First,

Happy Halloween!!

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To celebrate, I’ve got a special offer for you non-Athlon people that’s just plain SPOOKY!!… the Holiday Survival Program, check it out now.

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Second, I want to talk about a presentation I did yesterday for the staff of the Family Care Network here in SLO for their quarterly safety meeting. (they’re an amazing company and you should know about them and the great things they do for our community, www.FCNI.org)

Obviously I spoke on health, fitness and performance as you might expect… but my presentation on this stuff is not your typical, run-of-the-mill fitness lecture. And I always forget about that fact until I do one of these presentations and get reminded by my audience of how unique Athlon’s take on fitness and performance really is. Most of the other “fitness” people in my industry are still teaching/preaching the same ol’, tired bodybuilder methods that haven’t really helped too many people make the fitness gains they want.

I don’t have time here to give you the full presentation but I want to hit the two major movement points in the presentation that you need to understand so you’re getting the best fitness and performance results possible…

What do we ALL want when it comes to fitness (and for that matter, when it comes to anything)??

We want to: look good, feel good, perform well and think well.

And these four qualities can be trained and acheived with:

1. Good Movement, and
2. Good Nutrition

Today, we’ll focus on the good movement part…

There are two things that must be considered in your “good movement” (exercise) program. First, it must include training in ALL 10 Human Movement Skills:

1. Cardio    2. Strength    3. Flexibility

4. Power       5. Speed       6. Accuracy

7. Balance   8. Coordination   9. Agility

10. Stamina

Whether we’re talking about looks or ability, you need all of these skills for success. In athletics for sure, but what about that time when you stubbed your toe and had to take a quick and explosive step to catch yourself or you were going to find yourself with a mouth full of sidewalk (and probably teeth too)?! That step (if it was successful) is taken with power and speed! Trust me, you better have it when you need it, and training it in the gym will ensure you have it when you need it (unless you don’t want your front teeth)…

In regards to looks… where do you think our typical idea of what “looks good” comes from? (hint: Michaelangelo’s “David”)

We base much of our thought of an ideal body on the “Greek God / Greek Goddess” body. And what was that body based on? A WELL FUNCTIONING, STRONG, STABLE, ATHLETIC HUMAN BEING. They didn’t build those body’s going into a health club and sitting down on an exercise bike for 20 minutes and only training cardio!! In those days their bodies had to work and survive daily which required all of the above skills. And as a result they often had one heck of a nice body!

Think about what most exercising American’s do for their fitness program… Walking or Jogging. How many of the 10 human movement skills are being trained there?? I can see only two, maybe three, that are getting enough of a stimulus to really change and improve. Will that create an “ideal” good looking, well performing body??

NOPE…

Their going to need more speed work, power and strength work and agility work to mention a few for a good body…

The second quality that needs to be considered for a good exercise program is that it needs to train ALL Three Sensory Systems in the body that control for movement:

1. Visual      2. Vestibular (your inner ear)

3. Proprioceptive (the sensors in your joints)

The integration of these three senses is a crucial determinant of whether you’re “fit” or not. It’s how the brain knows if it’s moving, sitting, walking, falling, which direction, how fast, etc. And as you can imagine, knowing that at all times is a very high priority for your brain. How a person’s brain integrates these three systems is what makes that person a good (or not so good) athlete. And, whether movement is painful, or not.

If your exercise program is not stimulating your visual and vestibular systems then you’re leaving 2/3 of your fitness potential UNTRAINED…

Think: playing Frisbee in the park versus going for a jog on the street. In Frisbee, your eyes are moving in many different directions quickly (training the muscles of your eyes), and your head is turning, twisting, tilting and gliding on your neck (which trains your inner ear for good balance and perception). In jogging, your eyes rarely move off the fixed target 10 feet in front of your face and your head is trying to NOT MOVE AT ALL.

Which one do you think gets a person in better shape?… Yup, Frisbee! Or any other sport that integrates all of your systems, muscles, joints and bones.

So, obviously, the take home message here is if your exercise is not varied and challenging multiple skills and multiple sensory systems, it’s not optimal for creating fitness. And, as a result, you just might find as you get older and older you start losing the god-given, natural athleticism your body used to have, (or maybe you never had it to begin with because one of the above skills or systems never developed properly in the first place, which I can help you with too…

If you’ve hit a plateau, or are just not getting the results you expect from your fitness program then you should consider the points above and request your FREE fitness consultation here at Athlon! (an $85 value)

During this consult, you’ll receive detailed information on how to get fit and trim that’s tailored to YOUR needs, your systems and your body.

