Tag: tension

Muscle Building Tip

Posted on by Michael Devon

In order to maximize the amount of muscle you gain, your body must move correctly to ensure muscle is being developed in areas that it’s underdeveloped.

When you exercise with the correct form and optimize your biomechanics, your muscles get put to work in ways that they normally don’t. Dormant muscles get woken up and start contracting, tight muscles start to get lengthened, and your muscular system starts to integrate with your nervous system and fascial system to reshape your body.

This way of training builds muscle and strength, helps your body gain mobility and flexibility, all while simultaneously rehabbing injuries and decreasing pain. Allowing your body to perform better and move well during sports, everyday functions, and active lifestyles!

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.

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!

Less Pain Is Possible!

Posted on by Michael Devon

Is pain keeping your from the activities you enjoy? Have you been told surgery is your only option?

At SA Functional Fitness our pain management trainers restore the function of your muscles to support the integrity of your joints!

This is important because without proper muscle functions, your joints take on the stress from the force that your muscles should be absorbing.

Over time this leads to inflammation in the joints and causes pain from the joints working in a way they weren’t designed to.

Each trainer plans exercises to get to the root of your dysfunction causing adversity on your joints, or pain in general.

Most of the time surgery can be prevented, delayed, or faster recovery after surgery, from the right kind of exercise.

We work with numerous clients dealing with knee pain, back pain, hip pain, shoulder pain, and neck pain. Our goal as biomechanics trainers is to fix the underlying issue that contributes to pain in the first place. Sometimes this isn’t always possible, so our next goal is to mitigate the pain, or set your body up to recover from surgery faster and fuller with exercise before surgery.

If this sounds like something your body is searching for, then call us today to get started with one of our trainers!

Stretching Doesn’t Fix Anything.

Posted on by Michael Devon

If you are stretching or doing any kind of mobility work to help alleviate an ache or pain, read on.

Have you ever wondered why medication gets a bad reputation? Aside from the fact that the pills cause side effects that didn’t exist prior, the real reason medication isn’t widely accepted is because it doesn’t fix anything. The pills only help you manage the symptoms. And yes we realize some medication may be necessary but the disease that caused you to have to take the medication in the first place should be looked at as the culprit and effort put in to eradicate the disease instead of just accepting the disease as normal and taking pills to “live” with the symptoms.

If you are stretching or doing mobility exercises to eliminate aches and pains, you’re only managing the symptoms. They don’t fix anything long term. Just like the disease you’re taking the medication for, you still have the disease when you take the pills, you just don’t have as many symptoms. But if you stop taking the pills, your symptoms return. Just like if you stop doing your stretches and mobility drills, your pain and stiffness returns. So that should tell you that those exercises aren’t truly getting to the root of the problem (like a doctor who doesn’t get to the root of what’s causing high blood pressure but just prescribes pills because it’ll make living with the issue doable) and nothing gets fixed from the stretches you’re doing.

Not only do they not fix anything, they’re likely doing more harm than good to your body because you’re over stretching tissues that hurt but the cause is likely rooted elsewhere. This is why we use movement to fix aches and pains because once the body is operating efficiently homeostasis can be achieved and balance restored through the structure.

We want you to know there are better exercises to do than stretching and mobility drills that only provide temporary relief. You see, stretching away tension doesn’t work as intended because your body needs tension to support itself, otherwise you become like a wet floppy noodle. Knowing this, our objective is to teach your body how to properly distribute tension to the right parts of your body, to relieve tension in unwanted areas of your body. Then you don’t feel the need to stretch because your body is operating in a state of balance.

If you’re truly tired of constantly moving with pain and discomfort. If you’re truly tired of having to rely on some sort of half step protocol to give you some quick but short term pain management. If you’re truly looking for a way to fix your dysfunctional body for the long run. Contact our gym today and set up your last physical evaluation. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to rely on medication the rest of your life and would rather treat disease with dietary and other holistic changes, then think about your body the same way. Do you really want to keep spending time out of your day on stretching if you’re only counteracting the effects of the imbalance in your body that’s causing the problem, or would you rather spend a little extra time, initially, figuring out what’s causing the problem and fix it effectively so you can get back to living life on your terms!

Joint Health

Posted on by Michael Devon

A joint is only as strong as the muscle supporting it.

A muscle functions to uphold the integrity of the joints.

A dysfunctional muscle impairs movements, misdirecting force transmission to the joints.

A joint wasn’t designed to absorb force. Train your muscles to fulfill their purpose.

A functional muscle equates to a healthy joint.

A training plan that reinforces the contralateral connections throughout the body instead of isolating the muscles is a good place to start. This will ensure the joints aren’t being used as levers and teach the muscles how to leverage weight.

Stretching Tight Muscles

Posted on by Michael Devon

Stretching aims to get rid of tension. But your body needs tension to support itself.

Not all tension is bad, your body needs to learn how to properly distribute tension to the correct muscles.

When tension is redistributed to the proper areas of the body, muscles don’t feel the need to stretch because the body is in a state of balance.

This concept is a basis for correcting muscle imbalances.