Tag: muscle function

How Our Muscles Evolved from Walking: The Foundation of Human Movement (Part 2)

Posted on by Michael Devon

Walking is more than just a daily activity; it’s a fundamental movement that shaped the evolution of our muscles and overall physiology. Our ability to walk upright on two legs, known as bipedalism, is one of the defining characteristics of being human. This evolutionary milestone not only set us apart from other species but also influenced the development of our muscular system in profound ways.

•The Evolution of Bipedalism

Millions of years ago, our ancestors transitioned from moving on all fours to walking on two legs. This shift was driven by various factors, including the need to cover long distances efficiently, free up the hands for tool use, and adapt to changing environments. As we began to walk upright, our bodies underwent significant changes to support this new mode of locomotion.

•Key Muscles Developed from Walking

1. **Gluteal Muscles (Glutes)**: The gluteal muscles, particularly the gluteus maximus, are among the most prominent muscles developed through walking. These muscles are responsible for stabilizing the pelvis and powering our stride. Over time, they evolved to become larger and stronger, enabling us to walk and run efficiently.

2. **Leg Muscles**: Walking helped develop the muscles of the legs, including the quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves. These muscles work together to propel us forward with each step. The strength and endurance of these muscles were crucial for early humans who needed to travel long distances in search of food and resources.

3. **Core Muscles**: The core muscles, including the abdominals, obliques, and lower back muscles, play a vital role in maintaining balance and stability during walking. As our ancestors began to walk upright, these muscles became more developed to support the spine and prevent injury.

4. **Foot and Ankle Muscles**: Walking also influenced the evolution of the muscles in our feet and ankles. The arches of our feet, supported by various muscles and tendons, act as natural shock absorbers, while the muscles of the ankles provide stability and mobility. This adaptation allowed humans to walk on diverse terrains, from rocky landscapes to soft grasslands.

•The Impact on Human Evolution

The evolution of our muscles from walking not only made us more efficient walkers but also laid the foundation for other forms of movement, such as running and climbing. These adaptations provided a survival advantage, enabling our ancestors to hunt, gather, and migrate across vast areas.

In modern times, walking remains a fundamental exercise that continues to engage and strengthen these evolutionary muscles. Regular walking promotes cardiovascular health, improves posture, and enhances overall mobility—benefits that are deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.

Our muscles evolved to support walking, a movement that has been central to human survival and success. From the powerful glutes to the supportive core, the muscles developed through walking are a testament to our evolutionary journey. By walking regularly, we not only maintain the health of these muscles but also honor the legacy of movement that has shaped who we are today. So, the next time you take a walk, remember that you’re engaging in an activity that’s been essential to human evolution for millions of years.

Alignment 101

Posted on by Michael Devon

The position of (fill in the blank) influences the rest of your alignment. Because our body is interconnected, one structure’s alignment will influence another’s. For example when your pelvis is out of alignment, it pulls your spine out of its natural alignment. The spine’s position effects the position of your ribcage, head and neck, as well as further down your chain in your knee and ankle joints. Basically your center of gravity is thrown off.

When you’re misaligned, muscles pull you in directions you otherwise wouldn’t be in, to fight for “balance” and trick your brain into thinking everything’s positioned where it needs to be. You’re alignment (or lack of) influences how well you stand and move, and that influences how your body responds to its environment, functionally or dysfunctionally. The latter leads to pain and injury.

The Kinetic Chain

Posted on by Michael Devon

MUSCLE INTEGRATION MAKES UP EFFICIENT MOVEMENT. THIS IS BECAUSE ALL OF OUR MUSCLES ARE LINKED THROUGH THE KINETIC CHAIN. IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT HAPPENS IN ONE AREA OF THE BODY HAS A DIRECT OR INDIRECT EFFECT ELSEWHERE.

THE POWER OF THE KINETIC CHAIN CAN MAKE MOVEMENT THERAPEUTIC BECAUSE IF YOU HAVE KNEE PAIN, THE PAIN COULD BE CAUSED BY WEAK GLUTES. SO BY STRENGTHENING THE GLUTES, YOU RESOLVE YOUR KNEE PAIN.

IMAGINE YOUR KINETIC CHAIN LIKE A ROW TEAM, WHEN ALL YOUR TEAMMATES ARE ROWING AND DOING THEIR PART, THE BOAT MOVES WITH LESS EFFORT. BUT WHEN ONE OF THE ROWERS ISN’T DOING THEIR JOB, IT PUTS MORE RESPONSIBILITY ON THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE TEAM. THE TEAM GETS TIRED FASTER, BECAUSE EACH MEMBER GETS OVER WORKED,

WHEN LINKS ARE WEAK AND NOT DOING THEIR JOB (LIKE THE ROW TEAM ANALOGY), MOTOR COMPENSATIONS DRIVE YOUR MOVEMENTS. WHEN YOU DON’T MOVE WITH OPTIMAL MECHANICS YOU RISK INJURY AND REPETITIVE  DYSFUNCTIONAL MECHANICS LEAD TO PAIN.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO GET YOUR KINETIC CHAIN LINKED UP AND FUNCTIONING LIKE A ROW TEAM THATS IN SYNCH. WHEN YOU EXERCISE IN A WAY THAT ADDRESSES THE WHOLE SYSTEM AND THE WAY IT INTERCONNECTS, YOU BUILD MUSCLE FOR THE WAY YOUR BODY IS GOING TO USE IT IN REAL WORLD CONDITIONS.

