Tag: training studio

Personalized Personal Training

Posted on by Michael Devon

How it started; how it’s going.

Started with numerous issues, most notably was scapular dysfunction that contributed to pain in the upper traps.

The first exercise is conditioning the muscles of the shoulder girdle & thoracic spine to integrate instead of putting all the demand on the traps.

The second exercise is reinforcing the corrective mechanics and putting those muscle connections to work during movement.

The result is a better connected body that can disperse force through the kinetic chain and balance the workload for the muscles.

As we continue to clean up dysfunctional movement patterns, moving correctly will train the body to operate efficiently and handle the demands of the real world without pain and injury.

Nuero-Muscular Efficiency

Posted on by Michael Devon

Your ability to move well in all planes of motion depends on how effectively your nervous system communicates to your muscular system, and vice versa, and how efficiently both systems respond to each other.

If communication is disrupted the muscular system starts creating its own movement pathways and efficiency declines because the nervous system is no longer sending the correct command signals for optimal movement.

Eventually the compensatory movement patterns lead to muscle dysfunction, in one muscle or multiple, which then sets off a chain reaction of muscle imbalances throughout the rest of the body.

Global muscle connections throughout the neuron-muscular web lose their ability to work properly and at the proper times- agonist muscles and their antagonists, groups of muscle synergies, and stabilizer muscles, that make up entire chains of muscle, begin to misfire and disrupt the body’s ability to move in an ideal state of function.

The less functional your body becomes, the more problems start to arise. Physical function will effect physiological function. Physiological function will effect Psychological function. The physical inability of the body to lengthen certain muscles of the stomach will interfere with the physiological inability to digest food properly, from over-shortened muscle tissue decreasing the amount of space between the intestines and the rest of the organs. Potentially leading to constipation, and an altered mental state, when you’re in pain because you can’t poop.

Biomechanical efficiency is optimized when the brain and body are able to communicate clearly. The right signal from the mind to the neuron-muscular network will promote the correct response, and the most optimal form of movement for the body. The better the body becomes at movement, from exercise to everyday motion, the less aches and pains are experienced.

Reprogramming the Nuero-Muscular network to associate better biomechanics as the “new norm” is a process that slowly unfolds as more muscle dysfunction is exposed, and over time, corrected.

 

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.