Have You Thought About The Way You Move?

Routine tasks that you move your body through without much thought like bending down to pick something up can be wiring in bad mechanics.

Notice how the vertebrae bulge out when she firsts bends down, then when we correct the pelvis position her muscles contract around the vertebrae and protect them.

This shows how your body can just go through the motions however it thinks is correct, but your form might not be what you think it is. Fast forward and repetitive movements like this or exercises done wrong repeatedly will eventually lead to injury and cause “idiopathic” aches and pains.

This is why our training sessions do more than physical work because the brain is intricately involved in controlling your physical movement. We teach you to be mindful of how you’re moving in order to correct and reprogram sustainable function.

The Body’s Interconnectedness

As we get older, we’re often told that aches and pains are just a part of aging. A twinge in your knee, restrictions in your shoulder, tightness in your lower back are all common, but not normal.

Pain in one area of your body potentially stems from another region, because of the interconnectedness of your fascial web and kinetic chain linking everything together.

The unexplained problems in your joints are likely a result of your muscles not supporting your joints. Strain in your shoulder may come from dysfunction in the pecs or the lats. Knee pain results from lack of the glutes working properly. The point being, that where you’re hurting, might not be where the problem is.

Our trainers work to get to the root of your chronic pain by addressing dysfunctional movement compensations, allowing you to simultaneously build muscle to provide your body with the strength it needs to keep aches and pain from creeping back in.

If you’re spinning your wheels spot treating pain at the source, then come meet with us to learn how everything in your body works (or doesn’t work) together to influence how you move, and how your movement plays a critical role in pain and injury if you’re moving incorrectly.

Pain & Anxiety Relationship

Suffering from chronic pain and anxiety?

Both correlate to the way your body handles stress, based on your physical frame aka posture. A slouched posture correlates to depressive episodes and high anxiety, because your fascia stores emotions- ie; childhood traumas, environmental stress- and those emotions influence the way you carry yourself.

It’s rare to see someone with a strong posture suffer from depression and unmanageable anxiety, because their structure cultivates a better response to handle those stressors. The goal is not to avoid stress, but to teach your body to handle it more efficiently.

It goes deeper, but if you’re on the fence about improving your health, learn Functional Patterns training. The results fix structural imbalances influencing your physical and mental health, producing a body equipped to handle stress.

Learn more here.

*pictures based on Functional Patterns Training Methodology Results from FP Practitioners world wide. Notice more resilient structures vs. body language before training.

We’re the only facility in San Antonio and surrounding areas that train Functional Patterns and have 3 Functional Patterns Practitioners on staff! If you’re not local to SA check out the Practitioner Map to locate someone near you, for results like these!

Surgery Isn’t Your Only Option

It’s unfortunate that so many surgeons push surgery to correct injuries and pain brought on by mechanical dysfunction. Surgeons are crucial for emergency surgery, but when it comes to addressing bone malformations, joint replacements, spinal fusions, etc., they fix the joint at fault but don’t take into account what led the joint to get to that point in the first place, or how that newly fixed joint is going to mesh back into movement with the rest of the structure. Sometimes surgery fixes the issue you’re complaining about but creates another one.

Sometimes surgery is the only option, but if you’re like us and want to prevent surgery or approach rehabilitation from a non surgical route, then your training should address what is causing the problem. Exercise no longer has to be exercise to lose weight or sculpt a ripped physique. The right kind of exercise can provide rehabilitation to old injuries, while simultaneously building muscle where your body needs it, to prevent future injuries!

Don’t get trapped in the mindset that you need to exercise to lose weight (that’s mostly influenced by your dietary habits anyway) and then because you’re dealing with pain or suffering from an injury, you need to carve out more time to go to physical therapy. As mentioned, the evolved way of exercising takes into account therapy that the body needs to mitigate pain and injuries while you exercise.

But exercise can’t be performed the way you’ve always trained, or the way you see most others exercising or being trained, because those same exercises are likely leading to worse mechanics that cause your body to be more prone to injuries and deal with aches and pains. Exercise needs to be pinpointed to simultaneously build the strength and muscle you desire, to support your body, without causing poor movement patterns that lead the body to pain and injury that require surgery.

