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!

 

Muscle Power

A muscle will produce more force when it is used in integration with the other muscles in its fascially connected chain/sling.

To add to that, if you focus solely on “lifting heavy” weights on a limited range of motion exercise like the bench press (as evident by the picture), you’re packing on unfunctional muscle that can’t reach its full length potential when you need it to, away from the gym.

This can alter the tension relationships between your muscles and cause postural imbalances and injuries/pain further down the road.

It’s important that muscles function as they’re designed to and that exercise respects and enhances those functions.

We’re less about exercising and more about functioning. If you work to enhance the function of a muscle then as a byproduct you’re exercising, because if your muscle doesn’t function the way it should, then the simple act of trying to teach the muscle to perform that function will be a challenge on your muscular and nervous system, and produce the same benefit as exercise but with the added benefit of enhancing your muscle function.

The exercise pictured, the bench press, is not an exercise that you can learn or even relearn function for the pecs because it doesn’t allow the pec muscles to function the way they need to. It only isolates the pec muscles in one plane of motion, and with a limited range of motion that they rarely ever go through in the real world. Think about it, how often when you’re walking down the street or running when you play sports do you drop down to the floor, lie on your back and push weight off your chest? Or even drop to the ground and do a pushup for that matter? The answer is obviously, never! So this is an example of an arbitrary exercise that really doesn’t serve a functional purpose. Maybe for an offensive lineman on a professional football team, but even then they are standing upright when they are pushing someone off of them so the context of the bench press lift doesn’t carry over as much as we think it does.

The bench press lift itself is fairly limited and doesn’t train the rest of the fascial chain/sling that the pec muscle is a part of, so it’s not going to produce as much force or power because it’s just the pec muscle activating by itself.

Try this. Tap your index finger on your desk and feel/listen to the sound it makes when it contacts your desk. Now use your other hand to pull your index finger back (essentially winding it up) and then let your index finger slam down on the desk. It should produce a louder sound and feel more powerful than just tapping by itself. This example is showcasing how weak the muscle is when it works in isolation, but by pulling it back with your other hand you are involving more of the nearby muscles and stretching the fascia that houses it so when you let go it’s ready to produce more force because of more muscle recruitment achieved from a fuller range of motion.

So when you train your pecs, absent of their fascial connections, you’re missing out on the nearby muscles that the pecs attach to resulting in less power output. Additionally you aren’t getting a full range of motion (like your finger pulling back more) to get the pec fibers to stretch more, so that you can get a deeper contraction after the stretch. Although we’ve focused on the pecs as the example, the same can be said of every muscle on your body. The more muscles you can connect with a movement, and completing a larger range of motion will allow better force production and power from that muscle, resulting in overall better function.

When you have been used to a certain way of training and exercising your entire life, whether from high school athletics, body building magazines, commercial gym culture, or YouTube videos it can be hard to grasp the concepts of what real functional training aims to do. So if all of this doesn’t make complete sense, don’t fret, this is on the cutting edge of where the fitness industry is shifting and it challenges the brain and body at the same time. We’re here to help provide clarity and direction for those wanting to workout to enhance their function in life outside of the gym. This approach is different from general exercise to just get a workout in, versus exercising to improve the function of a muscle and a muscle chain/sling as described above. The latter will have the body in a healthier state and improve the overall fitness of the body, as opposed to becoming better at exercises we’re teaching your body how to become better at functions so it can perform in any given scenario.

For more visual examples demonstrating this concept, be sure to follow us on social media, @safunctionalfitness, to see exercise videos showcasing how we train entire muscle chains through entire ranges of motion.

*Client Testimonials*

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!