Tag: gym

The Way You Exercise

Posted on by Michael Devon

Recognize that the way you exercise has significant influence over your function and fitness, and your dysfunction and pain. Training like what you see in the mainstream gym culture likely produces the same results- decrepit posture, lower back pain, a knee brace, etc. Movement that replicates the mechanics of the way the human body moves day to day, has carry over to life outside of the gym. Ergo, pain free recreational activities and sports, no joint stiffness or muscle tightness, and an overall freedom to move!

Not Your Typical Gym

Posted on by Michael Devon

Working with a trainer for over a year without noteworthy changes in strength, most importantly strength gains without pain, is time and money you can’t get back. Not stronger arm muscles, but an entire body ready to function- function without any wrist aches or back pains. You only have one body and unless you’re on an active pursuit to take care and treat it right- the “old school” fitness industry will get the best of you.

Tricking you into thinking that building muscle and getting stronger means that you have to lift massive amounts of weight, or until you body “adapts” your joints might hurt and your lower back will feel stiff until it gets “stronger” etc., etc. FYI: your body will adapt… to whatever stimulus you’re putting it through. So if the way you train (or the way your trainer trains you) is harming your body then your brain will think that’s supposed to be that way and program it as normal.

Then you’re stuck in the vicious cycle of trying to workout and be healthy but also hurting, poorly conditioned, and living with aches and pains. Spending more time and money “supplementing” your training with massages, chiropractors, physical therapists, acupuncture, and cryotherapy to recover from the gym.

A trainer who’s evolved with their skills with Functional Patterns is out of league with traditional fitness trainers and work to mitigate all the arbitrary “supplemental practices” and focus on a strength program, a cardio program, a flexibility program, a rehab/prehab/injury prevention/injury recovery program, a posture/alignment program, a recovery program ALL IN ONE. A program this is sustainable and promotes longevity.

Challenge your trainer by insisting on better results- or find a new one. Your future health and wellbeing depends on it.

www.safunctionalfitness.com

Unique, Different, Relevant

Posted on by Michael Devon

A lot comes to mind when users experience the style of training we implement, it’s “weird, unconventional, confusing” yet “applicable, practical, sustainable, and for a purpose.”

We utilize Functional Patterns techniques and methodologies to produce changes on the human body that forms of traditional training and therapies aim to do, but can’t. It boils down to what is relevant and what is not… aka useless.

Are back squats, bench presses, mini band walks, and clam shells making the most of time spent exercising or rehabbing? From personal and observational experience, no. They might help, a little bit, for some strength and general movement to avoid being a couch potato, but the risks outweigh the benefits, and the carry over is minimal compared to what the human body actually needs.

As pictured, the way humans move most is via contralateral reciprocation- opposing limbs connecting. When one leg is forward, the other is back. When the leg is back, that same arm is forward. Exercise patterns should aim to respect this fundamental concept of movement, as it relates to the human body. IF we only had an upper body, then the isolation of the bench press would be more appropriate. Rather our pec muscles connect through fascia across our body via the oblique slings, to the opposing leg muscles of the hip and inner thigh. Isolation destroys these connections and teaches the body to work in isolation, when in reality it integrates to function as an efficient unit.

The human body evolved to walk, run, and throw. Thus our muscular connections developed to support these functions, so training the body in isolation continuously without training the entire muscular chain, and the chains it connects to, is a recipe for a degenerated body.

Integrated movement is one thing, but integrating your muscles through exercise patterns that mirror the way the body moves in real life is the recipe for a fully functioning, high performing body in life outside of the gym.

Moving to stay healthy and avoid a sedentary lifestyle is beneficial, and as mentioned earlier, the benefits are enhanced when the proper training stimulus is implemented. The risks of training your body the way the mainstream gym culture advertises leads to some muscle strength and overall muscle mass, but at the expense of joint pain, lower back stiffness, having to wear a knee brace, and a general decline in your capabilities in activities outside of the gym.

Whereas movement that replicates the way the human body moves on a day to day basis enhances your quality of life in the real world. Recreational activities like golf and tennis can be played without aches and pains, your muscles learn to leverage your motion rather than unnecessary strain on the joints as levers, and an overall freedom with your everyday movement manifests. In other words, the benefits of exercise extend far beyond the exercise itself and last long after the exercise is over.

