Tag: body mechanics

Mind Muscle Connection

Posted on by Michael Devon

Neuromuscular reprogramming is just fancy jargon for training the brain/body connection via the correct exercise stimulus.

We have our clients utilize a mirror for most exercises to point out when their form is compromised leading to injury and understanding why the way they perform certain functions causes pain.

The consensus is that their brain thinks the way they’re already doing it is right. But when they get a reality check in the mirror they can finally see (and feel) the cause and effect from improper movement.

Your brain is always going to prefer to stay in its comfort zone and move through the path of least resistance, which is what prompts your muscles to respond with inefficient patterns. A pro tip we teach our clients is to slow down the movement and focus on controlling the details. Your body will learn how to use your muscles efficiently to move correctly and retrain your brain in the process.

Come feel what our gym does differently from the rest in the industry. Set up your initial (no obligation) consultation so we can get to know your body and you can get a feel for our style of training.

Without This, Physical Activity Suffers!

Posted on by Michael Devon
activity like this, requires muscles that work, in order to perform without aches, pains, or injuries.

Without proper muscle activity, physical activity suffers.

If your muscles don’t work when you work, your body picks up the slack in deficit ways.

The body is king/queen at compensating, which means if you want it to achieve a range of motion it will do it, but it will use whatever muscles it can to get there.

When you don’t use the correct muscles to move your body, you risk injuring yourself or triggering pain from improper mechanics.

Your mechanics are directly related to your muscle function, so muscles that don’t work are going to cause your body to move inefficiently.

Walking the dogs, playing tennis, exercising, standing, and general movements all require functional muscles if you want to perform these activities without consequences.

The consequence for dysfunctional muscles, is poor body mechanics, poor body mechanics contribute to movement compensations, which lead to aches, pains, and injuries.

Let our team of trainers help teach your body how it needs to function, to move without pain!

Unlock Your Movement

Posted on by Michael Devon

How much thought do you put into your training? Are you addressing your mechanical issues or are you working around them?
Are you trying to optimize the way you move or are you just beating yourself into more problems?

There’s a smarter way to do things. A way that makes moving from point A to point B effortless. The Functional Patterns way.

Let’s say, for example, you have chronically tight hip flexors. In other words your hip flexors are locked in a shortened state. That means that every movement you do, whether it’s walking, squatting, deadlifting, sleeping, or standing, you will be doing so using your contracted hip flexors. At times, your hip flexors will be required to lengthen depending on the movement you’re doing, and if they aren’t capable of doing so, then you’re ingraining a compensational tendency to work around the fact that your hips are locked up.
Even if you’re attempting an FP exercise and you’re not addressing the fact that your hip flexors are locked in a shortened state then you are just applying your current dysfunctional mechanics to a different exercise.

The reason FP training is gaining so much traction is because we focus on getting results. And we get those results by being meticulously specific in the way we stimulate tissues.
The exercises are not arbitrary, they are not designed to be different to look cool. They’re designed to solve a problem as it relates to human movement. Every single time.

Come and check us out and feel what it’s like to unlock the shackles and move without pain!

Auto Mechanic vs Body Mechanic

Posted on by Michael Devon

When your check engine light comes on in your car or you hear an unfamiliar sound when you’re driving it, you know something is wrong and you take it in to the shop for a mechanic to evaluate what’s wrong. You wouldn’t chance driving a malfunctioning car at 70 m.p.h. because there is a lot of risk if something is wrong with your engine or your brakes aren’t working properly when you’re driving at high speeds. So why do you treat your body any differently? When your knee hurts when you walk, or your shoulder hurts when you carry a bag, or your lower back is in pain every morning when you get out of bed, that’s your body’s “check engine light” and it’s telling you that something is wrong and you should get it checked out.

The same way a car mechanic addresses the problems with your car, that’s how our team of trainers views and treats the problems with your body. We don’t want you operating at “high speeds” when your body isn’t functioning properly to support your movement. We aim to correct what is wrong so that your function doesn’t create more problems in your joints from faulty body mechanics. The human body was born to walk, and eventually run, literally the way our species evolved was by using our muscles in this fashion. So if you can’t perform one or both of these fundamental functions without some form of ache or pain, then your body isn’t functioning optimally. When your body isn’t functioning optimally it can still find ways to move and mask the pain, learn to live with the pain, or avoid the problem entirely. But this isn’t conducive to overall health and fitness.