There’s no obligation and it’s totally and completely free. To sign up, click here

All the best,

Ryan

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How the Modern American Lifestyle Has Created the Perfect Storm for Dysfunction.  And How You Can Control It and Feel Good Again!

The writing has been on the wall for a long time.  Movement IS life, life IS movement.  Many biological functions in your body are dependent on movement, especially your brain’s development and continual “tuning.”  Your brain began developing in the womb, first, through your mother’s movement, then later, through your own.  Movement physically changes your brain and enables it to function better.  Why do you think movement, play and restlessness are so inherent to children?

In The Well Balanced Child, Ewout Van-Manen points out that, “…physical movement is the basis for cognitive, social and emotional development.”  That’s because it encourages the necessary stimulus to form new brain connections.  This starts before you’re born and continues until you die.  Unfortunately, the modern American lifestyle has just about eliminated it, e.g., escalators, cars, TV remotes, computers, etc.  And the consequence… Americans have become bad “movers.”

Life is about being happy.  And to be happy you need a healthy body to move.  Injuries and pain shouldn’t be the norm, yet often are.  You should be able to go for a run without getting knee pain, you should be able to pick up a suitcase without back pain, and you should be able to grab something out of the back seat without injuring your shoulder.  You were built to run, jump, twist, turn and play without limitation and definitely without sustaining the nagging injuries that most people complain of.  You were built to be resilient, NOT FRAGILE!  And this is true at age 20, AND age 70.  You die with the same parts you’re born with, and those parts are built to work and repair themselves throughout your lifespan.

So where has it gone wrong?  Why do most American adults decline with age and just accept that they must live in pain and not enjoy movement like children?

The Perfect Storm for Dysfunction

There is one guaranteed FACT of human biology; you WILL get good at WHATEVER you do regularly, and you WILL get bad at what you don’t do regularly.  You’ve heard the statement before, “use it or lose it.”  If you throw a baseball every day you’ll get good at throwing a baseball, (in fact your arm bone will actually change shape to make you better).  If you do crossword puzzles often you’ll get good at them.  If you sit every day you’ll become a great sitter.  FACT!  And that’s what happens to most Americans at age six, we start sitting 6-8 hours every day!  Add a computer into the equation and you get three concurrent problems occurring at once, the perfect storm for dysfunction.

The brain uses three sensory systems for movement:

1. the Visual System (your eyes),
2. the Vestibular System (the balance center often called your inner ear), and
3. the Proprioceptive System (your body’s 3D map made up of sensors in your joints, muscles and skin).

The integration of these three systems is how the brain knows if it’s moving, sitting, walking, falling, which direction, how fast, etc.  And as you can imagine, knowing these things at all times is a very high priority for your brain.  How a person’s brain integrates these three systems is what makes that person a good (or not so good) athlete.  And, whether movement is painful or not.

When a person sits in front of a computer all day, the three systems become greatly under-used:  The proprioceptive system falls asleep as the joints, muscles and skin detect very little movement.  The vestibular system (inner ear) isn’t stimulated because moving your head would be a bad idea if you’re trying to focus on a computer screen and work.  The eyes are stagnant and sit still focusing on the screen two feet away. (remember your eyes have muscles too that need to move and stretch just like everything else in your body)

When the brain no longer has to integrate the three systems much to manage and control movement that ability shrinks away, “use it or lose it!”  Over time, movement becomes difficult and painful.  No wonder going to the gym after work is so difficult for people.  It’ll just lead to discomfort and pain.

The Solution

Enjoying movement like a child should be the norm, not the exception. If you’re brain’s sensory systems are alive and functioning well movement will feel good and you’ll want more of it, like a child. The solution, as you can imagine, is to follow the same developmental strategies that children to and use your three sensory systems… PLAY!

You have to live in such a way that the three sensory systems get stimulated on a daily basis.  Participate in activities that move your head in many different directions, change your eye positions quickly and often, and take your joints and muscles through many different motions.  Get out and play sports.  They accomplish all of this.

Other great activities include dance, martial arts, surfing, Frisbee, mountain biking, wrestling with your kids, playing with your dog, and the list goes on and on.  You’ve just got to get up from the computer and move in new and different ways daily!  And please note, walking, jogging and health club machines aren’t included in this list.  These activities involve little to no head movement and very little eye movement… not the goal here.

Depending on your current condition you may have to do a little “work” before “play” is fun again, e.g., mobility and flexibility training with an Athlon personal trainer.  We know how to progressively program movements that will stimulate and integrate your three systems and rehabilitate you back to your childhood… Plus, you’ll burn some calories and tone your muscles to boot, and that’s always a good thing.

