Tag: workout

Fitness: The Ability To Adapt To Your Environment

Posted on by Michael Devon

At this gym we take the mind and muscle connection to a deeper level of understanding and coordination to ensure you get results and not an injury!

You see it’s not enough to think of one muscle while you’re exercising, because when you’re being human and moving your body around like a human body is designed to move (with all its neuromyofascial connections) you have multiple muscles working at the same time- in coordination with each other to facilitate motion. In reality, an isolated muscle contraction can’t do anything to cause better movement, because an isolated muscle contraction does not exist… except in the gym.

Training to stimulate one muscle at a time creates a broken kinetic chain, which is what your body utilizes to function, move, and perform in the real world. Instead of just focusing on the legs or arms, we teach you to integrate your lower body with your core, and with your upper body. Then you learn to use those muscles to move your body through a specific exercise pattern that makes integrating those muscles more feasible. You’re verbally cued to position your bones and joints a certain way to start the exercise, move through the exercise, and finish the exercise so your muscles learn to automatically contract when your body moves through certain positions. Then we pattern exercises to mirror the positions your body moves through most in the real world, so your muscles contract properly during activities away from the gym.

If you’re still blindly performing an exercise for the sake of exercise, and not sure what or where you should feel muscle activity then you’re selling yourself short and not making the most of your time in the gym. We all have busy lives and struggle to fit exercise into our schedules, so you might as well make the most of every minute by mentally controlling the physical actions of your body during a workout. The mental coordination to position your body to produce proper muscle activity can be overwhelming at first, that’s why we help guide you through the process to ensure you’re building your body up and not breaking it down. We show you how your body prefers the path of least resistance and will easily compensate it’s way through an exercise, but then we correct your compensational movements by retraining your brain to recognize the difference and ingraining the correct form of body mechanics to serve your body in the gym, and away from the gym- enhancing your fitness, aka your ability to adapt to any environment and fulfill the task at hand!

If this all sounds super intimidating, don’t worry, because this is what we take care of for you. We hash out all the technical difficulties on our end so you don’t have to figure out what exercises will help or hinder you. If you want results, thats what this gym is about! Contact us today to find the answers your body needs to make real changes that last.

Posture and Pain

Posted on by Michael Devon

Functional Fitness attempts to adapt or develop exercises which allow individuals to perform the activities of daily life more easily and without injuries. One of the keys here is without injuries. As we evolve we are becoming a more and more stationary society. We go from sitting at our desk, sitting at lunch, back to the desk and finally home to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. Unfortunately this is what our day looks like 5 days a week! Then if we are being honest we spend Saturday scrambling to get our lives together so we can spend Sunday “recharging” aka binge watching Netflix.

This sedentary lifestyle is affecting our entire body but the most obvious effect is our posture. The issue is how our posture effects our day to day activities, workouts, and problems with pain. We are becoming hunched over and a lot of our muscles dormant due to lack of activity. “But I work out 4 days a week so this isn’t for me.” Do you have knee pain? Back pain? Neck or shoulder pain? Then your workouts may not be as effective as you think. You may be working out but are you respecting your bodies’ mechanics by integrating multiple muscles into an exercise the way we do in day to day life? Can you name one movement or daily function that only uses one muscle in your body? I can’t. Picking up a baby: biceps, core, hamstrings, back, glutes, to name a few. Taking a shower: biceps (washing your hair), core stabilizes you, hamstrings if you are bending over to shave. I mean you are always activating multiple muscle connections to do a daily task. The question is are your muscle connections functional or dysfunctional? Only doing isolated movement isn’t respecting your bodies mechanics. You could be feeding your dysfunctions instead of fixing them.

Fitness of the future won’t be concerned with how much weight you can lift or how big your arms are, true fitness will help improve people’s day to day living and allow their body to do whatever they need it to do without any restriction. The current fitness trend of “looking good” is not sustainable and can end up doing more harm than good on our bodies in the long run. At the rate we are going, heavy squats can lead to sitting in a wheel chair when you’ve reached your 50’s and 60’s, but if we respect our body mechanics then you’ll be walking well into your 80’s and 90’s. The tough question you have to ask yourself is, if your current fitness regimen is improving your life or hampering your day to day function?

Functional Fitness

Posted on by Michael Devon

Recently, functional fitness is gaining more of a following because of the impact certain exercises have in everyday life. The word “functional” relates to the way something works or operates, so if certain exercises can help you operate better (improve your life) wouldn’t you do them? The purpose of functional fitness is to utilize special exercises that mimic real life scenarios to prepare your body for life outside of the gym (operate better). Traditional exercises train your body in the context of the gym environment so you’ll aways find yourself spending more and more time in the gym to make progress, because the exercises don’t reflect what you’d encounter in real life. If you want to use your time in the gym to improve your time outside of the gym then this is for you!

If you bust your butt in the gym and plow through an intense training session, only to spend 20 minutes icing your knees every morning then is your workout really benefiting your quality of life in the long run? Mentally, you may feel good about how hard your workout was but if you’re physically worn down after every workout and can barely climb up stairs without knee pain or your lower back always feels tight no matter how much you stretch, then I suspect that your workout isn’t benefiting your life the way you intended.

First, you should ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your workout. Do you want your workout to make you bigger, faster, and stronger? Help you lose weight? Build strength and endurance to raise your children or keep up with your grandkids? Help manage muscle or joint pain that limits your quality of life? Do you want your workout to sustain your health as you age? Once you establish why you’re working out then you have to take into consideration if you’re current workout habits are going to help you achieve what you want to accomplish.