If you took your car to the car mechanic and they told you everything is fixed and working now…as long as you don’t drive over 50 m.p.h., make a left turn, or put your car in reverse everything will be fine. You’d likely except them to keep working on it until you can use your car safely on the roads. When we initially meet with you, we take an intake of what functions you have problems performing and we work with you to fix these dysfunctions in order to truly function without any consequences or restrictions. If someone comes in with shoulder pain, we wouldn’t say don’t raise your arm past your shoulder, drive with that arm, or carry your groceries with that arm and everything will be okay. That would be the same issue with your auto mechanic not fully fixing your car. We would be teaching people to avoid the problem and not getting at the root to fix it.

When working with us you should feel as though your mechanical dysfunctions, joint problems, muscle aches, etc., are on the path to getting resolved as we troubleshoot what is causing the malfunction rather than just having you avoid the issue. Avoiding the issue doesn’t do anything for your function in the real world, avoiding bending your knee, twisting your spine, or raising your arm overhead when you are performing exercise might make you feel like you’re getting stronger but it’s because you’re not allowing your body to encounter these problematic functions. But what happens when you need to bend your knee, or twist, or raise your arm up in real life? Dysfunction and pain! It’s time you start addressing these issues when you exercise to start creating a better path of movement without restriction.

Book your initial consult to start learning what muscles function and what muscles don’t, and how revealing this is the first step towards regaining your freedom of movement…without having to remind yourself not to use a part of your body so it doesn’t hurt, that’s not true function. You, or your trainer, or your therapist are avoiding the problem if you aren’t actively testing ways to address and correct it, and while we don’t guarantee an over-night fix of the problem, we will do what’s necessary for your body to start fixing the underlying issue and get on the path to healing. This is what separates us from your typical gym trainer, we have tools on our tool belt that nobody else does. The sharpest tools in our shed come from Functional Patterns! So stop spinning your wheels with what the mainstream fitness and rehab field dish out, hoping pain relief and function will come back when you need to start taking steps to make it happen, we will help guide your steps down a sustainable path towards health and fitness. Come check out the less beaten path at our gym!

Neuromuscular Exercise

Posted on by Michael Devon

Your brain naturally defaults to the neural pathway that represents what you’ve done before. These pathways are created based on habits and behaviors, ei; how you move, what muscles you use to move, what your muscles are doing when you’re not moving, etc.

The brain prefers the path of least resistance- the easiest route to avoid working hard. Since the brain (nervous system) controls our physical actions (muscular system), our function is at the mercy of this path. The way we move is determined on how hard the brain wants to work to coordinate the movement, dictating correct biomechanics versus dysfunctional mechanics based on how your brain is wired.

If your habits and behaviors wire in neural pathways that reinforce the easier path, then your body systems won’t work optimally and over time this becomes normal, and you aren’t even aware of the dysfunction. Using movement as an example… your daily habit of leaning on one leg and popping your hip out to one side when you stand creates a neural pathway, that your brain thinks is normal. Now when you go for a walk, this pathway that was created from your repeated behavior starts to manifest. Every step you take, your hip pops out to the same side as it does when you stand but you aren’t aware of it because your brain has wired this pathway as “normal.” Just because something is normal doesn’t make it right, because a hip that shifts asymmetrically when you walk creates a chain reaction that leads to compensations elsewhere in your kinetic chain. Causing force to pound into your hip joint leading to a hip replacement, unstable hips lead to an unstable spine and overworked knee joints, leading to neck and ankle problems, etc. Think about what else happens during other movements if all this is happening just when you walk.

This is why we prioritize the “mind muscle connection” during training because your body becomes blind to how it’s moving, when your brain has been controlling it a certain way for so long. Our trainers work to uncover if your movement patterns are serving your body for sustainable function or wrecking your body and expediting the aging process.