The movement strategies that children use to grow and become good movers, like skipping, rolling, rocking and various forms of crawling exist for a reason.  If you want to have the youthful vigor of a child again you simply need to reintegrate them back into your life.  Go have some fun and PLAY!

And by all means, call us here at Athlon and let us help you.  Sign up today for your complimentary fitness consultation.  It’s FREE and very informative.  We’ll sit down and discuss your goals and find a perfect path to get you there.  All you have to do is take that step.  Sign up today at:

www.SLOPersonalTraining.com/consult

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I’m sure you’ve heard the many different statistics on the lack of movement in our country:

• Only 3% of Americans participate in daily exercise,
• 78% of Americans don’t exercise at all,
• 35.7% of all adults in the U.S. are obese,
• Etc., Etc…

In my early years in this industry I blamed much of the above stats on laziness.  But I now know there’s something more going on that’s preventing people from truly expressing their natural born athleticism and pain free movement.  The stats above are the result of some deep held beliefs of “how things should be.”  Our cultural climate in this country with regards to health, fitness and function has some very powerful and disturbing paradigms that need to change.  These paradigms are:

• The human body has inherent design flaws that result in eventual pain and dysfunction.
• Change takes lots of time.
• Close enough is good enough.

All of these self-evident truths, are in fact, false.  The body is amazingly well designed to be athletic and functional, and it CAN adapt very quickly when given the right stimulus.

When it is properly cared for with a variety of movement training, and optimally fed, it is capable of both utterly astounding feats as well as simple, but important, things like playing with your kids after a long, hard day at work.

I went to the Avila Beach Farmer’s Market on Friday and like any good market or festival there was a play area for kids.  In this case it was a giant bounce house.  And every kid there was bursting with anticipation of getting to go in it.

However not a single adult (outside of me) gave it a second thought… and, in fact, a few were even annoyed that their children wanted to get in it so badly!

Why is it that children derive so much pleasure from movement and adults derive so little pleasure, and in fact probably derive a significant amount of pain from it?  When and why do we lose this natural human quality of experiencing joy from movement?

As I said in the intro, our society tends to believe it’s just our inherent ‘design flaw’ that comes with aging.  As you get older you get pain, and movement is a “dangerous” thing and you need to “take it easy.”

But there’s an inherent flaw in the logic that you must “slow down” and “be careful with movement” as you get older.  You still have the same body parts that you had when you were a child!  You still make energy in your body the same exact way, your joints have the same relative dimensions and mechanics as they did when you were a child and you still have an immune system that fixes all your parts when they get hurt, just like you did when you were a child.

So why do so many adults NOT derive the same pleasure as children do from movement?  Why do you think there weren’t more adults wanting to get into that bounce house??

Well, as you might guess, I have a theory as to the ‘why.’  And let me start by explaining a little about your brain…

Your brain has a very distinct need to have habits.  The whole process of learning and becoming good at something is for that something to become “habitual.”  Our brains are naturally wired to do this and they do it very well.  Habituation can occur, in the case of movement, literally within seconds.  And once habituation occurs we put that new skill on autopilot and let it run in the background while we put our focus on other things.  It’s just the very intelligent way that we humans were designed.

But the natural consequence of this habituation is that once something has been learned we become hard-wired to resist changing it, e.g., if one of your joints has “learned” to move poorly through lack of use, stiffness from an injury, or constant repetitive movement from your job, that joint is going to continue to move poorly.  It has now been “mapped” in your brain to move this way…

And that brings us to another important part of this “pleasure from movement” problem that we must discuss… the “movement map” in your brain.

Without getting too deep into neurophysiology just think of your brain as having a 3D map of its body made up from millions upon millions of tiny sensory receptors that live in the joints, muscles and skin.  With this map the brain is able to program and govern the many movements that we perform.

And as you could imagine, the ‘clearer’ your map the better your movement is going to be.  And not only will your movement be of a better quality, but your brain will actually feel more confident about its survival when it knows that it has a clear map to follow.

Conversely, when your map is less clear the more likely your brain is going to feel “threatened” by movement because of a lack of confidence in its ability to survive, and hence it’ll often create pain.  (remember, your brain wants to keep you safe and pain is its primary signal for “unsafe!”)

So, we have a brain that maps things so it knows exactly how to move in advance, but it also wants to develop habits so that everything just happens automatically without too much thought.  Can you see how this might be creating some movement problems in the majority of our “modern adults?”

Let’s think about the typical adult life.  Most of us have work environments that require a lot of sitting or a lot of repetitive movements that never expands our “movement map.”  We have nice cars that we sit in and drive right to the doorstep of our work and back to our doorstep at home at night.  And then we sit a lot more and watch TV.

