Tag: functional body

Something is NOT always better than nothing

Posted on by Michael Devon

Something is not always better than nothing. Usually it’s the other way around, the mindset that something is better than nothing. Jogging for a few minutes is better than not moving at all, but not if jogging causes your knees or your back to hurt.

Our trainers are of the mindset that something is not better than nothing, if something causes pain or adversity. Instead we teach you something that is better for your body and your needs. This ensures that you continue to make progress and you can sustain your fitness as you age. Because what’s the point of doing something if it wrecks your body and you aren’t able to do it for long.

Pushing past joint pain because you need to jog in order to lose weight for an upcoming wedding or because you keep gaining weight, isn’t healthy. It would be healthier to do something with your diet and eating habits and lose weight by addressing those. Then you can use exercise as a way to strengthen your body by moving correctly instead of rushing through a workout because you feel the need to punish your body for being overweight. Punishment during a workout often means pain after the workout.

If this sounds like you then you need to consider why you exercise. Do you want to lose weight, do you want to be strong, do you want your muscles to work so you don’t have pain? All of the above are possible but your path to achieve them needs to be intentional and holistic. Meaning you shouldn’t feel like you need to outwork a bad diet, food should be fuel used to give you energy for your day or a workout. It shouldn’t be used to cope from stress or overeaten regularly. Exercise should be used as a tool to build a strong and stable body progressively overtime and not a means to an end.

Diet and exercise work together to help your health and fitness. Rushing through a half-assed workout isn’t how your body was meant to be trained. The mindset that something is better than nothing isn’t a healthy one because it promotes a half-assed result. Spinning you in circles, not losing weight but not gaining extra weight from an unhealthy, unsustainable cycle. Lose the haphazard “something is better than nothing” motto because it’s limiting your potential.

Chase Function

Posted on by Michael Devon

If you don’t have function you don’t have a strong body. Period.

Your “strong muscles” eventually won’t be able to muscle through the same exercises you got away with in your youth or with your genetics. The way your body naturally moves will need the appropriate muscles working to facilitate movement or you’ll start allowing your body to compensate at basic tasks, allowing pain and injury to “sneak” up on you.

In reality the pain and injury stems from poor exercise habits that don’t train function. You can’t cheat your way or “muscle” your way through the mechanics of human movement, like when you walk or run, because there are too many variables occurring  to facilitate these movements that your brain can’t coordinate them while you’re doing them.

Instead it is beneficial to dissect specific functions that happen during walking or running and training the variables of those specific functions. This will allow your body to carry over the functions learned into the real world when your body naturally moves through those functions. So start executing functions that your body needs to do instead of executing exercises that you see in magazines and YouTube videos.

If you need help distinguishing what functional exercises really should accomplish then start training with our biomechanics trainers so you aren’t just exercising for the sake of exercising, but exercising to enhance function outside of the gym!