 

Hydration

Posted on by Michael Devon

Staying hydrated goes deeper than drinking enough water.
If you’re going to the bathroom every hour after drinking, it means your cells and muscle tissues aren’t absorbing any of the fluid. Likely because they’re stagnant and unable to conduct a current because they lack proper muscle contraction.

Imagine your tissues like a dried up, crusty wash rag you use to clean your body. When it’s dried up it doesn’t work well, but when you wet it, it becomes pliable again and able to function and get those hard to reach places. The dried up rag is like dehydrated muscle tissue, when your muscles are dehydrated they don’t work well. When your muscles don’t work well the contribute to more strain on your joints and overuse of other muscles. To get water to the muscles, you need to learn how to move better so that your muscles start contracting in places that they normal don’t (dehydrated stagnant tissue getting hydrated), when these more efficient contractions start happening more fluid is pumped to the tissues and they become hydrated, pliable, and ready to work better.

Try this; if you have any areas on your body that feel tight or restricted, palpate them like you’re trying to massage them and see how they feel. Compare to the same muscle on the other side of your body. If they’re dehydrated they’ll likely feel hard, misshapen, and not a lot of give to them. Whereas a muscle that’s hydrated you can sink into when you poke it, the contours of the muscle will feel smoother, and the shape of the muscle is full. Think about it as “stiff” vs. “gooey.”

To learn more, check out our latest post on Social Media or our “Fascia” Highlights on Instagram for a full video breakdown!

Our Trainer’s Aren’t Cheerleaders

Posted on by Michael Devon

At this gym you won’t find trainers that cheer you on to finish reps just to say you completed the set. Instead you’ll find trainers that coach you through the ins and outs of each rep to ensure your performing the exercise correctly.

You’ll be taught exercises specific to your body and what you need relative to the goals you have. You won’t be shown an exercise just to get your heart rate up and sweat pouring just to make you feel like you worked out hard.

We don’t see the point in getting your body moving fast and hard in the beginning, if you’re going to default to moving incorrectly and compensating your way through a movement. We take things slow to ensure that your brain and body are connecting on the same level and you’re learning how an exercise should feel, what muscles are working, and why you need to do it a certain way- when all your body wants to do is move through the path of least resistance, tricking your brain into thinking you’re doing it right.

So if you want learn how to exercise instead of just going through the motions (setting yourself up for pain and injury), book an initial consultation with our trainers today. This isn’t the Orange Theory’s, F45’s, CrossFit’s, or the Gold’s gyms of the city- we personalize our unique approach to training the human body. The way it was meant to be trained to prevent injuries and rehab existing ones, in the process of building strength and mobility that translates to the real world.

SAID Principle

Posted on by Michael Devon

Your body adapts to the demands you constantly place on it. This summarizes the science behind the SAID principle; Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. For example, by only doing squats for your lower body, your body adapts to this specific physical demand, but not to other patterns or environments for the lower body, like walking or running.

Another example can be if you sit for extended periods of time, your body will start to change and adapt its structure to the sitting environment that it’s constantly in. This makes it difficult to move correctly when you try to pick up your favorite recreational sport or hiking trail on the weekends, and leads to overuse on certain muscles and eventually pain or injury.

With only so many hours in the day, we all have minimal time to exercise. Which offers a unique opportunity to impose specific demands to counteract the effects of your normal environment. Meaning if you sit a lot, initially you’d want to choose exercises that promote trunk and hip extension, to work in opposition to the spinal kyphosis and hip flexion patterns of sitting. As opposed to sitting all day then getting on a bike and cycling; same pattern/demand as sitting. So nothing improves and your body further adapts your structure to your sitting environment. This can be a problem when you expect your body to perform like it always has.

Circle back to our initial example about squatting and the limits it places on your lower body function. The muscles of the lower body- glutes, quads, hip flexors, calves, plantar fascia, etc.- have all evolved to help the human structure walk and run. It wasn’t until the 1960’s-1970’s that Arnold Schwarzenegger popularized training the muscles outside of their intended functions and with exercise patterns that didn’t replicate the way the muscles worked together to produce human specific movement. A couple decades of consumers training the human body this way (coupled with a more sedentary lifestyle), led to a disassociation with our natural movement and one of the main reasons most people deal with some form of ache, pain, or injury. The body has adapted to exercises that don’t mesh with the way the body actually needs to move.

Whatever demand you put your body through repetitively, intensely, and subconsciously will be what your body is forced to adapt to. Make sure what you’re teaching your body has a carry over to the roots of your human function, so you can continue to move well, without pain, as you age.

How To Get Strong

Posted on by Michael Devon

Lifting more weight is a measure of strength, BUT not if your body is compensating around weaknesses and avoiding certain functions. The real feat is getting your body to do what it doesn’t want to do, to develop muscles that aren’t developed- unlocking functional strength that translates to better biomechanics.