The way we integrate the muscles during movement has a lasting impact and carry over to reality is because our focus is on human biomechanics. Relevant movement that conditions the body according to your biological blueprint rather than arbitrarily lifting weights balancing on one foot and raising a dumbbell out to the side at the same time. There are multiple ways to train multiple muscles at once but only one way to train the muscles for a purpose beyond exercise.

The arbitrary exercise pattern has minimal carry over other than simply challenging your coordination, balance, and some multiplanar muscle activation. The intent is right but the execution won’t support the desired outcome. Creating a movement sequence to build tension from the ground up, rotating your body to create a lever to lift the weight overhead at the end of the rotation, and raising an opposing leg to the weight over head to counter balance the tensions and produce contralateral connections throughout the body. While maintaining proper core pressure, leg, arm, pelvis, and ribcage alignment before, during, and after the movement. Following a sequence to produce the right muscle tensions at the right time. All through patterns that your body moves through daily, so your muscles are programmed to work automatically rather than having to consciously be aware of your glutes firing properly during a run or on the tennis courts.

Wow that’s a lot to think about! And it’s necessary, if you’re legitimately concerned about aging well, performing optimally, and living life without working through pain. We don’y mindlessly count reps, every rep is corrected to make the most of the movement and connect your brain and body in new ways. Over time your body learns to self correct the fundamentals of human movement and we are able to add more variables to the mix and maximize the muscle function and carry it over to your daily living.

This isn’t your typical gym, we educate our clients on the importance of why moving intentionally is necessary, how to manage your pain by reprogramming better movement capabilities, what parts of the body connect with other parts to make up an efficient whole, when to move a muscle to create a contraction and a pairing with the opposing muscle, and who is in control of it all- your mind and your body.

*Client Testimonials*

Posted on by Michael Devon

We do things differently here at SA Functional Fitness. We aren’t riding the fad on “functional fitness” to attract a specific market of customers, we’re codifying the entire spectrum of muscle function as it relates to the way humans move most and setting you up for real world function. This methodology allows us to simultaneously build muscle, increase strength, improve flexibility, and mobility when and where it counts. A byproduct of learning how to exercise correctly and using the right muscles enhances posture and alignment, restores muscle imbalances, eliminates joint pain, and fixes the body’s structure down to the biomechanical dysfunctions that cause pain and inefficient movement patterns in the first place, allowing for efficient recovery.

We train the entire spectrum of total body function to ensure your body is getting the proper stimulus to illicit the results you paid for! We practice what we preach, and we teach you the importance of the little details, and how, if left unresolved, the little things add up to major dysfunction throughout the entire kinetic chain. We’re patient and passionate personal trainers that enjoy teaching to all levels of function and fitness, with an emphasis on human biomechanics to restore optimal function to the body and the way it performs on a daily basis.

We aren’t your typical gym, we don’t waste time with arbitrary exercises, we develop your fundamentals of movement as it relates to the human body and the way it was designed to move, and then take it to the next level as your body adapts, increasingly challenging your structure with exercises in the gym, to help your body navigate reality with ease!

Don’t take our word for it; read what our clients are saying about our methods!

 

Sling Training

Posted on by Michael Devon

Myofascial Sling Training is a way to train the human body that respects the way it evolved to move. It’s not based on arbitrary exercise tasks, but rather on movement patterns that translate to everyday function. Sling training refers to the Myofascial Sling Systems that connect the upper body with the lower body and are responsible for supporting the body during day to day performance. Whether you’re an elite athlete, amateur golfer, a 5K’er, weekend gardener, construction worker, walking the dogs, playing with the grandkids, and just existing in the real world. Whatever kind of movement you’re doing, your myofascial sling network is producing the movement. In order to move well, you must train the muscles in a manner that reinforce the way the sling systems function. Isolated movement doesn’t fulfill the requirement because when the body moves, it functions as one integrated unit- so total body integration will start to potentiate the muscles involved and teach them how to work together to produce efficient movement.

At first glance sling training is falsely mistaken as exercise that doesn’t accomplish strength gains. However once the proper foundation is built, slinging has the potential to build mass proportionally across entire chains of muscle, create strength during movements that replicate the way we function in reality, provide lengthened potentials (flexibility/mobility) for tight and overactive muscles, and unite multiple systems of the body to work together in harmony and promote a cardiovascular workout as well as strength that manifests in everyday movement. Obviously other modalities promote this as well, the issue that we’ve found is that the traditional means are often temporary gains riddled with aches and pains and are not sustainable.

