Strong is good.
Strength is one of the most important physiological gifts you can give yourself. It’s the single most significant aspect of fitness from which all others are dependent. It undergirds all sport performance and is the key to enhanced metabolic activity, calorie burning and weight loss. Having strength also facilitates better structural and joint stability, improving balance and coordination.
Playing the long game.
We’ve essentially “switched-on” our older client’s bodies by simply improving their strength. Pulling them from the ranks of mall walkers and water aerobics classes to more meaningful, challenging and force-producing training – getting them under and over the bar, so to speak. Their lives now more robust, they feel anti-fragile, useful, having extending their “health span” by minimizing their sarcopenia, while also improving bone density issues. Profound impactful changes to an emerging demographic, yet applicable to all others, while not being gender specific.
The nuts and bolts.
Your body’s muscles are not used in isolation, but rather work together with adjacent joints and surrounding musculature in a dynamically linked system and almost always with a ground force reaction involved. A logic flaw we see in most approaches to training.
So doesn’t it just make sense to train this way? We think so.
That’s why we utilize compound multi-joint movements, under load, in free-space, in our training. Moves that work multiple muscle groups over long ranges of motion, like the barbell squat and dead lift – the two most important exercises that should be in everyone’s toolbox. Big bang-for-the-buck moves that improve force production and effectively strengthen the very muscles involved in contributing to those natural anatomical movements. And training that ultimately manifests itself with a systemic, full body unified strength, equally responsive, symmetrical, adherent to your genetic potential and pleasing to the eye.
Once a strength base is established for the average trainee and we see a plateau, we often add cardio-respiratory conditioning via circuit or interval training on an alternate day – with low-level aerobic movement scheduled for off-training days to promote recovery. Advanced programming is also available for those wishing to pursue further strength gains.
A final note.
Sound reason, scientific thought and critical pragmatic thinking will always be the prism we look through for our approach to training. It should be yours as well. Do your own research. Ask questions. (Why am I doing alternating lunges on a Bosu Ball, with a breathing mask, while holding 3lb dumbbells in a Hot Yoga room?) Learn to distinguish between silly moves and purposeful training. It’s your body.
Above all, you are an experiment of one, and your health and fitness needs should ultimately reflect that uniqueness via effective, efficient and safe training protocols.
Exercise, we believe, is the gateway to unlocking the pharmacy that is hidden within our bodies.