Working out improves many aspects of your life, but mixed with the wrong intentions it may lead to other health complications. For example, if you workout so that you can lose weight and every time you exercise you do high impact moves that place wear and tear on your joints, then over time you may injure yourself and have to take a few weeks off from working out with the potential of gaining your weight back. If you workout because your doctor told you it would help decrease pain but the nagging discomfort or stabbing pain won’t go away, gets worse, or spreads, then you may be performing the wrong types of exercise for what you really want to accomplish. My point being, the way you workout should be taking you closer to your goal, not further from it.

The fitness industry does a great job advertising exercises that look cool, are hard, and make you sweat. That’s why you see most people exercising the way everybody else is, but not really knowing why they’re doing a particular exercise. Sometimes we just do an exercise for the sake of exercising, sometimes that exercise benefits your body in an applicable way and sometimes that exercise distorts your body and, if repeated enough, can lead to problems with posture and movement.

Personally, when I choose an exercise I make sure that it’s going to benefit my life outside of the gym in some way. If I constantly perform bicep curls because I think it’s going to help me pick up my dog easier then I am missing the applicable part. When I go to pick up my dog I am not just using my arms to lift her, I am engaging other muscles in my body all at once to help with the movement. If I want to function better in reality, then when I workout I should implement exercises that mimic my real life environment. If I want to pick up my dog without hurting my back, I would choose an exercise that involves me bending over and standing up while I integrate my hamstrings, glutes, core, and arms all at the same time, because that’s what my body is doing when I pick up my dog. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the way you workout is going to determine how you move in real life. Traditional exercises don’t take this into account and so what you do in the gym doesn’t improve your life the same way true functional fitness does.

If you like to go to the gym and lift weights for the sake of lifting weights then more power to you. In the same breath, if you’re looking for a workout that has a direct carry over into how well you function in real life then contact us to set up a consultation. You’ll learn how you can make the most of your workout and if your current exercise routine is really helping you or actually harming you. At SA Functional Fitness we teach exercises that get your body on the path to enjoy all life has to offer- we don’t live to workout, we workout to live.

Sitting vs Standing Exercise

Posted on by Michael Devon

There’s a lot to consider when you workout, for example, knowing why you’re performing a particular exercise and what the outcome of said exercise is, what you want to accomplish with an exercise, and how your workout is going to impact your life outside of the gym. Do your exercises align with your goals? If you want to win the Tour de France then most of your time training will most likely be spent on a bicycle but if you’re just training to be able to keep up with your kids or grandkids then spending countless hours on a stationery bike won’t benefit you the way you want it to.

We’ve all heard it, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” Sure, you’ll be really good at riding a bike but what about running around town with your grandkids, throwing a baseball with your friends, or being able to walk your dog. Your body will eventually mimic the patterns of your training environment, so if you’re always riding a bike then eventually your body will start to portray the hunched over posture that your body is positioned in when you ride the bike. Then your posture begins to get stuck in this position and it gets harder to function in other environments like when you want to run faster during a sports game, go hiking with your spouse, or play fetch with your dog.

To the point of this article, if you sit at work for 8 hours a day and then go to the gym and all of the exercises you do are seated, then you aren’t really changing your environment. When you sit for long periods at work, your hips are flexed, so when you go exercise at the gym and always do seated exercises, your hips are still flexed, so you’re reinforcing to your body that it’s normal to always have the hips flexed. This can cause trouble when the hips need to extend, like in active situations in everyday life. Even something as simple as standing can be difficult if the hips are chronically flexed, your body starts to get pulled forward and down into the infamous hunched over position with rounded shoulders. Now imagine trying to perform to your fullest potential if your normal body posture is hunched over contributing to impaired movement.

I’m not an advocate of isolating muscles when you exercise because it can cause a disconnection between muscles in the upper body and lower body, which has serious consequences on overall function. Every time we walk we bring one leg forward and the opposite arm comes forward as well, this is an example of how the body operates keeping the upper body and lower body connected in a functional way. However, some people may have a disconnect between their upper body and lower body. This can be seen when they take a step, the legs move forward but the arms don’t swing, instead they stay stiff at the sides of the torso. Our body is meant to work as one unit every time it functions in real life, so we should train it according to how it functions if you want it to support you as you go through life.

I’m not saying that we should only be walking and running but what I am saying is that we should pay closer attention to how we exercise our body during resistance training. Are we reinforcing the bodies natural function or are we slowly breaking down our structure of support? Instead of mindlessly lifting a weight with the use of only one muscle, try engaging as many muscles as you can with one exercise, preferably, and if your body allows, encompassing multiple planes of movement. The next time you perform a cable row, do it standing and try adding a torso rotation as you row- now your connecting your lats with your obliques. You could also try taking a step backwards when you row and rotate- now connecting the lats and obliques with your glutes. When we engage multiple muscles at once, the brain starts to get involved with our bodies movement to help coordinate the exercise properly and in the right sequence, something that isolating the muscle alone won’t capture.

At the end of the day you have to ask yourself why you’re training. Are you doing it for a particular boost somewhere in your life, whether it’s to manage knee pain, keep up with life outside of the gym, lose weight, get stronger, or walk better? Whatever it may be, your training environment has to mimic what you want to get out of it. Don’t spend 5 days a week riding a bike if you what to be able to hike longer. If you’re only riding the bike to boost your endurance, you can boost your endurance by incorporating other facets of exercise into your overall routine, without sacrificing your posture from hunching over the bike or from sitting too much.