The more efficiently you can move, the less energy you waste and the more muscles you have working for you at one time to provide a safer way to move your body while minimizing the risk of injury. As humans, we typically walk upright on two feet and other movements branch off of walking patterns, so when we train, we should be training the slings to become better during movements that we go through on a regular basis. While some argue that the squat is a staple movement because children often times squat when they play, they’re not recognizing that the way the squat is typically trained… with a bar on top of your cervical spine, compressing your discs, as you lift heavier and heavier weight, in a repetitious fashion… is damaging. The strength gained in the glutes and lower body is often overshadowed by lower back pain, knee pain, hip pain, or general tightness that, over time, begins to interfere with everyday movement. The squat can be functional, but it’s during movement patterns that promote connectivity between the sling system and the rest of the myofascial meridians. The more connected your muscles are, the less compression you’ll experience in the joints because the muscles are working towards a greater contractile potential to absorb the force.

Our gym offers training that enhances the human body and builds it up, rather than breaking it down through pointless exercise tasks. Instead of coaching you to become better at specific exercises, we teach your body specific exercises that are going to help you perform better in life outside of the gym. Our goal, as trainers, is to create a workout program for you that is sustainable as you age, while still allowing you to make progress and challenge the body as your muscles learn new motor skills to enhance everyday movement.

Big and Strong

Posted on by Michael Devon

My name is Michael, and I am the owner of SA Functional Fitness. I used to think that lifting heavy weight and having big muscles made you strong, it does and it doesn’t. It does make you strong when you lift that particular weight in that particular pattern, however the strength I gained in the gym didn’t translate to reality. The way my body moved when I was in the real world, never represented the way I moved my body in the gym, so that strength in the gym only applied to the gym- never to my lifestyle.

I ended up with various aches and pains in my early 20’s that I wrote off as “no pain, no gain” and continued to do what I thought, at the time, was the correct way to train the human body. As time went on the aches and pains got worse and little injuries started to pop up, first as nagging, then as something that required me to alter my training program and seek traditional methods of healing. I tried chiropractic, massage, physical therapy, cryotherapy, Airrosti, foam rolling, stretching, mobility exercises, body weight training, and more. They all served a purpose toward managing my pain, however nothing truly fixed the underlying issue- I didn’t know how to move well. Poor movement over time started to break my body down due to various compensation patterns I had developed to offset my aches, pains, and injuries.

I finally connected the dots that the way I had trained my entire life was inadequate and what led to my body becoming disconnected, and essentially useless for the way I wanted to live- pain free! It wasn’t solely the heavy lifting, but the exercise patterns that I was moving my body through when I lifted. When the human body moves, at it’s basic function, muscles on one side of the body shorten and muscles on the opposing side of the body lengthen, to propel the body through space. This is called contralateral reciprocation- connecting opposing limbs with each other, right arm/ left leg. It’s easily observed during the most fundamental human movement, walking. When I went to the gym I was squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, doing isolated muscle work on machines, and ultimately trying to activate individual muscles to make them stronger and balance out the body. None of that worked as I intended. I discovered that muscles can never be isolated, unless your surgically separate them, due to a web that surrounds our body and unites every muscle with each other, called fascia. In other words, when one muscle is working, multiple muscles elsewhere in the body are also working to achieve the intended action. The way I was originally taught to exercise didn’t account for any of that. Over time, my body become out of synch with all the moving parts that make up efficient movement, and little things like walking my dog, playing frisbee, getting in and out of my car, and living life started to become hard because my body wasn’t prepared for the various forces encountered in reality.

These experiences led me to discover a training system called Functional Patterns, that’s geared toward training the human body and the mechanics that compose its various movement patterns, and then getting the body stronger when it moves through those patterns. After employing these new techniques into my training I immediately felt the benefits and saw the logic behind the system. Unfortunately I was still incorporating some of my old traditional exercises into my workouts because I thought it would compliment the new techniques. So some days my body would feel great and then the next day I could be in the same state that caused me to seek out alternative exercises in the first place. Finally I decided to abandon the traditional methods that didn’t serve my function, but only fed my ego and body image. After a few weeks of solely training with the new system I noticed that something felt different. I didn’t wake up with a stiff lower back, my knees didn’t hurt climbing down stairs, and I felt taller, lighter, decompressed, whatever you want to call it, my body felt like it was healing.