Circle back to why you need surgery in the first place, and what options you have to heal. Surgeons are always going to look at the problem and what surgery can do to fix it, occasionally you’ll get sent to physical therapy, but usually it only delays surgery or the surgeon will only see surgery as the only option to fix the issue. We want you to know, there are likely other options to fix the issue. Because sometimes the issue you complain about, isn’t the underlying issue. Sometimes it goes deeper than having knee pain and you need a new joint. Sometimes building a strong core and glutes will help support your pelvis better and influence the movement of force in the knee joint. Sometimes building a strong upper body will help your lower body move better, leading to less stress on the knee joint. Sometimes it’s a combination of things that improve the health of your knee joint. We work to get to the bottom of what your body needs to improve your overall health and function.

If you’re on the fence about surgery to fix an issue, you might want to consider the recovery from that. Using the knee for example, if the issue is with weak glutes or a weak upper body, surgery magically gives you a new knee joint, but if you don’t address the weakness in your body, in a few years you’ll be back in the same predicament. Your new joint will take the same force that your real joint used to take on because the rest of your body wasn’t built up to support your movements.

We are the only personal training studio in San Antonio that trains this way. We don’t like to call ourselves personal trainers because we get lumped in the category with the rest of the industry’s trainers. We are Functional Patterns Human Biomechanics Specialists. If you’re not familiar with Functional Patterns, look it up. It’s what sets us apart form the rest of the trainers out there and it’s the way we conduct our training sessions- to improve the current body you have, naturally and non invasively. For obvious reason we don’t display the corrective exercises that rehab your body, what you see on our website and social media is a tip of the iceberg of what we do. We only showcase the dynamic exercises that reinforce the corrective exercises we do behind the scenes.

Sure, it will take time, but with the work we put your body through, the results will last over time and not offer temporarily relief, but relief that is here to stay! Come find out more about our style of training and why it’s changing the fitness and rehab industry.

Posture 2.0

Posture is often associated with standing upright with the shoulders pulled back and the chest opened up, but posture is more than just standing straight.

Your body can’t hold one particular posture when it moves, so your muscles need to learn how to change “postures” when it changes positions.

When you think about what it means to have “good posture,” consider how that relates to your body in motion, and the changes movement produces in your body’s alignment.

When you bend over to pick something up, your pelvis is going to be in a different position while you’re bent over, than when you’re standing upright.

Therefore, your posture changes. It’s not about staying stacked a certain way 24/7, because certain functions require certain positions. Your muscles need to learn to drive your skeleton into those positions and get you out of them, so you don’t get stuck in a certain posture.

Posture changes constantly, and it goes deeper than what your posture looks like when you’re at rest. It’s one thing to be aware of your posture when you’re sitting, standing, or lying down. But have you ever given any thought to what your posture looks like when you’re moving? Exercising, golfing, walking, hiking, boxing, dancing, running, etc.?

Good posture means your body can maintain integrity throughout its structure, when at rest and when moving. Structural integrity is achieved when your muscles are functioning correctly to support your alignment and intrinsically stabilizing your body from external demands.

The better your structure can withstand external demands, like gravitational forces and daily activities, the better your alignment will become at rest. Your body won’t be beat into a certain posture, or “comfort zone,” because it will be strengthened to withstand those effects and align into a “neutral zone,” always ready to change and adapt to balance the demands placed on it.

Not all training is going to respect the concepts described above, some exercises may even cause your structural integrity to weaken- making your body more vulnerable to the forces acting on it. The exercises you perform should enhance your body’s capability to withstand gravity and daily activities, without adversity.

If you want all the gravitational gains, without the compressional pains, set up your consultation with one of our biomechanics trainers today!

Pain Is Not Normal

Pain isn’t something to accept with age or with injuries that weren’t properly rehabbed. Pain is your body telling you that something is wrong and ignoring this warning only compounds the problem as times goes on.

Pain will start interfering with your daily life more and more. It can impact your sleep, energy, strength, and function. And when these aspects become affected, other aspects of wellbeing become worse as well.

We’re not the typical “no pain, no gain” kind of gym. Our team works one on one with you to battle against muscle dysfunctions that are causing your pain in the first place. In other words we work to get to the root of your problem, rather than working around it.

What happens when the real world demands more of your body and you can’t “work around it?” Pain and injury manifest! So avoiding a certain function during an exercise because your PT or trainer told you to because it hurts when you do it, is not fixing the root of the problem.

Physical pain stems from the body being out of homeostasis and chaos ensues when your body starts compensating to make up from lack of balance. Muscles start working the wrong way when you move, and when the muscles start malfunctioning they contract at the wrong time, or use the wrong muscle to move your body around the pain or issue that you’re dealing with. These compensations compound over time and lead to pain expanding to other areas of the body or worse, eventually cause an injury.