Contact us if you want to evolve your training to achieve a more practical outcome, instead of just exercising through that path of least resistance.

Fitness: The Ability To Adapt To Your Environment

Posted on by Michael Devon

At this gym we take the mind and muscle connection to a deeper level of understanding and coordination to ensure you get results and not an injury!

You see it’s not enough to think of one muscle while you’re exercising, because when you’re being human and moving your body around like a human body is designed to move (with all its neuromyofascial connections) you have multiple muscles working at the same time- in coordination with each other to facilitate motion. In reality, an isolated muscle contraction can’t do anything to cause better movement, because an isolated muscle contraction does not exist… except in the gym.

Training to stimulate one muscle at a time creates a broken kinetic chain, which is what your body utilizes to function, move, and perform in the real world. Instead of just focusing on the legs or arms, we teach you to integrate your lower body with your core, and with your upper body. Then you learn to use those muscles to move your body through a specific exercise pattern that makes integrating those muscles more feasible. You’re verbally cued to position your bones and joints a certain way to start the exercise, move through the exercise, and finish the exercise so your muscles learn to automatically contract when your body moves through certain positions. Then we pattern exercises to mirror the positions your body moves through most in the real world, so your muscles contract properly during activities away from the gym.

If you’re still blindly performing an exercise for the sake of exercise, and not sure what or where you should feel muscle activity then you’re selling yourself short and not making the most of your time in the gym. We all have busy lives and struggle to fit exercise into our schedules, so you might as well make the most of every minute by mentally controlling the physical actions of your body during a workout. The mental coordination to position your body to produce proper muscle activity can be overwhelming at first, that’s why we help guide you through the process to ensure you’re building your body up and not breaking it down. We show you how your body prefers the path of least resistance and will easily compensate it’s way through an exercise, but then we correct your compensational movements by retraining your brain to recognize the difference and ingraining the correct form of body mechanics to serve your body in the gym, and away from the gym- enhancing your fitness, aka your ability to adapt to any environment and fulfill the task at hand!

If this all sounds super intimidating, don’t worry, because this is what we take care of for you. We hash out all the technical difficulties on our end so you don’t have to figure out what exercises will help or hinder you. If you want results, thats what this gym is about! Contact us today to find the answers your body needs to make real changes that last.

Dysfunctional Muscle

Posted on by Michael Devon

Work around dysfunctional muscles and movement impairments cumulate. Work through the nitty gritty of retraining the kinetic chain to optimal function and expect a return to quality of life and freedom to move!

The way you train determines the outcome. Proper exercise patterns that respect human movements, or arbitrarily lifting weights the way you see in most gyms or fitness ads.

We aren’t your typical gym, we don’t push you to your limits of already poor movement, we push you to the edge of learning (mentally and physically) how your muscles should function, and why.

Contact us today to start reprogramming your brain and body for the reality it lives in. Otherwise, poor movement compounds and eventually leads to overuse, pain, and injuries that make life in the real world harder to live with.

Now vs Then; Posture Results

Posted on by Michael Devon

The importance of posture is gaining more recognition as our society becomes more sedentary. Rounded shoulders, hunched back, sway back, and “text neck” impact most of us on a daily basis. Our environment shapes us, literally. If you sit behind a desk all day, you more than likely have rounded shoulders and a forward head posture, because you’re confined to a computer screen for 8 hours a day. Posture is problematic if you’re body gets “stuck” in that particular position and your body can’t get out of it when you move. Whether you’re exercising or grocery shopping, your posture will manifest during movement. Posture training goes deeper than just reminding yourself to stand up straight and pull your shoulders back. In order to truly get yourself out of that “stuck” position and move better, you have to reprogram your nervous system to allow for the long term fix.

Long term improvements to your posture orient from integrated exercise, not training the posture itself. Remember, the nervous system needs to be involved in the process so the body can intrinsically maintain the changes while at rest. So when you’re working all day, your body no longer accepts that familiar “hunched over” position as normal. Now you don’t have to constantly be conscious about sitting up straight with your shoulders back, you’re body will default to that new “stuck” position. Ideally a better position for your body. When the correct exercise stimulus is provided for the body, it will adapt to that stimulus. This is when the nervous system gets involved and connects with the muscular system, as it does in the real world. Exercise that aligns with this notion has the power to reconnect missing links in the muscles and reprogram the nervous system, making you “unstuck,” allowing for long term changes in alignment.