At this point, I had been a personal trainer for a few years, peddling out the same exercises to my clients that I had been doing for years. None of my clients complained because, like me, they thought it was all just part of the process. Some were in pain and we’d work on traditional rehab exercises that I had learned from physical therapy, and others just wanted a good workout and we’d work on traditional strength training exercises. Neither instances ever improved my clients pain to the point that it was gone, only diminished for a couple hours or days, nor improved my clients functional strength, only to the point that they could lift heavier dumbbells or more plates on a machine. In fact, my clients who were getting stronger in the gym were starting to complain about little joint aches and muscle twinges that they hadn’t reported when we originally started working together. I knew something was missing but I never had a long term solution to fix their pain or improve their performance without causing minimal amounts of adverse tension. Until I found and experienced the Functional Patterns training system. I decided to start implementing some of the exercises that had helped me and cut out the exercises that I thought were doing more harm than good. Slowly but surely my clients started to feel more lasting relief from their pain and felt better outside of the gym when doing things like playing golf, running errands, and even keeping up with their grandkids. I knew this system was a game changer and I wanted to learn more. I purchased some of their online materials and books to start with and felt my understanding of the human body and movement increase. Then I decided to seek out a practitioner to get training first hand by someone with more experience. My perception of what I thought exercise was about, was crushed- in a good way, and the doors to physical and personal growth opened wide.

At the time I had been working at a local personal training studio, that when I had started, their training methods made sense. But as my body and the bodies of my clients slowly deteriorated I realized that I had to leave the traditional fitness culture behind and spread the knowledge I had acquired to more people. This led me to open SA Functional Fitness to make a lasting impact on helping people move better, without causing pain in the process. Fast forward and I am now a Functional Patterns practitioner, still learning from fellow practitioners that have been incorporating this system longer, and learning from each client that I see. Every body is the same, as we all have the same underlying muscles that are designed to function a particular way, however every body requires different exercises to stimulate the muscles in a way that is going to undo the compensation patterns they’ve gotten themselves into. For example, as humans, we should all have the ability to drive our body forward when we walk by utilizing the glutes, as well as other muscle functions. Sometimes we lose that ability, for various reasons like too much sitting or old injuries, and we end up moving our body with only our calves, or hiking up one of our hips. The muscles must be retrained to activate the glutes during that particular movement, but not by doing squats or clamshells with mini bands, those are the wrong patterns. We teach you the correct movement patterns that are going to engage the glutes and integrate them with the rest of the body, in a fashion that mirrors real life movement, like walking or running. Over time your body will learn to move better at the things you do most, and if you move better, you aren’t victim to aches or pains that develop from improper movement.

Ultimately, if you’re in pain, that’s your body signaling you that it needs help. It’s key to get to the root of the muscle malfunction early before your body starts to move around the pain. Your body will avoid the painful stimulus and adapt your posture and eventually the way you move to allow you to “live” with the pain. We believe that’s no way to live and so we exist to help you find a long term solution to improving your movement- to mitigate pain and improve your posture. If you’ve been living like this for years and years, it’ll take more than a few weeks to undo the damage, but with your hard work and the right techniques, we’ll teach you a recipe to improve your quality of life, and sustain it.

 

Pain Isn’t Normal

Posted on by Michael Devon

Muscle aches and joint pain aren’t a normal part of exercise. They may be fairly common, but they aren’t normal. Exercise should serve as a form of medicine for the physical body and mitigate knee pain, lower back aches, and inadequate function. If your body is beaten up after exercise and broken down in life outside of the gym, that’s not the purpose of exercise. Exercise is medicine when the exercise respects the way the human body was designed to move.

Exercise should stimulate muscles the way they’re utilized in given scenarios, in the real world. Every time we move, our opposing limbs connect (contralateral reciprocation) so exercise patterns should prioritize this function if you expect to move well in reality. Moving your body up and down under a bar or relying on a machine to stimulate a body part doesn’t replicate the multiplanar movement it encounters in real life. If you expect to live life free of aches and pains, it starts with how well your body can move in real life.