Think about it, when your ankle starts to hurt, eventually your knee and hip might start to hurt too. The body is an interconnected web of muscle, and that muscle supports your bone alignment and the integrity of your joints. When one muscle is not functioning properly, it’s going to impact other muscles normal function- which has a direct correlation to how well your muscles provide strength, stability, and support for your body.

When you’re dealing with pain in a particular joint or region of the body, that might not be the source of the pain, but rather a symptom from a malfunction elsewhere in the body. If you (or your trainer) look far enough and evaluate deep enough to determine what is the cause of the pain, then you can formulate a game plan and create exercises tailored to your needs, to start fixing the underlying issue.

In other words you don’t have to live with the pain. You can stop compensating around a pain and prevent a new pain from occurring because you’ve been compensating. You can reprogram new function to support your body to eliminate the pain and restore balance.

Remember, pain is not normal. It’s not something to live with, wake up with, or work around, it’s something that has a source and cause. Once we figure out that source, we can engineer a training program to treat the cause, rather than the symptoms. That’s what we do at this gym. (Then once your body is healed from its pain, we start training your muscles how to exercise to keep the pain away for the long term).

We do things differently at this gym, call us to find out more about our approach!

210-947-4597

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Functional Anatomy Part 2

In our previous blog we went into great detail highlighting the importance of what function means as it relates to your physical wellbeing. In this blog were simply going to teach what you need to know about your anatomy and how to move it so when you start training with us, you have a basic understanding!

Let’s first start off explaining the basics of spacial proximity, your body’s ability to sense where it’s at. This is important because to correct biomechanical dysfunctions, the brain has to have an understanding of where the body currently rests (or the posture it defaults to) and then learn how to control the body into a better position- to illicit proper muscle contractions, to support better alignment. You must understand how to move your structures forward (anterior), backward (posterior), and sideways (lateral), up (superior), down (inferior), in (adduct), and out (abduct). Once your know the general directions of how your body can and should be capable of moving, then we get into the specifics of micro directional changes of the structures themselves.

Imagine your skeleton, and now think about shifting your ribcage laterally to the right, like you’re trying to stretch your right side of your torso. Or think about shifting your pelvis laterally to the left, like you’re doing The Bump. Those are lateral shifts, but you can also shift your pelvis back (posteriorly), like sticking your butt back, or your ribcage forward (anteriorly), like you’re puffing out your chest. Shifts can apply to other parts of your body, but at the onset we focus on your ribs and hips, since these are two big structures that have influence of your upper and lower extremities. Shifts can also apply to your weight, you can distribute your weight back, in your heels, forward, in your toes, or left and right, as you lean heavier on one leg. In reference to our last blog, if someone’s skeleton is stuck in an anterior pelvic shift (hips humping the air in front of them) we’d first teach them (body and brain) how to shift their pelvis back, into a posterior pelvic shift.

The next structural change you need to understand is tilts. A posterior pelvic tilt and an anterior pelvic tilt are the most common, but tilts can apply to the ribcage as well. A posterior pelvic tilt is in reference to the back of your pelvis tilting down, like your tailbone rolling under you, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs. An anterior pelvic tilt would be the opposite, the front of your pelvis tilting down, like you’re untucking your tailbone. So if you’re stuck in an anterior pelvic tilt, initially we’d teach you how to posteriorly tilt your pelvis to start reprogramming better muscle function in your posterior chain to alleviate the pressure you feel in your lower back because your pelvis is jamming up into your spine.

Rotation is another function that your anatomical structures need to be capable of, especially because rotational forces drive our body during movement. Rotating your pelvis to the right, like your pulling the back of your right hip bone backwards and the front of your left hip bone forwards, creates a turn in your pelvis and activation in your glutes! The same can be said of rotating your ribcage to the right, think about pulling the back of your right should backwards and the front of your left shoulder forwards to create a turn of your ribcage and an activation in your obliques! Can you start seeing how learning to move your structures, can create an automatic muscle contraction? This is helpful because how we teach your to move your structures, is how your body actually moves those structures during basic human functions like walking. So you don’t have to think about squeezing a muscle when you’re busy moving about in the real world, because your structures have already been primed to move like that with the exercises we teach you. And when your structures move the way they should, and they aren’t stuck in a position, your muscles learn to contract to support the ebb and flow of positions that your body moves through, to move!