The more weight you lift can make you stronger but if you don’t address the way your body compensates (consciously and subconsciously) to make it easier, then you’re just compounding dysfunctional tendencies. For example, when you curl heavy weight your biceps are working but your hips might be shifting forward to use momentum to help your arms lift the weight. When your hips are shifting forward, your lumbar spine is forced to act as a lever and compression builds in your lumbar vertebrae from repetitive misuse.

Getting your body to do what it doesn’t want to do might mean lifting less weight, but your structure is able to address its weak links and that is where strength originates. The sturdier your structure, stationery and in motion, the more concentrated force you can accumulate to produce power, without compromising form and causing pain.

Without feeling what we’re describing, you simply don’t know what we’re talking about. You have to feel it to know it. When you experience a properly executed exercise for the first time, and you’re shaking, sweating, breathing heavy, elevating your heart rate, and fatiguing muscles in regions that usually don’t activate… and you haven’t even touched a weight yet, you’ll know you’re fighting against your weaknesses. After all, if exercise is easy then you’re just going through the motions and defaulting to your body’s comfort zone. And that really isn’t getting you stronger the way you think it is. Exposing your dysfunctions and addressing those weaknesses will result in strength, without pain, spinal compression, joint aches, and injuries coming along for the ride.

Set up your initial workout with one of our trainers to start building functional strength, without setting yourself up for pain and injury down the road.

Muscle “Parts”

Posted on by Michael Devon

The function of individual muscles work together, through a (kinetic) chain reaction, to produce function for the entire body. So while we can try to train our muscles one at a time in the gym (you really can’t), in reality all of the muscles work together to move your body.

Constantly contracting the muscles in isolated exercises causes disconnections in the kinetic chain. Just like a chain that has missing or rusty links, won’t be as strong as a fully functioning new chain.

Every rep that you train a muscle to work by itself, apart from the rest of the chain it’s connected to, trains your brain to severe the built in muscle connections. Like a popular boy band when the lead singer will try to branch out into a career of his own, only to discover that he is nothing without the other members of his band.

Your muscles were designed to work as a team and should be trained together to condition total body integration, the way your body functions day to day. You can’t just use your bicep to take a sip of water, your shoulders are working, your pecs and lats are controlling the shoulder, your triceps are eccentrically loading, and your wrist and forearm muscles are involved. This simple example is used to illustrate the complexities of movement and how a movement might look like it’s controlled by a certain muscle, but not without the assistance of other muscles.

A more complex example is how you use your legs to walk but your legs are also being propelled by your torso and arms working in reciprocation to balance out the forces acting on it. Try walking down the street or across the room without moving your arms or your ribcage and see how awkward that feels. See, you can’t isolate one muscle at a time, not even in a very basic fundamental movement like walking. If your arms are swinging and your ribcage is turning, the muscles that attach to those structures are working. They might not look like an exaggerated exercise like a tricep extension, a chest press, or an oblique wood chop exercise, but they are working, otherwise you couldn’t move.

Exercises are exaggerated to stimulate the muscular system to strengthen and condition muscle functions, so that basic movements like walking, or even playing sports, becomes more efficient and less cumbersome on the body. Like studying hard for school projects only to find that after graduation, the job in the real world doesn’t require such scrutiny as your teachers placed on your grade.

So with the right exercise, your body can learn to exercise as one unit, in order to function efficiently as one unit in the real world. The way our body’s naturally move. Remember, in reality you can’t isolate one muscle at a time, any time you want to work just one muscle, some other muscle is supporting it, working with it, or counter balancing it, so there is always multiple muscle functions going on at once. Since your time exercising is only for a brief segment of your day, that time should be spent conditioning your body for the reality it will live in.

Work with our team of human biomechanics specialists to get the dose of exercise your body actually needs. Resulting in the strength and function you actually want!

Automated Muscle Contractions

Posted on by Michael Devon

Learn to move your pelvis and ribcage in multiple contexts, against multiple demands.

These structures influence function in the upper and lower extremities, alignment of the spine and head, and the ability to engage powerful muscles- like the glutes, pecs, lats, and core!

It’s one thing to consciously contract the glutes or your abs during an exercise, but in life outside the gym your muscles contract automatically based on the position your body is in.

Ergo, when we train clients in our gym we aren’t cueing them to squeeze this muscle or that muscle during an exercise, instead we cue them to align the structures of their body in a position to illicit an automatic muscle contraction.

As these positions become more efficient, we can tailor the exercise position to the specific context that it’s encountered in the real world to produce efficient movement, facilitated by the correct muscles automatically. That way when you’re out for a walk or playing a tennis match, you don’t have to think about what muscles are controlling your body and you can just go!

Control over these regions during exercise will enhance your movement potential in the real world because of their influence on multiple muscle functions, and how that contributes to efficient body mechanics.

You only have one body, learn what it needs and how to supply its needs with our team of biomechanics specialists training you on your journey to strength, function, and sustainable fitness!

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!