The reason exercise is so important is because it aims to prepare your body for life and if the exercise patterns don’t account for the way the human body was created to function, the body will lose it’s ability to function efficiently. It will start to compensate when it moves, whether that’s 10,000 steps a day from walking, running through the park, throwing the ball with your dog, playing tennis or golf, lifting weights, or any other type of movement that stimulates your muscles. Movement, in general, will start resulting in muscle twinges and joint stiffness, due to the body moving inefficiently. The movements themselves don’t cause the pain or flare ups, but they often get blamed. It’s the result of poor exercise habits, because the body isn’t equipped to handle any sort of 3-demensional movement in the real world since it’s been trained to move under a bar or isolate muscles on a machine in the gym.

When the body begins to compensate during foundational movements, like walking, it will start to move poorly in any given scenario. As the movement becomes more advanced, acute injuries and chronic aches result because the muscles aren’t conditioned to perform in multiple scenarios.  The muscles are stuck in the same repetitious patterns on a leg extension machine or bench press, that the body only learns how to move in that plane of motion, then when it encounters various forces in reality it gets jerked around because the muscles haven’t been taught how to balance the body’s center of gravity against life.

Functional Fitness

Posted on by Michael Devon

Recently, functional fitness is gaining more of a following because of the impact certain exercises have in everyday life. The word “functional” relates to the way something works or operates, so if certain exercises can help you operate better (improve your life) wouldn’t you do them? The purpose of functional fitness is to utilize special exercises that mimic real life scenarios to prepare your body for life outside of the gym (operate better). Traditional exercises train your body in the context of the gym environment so you’ll aways find yourself spending more and more time in the gym to make progress, because the exercises don’t reflect what you’d encounter in real life. If you want to use your time in the gym to improve your time outside of the gym then this is for you!

If you bust your butt in the gym and plow through an intense training session, only to spend 20 minutes icing your knees every morning then is your workout really benefiting your quality of life in the long run? Mentally, you may feel good about how hard your workout was but if you’re physically worn down after every workout and can barely climb up stairs without knee pain or your lower back always feels tight no matter how much you stretch, then I suspect that your workout isn’t benefiting your life the way you intended.

First, you should ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your workout. Do you want your workout to make you bigger, faster, and stronger? Help you lose weight? Build strength and endurance to raise your children or keep up with your grandkids? Help manage muscle or joint pain that limits your quality of life? Do you want your workout to sustain your health as you age? Once you establish why you’re working out then you have to take into consideration if you’re current workout habits are going to help you achieve what you want to accomplish.

Working out improves many aspects of your life, but mixed with the wrong intentions it may lead to other health complications. For example, if you workout so that you can lose weight and every time you exercise you do high impact moves that place wear and tear on your joints, then over time you may injure yourself and have to take a few weeks off from working out with the potential of gaining your weight back. If you workout because your doctor told you it would help decrease pain but the nagging discomfort or stabbing pain won’t go away, gets worse, or spreads, then you may be performing the wrong types of exercise for what you really want to accomplish. My point being, the way you workout should be taking you closer to your goal, not further from it.

The fitness industry does a great job advertising exercises that look cool, are hard, and make you sweat. That’s why you see most people exercising the way everybody else is, but not really knowing why they’re doing a particular exercise. Sometimes we just do an exercise for the sake of exercising, sometimes that exercise benefits your body in an applicable way and sometimes that exercise distorts your body and, if repeated enough, can lead to problems with posture and movement.

Personally, when I choose an exercise I make sure that it’s going to benefit my life outside of the gym in some way. If I constantly perform bicep curls because I think it’s going to help me pick up my dog easier then I am missing the applicable part. When I go to pick up my dog I am not just using my arms to lift her, I am engaging other muscles in my body all at once to help with the movement. If I want to function better in reality, then when I workout I should implement exercises that mimic my real life environment. If I want to pick up my dog without hurting my back, I would choose an exercise that involves me bending over and standing up while I integrate my hamstrings, glutes, core, and arms all at the same time, because that’s what my body is doing when I pick up my dog. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the way you workout is going to determine how you move in real life. Traditional exercises don’t take this into account and so what you do in the gym doesn’t improve your life the same way true functional fitness does.

If you like to go to the gym and lift weights for the sake of lifting weights then more power to you. In the same breath, if you’re looking for a workout that has a direct carry over into how well you function in real life then contact us to set up a consultation. You’ll learn how you can make the most of your workout and if your current exercise routine is really helping you or actually harming you. At SA Functional Fitness we teach exercises that get your body on the path to enjoy all life has to offer- we don’t live to workout, we workout to live.