Flexion applies in most cases to your spine and your extremities (arms and legs). If you flex your elbow, think about doing a bicep curl or trying to touch the front of your shoulder with your palm. If you flex your hip, think about brining your knee up like you’re going to touch your chest. If you’re flexing your knee, think about bending your leg like you’re trying to touch your heel to your butt. If you flex your spine, think about hunching over and rounding your upper back.

Extension would be the opposite of flexion. Spinal extension would be like you’re lifting your chest up and leaning back. Arm extension would be like a tricep extension, or straightening your arm. Hip extension would be like you’re reaching your leg back behind your body. Knee extension would be like you’re straightening your knee, like you’re going to kick someone in front of you.

Adduction is moving toward your midline, like you’re crossing your right leg across your left leg when you kick a ball, or bringing your arms to your sides like a standing military position. An easy way to remember this is, you’re “adding” something to your body.

Abduction is the opposite of adduction, you move away from your body. Like you’re raising your arms up to make your body into a “T” or you kick your leg out to the side like a roundhouse kick. An easy way to remember this is, you’re taking away (“abducting”) something from your body.

Protraction is when you move a structure forward, in reference to your shoulder blades protracting, your scapulae are spreading away from your spine, like your shoulders are getting wider. If you’re doing a pressing motion with your chest, you would extend your arm straight and let your shoulder blades push forward.

Retraction is when you move the structure back, again when thinking about your shoulders blades, you’re pulling/pinning them back (not too much, but some is necessary), like you’re trying to stick your chest out. If you’re doing a pulling motion you would bend your arm and let your shoulder blade pull back as needed.

Additionally, elevation and depression are useful to understand when thinking about the shoulder blades again, you can lift them up (elevate) and pull them down (depress), to allow certain functions to happen in the rest of the shoulder girdle and arms. For example, if you’re reaching over head, you’d need to learn how to properly depress your scapula… too much can cause an adverse compression in your lumbar spine. Elevating them would be useful in other exercises to help activate your upper traps properly… but not just shrugging them like an old school bodybuilder… lol.

All of these are a simplified explanation of basic mechanics that we teach you and the more you understand, the more capable your body becomes. Just because it’s a function doesn’t mean it is a function that your body will need at the start. For example, if you’re stuck in an anterior pelvic tilt, we wouldn’t want you performing an anterior pelvic tilt because that is just confusing the brain and telling it to keep reinforcing the position you’re already stuck in. So functions need to be calculated to benefit your individual body and the way it needs to get better at specific movements. If you need help learning what will benefit your specific needs, contact us to set up your introductory session!

Rotational Strength

Your body needs to have the ability to rotate through all planes of motion while your muscles are controlling the range of movement.

When the body has to stay stiff to activate muscles, and it comes time to bend, turn, change directions, etc., it’s going to put torque in the joints because the muscles can’t activate to support the body in those ranges of motion.

You want to train your body to be strong, yet pliable, in multiple ranges and varying scenarios. That can’t happen working exclusively on machines and 1-dimensional exercises.

Contact us today to start teaching your body how to move, correctly, through multidimensional exercises that build your body for a multiplanar world.

Ankle Sprains

A dysfunctional muscle in your lower kinetic chain will disrupt the interdependence of your neuromusculoskeletal system and cause dysfunction further up the chain.

Malfunction at your ankle causes your knee and hip to move poorly and compensate around the misuse of the ankle, the spine shifts to make up for the lack of proper mobility at the hip, which distorts the position of your ribcage and shoulder blades, causing your head and neck to be pushed out of alignment.

If left unresolved, movement compensations cumulate over your lifetime and signal to your brain and body that your dysfunctional alignment is “normal.”

Misalignment that stems from dysfunctional muscle, can’t be corrected for the long term with remedies like chiropractic adjustments alone. Your muscles are signaling to your nervous system that they “like” this position, no matter how damaging to the wellness of your body it is, and any time the spine gets realigned passively from a chiropractic adjustment the muscles intuitively pull you back out of optimal alignment. The objective should be to override the muscles keeping your body in malalignment, and through proper strength training, reprogram better muscle function!

A body that suffers from pain, doesn’t move well, and being stuck in a poor posture is not normal. Malalignment is a key risk factor for joint deterioration because the muscles are no longer in a state to support the joint in its proper position, leading to unnecessary force absorbed in the joint.

Stop looking for short term fixes, and passive manipulations, thinking they will help your body the way they’re advertised. Your body (muscles) and your brain (nervous system) are the only tools required to reprogram the function you’re missing to help your body regenerate.

FIX YOUR BODY… it’s the only one you have.