Alignment, posture, structural integrity, stability, however it’s referred to, plays a role in movement and therefore repeat injuries, chronic muscle aches, and nagging joint pain, which then influences movement further. If your alignment is flawed when you’re just standing or sitting, imagine how that “bad posture” will manifest during movement. Your body is going to compensate poorly when it moves leading to the vicious cycle of injury, aches, pains, and eventually lead to even worse movement quality. Whether you’re moving in the gym or around town, your body isn’t adequately  prepared for life and so it breaks down under all the varying forces. From climbing stairs, running, playing with your kids, walking your dog, GRAVITY! If you want more resiliency against these forces then, when you’re in the gym exercising, you have to prepare your body for life outside of the gym. Your body needs a reference to operate better in the real world by utilizing real life Functional Patterns of movement that translate to the way humans were designed to move. Functional Patterns is a training system that respects human evolution and integrates the muscles in accordance with how the muscles are actually, anatomically, connected. When muscles are isolated during exercise, those muscle connections are severed and over time the nervous system recognizes this dysfunctional state as the new normal. Leading to the bodies inefficient relationship with gravity. As you reprogram the nervous system with the right stimulus, from patterns that actually respect the way the bodies connected and tap into those connections during exercise, then better movement manifests in life outside of the gym. Better movement means less compensations and a solution to your nagging aches and pains.

Below are some results one of our clients was able to achieve, after working together once a week for 10 weeks, toward improving his posture for the long run. These changes are only skimming the surface and we have more work to do, but the only cue given during these photos was to “relax, take a deep breath in and let it out.” No other positional cues were given during the photos so we could see how the posture was actually influenced at the neuromuscular level- hence the structural changes even though he’s resting in all the pictures. Even though both poses are relaxed, there are visual differences between the poses because the posture was influenced at a nueromuscular level. In other words, we woke up some muscles that have been asleep (influencing the posture negatively) and put them to work in order to change the structure of the body at a deeper level, rather than just “standing up straight.”

Before (right) ; After (left)

Side view
Increased intra-abdominal pressure (fuller looking belly) so more muscles in the core are being engaged while at rest to support his new posture at an intrinsic level. Decreased forward head posture (height of his nose and angle of his neck) achieved, not from teaching him to pull his head back, but from waking up his deep front line.

Rear view
Overall spinal decompression (less scapular winging, lengthened spinal column) because of overall ribcage decompression. More space between his body and his arms hanging by his side, because his shoulders were pulled out of their chronic internal rotation.

Front view                                                                                                                                   Intra-abdominal pressure and spine/ribcage Decompression  (positioning of his pecs and height of his ears) resulting from an improved resiliency to gravity and an overall taller Rene. Less rib flare (hands pulled to side of his thighs rather than resting at the front of his thighs), due to the ribcage opening up.

As a result of changing the “alignment” at a neuromuscular level, Rene was able to diminish his lower back pain that he’s been living with for years! Since we aim to lift up the structure of the body during exercise, Rene reported feeling “taller” after every session which is a result of the spine and ribcage decompression, and a more efficient relationship with gravity. Decompression is only achieved at an internal level when the right exercises stimulus is provided, when the body becomes decompressed, the normal resting posture changes. It’s important to note that we did not spend any time after his first session focusing on posture- these changes in alignment were created by focusing on corrective exercise with proper breathing mechanics and body mechanics. It’s all about teaching the muscles to work together in harmony so the body learns how to function as one integrated unit and balance the forces influencing it everyday.

Don’t just change your posture for the short term by pinching your shoulders back and standing up straight. Address the mechanical issues of your body and, in the process, your posture will be changed at a deeper level. Stopping the vicious injury cycle and automatically opening the doors to better movement and pain-free living. Contact us now to set up your consultation and introductory posture assessment. Mention this post and we’ll waive your consultation fee so you can come see what steps you can take toward improving your posture and pain for the long term!