Something is NOT always better than nothing

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.

Unconventional Gym Exercises

The exercises we teach at this gym don’t look like your typical gym exercises and you must think that they don’t build muscle or they don’t build strength. What you don’t realize is that they support muscle integration from multiple chains of muscle in a manner that replicates the dynamics of human movement (weight transfer, contralateral reciprocation, total body integration, etc.) and promotes muscular and neurological balance through the system. Key ingredients for a strong body for life versus a strong body for exercises that don’t carry over to life dynamics.

Our team of trainers don’t just stand around and count reps because there is more to exercising than just doing this exercise for 15 reps, and then this one, and then this one, only to get your heart rate up and break a sweat. That’s important but there is more to it because, if you’re just going through the motions then you could be using the wrong muscles to perform the exercise.

We want to teach you how to contract a muscle properly and at the correct time. In doing so, your body will begin to reprogram new functions to support your movement patterns- during exercise and real life! Without muscles contracting to move your body, your joints begin to pick up the slack and wear and tear is induced in parts of the body that aren’t capable of handling the demand. This is when injury risk goes up and aches and pains creep in.

If you want to avoid injuring yourself and inflicting pain, that can be prevented, then you must learn how to move well and what muscle functions are involved in certain movements. The better you can execute muscle functions during exercises, the better those functions will manifest in reality when you’re walking, running, playing sports, or just living in real world conditions.

The secret is that the exercises you perform must mirror the way your body performs in the real world. So when you’re doing the same exercises you did in high school athletics, or what you read in a fitness magazine, or what you see other gym goers doing, your body is missing out on the crucial variables that separate ‘moving your body” from moving your body, using the correct muscles to control ranges of motion and functions that your body should be capable of performing in the real world without pain. In short, you’re either habitually going through the motions the way your body defaults to movement patterns or you’re using your muscle functions to intentionally control those motions and re-train the way your body moves through ranges or motion. A lot of times the traditional, conventional exercises that you can perform by “monkey see, monkey do” don’t replicate the way your body moves in reality and that can cause misuse and misfiring of muscles when you’re just trying to move in general.

Exercise is more complex than seeing an exercise and then doing what you see, because without the proper understanding of what you should be feeling and how your body should be functioning you could be training your body to contract the wrong muscles and compensate your way through an exercise, which leads to performing poorly for the dynamics of the real world.

As pictured, the exercises in this gym allow the body to move through the dynamics that compose human movement. The more skilled you become at these types of exercises, the more carry over those exercises have to life outside of the gym. Which is what your body needs, to function without aches and pains. When executed properly, the exercises we teach offer the combined benefit of strength training and physical rehabilitation at once.

Before you write these exercises off because they don’t look tough, don’t require lifting heavy weight, or look like dance moves consider this, maybe the way we’ve been taught to exercise as athletes, bodybuilders, powerlifters, yogis, etc., is incomplete. Maybe it’s too much for the body because the body hasn’t mastered the basics of fundamental movement. Aka human biomechanics, the complex intricate details about the way the human body moves around, and then creating and teaching exercises that match up to that movement. If you don’t train these fundamentals, how can something like lifting a heavy bar, on your spine, up and down, or moving through extreme ranges of motion, or even moving through ranges of motion that our body didn’t evolve to do, like animal crawls. Maybe all of this has some good intentions behind the practices but if our muscles evolved primarily from movements like walking, running, and throwing, then we should train those movements and create exercises around those movements. Instead of movements that we create for sport or ego boosts or just arbitrary patterns that our body, literally, at a functional level, should never have to go through- like a crab crawl or a warrior pose. Maybe we need to be a little more critical about the repercussions from some exercise practices, and the long term effects they have on your fitness, joint health, total body function, and pain. Maybe then, the need for rehab will go away, if we build strength around the movements we do most, rather than exercises that limit your strength to that exercise (in a gym and not outside in the real world). If your body is strong at what you do most, then it compensates less and has more functional capacity.

