is needed. That being said, subtle improvements can be detected within a training session by retest the movement patterns in question as much as possible (multiple times a session).

Continuous testing and retesting should occur in order to determine which corrective exercise is producing the greatest results.

This process of testing, analysis, implementation of corrective exercises and then (re)testing is a great strategy for improving your movement.

Try it out, let me know what happens!

If you have any questions let me know

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Correctives and Asymmetries

IN THE GYM,

first you identify your strengths and weaknesses – the next step is Training them accordingly.

If you are not on a professional sports team, then the “sport” you should be training for is LIFE.

And in order to have a balanced life – just as in movement – you must first identify your problems before you can go about fixing them.

All sports create asymmetries in the body due to chronic use of a specific type of movement required by the sport. This idea of ‘chronic use of a specific type of movement required…’ can and should be applied to every day life.

What types of movement (or non-movements!) to you do every day? – sitting, walking, driving or taking the bus will require your body to move in certain, habitual ways through the environment – biasing and fatiguing certain muscle groups.

Once you have identified the types of activities you do every day, you can begin to train for them in a general way. The result is that you will be able to move through your every day environment with greater ease.

Since we are speaking of generalities,
The general way to identify if you have a movement issue is with a ‘Functional Movement Screen’

  • Your ability to perform specific movements (like the Squat), or tasks (like carrying groceries) will tell you what areas you need to work on

The important thing is that you treat any weakness or asymmetry as an ‘injury’ and ‘rehabilitate’ it to the point that it becomes one of your strengths. At that point it is time to start again and reassess your movement – identify any other issues, and begin the process again.

A NOTE ON Asymmetries
– this could mean any imbalance between pushing and pulling, left to right sides of the body or more commonly: and imbalance between the front and the back of the body. As a species, humans are constantly flexing the front of our bodies and neglecting our ‘posterior chain’ > All I will say in closing is this : Get Your Lats On!