It seems the older and more “successful” we become the less we have to actually move to succeed in our daily life.  We become habituated to not moving (or to moving very poorly)!  And, as this day to day lack of movement continues the “movement map” in our brain becomes more and more “blurry.”

Think about the last time you were at a playground and what the kids were doing?  They’re crazy, right?!  They’re running and jumping around, hanging upside down, stretching and reaching, rolling and turning, just getting crazy having fun with movement.  Movement feels pleasurable to them, as it should.  They’re movement maps are nice and clear because of play (like the image on the left above).  They haven’t been “muddied up” with years of sedentary life, injuries and repetitive motions (like the image on the right).

When the brain has an unclear or poorly defined “map” it will create pain to prevent you from doing something that it doesn’t have a map for and hence might get hurt doing.  Remember, your brain’s number one objective is to keep you safe, and pain is its primary signal for “unsafe!”

This is why no adults wanted to get into the bounce house.  Many of them would have had to move in ways they hadn’t in a long time and thus wouldn’t have had a “map” for.  And as I said above, when you have an unclear map the brain will create pain to prevent you from moving.

Now at this point you might be tempted to say, “well just reverse the process by exercising.”  Or, “go ahead and get in that bounce house and start ‘clarifying’ your map again…”

And I would agree except for one problem, most people that have “habituated” bad joint movement and have a history of injuries are not ready to just start “playing”  (e.g., intense exercise to lose fat, or bouncing in a bounce house).  Though, these are healthy things to do in general, most modern adults can’t handle it.  They’d either experience pain on the spot (from a “threatened brain”) or they’d experience it later as muscles and joints began to swell and stiffen-up and again their brain became “threatened.”

This why most people fail when beginning a new exercise program.  They don’t have “good mapping” of their movements in their brain before picking up the intensity.  They experience pain and injuries and ultimately quit.

It’s like installing a racecar motor in an old, broken down VW bus.  The structure is going to fail under the stress of that powerful motor.  And in fact the statistics are pretty consistent in this area, 85-90% of all people starting an exercise program quit within the first six weeks because of pain or injury.  Unfortunately, once your movement map blurs it takes a little more preparation and thought to starting a movement program, e.g., exercise, without causing pain and injury.

And as sad as it is to say… most adults, through lack of any kind of variety of movement, have massively “unclear” maps in their brains.

It’s often promoted by people in the fitness world that, “you need to exercise to get healthy.”   But what they should be saying in most cases is, “you need to get healthy to exercise.”

I can’t tell you how many stories I hear of people not enjoying exercise because of pain and injuries.  And worse, how many stories I hear of other (so-called) professionals in my field that took one of these people and plugged them into a cookie-cutter fat-loss exercise regimen that ultimately failed them because they didn’t do anything to help the client “re-learn” how to move their joints first.

Now, that person feels that they’re an ultimate failure and weren’t meant to be “in shape.”  And they feel that we personal trainers are only good at getting “other” people fat loss results who can handle the  pain and discomfort that hey couldn’t.  (and unfortunately they’re probably right about 90% of the personal trainers in this world…)

You must get healthy first! This means learning to move correctly at each joint and in all ranges of motion and at all speeds again, e.g., clarifying your movement map.  The paradigm of the fitness world, “close enough is good enough,” is NOT TRUE!  If it were 85-90% of people would not quit an exercise program due to pain and injury.

So, to learn to LOVE movement, and hence, exercise, the REAL target of any good exercise program is the brain (and the 3D map inside it) not the muscles!  Change your brain and you’ll change your life…

This is what we do at Athlon.  Each session begins with warm-up and preparatory drills that clarify your brain’s movement map.  This instantly makes your brain happier, it makes you move better, it makes you more flexible, stronger and have less pain.  Then, of course, we do some pretty good exercise too…

If you’re not already training at Athlon come try it out today!  What are you waiting for, really?!  I guarantee you’ll like it more and have better results than any other fitness/performance program you’ve participated in.

Take advantage of your FREE Fitness and Nutrition Consultation? (an $85 value)  During this consult, you’ll receive detailed information on how to move pain-free, get fit and trim that’s tailored to YOUR body.  There’s no obligation and it’s totally and completely free. To sign up, click here.

Until next time,

Ryan

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References:
1. Blakeslee, S., Blakeslee, M. (2007).  The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.  How Body Maps In the Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better.  Random House Publishing.

2. Doidge, N. (2007) The Brain That Changes Itself.  Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.  Penguin Publishing.