So remember, if you want to be strong, you have to be efficient at what you do most. Come try a month with us and we’ll teach your muscles how to function, in the way that your body moves, to build the strength that you need to navigate the demands of the real world!

 

Integrated Fitness

The human body was designed to move as one fully integrated unit. The muscles connect with each other through patterns such as walking, running, and even throwing. When the muscles connect (talk) with each other, the body functions efficiently and compensations during movement are kept to a minimum. Poor movement compensations are the cause for most of the body’s aches and pains, and can be prevented by training the body the way it was designed.

If you want a fish to get better at swimming, you wouldn’t teach it to walk on land. The body of a fish is designed to swim, the same way the human body is designed to walk. Walking is a fundamental movement that every body utilizes at some point in their day. Whether you walk around the neighborhood, to and from your car, in the grocery store, or at the park, your muscles are engaging through reciprocal sequences (opposite limbs connecting) that allow it to propel itself through space. When exercise doesn’t account for reciprocation of body parts and the muscles get trained through isolated movements, it conditions the body to disconnect during basic human movements like walking. When the body is disconnected that’s when movement compensations arise, so every step you take, while you’re walking the dog around the block or walking into the gym, is a step that’s forcing your body out of its natural alignment. If you don’t do anything to remain aligned then every time you move, you’re telling your body that this misalignment is the new normal, and your body gets stuck in this position. In order to regain better alignment, you need to train your body the way it naturally moves, by engaging the myofascial sling system.

The body has a sling system that is interwoven in the myofascial network and those slings are responsible for connecting the upper body with the lower body, the same way they connect when you walk, run, or throw. (Yes your lower body is involved when you play fetch with your dog- if it’s not, then that’s a shoulder injury waiting to happen). The slings connect the right shoulder, through the external and internal obliques, to the left hip, and all the way down the front of that leg. Then around the bottom of the foot, back up the rear of the same leg, to the left glute. From the left glute, up across the spine towards the right lat, which then finishes back where it started, at the right shoulder. Then you have an identical sling connection connecting the left shoulder to the right hip. This is an in depth view of whats typically referred to as the body’s “X.” When you move, force is transmitted through the sling systems and balanced between the two sides so that you move efficiently. All of our muscles are encompassed in these slings so they’re working in harmony to balance out your movement. When muscles are isolated during exercise they stop working in harmony, so now the slings aren’t balanced the way they were designed. It’s like removing the lower left section of the “X,” it’s not going to be able to stand the way it was, instead it’s going to have to lean to one side to find balance. Our body works the same way, when the slings disconnect, you can still move, but you’re going to move with more imbalances.

If left untreated, muscular imbalances cause disturbances in your gait and shifting in your posture that contribute to joint pain and muscle aches. Since the body is no longer working optimally, the joints absorb the forces that the sling systems should be balancing. Imbalances in the sling systems cause some muscles to overwork to pick up the slack of the primary movers, leading to strains in those muscles. For example, if your hamstrings aren’t engaging when you walk, the calf usually picks up the load and since the calf wasn’t designed to handle all the responsibility it gets tired and the muscles in the bottom of your foot start to work by themselves. Hello plantar fasciitis. The same can be said of the lats and pecs not working in unison with the sling systems and being plagued with rotator cuff issues.

If you expect to live a pain free life and move freely, then exercise must account for reciprocal movements that engage the myofascial sling systems through Functional Patterns that mirror real life. Sitting on an exercise bike or a weight machine at the gym is good for your health, but it’s not preparing your body for life outside of the gym to the extent that sling training will. All exercise is better than no exercise, but not all exercise is created equal. Depending on what you want to get out of your time spent working out, evaluate what is going to be the most beneficial for your goals. Do you want to be really good at rowing or cycling for an hour but unable to run to save your life or do normal activities of daily living without experiencing aches or pains? It’s your life, build your body for how you want to live it.